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The Black Interior: Representations of Work and Feeling in African American Experience

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The Black Interior: Representations of Work and Feeling in African American Experience ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE BLACK INTERIOR: REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK AND FEELING IN AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Christin Marie Taylor, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed By: Professor David Wyatt, Department of English This dissertation traces tropes of black workers in order to recuperate the category of labor for literary studies. Following these tropes as they reappear suggests that representations of African American workers have not only had something to say about the stakes of labor as it pertains to social uplift and mobility but also the role of feeling and desire. We might think of these tropes as unveiling dialectics of "push and pull" forces that reside between the confines of the outside world and the soul. By examining tropes of black work in this way, The Black Interior expands materialist readings of labor to include the role of feeling and desire as first elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois. George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935), William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), and Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) use tropes of black work to reorient American consciousness toward the soul as the common root in the human rights pursuits that marked the twentieth century. THE BLACK INTERIOR: REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK AND FEELING IN AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE By Christin Marie Taylor Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor David Wyatt, Chair Professor Mary Helen Washington Professor Zita Nunes Professor Carla Peterson Professor Ira Berlin, Dean's Representative © Copyright by Christin Marie Taylor 2013 to my parents, their parents, and their gardens ii Acknowledgements People seldom stop to inquire about how it feels to be a graduate student. Ours is a labor of love. And our strivings are only made possible at the expense of a tremendous network of resources and support. I wish to express my debt and gratitude to members of the University of Maryland Department of English. A word of thanks is an insufficient return on the efforts of my director and chair Professor David Wyatt. He has given me a stewarding, insightful hand throughout this process of discovery. To Dr. Wyatt, thank you for your work. I thank Dr. Mary Helen Washington, Dr. Zita Nunes, and Dr. Carla Peterson for their inspiration as well. I also thank Ms. Manju Suri for her support. And I extend a note of appreciation to Professor Ira Berlin of the Department of History for his kind attention. I thank the National Agricultural Library for allowing me to sift through their George Washington Carver papers. I also acknowledge the University of Maryland Graduate School for a fellowship that financed my coursework year. I am deeply moved by the fellowship of family, colleagues, and friends who so readily offer up a place of refuge for the mind and for the soul. I feel lifted by the company and counsel of Professors Wende E. Marshall, Laura C. Williams, and Kara A. Morillo. To Dr. Marshall, I know that part of you has been for me. Laura and Kara have enriched my project and my experience as a graduate student. To "Professor-Ms." Morillo, thank you for your honesty and frank advice. To Dr. Williams, thank you for your constant advisement and "t"houghtful-"t"horoughness. Finally and foremost, I humbly thank my parents Lloyd and Kilja Taylor for the wealth of their gardens. The richness of their soil and its products has allowed this project to flower. As I sit in their gardens now, I am reminded to honor all that our forbearers have given and forfeited so that we might comfortably follow. Thank you for tending to me and to the "wonder-quality" of my soul. iii Table of Contents Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………….…...iv Black Work and Black Feeling: An Introduction…...………………………………...…..1 Chapter 1: Culitvating Desire: Black Women's Work in George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss………………………………………….…………………...…..15 Chapter 2: The Fire This Time: Pressure and Affect in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge………………………………………….………………..……...…..51 Chapter 3: The Boogie in the Bush: Jim Crow Hedge-emony in Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples………………………………………….……………….......91 Chapter 4: A Mess to Witness: Scenes of Abjection in Sara E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live………………………………..…………….………………....128 Conclusion: Black Work and Black Feeling? ………...………………………………..169 Bibliography…………………………………………………..………………………..174 iv Black Work and Black Feeling: An Introduction Yet the soul-hunger is there, the restlessness of the savage, the wail of the wanderer, and the plaint is put in one little phrase: "My soul wants something that’s new, that’s new." W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Representations of sharecroppers have been powerful signs in the American literary imagination. Sharecroppers appear as "black reapers…sharpening scythes" in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). In "Reapers," Toomer fastens the imagery of production to a metaphor of morbid harvest. Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done, And start their silent swinging, one by one. Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade. The richness of the poem rests in its tension. "Reapers" situates the mechanics of work— the alliterative sights and sounds of sharpening steel scythes on stones and "silent swinging"—alongside a peculiar mood. All is cloaked in an eerie calm as droning monotony meets the sudden shock of death. "Reaping" as a murder of sorts strangely disrupts the work of "reaping." The speaker concludes with a pair of images: a belly and a blood-stained blade. The casualties of reaping are a part of a casual "thing that’s 2 done"—a dark, continuous process (3). The sharecropper figure operates in a space that is ambiguous and in-between. "Reapers" raises questions about the constraints of work with natural resources, the costs of work on the land and on other animal bodies, and the uncertain question of what the worker becomes when folded into a mechanism that "comes to collect." Race is a lingering imprint among other physical and emotive registers that cast industrialization as "black" reaping in Toomer's poem. Black reaping not only speaks to the tax of such work upon the worker but also articulates other expenses. While the costs of black work are ambiguous in "Reapers," its power to injure the spirit is made more explicit in Arna Bontemps's "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" (1926). As the title suggests, "a black man talks." I have sown beside all waters in my day. I planted deep, within my heart the fear that wind or fowl would take the grain away. I planted safe against this stark, lean year. I scattered seed enough to plant the land in rows from Canada to Mexico but for my reaping only what the hand can hold at once is all that I can show. 3 Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root; small wonder then my children glean in fields they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit. As one on the literary Left, Arna Bontemps's portrayal of sharecropping presents reaping as labor with no material return. The product of the speaker's work is neither a future nor an inheritance that his children might claim. The children, like seed spread across the Americas "from Canada to Mexico," are bound across borders by a shared, inherited condition. As a result of the inheritances of corrupt labor relations, they are left to merely "glean," or to pick up the residual pieces. While the speaker meditates upon his and the future generation's condition—a situation in which matters of color and oppressive labor are inextricably linked to poverty and resource isolation—he also makes a subtle claim for the need for a better feeling. In the first stanza, the speaker's feeling appears as a deeply planted fear. By the final couplet, there is little resolution. The "children" of the younger generation are left to process the unresolved feelings that had plagued an older guard. The Black Interior: Representations of Work and Feeling in African American Experience traces tropes of black workers in order to recuperate the category of labor for literary studies. I examine a previously overlooked constellation of literature that relies on tropes of black workers. I use tropes of black workers because they have functioned in literature as a placeholder and as a site of contest for social and political thought about a range of "Negro Questions" pertaining to the "problem" of an impoverished, throbbing 4 black mass. Following these tropes as they reappear suggests that representations of African American workers have not only had something to say about the stakes of labor as it pertains to social uplift and mobility but also the role of feeling and desire. We might think of these tropes as unveiling dialectics of "push and pull" forces that reside between the confines of the outside world and the souls of Americans throughout the twentieth century. By examining tropes of black work in this way, The Black Interior expands materialist readings of labor to include the role of feeling and desire as first elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk and the Common Ground of Feeling W.
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