25 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

Her Self in the Making: Female Promiscuity in ’s The Blacker the Berry

[F]or your intellectʼs sake get rid of the puritan notion that to have casual sexual intercourse is a sin. Itʼs a biological necessity my dear. More tragedies result from girls clinging to their virginity than you would imagine. (Thurman, “Letters to Dorothy West” 172)

Introduction: Locating a Brave Sexual Subject n recent years, a growing number of scholars have shown interest in transient intimacies, yet, as Juana María Rodríguez points out in I “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies, ” studies concerning queer sociality almost exclusively focus on gay encounters. Arguing that the anonymous sexual encounters described by leading male scholars to be available in urban centers can be “life-threatening, inaccessible, or uninteresting” to many subjects, Rodríguez stresses the importance of fantasies that fulfill the sexual needs of those subjects (Rodríguez 341). “Nonetheless, ” she continues, “many dykes, trans-men, butches, disabled people, and queer, straight, and trans-women have ventured outside the sphere of fantasy and have bravely entered, or stealthily crept, into the available male domains of public sexual exploration and have found pleasure there” (Rodríguez 341). Much of her work is thus concerned with othered yet brave subjects, especially lesbians, who have even gone further to create and sustain alternative sexual spaces—cyberspace, for instance—wherein pleasures are explored and radically non-normative experiences of sociality are possible. I submit that one may find a fictional rendering of such a subject in Wallace

The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan, No. 15, February 2017. Ⓒ 2017 by The American Literature Society of Japan 26 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

Thurmanʼs The Blacker the Berry (1929). In an attempt to explicate the Renaissance authorʼs interest in queer sociality as represented in his first novel, I locate its heroine Emma Lou in the genealogy of marginalized yet brave sexual subjects. Emma Lou finds herself in a web of contradictory societal expectations that confine female sexuality to something that is expressed only within marriage and simultaneously exclude her from the marriage market on account of her very dark skin. Unlike many other African American female characters of the era, however, these expectations by no means define the actions and decisions of Thurmanʼs heroine. Indeed, as Catherine Rottenburg rightly observes, Emma Lou “explores extra-marital sexuality with little shame” and, importantly, “does not end up dead (Clare Kendry [of Nella Larsenʼs Passing]), dying (Helga Crane [of Larsenʼs Quicksand]), or about to be married (Angela Murray [of Jessie Fausetʼs Plum Bum])” (Rottenburg 61). While decidedly straight in terms of her object choices, Emma Lou seems to perform queerness not as identity but a positionality that resists the heteropatriarchy of her society.1 Emma Lou forms and deforms her self through moments of queer sociality and manages to escape societal punishment. As the epigraph of this essay openly reveals, Thurman considers casual sex to be “a biological necessity” rather than “a sin” that deserves punishment (“Letters” 172). Thurmanʼs valorization of promiscuity evidently resonates with current queer theoristsʼ celebration of alternative intimacy that “forms subjectivity in its articulation” as opposed to “two coherent selves coming together or the sharing of discrete subjectivities” (Vogel 22). As I will argue, viewing Emma Louʼs promiscuous survival in Harlem through the lens of non-normative intimacy or queer sociality allows us to appreciate Thurmanʼs project in Blacker to construct a narrative of a female self in the making. In spite of her bravery, Emma Louʼs promiscuous survival remains precarious due to her subject positioning as a dark- skinned black woman during the time of urban reform. By situating Thurmanʼs text within the context of the intense criminalization of black sexuality, I will propose that it offers an alternative vision to the rigid gender and sexual norms of racial uplift that was led by such prominent figures as Crisisʼs W.E.B. Du Bois and Messengerʼs Chandler Owen. As I hope my reading of Blacker, and of Nella Larsenʼs Quicksand, will make clear, the promiscuous character of Emma Lou also serves as an alternative to a literary tradition, resisting what Ann duCille has dubbed the coupling convention that uses marriage as a trope. Thurmanʼs decision Her Self in the Making 27 not to use the marriage plot as a narrative framework reflects the rebellious authorʼs radical critique of the marriage ideal as well as the ideology of racial progress that revolves around it. In Blacker, this essay will finally claim, female promiscuity offers the possibility of a self-formation that refuses to be confined by the teleology of racial uplift.

1. Marginalization, Resilience, and the Morning After Remembered as a “strangely brilliant black boy” (Hughes 235) by and as “the most symbolic figure” (qtd. in Singh and Scott xxi) of the Harlem Renaissance by Dorothy West, Wallace Thurman was among the younger writers of the literary and cultural movement who vocally resisted the uplift ideology that valued middle-class respectability. A contributor to The Messenger and The New Republic as well as the editor of the two short-lived magazines Fire!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman served as a pivotal figure among the group of anti-uplift artists and authors for whom playfully coined the term “Niggerati” (Hemenway 43). As Amritjit Singh, one of the co-editors of The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, observes, Thurman has hitherto been “more often treated as a lens through which to view the movement than as an artist and public intellectual in his own right” (14). Indeed, his second novel, Infants of the Spring, has gained some critical attention in recent years largely due to its vivid descriptions of the rebellious younger generation of authors and artists whose members include Hughes, Hurston, Bruce Richard Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. On the other hand, Thurmanʼs first novel, The Blacker the Berry, has been largely neglected, though several scholarly essays about the work have been published since the late 20th century. Appreciative assessments of Blacker often center on Thurmanʼs decision to portray a woman as his protagonist. For example, Granville Ganter notes the possibility that “a female persona heightened the sense of marginality he wished to explore in his characters” (89). In an essay titled “A Female Face, ” Thadious M. Davis emphasizes the parallels between Emma Lou and Thurman himself, who was, like his heroine, “dark-skinned and sensitive to color hierarchy within the race” (114). Davis makes the claim that Thurman employed “the textual strategy of responding to racial separation and oppression by assuming a female face” (114). Daniel M. Scott III, who is also a co-editor of the Thurman anthology, argues in his essay on Blacker that Thurmanʼs attempt to 28 Chiaki ISHIKAWA transcend his own gender becomes “an exploration of non-essentialized, de- natured constructions of the self” (329). These scholars positively read Thurmanʼs use of a female protagonist as exemplifying the male authorʼs non-masculinist stance, which Stephen Knadler also refers to as “post-identity” and/or “queer” (912). My contention is that these existing studies fail to historicize Emma Louʼs promiscuity. As a result, they overlook her resilience and her deviation from the restrictive sexual norms that existed for women within the African American community. Davis states, for example, that “a femaleʼs conventional engagements with men” allowed Thurman to “represent his own homoerotic attractions” (115). Emma Louʼs sexual pursuit simply cannot be considered “conventional” if we contextualize it within the contemporary sexual politics of racial uplift that supported the government-led campaign of urban reform. In fact, Thurmanʼs choice of a woman as his main character assumes great significance against the specific context of urban reform during the social hygiene era, wherein black womenʼs extramarital, often transient sexual practices were intensely criminalized in an attempt to prevent venereal disease from being widely spread. Adding to an increased anxiety about young womenʼs sexual behavior in modern times, black womenʼs supposed pathological promiscuity shaped urban reformers and influenced criminal justice administratorsʼ policing and surveillance policies. Unmarried working women in New York could be arrested for such charges as prostitution, solicitation, and incorrigibility and sent to prison if they tested positive for venereal disease (Hicks 221-22; Robertson et al. 457). It is during such an era of intensely racist and sexist policing gazes and actions that Emma Lou strolls the street, bravely entering into a movie house and dance hall without an escort, and meets men. The way in which she navigates through the streets, social venues, and residences of 1920s Harlem illuminates the harsh reality of marginalization that occurred due to racism, sexism, and intra-race color prejudice, revealing the rich complexity of black urban life. Living in a white-supremacist society wherein “[t]he nearer white you are the more white people will respect you” (Blacker 13), light-skinned African Americans often aspired to produce even lighter-skinned children. As the narrator bluntly states, “all of the Negro leaders and members of the Negro upper class” are “either light skinned themselves or else had light-skinned wives” (30). A wife with dark skin is considered “a handicap” (30) unless she possesses some quality to Her Self in the Making 29

“compensate” (31) for her darkness, such as wealth, intelligence, fame, beauty, and/or special talent. In such a society, Emma Lou, who is not only dark-skinned but also “commonplace and poor, ugly and undistinguished” (122), undoubtedly encounters difficulty in finding her match. Narrated from Emma Louʼs marginalized position, Blacker exposes color prejudice within the African American community, offering an analysis of how it works in tandem with the eugenic idea of using marriage and reproduction to uplift the race. With the exception of her dark-skinned father, who deserted her mother soon after their daughter was born, Emma Louʼs family members are all proudly light- skinned. Treated as “the alien member of the family” throughout her life (9), Emma Lou abandons her small hometown of Boise, Idaho, after receiving her high school diploma. Her intention is to seek out the possibility of socialization with “the right sort of people”—that is, respectable African Americans (30)—by attending college in Los Angeles. Yet she soon discovers that on campus, young African American men and women of the upper class are more color-conscious than she would have imagined. Boys taunt Emma Lou behind her back, jeering that “[s]heʼs hottentot enough to take something” (21), and girls refuse to pledge dark-skinned students into their sororities; these girls do not look for friendship in their dark-skinned contemporaries, knowing full well that the boys, “their future husbands” (31), do not favor such prospects. Constantly ridiculed by men of her race, Emma Lou cannot fulfill the ideal of marriage that, ironically, was imagined in an effort to bring freedom and protection to women. Disappointed and “desperately driven to escape” (41), Emma Lou leaves Los Angeles for Harlem before completing her degree as soon as she saves enough money. To Emma Louʼs disappointment, however, color prejudice is also persistent among those who do not value respectability and racial progress, and therefore dark-skinned women like herself are considered inferior. On the Harlem streets, men make fun of Emma Lou, tossing her misogynistic remarks such as “I donʼt haul no coal” (58). As far as color prejudice is concerned, the college boys and those men in the streets are both discriminative, and the only difference between them is whether they insult Emma Lou to her face or behind her back. Emma Lou later falls for a working-class man named Alva, but he courts her initially “to show [his friends] just how little he minded their kidding” (82). When Alva mentions the saying “[t]he blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, ” his friend replies: “The only thing a black woman is good for is to make money for a brown-skin papa” 30 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

(84). Marginalized but not defeated in such a color-conscious society, Emma Lou strolls the streets of Harlem. Especially in love with Seventh Avenue, a street “so active and alive, ” she exclaims, “At night it was glorious! Where else could one see so many different types of Negroes? Where else would one view such a heterogeneous ensemble of mellow colors, glorified by the night?” (57). With some of these men, she experiences or “steals” pleasure. In the opening scene of Part 2, appropriately titled “Harlem, ” Emma Lou sees a man off from her room without reluctance.

Emma Lou turned her face away from the wall, and quizzically squinted her dark, pea-like eyes at the recently closed door. Then, sitting upright, she strained her ears, trying to hear the familiar squeak of the impudent floor boards, as John tiptoed down the narrow hallway toward the outside door. Finally, after she had heard the closing click of the double-barreled police lock, she climbed out of the bed, picked up a brush from the bureau, and attempted to smooth the sensuous disorder of her hair. . . . [T]his morning, she was irritated because [her hair] seemed so determined to remain disordered, so determined to remain a stubborn and unnecessary reminder of the night before. Why, she wondered, should oneʼs physical properties always insist upon appearing awry after a night of stolen or forbidden pleasure? (39)

She and John spend two nights together, after which she “boldly” (40) refuses to see him again. Emma Louʼs nonchalance is remarkable; she flatly concludes that she has been in New York for “five weeks—thirty-five days and thirty five nights, and of these nights John had had two” (40). She has decided to apply for a job later that day and thus needs to look decent, or “pert” (40), to borrow her expression. Emphasized in this scene is the conflict between Emma Louʼs experience and memory of “mutual ecstasy” (40) and the social expectation that forbids women intimacy outside of marriage. In order to be accepted in African American middle-class society, unmarried women (and, for that matter, married women as well) must maintain an appearance of sexual purity, hiding any trace of pleasurable experiences. By beginning the Harlem section of this narrative with a morning after scene rather than, say, with a depiction of their night together in bed, Thurman foregrounds the sensual face of Emma Louʼs life in the city while at Her Self in the Making 31 the same time placing it within the context of the politics of respectability. As Johnʼs “tiptoe[ing]” suggests, Emma Lou must be mindful of the residenceʼs other occupants—especially the landlady, who indeed later evicts Emma Lou on account of her allowing a man into her room. The landlady complains, “I thought I made it clear that I was a respectable woman and that I kept a respectable house” (98). The presence of “the double-barreled police lock” (39) on the outside door also symbolizes her efforts to keep immorality out of her building. This effort resonates with the logic of “the lodger evil” as laid out by leading urban reformer Lawrence Veiller and followed by racial uplifters including W.E.B. Du Bois; according to this line of reasoning, taking lodgers into oneʼs home causes a moral corruption of its family members, particularly the young female ones (Robertson et al. 443-44). For those reformers and uplifters, evil existed outside the domestic sphere, thus it was deemed highly important to draw a clear boundary between public and private. Emma Lou considers such an attitude to be symbolized in the double-barreled police lock, as the family seems to be “barricading themselves in” (99). Furthermore, she questions its effect in her statement, “they all seemed to fortify themselves, not only against strangers, but against neighbors and friends as well” (99). For her, the meaning of a space is not determined by geographical boundaries but rather by the people who occupy that space and the way in which they interact with one another. In shutting the doors of their homes to neighbors and friends, respectable homeowners preclude the possibility of a freer or queer sociality that might (or might not) benefit their young daughters. Emma Louʼs canniness allows her to experience pleasure when and where she is able, even within the restrictions of urban reform. For Thurman, who believes that sexual repression causes “tragedies” as indicated in his letter to Dorothy West, such canniness arguably symbolizes a modern black womanʼs tenacity to reject total victimization in the face of the blatant racism and sexism of this era. In my reading of this work, what is remarkable about Thurmanʼs representation of Emma Lou is that when dealing with the painful experiences of marginalization and a longing for belonging, he does so by presenting an alternative image of a black woman who barely finds a way out of victimhood. Despite its precariousness, her survival makes her a notable deviation in the specific context of racial uplift and social hygiene. In the following section, I will examine the promiscuous character of Emma Lou as a literary alternative and analyze the way her resilience obliquely comments on one of the most celebrated texts of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella 32 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

Larsenʼs Quicksand.

2. Female Promiscuity as a Literary Alternative Among prominent African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance, sexual desire was discussed exclusively in the context of male sexuality, and even though female desire was gaining increasing recognition, it was often rendered indistinguishable from what they considered maternal instinct. To cite an example of racial upliftersʼ dominant view of the sexual difference between men and women, Messengerʼs Chandler Owen wrote in 1923 that:

Man is a veritable Vesuvius, whose molten lava of sex passion, burning and boiling and seething with unrest, drives him to seek satisfaction. Like a volcano he must throw it off. Woman, periodically affected, poised by long eras of modesty, has little to control, and that is easier controlled when necessary. She enjoys a large sex satisfaction from maternal love and [the] suckling of children. Nevertheless, man has but one outlet, the woman. He, therefore, makes promiscuity supply him the satisfaction which woman secures from [the] suckling of the young. (Owen 602)

Emma Lou is well aware of what is socially expected of women according to such a gender-biased explanation of differences in sexuality, yet she consciously allows her sexual desire to win out over the pursuit of respectability. When a stranger catches her attention by touching her leg in the darkness of a movie theater, for instance, Emma Lou notices the “pleasant, warm, fleshy feeling” (78) of his hand, and her mental reaction expresses the conflict between respectability and desire. She hears a warning voice in her head urge her to “Slap him in the face. Change your seat. Donʼt be an idiot,” only to immediately be charmed by the man:“He has a nice smile. Look at him again” (78). She then initiates a conversation with the man, and the two have a one-night stand. From her first brief sexual encounter with a man in Boise, Emma Lou never “consider[s] regretting the loss of her virtue” or allows her familyʼs words to “cause her conscience to plague her” (33). Emma Louʼs embracement of her sexuality is based on her awareness of her own physical need. We witness her “[l]ying in bed late every morning, semi-conscious, body burning, mind disturbed by thoughts of sex. Never before had she experienced such physical longing” (75). By representing female sexual need as a physical one, Her Self in the Making 33

Thurmanʼs text shamelessly places it outside the context of marriage and maternity. The social demand to properly reproduce and the physical need for sex are clearly differentiated here. Such a separation of sex and society comments on the traditional use of marriage as a trope within African American literary history, which Ann duCille describes as the coupling convention. From the latter half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, female African American authors employed this trope and “explored the so-called more compelling questions of race, racism, and racial identity [and the] complex questions of sexuality and female subjectivity” (duCille 4). During the Harlem Renaissance era, authors such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston examined gender, class, and racial complexities using this strategy. In these authorsʼ work, marriage is purposefully used as a metaphorical framework through which the authors represent female sexuality while simultaneously contesting the stereotypical image of black women as innately promiscuous. Even though the “subversive ways” (duCille 3) in which this strategy works should not be underestimated, such an approach is possible only so long as womenʼs sexuality is expressed within the context of marriage. While the trope of marriage more or less works in tandem with sexual innuendo, Thurman was clearly interested in a more explicit representation of sexuality. Adding to the issue of openness in expressivity, it should be noted that the coupling convention does not concern those women who are rejected by the very community upon which it is premised. Suffice it to say that some women do not have access to marriage or marriage-like relations to begin with. In short, duCilleʼs critical scheme simply cannot map a dark-skinned female subject like Emma Lou. To better understand Emma Louʼs literary deviation from the mainstream, I suggest we read Blacker along with Nella Larsenʼs Quicksand (1928), a novel with an excellent use of the coupling convention that was celebrated by uplifters such as Du Bois.2 Emma Louʼs pursuit of extra-marital intimacies might be read as an alternative to Helga Craneʼs shame-ridden “conversion” from a modern woman to a traditional wife/mother (Larsen 118). In a review published in November 1928, Thurman criticizes Larsenʼs characterization of Helga “doing such an unexpected and unexplainable thing” (“High, Low” 219)—that being said, to “get blown into the gutter” and “let herself be carried away by a religious frenzy to the point where she marries a Southern minister and spends the rest of her life having babies” 34 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

(220). Thurman finds it unrealistic that Helga suddenly turns to religion and has sex with the minister, knowing that he will then marry her, after it becomes clear that her desire for Dr. Anderson will never be requited. Rather than staying where she is and making an effort to change the status quo, Thurman argues, Helga always “runs away from certain situations and straddles the fence” (220). Seeing Dr. Andersonʼs withdrawal after a shared kiss, Helga out of desperation submits herself to the traditional, reproduction-centered practice of marriage, which she has until that point refused, becoming the ministerʼs wife and subsequently the mother of his six children, and, as a result, critically ill. The use of the coupling convention thus allows Larsen to brilliantly portray the way in which a traditional marriage wherein birth control is not practiced ultimately jeopardizes Helgaʼs physical and spiritual well-being.3 In Thurmanʼs view, however, a modern African American woman could be much more resilient than was believed. In Blacker, published three months after his review of Larsenʼs work, Thurman responds to Larsenʼs victimization of Helga through the promiscuous character of Emma Lou. In the final chapter, aptly entitled “Pyrrhic Victory, ” upon realizing that “she had been nothing more than a commercial proposition” to her lover (139), Thurmanʼs heroine determines to choose the alternative of “govern[ing] herself” and opts to “accept her black skin as being real and unchangeable” rather than to seek the acceptance of others (142). In the same breath, Emma Lou also realizes that “she had exercised the same discrimination against her men and the people she wished for friends that they had exercised against her—and with less reason” (144). This realization subtly hints at the possibility for Emma Lou to establish better relationships through a positive change in the way she views herself and others. Following her decision to establish autonomy via a renewed sense of self, the narrative almost abruptly ends, leaving readers to wonder what her choices might actually look like. Nevertheless, one thing is certain—she will remain in Harlem, alive. She is, for a moment, tempted to return home to her family, but she pauses, thinking: “She had once fled to Los Angeles to escape Boise, then fled to Harlem to escape Los Angeles, but these mere geographical flights had not solved her problems in the past, and a further flight back to where her life had begun, although facile of accomplishment, was too futile to merit consideration” (141-2). This self-recognition is reminiscent of Thurmanʼs criticism of Helgaʼs unrealistic transition. We might also recall Emma Louʼs hatred toward her “semi-white” (3) Her Self in the Making 35 hometown of Boise, Idaho, where she was the only African American student at her high school. Having experienced intense marginalization even within her own family because of her skin color, Emma Lou mockingly states, “Home? It had never been a home” (41). At this point in her life, then, she knows very well that relocation alone is hardly a solution. Whereas Helga leaves Harlem for a conventional wifedom that ultimately destroys her life, Emma Lou lingers there (infinitely, if you will), gesturing toward the possibility of a less destructive self-formation that is not defined by the prospect of marriage. By ending the novel with Emma Lou leaving Alva but not Harlem, Thurman creates a discursive space wherein Emma Louʼs future is suspended but directed toward a specific implication, one that relativizes the coupling convention of Harlem Renaissance literature.4 Here, the combined burden of gender and racial oppression is addressed without the use of the marriage plot through Emma Louʼs promiscuous journey that has no concrete end.

3. Against the Teleology of Racial Uplift Far from being a mere formal choice, the novelʼs open ending reflects Thurmanʼs belief in the ongoing, unpredictable, and interrelational formation of self as opposed to the final creation of a coherent, established identity. Measured by such conventional concepts as love, care, and commitment, this open ending wherein Emma Lou leaves Alva signifies a failure to establish and sustain a long- term, domestic form of sexual association that ultimately leads to marriage and reproduction. Making Emma Lou believe that he loves her, Alva slyly takes money from her even though he “hadnʼt asked her for it” (100); he later cohabitates with Geraldine, who is pregnant with his baby; after the baby is born with a disability and Geraldine runs away, Alva does not hesitate to use Emma Lou as a nanny. The story ends as Emma Lou leaves his room, which had until this point occasionally and temporarily established the privacy of their relationship. That room is now occupied by four of Alvaʼs male friends and a boy named Bobbie, whom Alva enfolds. Likely with this decadent character, among others, in mind, Candice Jenkins charges Thurman (along with Claude McKay) with “[espousing] the romanticized and stereotypical view of the black urban proletariat as primitive and ʻcloser to natureʼ” (Jenkins 26). Certainly, Alva embodies what contemporary reformers considered to be immoral and disorderly—be it his laziness, alcoholism, or 36 Chiaki ISHIKAWA bisexual licentiousness. To move beyond moralistic judgment, however, Alva serves as a medium to critique the idea of racial progress, which was thought to be measured by blacksʼ proximity to whites. His character and relationship with Emma Lou offer an empirical account of peoplesʼ intimate life that counters the teleology of racial uplift, which reduced the possibilities of diverse sexual experiences and expressions into the heteronormative model of marriage and reproduction. We might even argue that it is as a result of, not in spite of, her painful relation- ship with Alva, where “she gives important things and receives nothing in return” (144), that Emma Lou comes to the powerful realization that she must overcome her self-hatred that is complicated by her black skin and instead seek an “acceptance of herself by herself” (142-143). She has internalized the very color prejudice that society has thrust on her, which deems her unworthy of love and respect; accordingly, Emma Lou victimizes herself whenever the issue of skin color is brought to her attention. She is now, however, capable of putting herself into perspective—“After all, she wasnʼt the only black girl alive” (142). This new perspective that emerges at the end of their relationship indicates that Emma Louʼs identity is being formed through the process of intimacy; this is in contrast to the opposite possible transformation, in which their intimacy would have been founded on her pre-established identity. We thus witness an interrelational subjectivity that comes into being unexpectedly. As Rodríguez suggests, identity “is about a self that is constituted through and against other selves in contexts that serve to establish the relationship between the self and other” (Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad 5). In Blacker, the geopolitical context of Harlem provides a space that makes unpredictable, interrelational self-formation possible. As Emma Lou sees it, “there was nothing like [the Harlem streets] anywhere” (132). In order to better understand Thurmanʼs valorization of intimacy as providing a conduit for self-formation, I suggest that we unsee the Alva-Emma Lou relationship as a failure for a moment, even though it is perceived as such by Emma Lou herself. Instead, we might reinterpret it as a means of providing sporadic encounters in motion. Thurman underlines the mobility of this intimacy by mentioning that their sexual meetings take place “in City College Park or in Alvaʼs room” (102). Thurmanʼs interest in public, mobile sexual encounters seems to be in line with the theory of sex in public laid out by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, who positively interpret the potential for criminalized intimacy Her Self in the Making 37 to transform the desexualized public sphere that is founded on the privatization of sex and the sexualization of personhood. According to these provocative thinkers of the present day, criminal intimacies “bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” yet they “do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation” (Berlant and Warner 322). I would, however, add race and class to Berlant and Warnerʼs catalog of examples of the factors that criminal intimacies counter, as what Emma Louʼs sexual practice resists is not (only) the state at large but more specifically the African American middle-class society that has alienated her on account of her skin color but that nonetheless requires sexual purity and the appearance of being “pert”(40), Emma Louʼs own word to describe the state opposite to sensual disorder. Berlant suggests that we may challenge the established division of public and private spheres by examining other mobile processes of attachment. She states that “[w]hile the fantasies associated with intimacy usually end up occupying the space of convention, in practice the drive toward it is a kind of wild thing that is not necessarily organized that way, or any way. It can be portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices” (Berlant 4). If we accept that Thurman is advocating this sort of alternative approach to intimacy and spatiality in Blacker, we might understand Emma Louʼs attachment to Alva as creating a mobile, sporadic, yet exclusive space of intimacy. In this context of rethinking what constitutes a proper relationship, it is only fitting that what connects Emma Lou to Alva (beyond their mutual physical attraction) is his radical critique of the inviolable status of institutionalized marriage. Alva has been married twice before, and has not obtained a divorce from his first wife, since, as he tells Emma Lou, “I married [my second wife] when I was drunk” (101). He has not seen this wife since the day he became sober and left her. Called into question here is the imagined effect of the marriage license, which has no holding power over actual relationships yet disavows and illegitimates intimacies outside of marriage, including same-sex relationships. Alva himself is seen “embracing an effeminate boy” in the final pages of the novel (144), revealing a homoerotic desire long hidden from readers as well as Emma Lou until that moment. There is even a possibility that Alva engages in relationships with women in order to cover or camouflage his same-sex desire. 38 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

His talks, then, become a critique of an institutionalized system of marriage that continues to marginalize such desire as perverse and abnormal. Alva thus criticizes the discrimination that exists against marriages that contradict the reality of African American men and womenʼs intimate lives, which consist of a variety of sexual contacts and connections, to include same-sex relations. Emma Lou admits that Alvaʼs claim is “logical, if illegal” (101), and asserts that it “convinced her that he was undoubtedly the most interesting person she had ever met” (102). As interactions with Alva give her a new perspective on the institution of marriage, Emma Lou also renews her opinion about those whom she once considered “the right sort of people”—that is, African American men and women of the upper class, who value propriety and respectability in the name of racial progress. Emma Lou has long been obsessed with respectable men (who often have light skin); in fact, aside from the excitement of dancing together, Alvaʼs faux-respectable demeanor as well as his light skin are what mesmerize her from the outset. Now, however, her opinion is different; she recognizes those respectable men as “a litter of sick puppies” who are caught up in the restrictive politics of racial uplift.

Their world was so small—church, school, home, mother, father, parties, future. She invariably compared them to Alva and made herself laugh by classifying them as a litter of sick puppies. Alva was a bulldog and a healthy one at that. Yet these sick puppies, as she called them, were the next generation of Negro leaders, the next generation of respectable society folk. They had a future; Alva merely lived for no purpose whatsoever except for the pleasure he could squeeze out of each living moment. (130)

These men are a group, “a litter, ” rather than individuals, bound together by the uplift ideology and the idea of racial progress, for whom such institutions as church, school, and the nuclear family are indispensable. To be clear, the text does not necessarily advocate or celebrate the purposeless life. For instance, it is ironic that Emma Lou describes Alva as “healthy, ” given his declining health due to alcoholism. I claim that Thurmanʼs point was, rather, to call attention to the beauty of appreciating the present moment and welcoming the pleasure—all pleasures, not simply those that are erotic—that you can only experience by detaching yourself from the future and from the past. The cabaret scene, where Emma Lou Her Self in the Making 39 gets physically close to Alva for the first time, brilliantly captures such pleasure and even ecstasy.

In a moment they were swallowed up in the jazz whirlpool. Long strides were impossible. There were too many other legs striding for free motion in that overpopulated area. He held her close to him; the contours of her body fitting his. The two highballs had made her giddy. She seemed to be glowing inside. The soft lights and the music suggested abandon and intrigue. They said nothing to one another. She noticed that her partnerʼs face seemed alive with some inner ecstasy. It must be the music, thought Emma Lou. Then she got a whiff of his liquor-laden breath. (67)

Adding to the anonymity and silence of this encounter, both partnersʼ alcohol consumption intensifies the feeling of sensuality. With their two bodies “fitting” one another, Emma Lou “glow[s]” from the inside, and Alvaʼs expression becomes “alive” (67). As long as they are dancing together face to face, they need each other; they become two unknown selves of no specific race, around whom the exclusive space of intimacy is centrifugally created. To taste such a vivid joy of life, Thurman seems to suggest that one must let oneself go and become “swallowed up” by the moment. To be clear, such moments of intense pleasure as well as the coupleʼs goalless intimacy by no means present a fundamental solution to Emma Louʼs marginalization and alienation. Pleasure does not promise anything; it does not provide the love, care, or belonging that Emma Lou hopes to receive from a partner. As soon as the dance ends, Emma Lou must return to the reality where her demeanor must be carefully crafted. Following the above-described encounter, Emma Lou literally becomes speechless; she responds to her white companyʼs teasing with a nod and a smile and conceals her lingering excitement, attempting to appear “properly enigmatic” (67). To deny the precariousness of her survival, which largely depends on her canny navigation skills, would be to overlook the novelʼs social critique function. When alone in public, Emma Lou must continue conscious of the scrutinizing gazes that she may receive from a “persistent male” and “an insulting policeman” (142). In short, due to the historical context of her time, Emma Louʼs gendered and racialized body carries a burden that experiences of pleasure alone cannot overcome. 40 Chiaki ISHIKAWA

As a critique of the culture of sexual repression, Blacker not only revaluates female promiscuity as one expression of sexual need, but also reveals the limits of and conditions for such an expression. Written in the midst of racial uplift politics, Thurmanʼs narrative of a womanʼs promiscuous self-formation challenges the race leadersʼ idea that racial progress can be measured by blacksʼ proximity to white respectability. With the narrativeʼs open ending, Emma Lou formally and ideologically resists the neat closure of the marriage ideal—an ideal supported by the teleology of racial uplift. Clearly, her self is still in the making. Just as her departure from Alva “caused the people in the next room to stir uneasily” in the end (146), Thurmanʼs text performatively stimulates our imagination, upsetting our preexisting notions of self, intimacy, and pleasure.

Notes

An early version of this paper was presented at the 86th annual general meeting of the English Literature Society of Japan, held at Hokkaido University, Sapproro, in May of 2014. 1 It should be noted that I differentiate the term ʻqueerʼ from ʻgayʼ or ʻlesbian.ʼ As David Helperin, one of the founding scholars of queer studies in the , explains, queerness “demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices” (Helparin 62). 2 Referencing the literary representations of Harlemʼs white-marketed cabaret culture, Vogel states that “[cabaret] scenes like those in Quicksand, [Hurstonʼs] ʻHow It Feels to Be Colored Me, ʼ and The Blacker the Berry. . . speak of and to each other, working within and pushing against representational conventions of Harlemʼs nightlife” (Vogel 102). Granville Ganter also recognizes the intertextual connection between Blacker and Quicksand, though not specifically in terms of sexuality. He writes that “[b] oth heroines experience the tragic recognition that even the most noble human actions cannot provide unalloyed satisfaction” (Ganter 100). 3 I have elsewhere analyzed Quicksand in relation to the history of the birth control movement in the United States (Ishikawa 3-7). 4 To be sure, other scholars have also examined the ways in which Harlem Renaissance poets and authors resisted the respectable representations of African Her Self in the Making 41

Americans. In his influential essay on a queer Harlem Renaissance, Michael L. Cobb suggests that queer authors, including Thurman, considered rudeness to be a key factor in the search for “formal possibilities for a black and queer literary aesthetic” that would challenge the social demand for respectable or polite speech (Cobb 328). In his essay, however, the term queer appears to signify exclusively same-sex sexuality, making this aesthetic less relevant to a discussion of Emma Louʼs narrative.

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