University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

I begat this, flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress: the costs of artistic and sexual exploration and healing within an interstitial freedom

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I begat this, flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress: the costs of artistic and sexual exploration and healing within an interstitial freedom

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Content i
I Begat This, Flipping in the Ghetto on a Dirty Mattress:
The Costs of Artistic and Sexual Exploration and Healing Within an Interstitial Freedom
By
Leesa Simone Fenderson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2024
Copyright 2024 Leesa Simone Fenderson

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT……………………………………….…………………...………..……….....……iii
INTRODUCTION…….………………………………….………………………………...……..1
CHAPTER ONE: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, SULA
& MAUD MARTHA …..………………….………………………………………...….……….10
CHAPTER TWO: CORREGIDORA & I MAY DESTROY YOU…………….……………….35
CONCLUSION…………………..…………………………....…………………………………48
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………..………………….……...………………………...………….51

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ABSTRACT
The mutually constitutive notions of sexual freedom and artistic cultural production are
ripe areas for an exploration of the interchangeable categories of writers as artists and
protagonists as sexual beings who push against the bounds of their subjection. I open attempting
to make accessible the elusive notion of freedom. What does freedom mean for the Black woman
who is perpetually subject to the oppressive forces of patriarchy and the forward-looking, futureoriented projects of racism and colonialism? What does this approximation of an interstitial
freedom cost the artist? To approximate an answer, I examine the creation of art and the
attending costs of the act of artistic creation by Black women in visual, literary, and sonic media.
Lastly, I evaluate how fame and knowingness operate to lessen or increase the cost of a freedom
that is interstitial, using the ever expanding or tightening enunciatory gap present in the lives of
Black women novelists.

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INTRODUCTION
In Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel V. Carby prescribed that “Black feminist criticism
be regarded critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus
of contradictions” (10). It is at that locus, within the framework of novels, music, and television
that I investigate the depictions of sexuality, art, and the lives of artists within a complex
freedom. A freedom not only for the characters drawn by Black women writers but a freedom of
craft employed by those fictioneers. In the essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara
Smith writes that “the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially
interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers” (170). Through the interrogation of
critical analyses and an evaluation of the politics of race and class, the novels Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Sula and Maud Martha, Corregidora, the series: Insecure, I May Destroy You,
Rap Sh!t, and Lucille Bogan’s blues serve as the narrative technologies of Black women writers
in my evaluation of the costs and effects of sexual independence within an interstitial freedom.
Black women’s narratives in music, novels, and the small screen that depict the quotidian
lives of Black people inevitably reproduce intimacy, desire, lust, and sex. Sex and sexuality as
narrative tools are often analogous strategies deployed to reimagine the myriad polemic issues
Black women faced as racialized subjects. Although the scenes of intimacy may appear as
reportage or a necessary moment to define relational intimacy, they are also representative of the
way subjugation and the self-sacrifice of the Black female subject has manifested in the world at
large. Black women have enjoyed freedom—sexual freedom, physical, and psychological
freedom. However, that freedom was marked by barriers, some visible, some moving, some
invisible. And within the framework of those barriers, the freedoms were interstitial—that is,

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they were situated within but not necessarily aligned with or characterized by the normative
definition of free.
Lauryn Hill, among the largely male lyrical elite, raps in the tradition of hip hop that
requires bravado for amplification and authentication. She established herself as a lyricist, a
performer, and a vocalist with her rasping alto register.
I begat this
Flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress
You can’t match this rapper slash actress
More powerful than two Cleopatras
Bomb graffiti on the tomb of Nefertiti
MCs ain’t ready to take it to the Serengeti
My rhymes is heavy like the mind of sister Betty (Betty Shabazz)
L-Boogie spars with stars and constellations
Then came down for a little conversation
Adjacent to the king, fear no human being
Roll with cherubims to Nassau Coliseum
Now hear this mixture, where Hip Hop meets scripture
In these bars, she lets us know that she is also an actress. We had seen and heard the
fullness of her ability as a thespian and vocalist in Sister Act II. She has much to boast, not only
with what she accomplished as a member of the Fugees and with her history making solo
albums, but also for the level of artistry at which she operates. She is brilliant, not as a female
MC, just as a lyricist among the highest echelons of poets and storytellers whose narrative
medium is the microphone and drumline. And it is this art, her cultural production as a prolific
oral storyteller that brings her into the conversation of what we lose when we pursue our art and
sexual freedom.
Fred Moten argues that freedom is indeterminate. In “The Case of Blackness,” he turns to
the moment of escape in the abolitionist text, Incidents in The Life of A Slave Girl and in using
that moment he argues that the fugitivity of the protagonist in the garret is an unaccomplished

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victory, essentially, a freedom in confinement. “It is the unfinished accomplishment of a victory
that finished accomplishment takes away ... it occurs in a cramped, capacious room, a crawl
space defined by interdicted, impossible, but existent seeing and overhearing. It's a victory that
comes fully into relief only when taken by way of the gift of one's freedom. What one desires,
instead, is the unfinished victory of things who can't be bought and sold especially when they are
bought and sold” (204). Jacobs depicts a sweet victory of the protagonist daring to steal a life she
never really owned to begin with. Her presence in the garret, free from a sexually abusive
enslaver, yet confined in a crawl space, is an interstitial freedom. Moten’s Black optimist reading
of Jacobs claiming freedom is a literary depiction of what it is to own one’s dispossession and
eventually one’s sexual pleasure. It is at this locus that I explore the depictions of sexual
intimacy as revolutionary acts of resistance that evidence freedom on one’s own terms, even
within the confines of the continued violence that persists within Black life. Freedom, even
interstitial freedom comes at a price—the proverbial “ghetto” and accompanying dirty mattress.
Toni Morrison in her essay, “The Site of Memory” writes the following about the nature
of the first fictional African American narratives, the abolitionist text, written by Black women:
“Whatever the style and circumstances of these narratives, they were written to say principally
two things. One: ‘This is my historical life - my singular, special example that is personal, but
that also represents the race.’ Two: ‘I write this text to persuade other people - you, the reader,
who is probably not black - that we are human beings worthy of God's grace and the immediate
abandonment of slavery’” (234). While our current fictioneers would denounce an effort to
persuade others of their humanity in their fiction—in the space of an indeterminate freedom that
we occupy we are all still nevertheless tending toward wholeness as postcolonial subjects and

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subjects of the disaster of chattel slavery. We write from that history—with the abolitionist text
as foundational in the canon of African America and diasporic Black fiction.
Fiction and history as mutually constitutive categories, where each rely on the other and
each belies the other, is a rich site for the evaluation of what we lose when we exploit our art and
explore our sexuality. Morrison, a fictioneer and documentarian of Black lives, writes of the
rhetorical goals of the abolitionist text. She writes of history, authorship representation, audience,
and the polemic and humanitarian goal of the abandonment of chattel slavery. Carla Peterson
notes, in Doers of the Word, quoting literary theorist Baktin that, in moments of crisis, “a
national culture is decentralized and loses ‘its sealed-off and self-sufficient character’” (147).
Carla Peterson further notes that, “given its popularity and influence as well as the allinclusiveness of its subject matter, the novel would appear to be an ideal vehicle through which
African Americans could speak to one another in the Mid-nineteenth Century and thereby
imagine community,” (149). Employing that rationalization, the novel and its popularity was also
a polemic device whereby story would serve as a vehicle of persuasion, where Black women
could write of their trials in an effort to build community around the movement to abolish
slavery. In particular, fictional narration provided greater agility in storytelling than being bound
to the nonfictional strictures of autobiographical renderings of enslavement. Historical
documentation and the novel are mutually symbiotic endeavors feeding each other and feeding
off the other.
Peterson, evaluated the agility afforded writers through fictional narration in her
discussion of Wilson's abolitionist text Our Nig. She delineated that the third-person fictional
narration employed by Our Nig gave Wilson greater “narrational possibilities than traditional
autobiography. By explicitly inscribing the third person within the text, such narration effectively

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opened the enunciatory gap closed down by slave autobiography, acknowledging the split
between narrating and the narrated personae,” (149). Applying this evaluation, I would extend
those narrative possibilities to the first-person narration employed by Jacobs in Incidents in The
Life Of A Slave Girl. Although the fictional I is akin to the autobiographical I, fiction as a form
afforded Jacobs an enunciatory gap through her first-person character, “Linda Brent.” Jacobs
embodies Brent and we align our desires with the desire of the first-person protagonist. “Unlike
the slave narrative in particular, fictional narratives resisted teleology, offering a discursive space
for a larger meditation…” (Petersen 149). The reader then embodies Brent and roots for her
freedom. The novelized story of the enslaved offered Jacobs an alternative world, unlike history
or autobiography, Jacobs was able to create characters akin to her suffering. Mutual feeding.
The Black women fictioneers that balanced on the foundation established by the first
fictional-historical text are all subject to the enunciatory gap—a gap that for some widens and
closes subject to the whims of fame and balancing a public and private life. Toni Morrison, a
mother, and full-time editor at a major publishing house woke daily in the early morning hours to
write. Speaking of the tightening and loosing of the enunciatory gap Morrison concludes in the
essay, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”: “There is conflict between public and private
life and it’s a conflict that I think ought to remain a conflict. Not a problem, just a conflict.
Because there are two modes of life that exists to exclude and annihilate each other. It’s a
conflict that should be maintained now more than ever because the social machinery of the
country at this time doesn’t permit harmony in a life that has both aspects,” (339, Black Women
Writers (1950-1980)).
Is this the cost of the freedom to create? The cost of being sexually and artistically free
subjects? Disharmony in our public and private lives? Mary Helen Washington, in writing about

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Nella Larson, in Invented Lives, highlights the cost of success as an artist and how it has affected
the private life of artists. Nella Larsen, the first Black woman to win a creative writing award
from the Guggenheim foundation in 1930, went into a thirty-year silence never publishing again.
She died in obscurity in 1962.
Larsen as a literary voice ceased to exist. She was accused of plagiarizing a story that
was published in Forum Magazine, in 1930. Although her editor, who had seen several drafts of
the story defended Larsen, the writer was nonetheless shattered by the accusation. Further, to the
disharmony and the undulating space of the enunciatory gap, Larsen and her husband Dr. Elmer
Imes’ divorce was widely sensationalized. The Baltimore Afro-Americans speculated that
Professor Imes was involved with a white woman and that Larsen’s travels to Europe to write
caused fissures in their relationship. There were also conjectures that Larsen had attempted
suicide.
“These two events of public shame, plus a fragile and vulnerable personality, a sense of
oddness that made her seem strange to her friends, and a deep-seated ambivalence about her
racial status combined to reinforce her sense of herself as outsider and may finally have pushed
her into a life of obscurity,” (162) How do we as artists balance the conflict or the enunciatory
gap between private life and the creation of art for public consumption? Is that conflict, that as
Morrison notes exists to exclude and annihilate each other, an extension of the proverbial garret?
Does it keep one in the indeterminacy of interstitial freedom?
Gayl Jones, author of Corregidora, delineates in the essay, “About My Work,” that the
outside world can sometimes have a place in literature, “Sometimes politics can enhance,
sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature” (234, Black Women Writers (1950-
1980)). Corregidora was acquired by Toni Morrison for Random House and first published in

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1975. Before being published, Jones began Brown University's graduate writing program in
1971. While the faculty and students were in awe of her talent, many were struck by her silence.
Needing a fiction faculty member for her thesis Jones worked with novelist R.V. Cassill. Cassill
remarked, “I was doing all the talking, and she would sit rigidly just bobbing her head in a regal
manner. Yet there was a kind of arrogance to her. Perhaps it was the arrogance of an artist
fiercely committed to a vision, but I also sensed a bottled-up black rage.”
As such, Morrison her editor promoted Corregidora. Hilton Als for The New Yorker,
profiling Morrison, wrote: “Toni became not a black editor but the black editor,” a friend of hers
told me. In 1975, D. Keith Mano, the “Book Watch” columnist for Esquire, devoted an entire
article to Gayl Jones and her new book, “Corregidora,” but the piece was as much about
Morrison as about Jones. “Toni Morrison is Gayl’s Svengali editor at Random House,” Mano
wrote. “Toni is dynamic, witty, even boisterous in a good-humored way. And sharp. Very sharp.
She often uses the pronoun I. She’ll say, ‘I published “Corregidora.” ’ . . . I suspect the title page
of ‘Corregidora’ should read, ‘by Gayl Jones, as told to Toni Morrison.’ ” Jones was
uncommunicative, as Als notes, and Morrison had books to sell.
Notoriously reclusive, Gayl Jones in some ways might have been protecting herself and
her art from the price of the freedom to create. But there would be a penance nonetheless, the
proverbial enunciatory gap would be filled. How dare a Black woman artist write a book about
the weight of generational trauma, sexual freedom and healing though blues riffs and
performance and not adhere to the requirements of the publishing industry’s spoken and
unspoken marketing and self-promotional rules? Refusing self-promotion meant Jones would
suffer the creation of a fabricated public persona, she concurs, “I think I have an unfortunate

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public image, because of the published work. People imagine you’re the person you’ve
imagined,” (25, Black Women Writers (1950-1980).
Enter musicality as storytelling in the trajectory of Black art as spoken and unspoken
resistance, as well as the mutual symbiosis of historicizing Black lives and the telling of stories.
Lauryn Hill, who has arguably the most prolific album of my generation, 80s baby-90s kid, only
has one album of note. Why? Lauryn Hill, in what sounds like a cry, asks us and/or her son,
Zion, to understand why she made the choice she made:
“Unsure of what the balance held
I touched my belly overwhelmed
By what I had been chosen to perform
But then an angel came one day
Told me to kneel down and pray
For unto me a man child would be born
Woe this crazy circumstance
I knew his life deserved a chance
But everybody told me to be smart
"Look at your career, " they said
"Lauryn, baby, use your head"
But instead I chose to use my heart
Now the joy of my world is in Zion”
Lauryn Hill as an artist expressing her sexual freedom, she fell in love with the son of
Bob Marley, Rohan Marley and produced a son, writes Joan Morgan in She Begat This: 20 Years
of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a biography about the singer (57). Who would encourage
abortion and why? Is it because the cost of artistic freedom, and the height of success, meant that
a woman must choose her career over family? Is the penance for sexual and artistic freedom the
judgment of the world?

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It seems the cost of artistic freedom is fame coupled with judgment. Fame in a world that
offers Black women little to no grace can be much like the garret, too short to stand in and too
narrow to lay down. For Gayl Jones, what was the cost to her? What was the cost to Nella
Larsen? Lauryn Hill? The public eye that we’ve asked to imbibe our art can be a penetrating and
debilitating with its pressure of perfection. All the world is a stage and literature as a practice for
Black women artists is a public performance that comes with all the attending violence of
existing within that phenotype. Although a solitary act, writing asks the world to slow down, stop
look at me, my story, my narrative. Enjoy my arc, my word choice, my hi-hat, my tempo, my
rhythm, my blues. And sometimes like in the case of Jones, don’t look up from the page for the
creator—look only at her words. Please.
And why? Why do you ask? Because the social machinery of the country doesn’t permit
harmony in the life of a Black woman artist who has both. Because, when has the Black woman
been afforded the grace to fail, to fall, to exist, or even more cruelly when has she been afforded
the grace to succeed, to be exceptional?

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CHAPTER ONE: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, SULA & MAUD MARTHA
What are the costs and effects of the independence and freedom depicted in Their
Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Sula by Toni Morrison and
Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks? What are the costs to the artists?
Darwin Turner, writes this of Hurston, “The Zora Neale Hurston who takes
shape from her autobiography and from accounts of those who knew her is an
imaginative, somewhat shallow, quick-tempered woman, desperate for recognition and
reassurance to assuage her feelings of inferiority; a blind follower of that social code
which approves arrogance toward one’s assumed peers and inferiors but requires total
psychological commitment to a subservient posture before one’s supposed superiors. It
is in reference to this image that one must examine her novels, her folklore, and her view
of the Southern scene,” (98). I desire to write prose so inflammatory that a critic
describes me with such attention—close my enunciatory gap so shadily that I know
you’re listening. Hurston has often been rejected and subjected to harsh criticism and I
think it’s because she doesn’t concern herself with the enunciatory gap or the remnants
of the Cult of True Womanhood that seemed to be trotted out and applied to women for
whom it was never intended in an effort to humble.
Despite that treatment, praise has been showered on Hurston and the main
character, Janie, in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Lee R. Edwards
discusses Janie’s heroic power in her critical study of female heroism, Psyche As Hero:
Female Heroism and Fictional Form (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1984), and concludes that Janie’s heroic status as the end of the novel is unprecedented

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in women’s fiction: ‘What she has, she shares with no other character we have
considered: radiance, a complex and unshakable optimism, a capacity to stand alone
without thereby abandoning a fully realized and never betrayed connection with
another’” (292).
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in 1936 and published in 1937. This
bildungsroman by Zora Neale Hurston follows the cognitive and emotional growth of a young
woman, Janie Crawford as she steers through life in the south during the early 20th Century.
Grounded in a theory of cultural, oral legacy, Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is
an undulating duplication of Black culture and dialect—the rhythmic shape of Black talk. When
evaluating Hurston’s text, one is confronted with various modes. The mode of the narrator is
understood as standard and the mode of the character in dialogue is understood as dialect—this
evaluation of her prose creates an unintended or intended ‘othering’. And in between those
modes, of standard English and dialect, is a blurring that is understood to be free indirect
discourse, that is, feeling, thought, and ideas that float in that weightless space between narrator,
author, and character.
What if the character, narrator, and author in their individual roles as players in a
narrative were operating in separate spaces coherently, indistinguishably, and simultaneously,
such that there is no other? Hurston is at once adult Janie and young Janie. Hurston is at once a
speaker of dialectical porch talk and the intellectual force narrating in the standard tongue of
“formal” American English. Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, all events are happening at once
and in sequence. Time and space are illusions. In Their Eyes each identity and operative in the
narrative exists at once in a single moment or scene and across the entire narrative time

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continuum. As such the distinction of the black intellectual narrator and her dialectical roots is an
illusion.
These modes of transgressing singularity in the face of dominant culture possession
and ideologies in favor of an illusion has been employed by Black writers since enslavement. In
evaluating the illusion, a review of Monique Allewaert’s On Parahumanity may open up a route
by which to understand this literary theory of relativity. Allewart prescribes that the nonhumanity
of the enslaved was a rerouting of colonial valuations of humanness in favor of a more subtle,
more powerful parahumanity. Allewaert looks to the Journal of an enslaver, Matthew Lewis who
proposed that, “Early nineteenth-century Jamaican plantation culture was a performance that
Afro-Americans understood and directed far better that he could. His slaves [he wrote,] ‘acted
their part so well, that they almost made me act mine to perfection.’ In fact, as far as the slaves
on his Jamaican estates were concerned, Lewis was as much possessed by them as he possessed
them” (87). It is that performance that Hurston employs as author, narrative voice, and many of
the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The question then, in Hurston’s creation of mutable character approximating humanity
in a search for sexual freedom, is the cost a representative nonhumanity? Allewaert further posits
that the enslaved “persons had developed codes and rituals through which possession no longer
simply indicated ownership of property because it also opened onto cosmologies in which one
force could move through and temporarily overwhelm another. These rituals of possession
indicate that Lewis was correct when he admitted that he not only manipulated his slaves but was
also manipulated by them” (88). It is the cheekiness of the performance, the brazen smile of an
unbroken self, the seduction away from the shame and pain of slavery that is evidenced in the
characters Nanny, Phoebe, and Janie. Like the performance of parahumanity, the performance of

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captivity is a break from the underwhelming routine recital of a predetermined, freedom on the
captor’s terms. Janie is at once defiant of the terms of her captors and on a journey to define her
own terms. So is Hurston. Janie’s performance of captivity is akin to what literary critics have
deemed to be free indirect discourse. And that is the price of Hurston’s artistic freedom, the
performance of captivity as a writer so that she may dodge the enunciatory gap that is a perilous
gulf where writers must explain their literary genius so that it may be prodded and poked with,
“how’d you do that?” and “who said you could”?
In Their Eyes Were Watching God Janie’s understanding of self begins at a young age.
Janie is confused when she sees herself as a brown child in a photo next to white children. When
the mother of the white children pointed at “de dark one” she said, "Dat's you Alphabet, don't
you know yo' ownself?" Janie learns her first lesson on racial difference. However, she had
already been in performance mode, a mode of switching into the standard or norm. This mode of
normalizing in the face of difference, enslavement, or violence we can conclude she learned from
Nanny who as an enslaved person had to lean into modes of performativity in order to survive.
The cost of her indeterminate freedom is performativity—multiple selves. Yet each real, reliable,
and true, multiplicative does not equal unreliable.
The enslaved, the sharecropper, and later the Black American citizen built modes of
self and politic that were not simply critiques of the category of the human existence as defined
by those who enslaved them but were also an amalgamation of various modes of performance in
suspension, in indeterminacy. The concept of the other, nonhuman was necessary for the
requisite moral justification engineered by the captor of the enslaved. The violence, conditional
commutation of death, the natal alienation, mutilation of the psyche—these actions and effects
were a stunning moral contradiction made conscionable by the concept of the other, non-human,

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subhuman. Why wouldn’t one want to suspend the notion of subhuman or other and allow for a
simple return to the normative human category? Jody, Janie’s second husband and mayor of
Eatonville, became the epitome of the normative human in his quest to have what they have, he
is described as “kind of portly like rich white folks,” (32). He is depicted as ambitious,
demanding a cowing from the townspeople. This assimilation of the captor is a second type of
captivity. Jody forced the towns people to dig a ditch and “the murmured hotly about slavery
being over.” As we see through Jody’s character, leaning into the normative category of human
is a duplication of the captor’s modes of subjugation and the captor’s reliance on the prison of
patriarchy.
Allewaert notes that the mutable, parahumanity of Black people has been overlooked
in favor of an analysis that moves to put Black people on par with the prescribed European
Westernized standard of human or Man. However, it, the mutability of the versions of Janie and
the townspeople who speak in dialect lends to a reading of intentional modes of existence as
character and as varying modes of storytelling—as the narrator, character, and author. Allewaert
doesn’t go far enough—the mutable, parahumanity—is akin to the pain that gives ways to the
richness of Gospel music that stirs one on a cellular level. The interstitial freedom to create,
rooted in pain and the genius of mutability is still interstitial and still rooted in pain. As Allewart
prescribed, the nonhumanity embodied by the enslaved in Jamaica was a rerouting of colonial
valuations of humanness in favor of a subtler, more powerful parahumanity (87). This
parahumanity and mutability can be seen in the folklore of the mule, a representative abused
animal that Janie stood up for in ways that she should have stood up for herself. The story of the
mule’s antics grew and stretched; the town folk employed hyperbole in their telling and retelling

15
of the mule folklore. Language births parahumanity and mutability. The retelling sustained the
mule long after its passing.
The mutability of the subject was not just in the body but also in the psyche. Nanny,
Janie’s grandmother was an enslaved person. She was raped by her captor. Her captor’s wife
asked, “how come [the] baby look white?” With no possible explanation her captor’s wife
prescribed, “One hundred lashes wid a raw-hide on yo’ bare back. Ah’ll have you whipped till de
blood run down to yo’ heels!” In order to save Janie’s mother and herself Nanny runs away. This
story is told through Janie’s retelling to Phoebe. It is told through Nanny’s first-person
recollection and Hurston’s rich understanding of slavery, the confusion of post-Civil War
freedom and Hurston’s contemplations on womanhood. All three persons existing at once and
over the stretch of time since slavery to Hurston’s writing the book in Haiti in 1936 are necessary
agents in the rendering and as such neither is free, all are writing from the metaphorical garret.
Hurston, through Nanny tells the reader that Janie’s body is subject to violence and
struggle without a man to care for her financially. That mode of womanhood is a performance of
freedom under distress. It is also a performance of success as determined by the captor. It is the
enunciatory gap—the impossible garret. Nanny sees freedom for Janie as separation from “de
white folks’ yard’ However, that freedom is also in the restraints of a loveless marriage a
marriage of control and of violence that would mirror the marriage of Nanny’s captors. Janie
agrees to the marriage placating Nanny. However, her captivity in that marriage allows no room
to exist in a mutable state of free parahumanity. She is embodying the European model of human
and soon comes to realize that in order to resist Janie must either fight or leave. “What was she
losing so much time for? Janie hurried out of the front gate and turned south,” (31). The captive
must be the author of her captivity.

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Janie first appears on the page as an adult surrounded by and covered in the motifs that
Hurston employs as she moves the narrative time forward and makes it stand still. The porch,
overalls, hair, and mud are all symbols of Janie’s journey toward the actualization of the self.
Meeting Janie as an adult who will tell us a story about porches, overalls, hair and mud at first
appears to be a literary device: the flashback—where the narrative begins at the end. This is
approach to the bildungsroman allows the reader to enter the mode of audience to a story told by
an adult looking back over the long stretch of her life. However clever the device, Hurston’s
subversive approach that then appears linear and also achronological is instead less of movement
back and forth in time and more of a stacked series of events that are distinct and yet occurring at
the same time. Time is treated as a condensed, expanded, relative, viscous object that Hurston
manipulates and has Janie inhabit at varying stages of her life and all at once.
Janie experiences Tea Cake, her third husband and seemingly true love, decades before
she met him while lying under a pear tree, she described a bee and bloom arching to “meet the
love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every
blossom and frothing with delight,” (11). Tea Cakes death marks the end of their great love
story. The reader learns of Tea Cake in the first pages, yet we don’t come to understand his
significance until the end of the book. Hurston merges speeds up time and slows it down making
it a malleable tool to deploy her story as well as Janie’s. This is an example of Hurston’s
manipulation of time. Janie experiences Tea Cake’s death and holds the grief like a stopped
clock that she begins again when she is ready to grieve. “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could
never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. Tea Cake exists on the page
from the beginning of the journey. Hurston installs his presence in the readers’ consciousness so
that his existence can be stretched in time and space as she and Janie desires.

17
In the end, the Janie who pulls the horizon up over her shoulders is the same Janie who
stumbled into the reader’s consciousness muddied and in overalls. She is the same Janie that tells
Nanny’s story, loves Tea Cake before she meets him and slides in and out of the narrative mode.
Nevertheless, is it Hurston or Janie who explains love to Pheoby? “…love ain’t something lak uh
grindstone … love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the
shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.” For Hurston as an artist, writing of sexual
freedom, existing as mutable parahuman is the cost of this indeterminate freedom to write and to
employ devises such a free indirect discourse. Hurston as author in a time of canonical standards
as engineered by the white patriarchy, at once defies the standard with dialectical prose while
simultaneously employing an accessible narrator to comfort the reader who feels disrupted or
unsure of the language steeped in metaphor and the dozens. This language like myth, like
codeswitching, like modes of parahumanity, like creating in liminal freedom is a strategy of
resistance.
Having broken with the idea of the European defined concepts of freedom and the
human, Allewaert’s uses of myth to depict the parahuman’s strategy of resistance. Allewaert uses
the words of griots and Obeah practitioners, as documented by Lewis, the plantation owner.
“Lewis’ writings became a portal through which fragments of diasporic Afro-American cultures
passed into the historic record.” However, this is where Allewaert and I depart again and where
Hurston’s use of the dialectical, dozens and metaphor in dialogue affirms a path of resistance that
further depicts the separation of the captive from the captor. What is the historic record? Or
more specifically, whose historic record? My mother told me Anansi stories as a girl, and I will
tell those mythologies to my children or my siblings’ children. There is power in the oral and
aural. As such, when Allewaert asks the reader to consider the Anansi story Lewis transcribed in

18
a letter to a friend, as well as other myths he records in his Journal, I wonder about the now
powerless of the myth in transcription.
As demarcated earlier in Hurston’s manipulation of time, folklore and myth happens
all at once. There is no one story, or storyteller as evidenced by the layering of Nanny, Janie and
Hurston in the rendering of Nanny’s escape from violent retribution. The voluminous quantity of
myth leads to variants. Variants must exist in indeterminacy, in the conceptual garret. Myth is at
once the thesis and the antithesis of a concept. The concept of life and death, drawing an
extension of life onto parchment, with the stroke of the brush and the rendering of human parts:
ears, eyes, nose, mouth, skin—the myth the space between being and un-being is stretched
between the worlds of life and death but never holding ground in either. This space between
being and un-being was manipulated by Janie in Tea Cake’s death and first encountered in town
folklore of the mule. Myth is the synthesis of a concept: it is and it is not, synthesis is becoming.
It is the becoming, the perpetual interstitial quality of being, that is parahuman. This interstitial
quality was the essence of Janie as she moved forward in the time of the narrative yet embodied
the woman who in the end of narrative knew that the love that she had searched for outwardly
was really within the confines of her own freedom. Spirit in body, and in reimagining, plateaus at
freedom defined as captivity is also myth—such that like Janie’s understanding of the self and
love, myth is perpetually advancing and arriving on the shore of reality. Myth is alive and ever
changing.
However, like freedom and humanity, once defined by the captor for the captive, the
interstitial quality—the lack of arrival is removed. As such, defining the myth in text removes its
fungibility and its desirability. Thought is made palpable in the mouth and in that space, it is
neither a thesis nor antithesis, it is the becoming—the synthesis, an evolution and revolution with

19
no arrival or goal. Like the naming of the thing, the immortalization of myth on the page
removes the possibility of variants, such that every time my mother told me an Anansi story it
grew and changed. The story her mother, now deceased, told her traverses the space between life
and death and asks that it only be told and received orally and aurally. In that way the story
remains in the world of myth and continues to exist on the terms decided upon by the
parahuman. This can be seen on page 101, where Allewart describes how Lewis manipulates a
tale in his rendering of it on the page, “Goosee Shoo-shoo lets her narrative culminate with
bounties of rum and tobacco that move from the diegetic to the extradiegetic frame. [At] the
story’s close Lewis explicitly breaks into and closes off the extradiegetic scene of communal
plentitude to offer a moral that he suggests brings closure to a story that would otherwise devolve
into a purely appetitive performance.” Once Lewis transcribes and translates the myth its arrival
and mutilation removes the interstitial performance quality and turns it into a thing—a thing to
be possessed by the historic record.
Immortalizing myth removes its transient nature and its ability to reform, transmute,
and curl and bend to the winds of the tale and mysticisms that move the myth beyond the world
of plot or novel. Like the parahuman, the myth defines its own terms by being those terms:
transformable in the space of breath, in the space of telling. Writing them as Lewis has, is
defining in the way that subjects of slavery and other forced laborers were defined as subhuman.
Inherent in the transience of myth is a desire akin to the desire of the slave to operate in the
modality of parahuman. And in the same way that the parahuman refutes the desirability of the
human term, the nature of myth bucks against the boxing and finishing of these stories on the
page. Myths exist in the world without container. The attempt to contain the myth is an attempt
to remove the inherent power that the slave master feared.

20
Accordingly, in order to capture a story that grounded a cultural legacy of oral
storytelling, Hurston had to blur time and blur the orator. Describing this feat as free indirect
discourse is inadequate. Free indirect discourse is tied to the page. It does not exist in the free
space of relative time. It does not exist across decades and modes of captivity to freedom. In fact,
the mode of dialogue is ever changing and difficult to confine. Thus, making it standard. Is it not
all standard? Because the book is set up against the purported norm in many critical analyses a
definition is required. However, as Janie described love, this narrative is ever changing and
evolving on the shore of the minds of new readers. We are all Janie, and we are all relative. In
the way many scholars contend that Baldwin wrote about Black people for a white audience,
Hurston wrote about Black people for an audience of herself. And in doing so made a specific
story universal. We are all Hurston, we are all Janie, we are all relatively free.
As a result of this relativity, it is clear that Janie’s words, her voice in dialogue is
spoken by the same person who narrates the story in what is deemed to be the accessible English.
As an anthropologist, Hurston examined many peoples who inhabited a manipulatable time and
voice. Jamaican patois, Haitian Creole, Southern dialects. These modes of speech are not
evidence of a people devoid of critical thought. In fact, the speech in metaphor and entendre is
evidence of a thoughtful, critical consciousness.
~
Although born Chloe Anthony Wafford, she was known as Toni Morrison. In a recent
documentary she recalls that her naming or renaming was a way of dividing her life. She goes by
the sobriquet of her saint’s name, Anthony and her married name, Morrison. Looking into the
camera she said the division is about, “the person who is out there and the other person who
doesn’t do documentaries.” Ms. Morrison. has said that she has spent her entire writing career

21
trying to make sure that the white gaze is not the dominant one in her writing. She said, “there is
this whole other world going on when they [white people] aren’t even looking.” It is from that
world that Morrison created stories, speaking to us from us. “My sovereignty as a racialized
person had to be struck immediately with my very first book,” Morrison said.
Black Matter(s) matter? Matter is a substance; it has a thingness or beingness. It is tactile
and can be held. Matters can also be issues, complications, controversies—stuff that plague the
lives of Black people in America. Or one can say black, as a color, Black as a people, matter. We
are of import and require special care when writing about or thinking of, especially when
thinking of, well also especially when writing of. Morrison puts into practice all three
connotations of matter, with the particular intentionality of that parenthetical holding the plural
and or verb tense of her word choice(s).
In her essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison unfolds and rips at the seams of
the literary canon, and its exclusionary practices, in order to evaluate the African American
presence in American literature. She goes through the rewriting of history where Egypt was
replaced with Greece as the cradle of civilization, and as a result erased Greece’s own historical
foundations. What I found deeply enriching in this essay was her answer to, “What makes a work
‘black’?” She writes, “The most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial)
distinction, the one most fraught, is its language—its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational,
manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked, and unmasking language” (173). After telling us,
Morrison goes on to show us. We see the opening paragraphs of Sula through her eyes and
through the white gaze. She gives so much of herself as a writer, I almost want to ask her to close
the curtain, close the enunciatory gap, but I am greedy and salivating at the luxurious feast of her
brilliant, narrative mind laid bare.

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Sula
Freedom, even interstitial freedom often comes at a price. The women of Toni
Morrison’s Sula are subject to no one, especially as it relates to their independence from
judgment and their want to have their sexual desires satiated. An interesting figure that would
serve as a rich character contrast can be found in Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Geraldine Brown, a Black woman, who is the human embodiment of white propriety as a
subjugating force in Black lives, is also a Post WWII feminist artistic subject. Geraldine is the
repressed owner of a white cat with blue eyes that is killed by her son who longed for the
intimate love she bestowed on that cat. Geraldine with her tight grip on life represents the
hegemonic white society, she is at once tightly wound, physically free, and sexually imprisoned
within herself. When she has sex with her husband, “he must enter her surreptitiously, lifting the
hem of her nightgown only to her navel...she stiffens when she feels one of her paper curlers
coming undone from the activity of love; she imprints in her mind which one it is that is coming
loose so she can quickly secure it once he is through—she hates the glucking sound they make
when she is moist,” (85). Geraldine seemingly hates the act that is for her husband, so much so
she hates her own physiology that produces moisture in response.
Yet she is complex and although wound tight desires pleasure, that feeling. “The closest
thing to it was the time she was walking down the street and her napkin slipped free of her
sanitary belt. It moved gently between her legs as she walked. Gently, ever so gently. And then a
slight and distinctly delicious sensation collected in her crotch. As the delight grew, she had to
stop in the street, hold her thighs together to contain it. That must be what it is like,” (85). Much

23
of what Morrison describes reads like the clutches of propriety. Geraldine embodies the “better
Black”, the uppity Negro, in comparison to the other characters who are less close to whiteness
and propriety defined by whiteness. Geraldine, Black and tamped down, is in a prison of her own
design, she is controlling but owns nothing of her own desire, except when it comes upon her
unexpectedly. Respectability and decorousness have confined her. It is almost as if Geraldine as
a representative figure knows that on the other side of sexual satiation and self-determination is
punishment, a causally connected repercussion--such is the power of Black women’s sexual
freedom. Geraldine serves as a powerful representative figure who counters and buttresses the
characterizations of Sula and Maud Martha.
Sula is a Black feministic artistic subject replete with a rich inner life and sexually free
outer life. Morrison writes about Sula, “I began to write my second book, which was called Sula,
because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way in which I heard her name
pronounced … I don’t remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember is the color
around her—a kind of violet, a suffusion of something violet—and her eyes, which appeared to
be half closed. But what I remember is how the women [Morrison’s mother’s friends] said her
name: how they said ‘Hannah Peace’ and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret about
her that they knew, which they didn’t talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seemed loaded
in the way in which they said her name. And I suspected that she was a little bit of an outlaw but
that they approved in some way” (241). It is the approval that strikes me here in Morrison’s
recounting of an anecdote that formed the titular character, Sula. This, Morrison's writing about
her fiction, comes from her essay collection: The Source of Self Regard. I picture the women,
who spoke Hannah Peace’s name, considering the women who make up the world of Sula with

24
approval of their sexual freedom and their outlaw ways. And at the same time portending a
remuneration for those outlaw ways as if a “natural balance” needed restoration.
Valerie Smith in Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination, describes Sula as a
work that “confounds binary oppositions … throughout the text Morrison interrogates the ground
upon which individual and collective identities are constructed” (32). Indeed, Morrison begins
“not with the introduction of characters, but with the history of characters’ natal communities”
(Christian 102). That natal community, the ground, is situated in a town named the Bottom--it is
land that was promised to an enslaved man in exchange for labor. The white farmer tricked the
enslaved man into believing that bottomland, although more difficult to farm, was from God’s
point of view the “bottom of heaven” (5). Smith, in recounting that people were left to wonder
whether the beautiful land really was the bottom of heaven, suggests that Black people have
historically made meaning from practices that seek to disenfranchise and oppress them (33). The
‘making meaning’ is a negotiation of a space too short to stand in and to narrow to lay down, it is
the garret. It is the psychological analogy of interstitial freedom. And it is at that site—the
Bottom, the physical and psychological space, that the women of Sula confound the binary-ness
of their sexually free Black female oppositions.
In keeping with the binary opposition, Morrison begins the novel with a gendered binary
opposition. The book ostensibly is about women, however Sula, the protagonist, doesn’t appear
until we are a third into the text. Instead, we begin with Shadrack, a man struck by the atrocities
of war who returns to the Bottom and begins the practice of National Suicide Day. Much like its
name, National Suicide Day, is its own perverse freedom. Shadrack is made impotent by war and
is a sexless character, “he was drunk, loud, obscene, funny and outrageous. But he never touched
anybody, never fought, never caressed” (15). We also meet Tar Baby, the Dewey’s who are

25
childlike, and Plum who despite his mother Eva’s best efforts succumbs to a heroin addiction. To
save him from himself Eva burns him alive. Here we have the men of the narrative broken, childlike, mad, “it was natural that he, after, all, became the first one to join Shadrack—Tar Baby and
the deweys--on National Suicide Day” (41). And later we meet Nel’s husband broken in his own
way by the requirements of Post-World War II American masculinity and racism.
Is Shadrack’s and Plum’s emasculation a representative emasculation that makes it
possible for the women to control and define their own sexual desires? Is this emasculation
representative of the life of Black women who welcomed home husbands and lovers after World
War II, who were broken in ways that love could not repair? If the men were irreparable like a
hymen, then the women were left to sort out and control their freedom. That reading steals the
power of their desire to flame and blossom of its own free will without an outside intervening
force. But when has the Black woman ever existed beyond or outside of the reaches of the
masculine world and its perilous designs on domination through violence? How are Black
women not subject to the euphemistic notion of making the world safe for democracy’s non de
plume: whiteness?
Yet, the women in Sula are intricately agential, and with that agency they strive for a
complex freedom. And within the designation of ‘woman’ I include the house that Barbara
Christian notes has been made into a character by Morrison’s “stunning description of the
Peaces’ matrifocal house” (113). Eva is the one-legged matriarch who is said to have had her leg
dismembered by a train in order to collect a settlement to create the matrifocal home for the
generations of women she mothered and the boys she took in. Eva has been left to raise Hannah,
Pearl, and Plum. Hannah married, had Sula, and returned to her mother’s house when her
husband died. The Peace women loved men. Eva with one leg entertained a “regular flock of

26
gentlemen callers” and though she was not intimate with men, they wanted to see her lovely calf.
They read to her and argued with her and felt good being in her company. “It was manlove that
Eva bequeathed to her daughters. Probably, people said, because there was no men in the house
to run it. But, that was not true. The Peace women simply loved maleness, for its own sake” (41).
Hannah “rippled with sex,” “she would fuck practically anything … seeing [Hannah] step so
easily into the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier,
taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (44).
For Sula, in addition to a sex education replete with choice and freedom and life’s binary
oppositional balance embodied in the men--Shadrack, Tar Baby, the deweys and Sula’s uncle
Plum, Sula also learns about friendship. Her and Nel, a girl from a home raised by a woman
remarkably similar, in prudence and control, to Geraldine Brown, develop a deep intimate bond.
They share in their sexual awakenings and share in escaping the violence of white boys. They
also experience a binding tie with the tragic death of Chicken Little by Sula’s hand and Nel’s
observance of it. “The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little
sank. They expected him to come back up, laughing. Both girls stared at the water. Nel spoke
first. ‘Somebody saw.’” (61). Here Morrison is setting us up to see the girls as close friends who
have been through a deep trauma together. And it is those types of experiences that create
intimacy, a fusion, and a dedication to each other that would highlight a sense of loyalty. “Nel
and Sula stood some distance away from the grave...at first, as they stood there, their hands were
clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced
in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day”
(66). Morrison’s narrative choice to end that chapter with the loveliness of a summer day, and
the clasp of fingers in friendship and love, sits in the readers’ minds. The juxtaposition to tragedy

27
deepens further a connection of which neither girl, turned woman, will find in a lover or
husband.
It is a brilliant narrative strategy. The reader pulls from that sweet soft spot of love when
Sula who has left the Bottom returns and brings with her the light that had left Nel’s eyes. Nel’s
marriage had offered her little joy and the Bottom was the Bottom. Nel feasts upon the magic of
Sula’s return. “[Nel] knew it was all due to Sula’s return to the Bottom. It was like getting the
use of an eye back, having a cataract removed,” (95). With this rendering of being made whole
through friendship, we are primed to love the two together again. And perhaps to see them as
outlaws and read the love between these two women as sister-love. So, when Nel comes home to
her husband, Jude, naked and on all fours with Sula, the reader is pained with how and why
questions. Nel’s soliloquy in the moment of reveal is as beautiful as it is soul crushing, “I waited
for Sula to look up at me any minute and say one of those lovely college words like aesthetic or
rapport, which I never understood but which I loved because they sounded so comfortable and
firm. And finally, you just got up your clothes and your privates were hanging down, so
soft...and she was sitting in on the bed not even bothering to put clothes on...Her chin was in her
hand and she sat like a visitor from out of town waiting for the hosts to get some quarrelling
done and over with so the card game could continue” (106). Morrison as an artist, someone who
delicately crafts a story that devastates like an atomic bomb, wrote this passage as a foundation
of a question. With the freedom of these women, these feminist artistic subjects, inhabiting
sexual lives, robust with desire and fulfillment, what is the cost?
For Sula, we may initially find the cost of her sexual freedom to be a friendship, a deep
sister love shattered, irreparable. But on further inspection, Nel focuses on Sula’s body language
after Sula’s tryst with her husband. After all, this narrative is not about Nel, or friendship, or

28
love, it is about Sula. Sula, a representative figure of the Black woman artist unable to produce
art because of the confining garret of racism, is the embodiment of a cautionary tale of what
happens when sex and intimacy, the fervor of it, is given free reign. Sula, in Nel’s soliloquy,
does not use words, she sits naked unencumbered by a need to dress or cover her body, her sin,
herself. She is free of the weight of conscience surrounding such a betrayal, she is Hannah
stepping gingerly from the pantry after a romp with a married man. Nel describes Sula as waiting
for the mess of it to be done. This is the cost of sexual freedom—nothingness.
~
Barbara Christian notes that Gwendolyn Brooks in her novel, Maud Martha defeats the
“mystique of heroism” forced on earlier Black women characters by concentrating on the
ordinariness of daily life which allows Maud Martha as a character to escape from the pressures
of “heroism” (438, Invented Lives). Harry Shaw’s biography: Gwendolyn Brook (Boston:
Twayne, 1980), “devotes an entire chapter to Maud Martha, but it ignores social and political
realities as an ingredient in her literary concerns and techniques” (437-438, Invented Lives).
Perhaps these readings of escaping heroism and ignoring the social and political realities are
intended to force a close of the enunciatory gap between Brooks and her text. Maud Martha as a
text is often left in the silence or margins of African American canonical texts. There are
silences, and quiet sentences, but so much anger. And it those silences and the quiet anger of
Brooks that cause readings of the text and titular character to be so opaque and read much like
the grasping of straws.
As such, “in an unpublished poem entitled “After a Perusal of Ancient History,” Brooks
emphasized the encounter with “little people” with little minds engaged in minutiae as their
‘same little puzzled/Helpless hands/Pull away at the Blinds,” and ascribed the situation to human

29
history, past, present, and future,” (88, Kent, Black Women Writers (1950-1980)) It might be
little people with little minds, such as Shaw, who want to close Brooks’ enunciatory gap, but
how an artist deals with their interstitial freedom and creating within those confines, and their
fictional or autobiographical “I” is personal and not a necessary tool for meaningful engagement
with their text. As for Brooks, she has said that “there is something different that I want to do. I
want to write poems that will be non-compromising. . . I want to write poems that will be
meaningful to those people (Black people) I described a while ago, things that touch them” (80,
Gayle, Black Women Writers (1950-1980)).
Brooks also notes, in her essay, “The Field of the Fever, the Time of the Tall-Walkers”
that “a major and muscular Black voice of this day, is correct in “The New Integrationist”:
I
seek
integration
of
negroes
with
black
people.
I know that the Black emphasis” Brooks continues, “must be not against white but FOR Black. I
know that a substantial manner of communication and transaction with whites will be,
eventually, arrived at, arranged—if Blacks remain in this country; but the old order shall not
prevail: the day of head pats for nice little niggers, bummy kicks for bad bad Biggers, and
apparent Black acceptance of both, is done” (78, Black Women Writers (1950-1980)).

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Maud Martha
Unlike Sula, Maud Martha is a narrative that focuses closely on the titular character from
the beginning. Maud Martha Brown is the protagonist of Gwendolyn Brook’s autobiographical
novel, Maud Martha. Maud and The Bluest Eye’s Geraldine seemingly have similar ordinary
lives, both women are subdued, married, deeply unsatisfied, and conceal their feelings. However,
their interior lives could not be more different. Maud has a rich interior life; her mind and its
workings are at once the narrative baseline and the propulsive force. Mary Helen Washington in
Invented Lives writes, “In 1953 one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about
bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and the silence that results from suppressed anger” (388).
Maud Martha depicts a sort of middle-class tampered down sexuality and asks: How can
women express their sexual selves? Throughout the text, Brooks portrays various kinds of Black
domestic life without suggesting that there is only one option. Maud and her husband have
settled for each other, in a way because they were supposed to. And in portraying Maud Martha
as the “good girl” Brooks opens up the question: What can women do? How can they fully
express their sexuality? The narrative answers by privileging Maud’s interior sensibility. Barbara
Christian notes in Black Feminist Criticism that Maud’s, “sense of her own integrity is rooted
mostly in her own imagination—in her internal language as metaphors derived from women’s
experience, metaphors that society usually trivializes but which Brooks presents as the vehicles
of insight” (176). The narrative is not driven by conflicts. The propulsive force is the desire to
show and the sensual, artistic desire to know oneself.
“Words do wonderful things.” Brooks writes in the “Afterword” to Pauline Hopkins’
Contending Forces, “They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can
sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a ‘Hup two three four.’ They
can forge a fiery army out of a hundred languid men,” (1) Brooks is writing about a novel that is

31
described as a quaint little romance. Although Brooks writes of another’s text, all the above is
applicable to her prose in Maud Martha. Further Brooks notes that Black fury entered Hopkins
not seldom and not softly. Again, much of that is also applicable to Maud and no less complexly
Brooks herself. Brooks and Maud are refined in their anger.
We see Maud from the inside out, she is not made up of the characters around her or her
actions such as Sula is, so we find that she is rippled with sex in a quiet but no less sensual and
essential way. Washington writes, “She has the artist’s eye, the writer’s memory, that unsparing
honesty that does not put a light gauze across miseries” (393). And she does not, Maud’s less
than fulfilling life is brought into sharp contrast to her latent but powerful desires, “What she
wanted to dream, and dreamed, was her affair. It pleased her to dwell upon color and soft beady
textures and light, on a complex beauty, on gemlike surfaces. What was the matter with that? …
She was eighteen years old, and the world waited. To caress her.” (22). Indeed, what was the
matter with that? Art, the complex mind of an observing discerning artist, was Maud’s sexual
freedom. But much like the garret, that space was too small for her stand up and too narrow for
Maud to lay down.
Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize decorated poetess, in writing Maud Martha
rejected what American society saw as beautiful, in Maud’s reemergence she refers to the “usual
representatives of womanly beauty, pale and pompadoured.” Brooks creation of Maud Martha
was her own resistance, her own turn toward freedom, Mary Helen Washington describes Maud
Martha’s presence in the black and white world’s as, “profoundly disturbing—a plain, darkskinned black woman with sharp insight and a probing mind that cut through and exposed the
powerlessness and self-contempt inherent in the world’s negative assessment of her” (401).

32
Maud Martha suffers discrimination from lighter complected Black people and white people. Her
marriage, her status and even her anger had caged her. Mary Helen Washington writes, when at
last, “poised on the edge of self-creation, just when we expect the ‘illumination of her gold’
Maud announces that she is pregnant again and happy” (400). Washington reads this as Maud
being released from an incapacitating anger, being outside with her daughter, “out of the psychic
confines that left her preoccupied with her allurements,” Maud is ready for anything, (401).
While this is a generous reading, I am left to wonder about Maud’s art and her unfulfilled sensual
desire. What of her fulfillment?
My contention is that before Brooks created a judicious end to Paul on the page, she
allowed Maud a pleasurable, freedom an intimacy and closeness with herself. In the last chapter,
we find Maud appearing content and quite intimate with her intimacies, “the sunshine had
broken the dark green of that shade and was glorifying every bit of her room. And the air
crawling in at the half-inch crack was like a feather, and it tickled her throat, it teased her lashes,
it made her sit up in bed and stretch, and zip the dark green shade up to the very top of the
window—and made her whisper, What, what, am I to do with all of this life?” (175). Though
still married, and her art beyond her, her internal affections and intimacies still allured and would
still allure until Brooks allows Maud to step fully out of that garret.
In a sequel to Maud Martha, “The Rise of Maud Martha" published in 1955 as a short
story in the collection We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans, Maud’s
husband burns alive in a bus fire. Maud describes him without restraint as “black and a more
dreadful blackness than that which he had ever known and despised.” In the end, we find Maud
free of the encumbrance of a man who found her less than attractive, who could not match her
mind or need for the arts. Her palate is cleansed, and Maud is ready for the sweetness of cake.

33
Brooks in a 1975 interview, published in the College Language Association Journal, says
cheekily, sitting confidently in her enunciatory gap, “So I put her husband in that fire. Wasn’t
that nice of me? I had taken his as far as I could. He certainly wasn’t going to change. I could see
that,” (16). But what does Brooks see for herself, for her own freedom indeterminate or
otherwise?
Brooks takes on anger, and she places it directly on the page—she is not bound by an
incapacitating anger. Her anger and the freedom to produce for a wide audience was on display
her essay “Why Negro Women Leave Home”. In the essay Brooks, much like in the novel Maud
Martha, speaks directly to the confines of marriage, male imposed supremacy, and the autonomy
of women. Having the “good taste of financial independence” Black women did not have to
settle for a union that deprived them of self-respect and dignity. Mary Helen Washington, in
Invented Lives, writes of the women Brooks describes in the essay, “None of these women seems
at all interested in pleasing a husband but rather in getting on with the action that will give her
greater freedom and greater control over her life” (400).
According to her New York Times obituary, three years after graduating from Woodrow
Wilson Junior College in Chicago in 1936, Brooks married Henry L. Blakely, a young writer
who eventually published a book of his own poetry. They lived in Chicago for 30 years. After
attending a Black writer’s conference at Fisk University in 1967, Brooks got closer to the poets
of the Black Arts Movement. She and Blakely divorced in 1969. “Ms. Brooks's poetry shifted
noticeably in form and concern after she attended a conference of black writers at Fisk
University in the spring of 1967. While there she listened to readings by Amiri Baraka, Ron
Milner and other young firebrand poets. They ‘seemed so proud and committed to their own
people,' she recounted. 'The poets among them felt that black poets should write as blacks, about

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blacks, and address themselves to blacks.' She later wrote: 'If it hadn't been for these young
people, these young writers who influenced me, I wouldn't know what I know about this society.
By associating with them I know who I am.' Brooks and Blakely reconciled in 1973, he
apparently resented her fame. He died in 1996, four years before Brooks passed.
Our characters, though big in our minds and on the page, are but small slivers of a life
lived. The sexual freedom, through the production of art, that I had anticipated for Maud was a
metaphysical feat of production for Gwendolyn Brooks. “Much that happened,” Brooks says in
her autobiographical statement, Report from Part One (Detroit, Mich.: Broadside Press, 1972),
“to Maud Martha has not happened to me—and she is a nicer and better coordinated creature
than I am. But it is true that much in the ‘story’ was taken out of my own life, and twisted,
highlighted, or dulled, dressed up or down” (191). Brooks describes her only novel: “Maud
Martha is a lovely little novel, about a lovely little person, wrestling with the threads of milieu.
Of course, this ‘lovely little person’ was the essence of myself, or aspects of myself tied with as
neat a ribbon as my innocence could manage” (114). And that is the cost of desire and the
freedom to create. As a feminist artistic subject, the cost of Gwendolyn Brooks’ sensuality
through art was tying Maud’s vibrant, sensual, and artistic life up in a neat, lovely little ribbon.

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CHAPTER TWO: CORREGIDORA & I MAY DESTROY YOU
In sonic and visual cultural production, how have Black women artists
depicted skin and surface as a site of resistance and futurity within an
interstitial freedom? Can we step out of the garret as artists and sexually
free subjects? Is that our artistic afro futurism?
The human is a stratifying concept. Even more complex and indeterminate within the
conceptions of the normative white world is the Black human woman. The Black woman as
subject is often defined by her depth, that is, she is defined by turning her inside out to see the
authentic. The concept of depth is about the imposition of a racializing concept on Black
humanity. The recognition and inclusion of Black humanity often requires a “deeper reading” as
if the surface is inconclusive, or worse yet unreliable. But what is surface? Surface is skin,
surface is culture, surface is pain, surface is art. Uri McMillan, a cultural historian who
researches and writes in the interstices between Black cultural studies, performance studies,
queer theory and contemporary art, writes, “surface is what insists on being looked at rather than
what we must train ourselves to see through” (McMillan). By theorizing surface as depth and as
relational, McMillan considers the fecund potentialities inherent in a more robust and cogent
theory of the surface, particularly surface as an instrument of the multisensory. That
multisensory experience has come from Black expression in sonic and visual artistry since the
inception of those forms.
Lucille Bogan, also known as Bessie Jackson, was a “dirty blues” singer. She sang of her
desires, with songs that rank among the most sexually explicit ever recorded. 'Shave 'Em Dry',

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recorded under the pseudonym starts, “I've got nipples on my titties as big as the end of my
thumb/ Got somethin' 'tween my legs'll make a dead man come!”
A recording of her song, “‘Til The Cow Come Home” can be found on YouTube. When
you click play what comes out is not the crisp highly produced sound of contemporary music. On
the top of the sound, above her alto register and next to her pain is a film—a thin surface. The
epidermis of the recording, the fuzz on the needle, is plush with feeling and depth. It is the
historicizing of a type of freedom through desire for the flesh. That surface is a sonic
representation of what must be listened to and not pierced for a deeper meaning, that is, not
pierced for a more authentic reading of Bogan when she says, “I can do it to you baby til the
cows come home.” Bogan means exactly that, and that reading has all the value and validity
typically applied to depth.
Continuing with the evaluation of blues as a sonic presentation of the possibilities of
surface as depth, let us turn to the way blues can be applied to narrative and as a result also
surface as depth. Cheryl A Wall, in Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and
Literary Tradition grapples with what she describes as a "blues trope" (7). Blues musicians
make, "changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order,
repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues cries that often punctuate the
performance of the songs" (7). This technique is worrying the line. This line as surface
expression is often employed by the artist to emphasize, clarify, or subvert meaning. It is
worrying the line that audiences become attuned to. Throughout Bogan’s record, the sound, her
voice, her words in repetition employ that blues trope. Her gospel, her desire is as plain as a
narrative can be. Wall applies this “blues trope” to the literary techniques of Black writers who
subvert, revise, or extend notions of familial and literary lineage. These techniques amplify the

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surface of song, and likewise the surface of literary narratives, by forcing us to look at and to
hear what is in front of us. Changes in stress and pitch, exclamatory phrases, changes in word
order, repetition of phrases force us to acknowledge difference, see color, see desire, see love,
see trauma, and be better audiences, and, as a result, better storytellers.
Black art, such as blues and literary narratives, registers the exclusion of Black people in
American artistic society, and American society at large. By creating our own forms under the
banner of literature, film and song, our art exceeds and troubles the commonsense understanding
of those expressions and traditions. And with that troubling, with exceeding the commonness of
expression Black artists have been excluded from, comes scrutiny. McMillan notes that
historically, surface was deemed superficial, or deceptive, or unable to hold up to rigorous
scrutiny. In short, “truth” resides in deep insights gleaned through rigorous excavation. Surfaces,
conversely, are “false” and opaque, since the most significant truths are understood not to be
visible and immediately discernible (McMillan). The question then becomes: visible to whom?
And discernible by whom? And at what cost?
Issa Rae, the original awkward Black girl, created her own form of visual representation
of the spectrum of Black womanhood. By subverting the notion of the strong, struggling Black
woman and by saying, no stop and look we are also awkward and insecure, she is balking at the
ways in which others have attempted to see through Black women to the depth of their
discernible strength begat from pain and struggle. On the surface, many of us are human and
insecure and have accessed the range of human emotions not historically afforded Black
women—human emotion, such as softness and vulnerability, that was often met with derision
and skepticism. And not just by the alleged dominant culture.

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Uri McMillan notes a theoretical repositioning in the creation of Black art. “Recent
interdisciplinary interventions—particularly in psychoanalysis, Black cultural studies, sensation
and affect studies, and aesthetic theory” are shifting, “to consider the Black epidermal surface--
the skin, as an overlooked site of our newly expanded sensorium” (McMillan). The surface of
Black skin is its own authenticity, its own depth. And as such, in exploring visual media, lighting
of Black skin takes on a polemic role in biting back against the notion of superficiality or
deception as it relates to the nature of surface.
Nadia Latif writes that while race and representation in film and television has been taken
on through movements such as #Oscarssowhite, “the conversation about the aesthetics of
representation – what people of colour actually look like on screen – is rarely addressed.
Chronically bad lighting for black actors has been a problem ever since black actors first
appeared on screen (and before that, to the era of blackface and minstrelsy). I shudder when I
think of the number of times I’ve watched a beautiful dark-skinned actor transformed into an
ashy sallow spectre because too many film-makers fail to tailor their practice to making that
actor look as good as everyone else” (Latif). The Insecure production tackles the historical
practice of ignoring the aesthetic representation of Black skin on film. The show’s Director of
Photography noted the “the importance of moisturising the actors’ skin to give the lighting the
most bounce” (Latif). And Howard University professor, Montré Aza Missouri, teaches her
students that “the sensors used in light meters have been calibrated for white skin. Rather than
resorting to tricks, they need to manage the built-in bias of their instruments, in this case opening
their cameras’ apertures to allow more light through the lens” (Latif). Insecure in giving the
surface of Black skin its own visual purpose and intensity is marking surface as depth, surface as
truth, surface a narrative force.

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Insecure’s cinematography and story say to its audience that right here on the surface we
will show a Black woman who does not always have a saucy comeback or tough push through
attitude. Instead, the sitcom says do not look away when in season one episode one, a student
that Issa Dee works with calls her out on being weird. The camera captures the plain surface of
her awkwardness. It pans to her forced cringeworthy smile, zooms in on Issa nodding her head
affirming her awkwardness, and we all sit in the room with her right on top of the discomfort.
We don’t always get it right. And for many Black women we spend a long time figuring it out.
We don’t all come out of the womb stomping into court Annalise Keating style or Olivia Popelike with tailored pants suits, red bottomed heels, and wigs that we are strong enough to shrug
off, showing the world the vulnerability of our straight backs. Often, it is our Chucks, and last
season’s high waisted jeans and short natural afro right on the surface that insists on being
looked at.
The writers of Insecure not only use character development and cinematography to
challenge the notion of surface as superficial. They also employ narrative devices such as satire.
In season two of Insecure, the writers wrote in a show within the show: Due North. It is a soap
opera set in the antebellum South, it stars Regina Hall as an enslaved woman named Ninny and
Scott Foley as the enslaver, she’s “in love” with. There is even a consumptive child watching the
drama unfold from the shadows. The main characters of Insecure watch the show at varying
points throughout the season. Due North is a satirical look at the way the narrative of the disaster
of chattel slavey often depicts a love story between a rapist enslaver and a woman with no
agency and as a result no ability to give consent. The writers make a satirical statement about the
ways in which the normative sexual violence during the disaster of slavery has been reimagined
as romantic and palatable. Try as one might there is no room to prefabricate a critically

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excavated narrative or pull back the satirical surface of Due North for a deeper reading. The truth
of America’s historical past is right there on the surface.
Rap Sh!t Issa Rae’s next series, follows two rappers attempts to navigate the music
industry in the age of social media. The series stars Shawna, a receptionist at a swanky Miami
hotel. Shawna resists the pressure to use sexuality to garner attention for her art. Whereas, the
other member of the duo, Mia who while raising a little girl, works two jobs and maintain an
OnlyFans online site. While Shawna might be deemed sanctimoniousness, Mia embraces sex as
a tool to garner celebrity and make money. At all times, camera phones are up, and the lives of
these women are captured for the consumption of those who log in, scroll, comment or those
who are silent voyeurs, consumers, nonetheless.
The dramedy is a study in friendship, image and cost of owning and or selling the surface
of one’s skin, voice, in a rapidly regurgitating, insatiable self-promoting public space all in the
name of art. Rap Sh!t is a depiction of Black women navigating the insidious, consuming nature
of the music industry. As consumers of the dramedy, we are also consumers of the character’s
art. We watch knowing that the two women will have to lose before they gain, but as underdogs
in the microcosm of a consumer culture we align our goals with the women pursuing artistic
dreams who for many die on the crumbling steps of hip hop fame and adoration. In highlighting
the rise to stardom of two young rappers, both Black women, Rae asks quite plainly about the
cost of artistic freedom in an internet age. The surface of social media is shiny, intoxicating, and
tied to the same dangers of fame.
Mia, who’s character is not so loosely based on Young MA a current rapper and leader of
the City Girls. Mia sometimes sells live video of her naked flesh on the internet. In one scene, we
see before her camera undressed as a John consumes her flesh. The surface of her skin much like

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the camera work in Insecure is moisturized and inviting, but what is the cost to her? The other
member, Shawna, would prefer conscious rap, “My art is not for the male gaze, I want to make
something relative to people’s lives,” she says in response to Mia’s desire to make fun, irreverent
music. As the series unfolds cell phones are always in hand record ready, and the Instagram feed
of a consumer or character often fills the television screen making us the consumer of the drama
and of flesh. As consumers, we say to the rap duo, if you want the freedom to pursue your art it
must be on our terms. The dramady highlights an audience that wants to be fed music that on
deeper excavation is entertaining and debilitating to the artist. In fact, at their first performance
their manager of sorts, requires, “ass shaking and titties bouncing.”
Returning to Uri McMillan’s discussion of surface as depth, he explores “the violences of
interpretation that prematurely fix the meaning of minority artistic production within
prefabricated narratives” (McMillan). What Rap Sh!t offers is a discussion on the current state of
surface, surface that is readily available for consumption. The phones, the camera work, the
speed of the narrative, the complex characters who are foils of each other both striving for an
unrealistic goal all serve as a heuristic that begs us to see the complexity on the surface of this
series. Two women have a shared goal, their skin, their talent, their sexuality, their conflicts are
plain, and we root for them because we are them. There is nothing to excavate that is not on the
shiny surface of the zoomed in iPhone with hearts blossoming ‘likes’. The prefabricated
narrative is incomplete because right there on the surface of their conflict is friendship, love, and
artistic creation.
While Issa Rae employs a surface reading of humor and characterization as depth in
Insecure and Rap Sh!t, Michaela Coel has delivered an epic series detailing sexual trauma that
demands our complicity without didacticism. I May Destroy You is a layered narrative about

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consent, trauma, friendship, and artistic cultural production. The show defies genre or critical
classification, it resists the violence of interpretation and the prefabricated narratives of critical
excavation. Black creatives, across the diaspora, are bending form and genre to speak to the
existential predicaments that Black people labor under. In order to approach the complexity of
these works we must bend our ideas of form and genre. We must bend grammar and syntax in
order to say more and approach the fuller range of our artistic possibilities. Thereby, making the
prefabricated narrative responses, which arrive when Black artistic production is excavated for
what is below the surface, impossible. In the case of I May, a woman is harmed and in
investigating that harm and her recovery, we are met with a series of interactions that in it of
themselves are vile and wounding. Michaela Coel, as artist--as writer, director, and star, places
each narrative event right in front of our face, plain as day. Arabella, the protagonist who is a
writer played by Michaela Coel, makes plain that the depth we may be waiting for is the
unadorned and conspicuous surface of her trauma.
I May Destroy You is an experience that is multi-sensory, rather than strictly ocularcentric. Its narrative surface is not inert, but vibrant, pulsating, and constantly in motion,
undulating, like a wall of water (McMillan). The series premiere, titled “Eyes Eyes Eyes Eyes”
written by Michaela Coel and directed by Sam Miller, is about the protagonist under the gun to
complete a draft of her second book. With the deadline looming, up-and-coming writer Arabella
gives in to procrastination and joins a friend on a night out. The Black woman as artist is
captured right away as the camera focuses on the blinking cursor waiting for the words to come.
We find out earlier that Arabella's draft is due the next morning. We have all been there.
Arabella succumbs to the temptation of one drink or perhaps she cannot stand to look at the
flashing cursor. She finds herself at the Ego Death Bar. Soon she is taking shots with a friend and

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a couple strangers. Before the bottoms up, everyone around the table yells, “Eyes, eyes, eyes,
eyes” a requirement for eye contact less one will succumb to the punishment of seven years of
bad sex. The irony, right there on the surface, is brilliant.
In returning to that scene after watching the whole series, I found that the camera is our
eyes. It is saying look at the face of the man who spikes Arabella’s drink, a face that returns in
haunting and violent repetitions of foggy memory throughout the series. That repetition is
worrying the line, a blues trope. After the shots, we find the group dancing to seriously upbeat
music. It is a loud sonic narrative choice to raise the stakes. It covers the surface of everything,
the fun, the bodies in rhythmic motion, and it works to set us up for the move to down beat and
the slow motion of Arabella’s descent into disembodiment. Something is amiss. Arabella cannot
stand, she attempts to find the door, she crawls outside, people watch, and no one helps. We are
the audience of do-nothing voyeurs, we are complicit, we watch the surface of the visual blur and
depict that Arabella is in trouble. She was set up.
The next morning, cut to Arabella back in the office typing. A slow reveal shows her cell
phone screen cracked and an open wound on her forehead. After meeting with her agent who
finds the end of the draft, she submitted to be unacceptable, she attempts to go home. She cannot
remember how to get home. Over the sonic surface of the audio is a high-pitched sound. A
woman taps her nails on the plexiglass of the bus stop where Arabella sits disoriented. The
tapping sound is enhanced. The woman asks, “Are you Arabella?” The question is benign, but
we are primed for danger. The camera zooms in on the woman’s hands and she is dark skin. The
surface of her skin is why she wants to compliment Arabella who has written about women with
dark skin and big lips. The woman feels seen, eyes. The sonic note of memory, the high-pitched
sound of disorientation overlays the dialogue. We know it is in Arabella's head, but now it is also

44
in ours. The woman puts Arabella in a cab to her home. Arabella turns the knob to her bedroom
and the high-pitched thrumming sound returns. It is an indicator of trauma and memory
returning—worrying the line. The scene cuts to a man thrusting and humping a lifeless Arabella
in a bathroom stall. In the doorway of her bedroom, Arabella looks up and to the side and says,
“him.” The reveal, for the audience, is as harsh and as searing as it is for Arabella.
Aida Levy-Hussen, in How to Read African American Literature, defines traumatic time
as a structure of narrative … that defies chronological mapping and instead takes shape through
repeated, affectively charged references to an original traumatic event” (20). Coel employs
traumatic time as narrative strategy. The episodes, after the premiere, follow Arabella’s detective
work to figure out what has happened to her and who was involved. We also watch as she deals
with trauma, the reporting of it and managing another sexual experience where consent or lack
thereof returns. Traumatic time as a narrative strategy is also employed by Coel through the
unfolding of the sexual experiences of her friends that depict deception, the blurred lines of
physical entrance, sexual crimes between men and the trauma of reporting such crimes, and
lastly friendship betrayal. All these events are presented without any didactic judgement and
without any angling that tells the viewer how to see or feel about the traumas. There is no
piercing the surface for what McMillan describes as “what we must train ourselves to see
through” (9). Coel presents these events plainly without scouring their depths for truth because
the surface of her narrative choices may be deemed suspicious. The bald surface of these events
is plain, unambiguous, and traumatic. Here, and as defined by Levy-Hussen, “traumatic time is
non-linear, di-unified, and regenerated by the impossible desire for a redemptive return to the
past” (20). Coel simultaneously uses traumatic time to call back to Arabella’s original trauma
while using the forward narrative propulsive force of these other traumas to move us from

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episode to episode. The meticulous weaving and thematic connections are an artistry of surface
revelation.
Much like Michaela Coel, who developed I May after being drugged and experiencing
sexual assault, the protagonist in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Ursa, is a producer of sonic cultural
production who breaks the chains of generational trauma by defining herself as an artist first and
victim never. In "Trouble in Mind: Blues and History in Corregidora," Cheryl A Wall describes
how blues singer Ursa Corregidora uses sexuality and the blues to render her physical and
emotional pain. Although the novel is about Ursa grappling with her sexuality, reproduction, and
generational trauma—the role of Ursa’s voice as an artist is just as poignant if not more so. Ursa
is Lucille Bogan, worrying the line to trouble the surface of the story with repetition and the
exclamation of freedom from trauma. In order to press against the confines of the prison created
through the non-linear generational trauma of the retelling of violence, Ursa uses the blues, her
art.
During a moment where we slip into Ursa’s memory, Mama says that songs are the devil
unless raised up to the glory of God, Ursa narrates a response, a blues riff, “But still I’ll sing as
you talked it, your voice humming, sing about the Portuguese who fingered your genitals …
Slapped you across the cunt till it was bluer than black. Concubine daughter.” Then Ursa returns
to dialogue with Mama. Mama asks: “Where did you get those songs? That’s devil music.” And
Ursa replies, “I got them from you” (53 - 54). Ursa had not unearthed a deeper richer space so
that we may know and believe her. She did not have to. The devil music is her worrying the line
and marking traumatic time. Much like Ursa and Arabella, Michaela Coel herself had been
victimized. However, in employing using sonic and visual cultural production she has refused
the role of victim.

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“Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning” (54). In
addition to oral traditions, Jones also uses the call-and-response pattern of Black performance
and audience/congregation responses. There are also blues refrains and the improvisation of jazz
throughout the language and as narrative devices. “My great grandmama told my grandmama the
part she lived through that my grandmama didn’t live through and my grandmama told my mama
what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were
suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget. Even
though they’d burned everything to play like it didn’t never happen.”
Grandmama’s generational quest for justice that manifests itself in making
generations. Early in the narrative, Jones establishes that Ursa must have a child so that child can
be told about the sexual violence endured by generations of women. “... The important thing is
making generations. They can burn the papers but they can’t burn consciousness” (22). That
child must bear witness to the evil ways of Corregidora. And as a result of that tell and retelling,
generationally, justice will be served. It is, however, an infinite process of justice. If it must be
perpetrated through generations when will the line of progeny ever be free of it?
Although this novel is about Ursa grappling with her sexuality, reproduction, and
generational trauma—the role of Ursa’s voice as an artist is just as poignant if not more so.
“They squeezed Corregidora into me, and I sung back in return” (103) The oral storytelling
tradition is a tool for history making and correction, but it also serves as a way to pass on trauma.
In order to press against the confines of the prison created through generational trauma, Ursa
uses the blues, her art. “I would sing songs that had to do with holding things inside you. Secret
happinesses, a tenderness” (154). After Mutt’s attack and Ursa losing her baby, her womb, and
the hope for any children, Ursa wanted to return to her art—even before she knew she was well

47
enough to do so. And by the end of the narrative we find Ursa once again on stage using her
voice to manage a drunk customer. “I started singing a song, hoping that would make him quiet.
I did. I put him where he wanted to get. I sang a low down blues,” (168). Overall, it’s my
contention that the novel, as neo slave narrative in many ways, privileges art in ways that writers
of abolitionist text were unable to especially in the recounting of the sexual violence enacted on
the black female body.
The Black women cultural producers make use of surface aesthetics to render the “racial
and gendered body pliable and multiple as well as ambivalent and ultimately unknowable”
(McMillan). These artists: Lucille Bogan, Issa Rae, Michaela Coel, and Gayl Jones, “share a
desire to more rigorously attune us to the different scripts that skin, particularly black skin, can
enact when it is not simply seen as the visual ur-tex of epidermal difference (McMillan). Black
skin is not simply seen, it is felt, it is art, as Grace Jones has described herself, skin as surface as
depth is pure energy, it transmits. The transmission here is the structure of healing in
Corregidora and the structure of healing in I May Destroy You.

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CONCLUSION
The arc of enslavement to freedom bends toward fictional narrative and historicism for
reportage, healing, and forward movement toward wholeness--beginning in 1861 with Jacobs’
Incidents in The Life Of A Slave Girl coupled with the Cult of True Womanhood. The Cult
equated a white woman’s value with moral and gendered abstractions. The ideal made for an
enunciatory gap that Black women wrote from to tell their plight as sexualized object. It was
impossible for a Black woman to be raped because they could not meet the standard of true
womanhood. As such in order for white women to stay within the confines of purity, that was
self-policed, Jacobs could only allude to the sexual violence and horrors of slavery for fear she
lose her audience. This manipulation was best served by the agility offered by fiction. (Hartman)
In 1987, Toni Morrison published Beloved, a neo slave narrative based on a newspaper
article about Margaret Garner—an enslaved woman who isn’t tried for murder after killing her
daughter but is tried for theft of property. Morrison asks, who then can judge the woman who
killed her child so that she may avoid the violence of slavery? She writes, “And that would only
be, of course, her daughter, the one she managed to kill … then I could sort of imagine it, or
think about it, and see what would happen when the dead daughter is introduced to the text”
(309). This is the crux of the interplay between fiction and history. Morrison filling the gap
between historical knowledge and the intimacy and interiority of the pain of the disaster of
slavery, she writes, “I didn’t want to chew on that evil and give it an authority that it didn’t
deserve, give it a glamour that it didn’t really have; I wanted to return the agency into the hands
of the slaves,” (Source of Self-Regard, 330). At this stage in the bend, Morrison can use the
imaginative possibilities to tell a greater truth. And through imagination she writes about
interiority and gives greater humanity to fictional Black characters. Without the imposition of the
goal of the slave narrative and the absurdity of white women’s Cult of True Womanhood

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Morrison could craft scenes where Black women experience physical love as well as scenes
where they are sexually assaulted and not lose their access to humanity. We have made great
narrative strides.
By 2017, the writers of series Insecure are able to make a satirical statement about the
ways sexual violence created even more complex power structures during slavery. Due North - a
soap opera set in the pre–Civil War South, stars Regina Hall as a slave named Ninny, Scott Foley
as the master “she’s in love with,” and there’s even a consumptive child watching everything
from the shadows. The main characters of Insecure watch the show at varying points throughout
the season. Due North depicts the sexual violence of enslavement satirically in order to make a
statement about how depictions by the well-meaning are often lack complexity. Our narratives
are now able to make layered statements about our indeterminate sexual and artistic freedom.
The Black woman as artist persists and finds reclamation in the space of trauma. We
don’t ask for attention; we don’t ask for light—we are our own aperture. Nikki Giovanni wrote:
“We don’t ask the sun to consider the pleasure of the moon; why should female and Black
humans be constantly asked how we feel about our essence? Those who ask are, in essence,
trying to assure themselves that they are inherently better off to have been born male and
preferably white. That’s just so much tommyrot. I wouldn’t be other than what I am because for
one I can’t; I can only fool myself into thinking that I can. And for two: I like myself,” (207,
Nikki Giovanni, Black Women Writers (1950-1980).
Perhaps that is the forward-looking reclamation, the tommyrot that keeps us in that
perpetual indeterminate not quite free state. In moving toward a true creative and sexual freedom
can we find a space that is no longer interstitial? Can we step out of the garret as artists and

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sexually free subjects? Is that our artistic afro futurism? Is it achievable or will there always be a
cost?
Washington writes of Gwendolyn Brooks, “Though Maud is silenced in fiction in ways
that Brooks in nonfiction is not, she too leaves husband and home and goes looking for a way to
be straight and tall in the world,” (400, Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives). Is that our
charge—to be in a perpetual search for the best ways to be straight and tall in the world?
Or perhaps like Maud Martha, at her husband’s funeral—a funeral for freedom’s
indeterminacy—we will think only of our gorgeous wanting and focus instead on tasting the
delicious desire of sweet pleasure.
“Her pity was all for him. He, who had so loved physical beauty, in the end a fire-used,
repulsive thing.
But for herself (she did not think of groceries, she did not think, as yet, a certain, old,
child-helplessness of the eyes)— why, she could actually feel herself rising. She felt higher and
more like a citizen of—what?
A road was again clean before her. She held the destinies of herself and of her children in
her individual power—all was up to her.
Down and down they sent her Paul. The relatives, for some time worried, looked on her
with approval at last. For she was crying.
Crying because she could not stop herself from thinking about the after-funeral white
cake that waited in her mother’s home” –1955 (432, Brooks, “The Rise of Maud Martha”).

51
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The mutually constitutive notions of sexual freedom and artistic cultural production are ripe areas for an exploration of the interchangeable categories of writers as artists and protagonists as sexual beings who push against the bounds of their subjection. I open attempting to make accessible the elusive notion of freedom. What does freedom mean for the Black woman who is perpetually subject to the oppressive forces of patriarchy and the forward-looking, future-oriented projects of racism and colonialism? What does this approximation of an interstitial freedom cost the artist? To approximate an answer, I examine the creation of art and the attending costs of the act of artistic creation by Black women in visual, literary, and sonic media. Lastly, I evaluate how fame and knowingness operate to lessen or increase the cost of a freedom that is interstitial, using the ever expanding or tightening enunciatory gap present in the lives of Black women novelists.

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Creator Fenderson, Leesa Simone (author)

Core Title I begat this, flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress: the costs of artistic and sexual exploration and healing within an interstitial freedom

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 05/07/2024

Defense Date 03/18/2024

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

Tag artist,artistic cultural production,Black womanist,Black women,Black women writers,Cost,enunciatory,film,forward-looking,future-oriented projects of racism and colonialism,interstitial freedom,Literature,Media,novel,novelist,OAI-PMH Harvest,protagonists,sexual freedom,subjection,writers as artists

Format theses (aat)

Language English

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Creator Email lfenders@usc.edu,lsf2123@columbia.edu

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