Identity and the Politics of Space in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction Ceron L

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

A ROOM OF HER OWN: IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE IN

CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN'S FICTION

CERON L. BRYANT

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2012

Ceron L. Bryant defended this dissertation on March 19, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Maxine Montgomery Professor Directing Dissertation

Kathleen Erndl University Representative

David Johnson Committee Member

Dennis Moore Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

To my loving parents, Joe Alton Bryant and Ada Battle Bryant, thank you for showing me how to speak positive words into existence. I love you more than I will ever be able to show you.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The culmination of this dissertation is more than what is shown on the following pages. The pages reflect the prayers, generosity, and inspirational words of so many people. I will never forget these people for helping me to accomplish one of the greatest singular achievements of my life.

First, I have to thank my gracious major professor, Dr. Maxine Montgomery, for continuing to demonstrate that rigorous scholarship is always the easiest route to take on an academic journey.

To my committee members Kathleen Erndl, David Johnson, and Dennis Moore for their encouraging words, thoughtful criticism, and time and attention during busy semesters.

A very special thanks goes out to my family for forming a shell around me whenever I sensed an oncoming storm. Your calls, your notes, your smiles, and the laughter (oh, the LAUGHTER!) were an integral part of this process. Sharice (Sherry),

Ardrell, Joe (Joey), Heather, Shanley, Langston, Benjamin, Momma, and Daddy - simply

"saying" your names in this document makes it complete.

To the English faculty at Florida A&M University, especially Emma Dawson,

Jeneen Surrency, Lamar Garnes, and April McCray, thank you for the encouragement and guidance. You always knew when to step in when I needed you the most.

To 2-1-1 Big Bend, Incorporated, especially Jocelyne Fliger, the miracles you perform every single day are breathtaking. Thanks for teaching me how to listen.

iv Angela Frazier, Wendy Mack, Antonio Smith, Antiwan Walker, Richard Severe,

Miderland Alexis, and David Blackmon your strong and sturdy shoulders have lifted me to see high places that I once feared were out of my vision.

To Dr. David E. Mosley, my voice of reason, thanks for fostering a safe environment wherein I could search into the depths and muck of my existence and produce gems.

Yakini Kemp, whenever I think of the terms " unapologetic intelligence," " astute professionalism," and "firm kindness," your image comes to my mind. It is hard to overstate the impact your presence has had on my life.

To Talladega College and Alpha Phi Alpha, Fraternity, Incorporated, thank you for your history and the legacy of greatness you established for me.

To Evergreen Missionary Baptist Church in Kingsland, Georgia, and Abundant Life and

Restoration Ministries in Tallahassee, Florida, thanks for keeping my soul anchored.

Finally, I thank God for the many Blessings that have been bestowed upon me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1

Chapters

1. “BUT MY LONELY IS MINE”: ACHIEVING FREEDOM AND A LIMINAL SPACE THROUGH BLACK FEMALE ORALITY IN TONI MORRISON’S SULA(1975) ...... 13 2. RELYING ON THE PAST TO IDENTIFY THE PRESENT: ORAL LORE AND RITUAL IN PAULE MARSHALL’S PRAISESONG FOR THE WIDOW (1983)………………………………………………………………………………….....40 3. (RE)LOCATING THE ‘DEBIL WOMAN’: USING ORALITY FOR TRANSCENDENCE AND A FREE ‘IN-BETWEEN’ SPACE IN SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS’S DESSA ROSE(1986)……………………………………………………………57 4. WHEN ORALITY IS THE ONLY MEANS OF SURVIVAL: RELYING ON THE BLUES FOR A LIBERATING AND TRANSCENDENT SPACE IN GAYL JONES’S CORREGIDORA(1975) …………………………………………………………………………………………....76

CONCLUSION…...... 99 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………105 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…...... 115

ABSTRACT

Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Sherley Anne Williams, and Gayle Jones are contemporary African American women novelists who are keenly aware of and genuinely concerned with Black women and their ability to define themselves. The authors know that Black women live very complex lives and that Black women have been historically removed from that process. Subsequently, their texts enlighten readers about Black women's desire for their own space, a place of refuge fled to by Black women in order to combat the social politics that lead to oppression. Their texts depict and speak to a relatively broad range of Black women's forms of objectification.

Sula, Praisesong for the Widow, Dessa Rose, and Corregidora share similar concerns: How does the Black woman respond to an oppressive and patriarchal society? What anti-patriarchal practices are used to combat this oppression? What are some of the specific agents used by Black women implemented to maintain a defined

Space? Is obvious accessibility the only reason folklore and vernacular speech are used as a means of self-definition? While many critics and scholars have identified the importance of Black women escaping oppression and objectification, what remains is a more in-depth analysis of the methods involved as the Black women work to define themselves in their own sovereign Space.

vii

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years;

but in the fin de siecle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where

space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and

identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.

-Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

In order to establish a foundation for my theory, it is necessary to first examine

W.E.B Dubois' groundbreaking idea of double consciousness.1 In it, Dubois explains the result of the psycho-social pressure felt by Black people living in America. He writes:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always

looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the

tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his

twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

1 strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this

longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better

and truer self. (28)

In this famous passage, Dubois has not only established himself as the leading Black intellectual regarding the racial issues of his time, but he also manages to fluently explain the perception of Black identity through the eyes of Black people. Robert B. Stepto seems to support this when he writes about Dubois' work, "the first substantial immersion narrative in the tradition; with its publication, all of the prefiguring forms and tropes that will develop another literary period are finally on display" (34). More specifically,

Dubois’ theory reifies notions of a duality of between black and white, male and female, self and other, and good/bad.

Where Dubois simply dichotomizes the existence of established structures relating to identity, Homi Bhabha (re)organizes the argument by suggesting that there is more of a fluidity of identity.2 Bhabha notes,

The move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual

and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject

positions - of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale,

sexual orientation - that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is

theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond

narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or

processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. (1)

2 In what Bhabha calls Third Space, he moves identity to a space that breaks down the established configurations of identity that had been defined by patriarchy. To go on,

Bhabha uses the term "Other" in order to identify the marginalized entities that move toward that Third Space.

Having set up the parameters of my discussion, it is now possible to explore the methods in which Black women reach that "in-between" space. This project seeks to interrogate the ways in which the authors manage to synthesize the movement of Black women towards a domain where Black women can freely define themselves. More specifically, I will examine the role of folklore-- speech, ritual, and language--and illustrate how it is a mechanism that challenges fixed notions of identity.

In Toni Morrison's Sula, for instance, the title character struggles to move away from the fixed social boundaries of the Bottom by stepping out of the traditional parameters of marriage, womanhood, and female friendship; in Paule Marshall's

Praisesong for the Widow, Avey Johnson lingers in a place that encourages her to reject her past and her race. She is locked in a middle class existence heavily weighted with the roles of motherhood and matrimony; in Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, Dessa literally has to escape the horror of slavery but has to struggle even more to capture her own identity as a free Black woman. In doing so, she is also subjected to the stern gaze of a racist Nehemiah who attempts to chronicle her escape and the capricious attentions of

"Rufel", who by all intents and purposes, serves as a slave mistress to Dessa; and in

Gayle Jones's Corregidora, Ursa is plagued with immediate and generational abuse. In order to combat societal objectification, Ursa's body refuses to respond to stimulation that has already been fashioned for her at the hands of a patriarchal society. These novels

3 clearly demonstrate that Black women are in a constant state of turmoil as a result of living in patriarchal societies that devalue, dehumanize, discriminate against, and objectify them. These novels also present readers with folklore as the method utilized by

Black women to implement specific anti-patriarchal practices.

Specifically, this project will present and provide discussion for the following questions: What is the role of the Third Space as a form of escape in the lives of Black women? In terms of freedom, how does folklore become a self-liberating tool? What peculiar challenges do Black women encounter from within that serve as challenges to escaping patriarchal objectification? How does the author establish the foundation or springboard for the Black woman to desire to define herself? How does the establishment of a Black woman's self-identity confine the discussion of objectification and transcendence?

Taking into consideration that Black women in America have always had to withstand the critical definitions of a patriarchal society, these novelists have managed to construct stories where Black women, as Cheryl Wall States, "talk back" because the novelists speak out against all forms of sexual, psychological, and physical oppression.

As a result of writing these stories, the novelists have continued the theme of Black women fighting and struggling to dwell within a safe Space - one that is free of an immediate, dominant patriarchal code. To go on, Patricia Hill Collins defines this space as, "...not only safe--it forms a prime location for resisting objectification of the Other"

(95).3

Obviously, the oppression that Black women have endured is worthy of much more scholarly discussion, but my study focuses more on their response and how folklore

4 becomes a viable device to combat this persecution. Because this study investigates

Black women and how they respond under the gaze of the patriarchal society, the study bases itself on four rather important theoretical assertions: one, Homi K. Bhabha's discussion on cultural location when he says, "'in between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood-singular or communal-that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself"(2-3): next, Ann Ducille's psychoanalytical discussion of Black women when she comments, "...we are the last race, the most oppressed, the most marginalized, the most deviant, the quintessential sister of difference"(22): also,

Christopher Baker's discussion of "Other" when he says, "The Other is now no longer willing to be labelled and defined by the West"(17); and lastly, Kevin E. Quashie's concept of selfhood included in his discussion of identity when he writes, "...identity is a politic, a venture or argument that has a direct relationship to power and resources, social and otherwise...."(2).

Among the novels that I will discuss, Sula is arguably the most well-known.

Though the length of the text is more concise than other contemporary novels, Sula's complexity and moxie continues to maintain the attention of many critics and scholars.

In her reference compilation on Morrison, Carmen Gillespie adequately characterizes

Sula as "confront[ing] issues of loyalty, family, assimilation, innocence, gender, and sexuality, but is at its heart an examination of the priorities that determine the character, quality, and relationships of a woman's lifetime"(189). Hortense L. Spillers seems to agree with Gillespie's assessment regarding the complicated involvement of the novel when she calls Sula, "...the single most important irruption of black women's writing in

5 our era"(93). Spillers goes on to call Sula a "new female being"; however, Spillers and the other critics provide little discussion of how Sula arrives in her "new" Space. My contention is that Toni Morrison relies upon folklore in writing Sula, as is evident from the novel's opening which reframes the folkloric story of the white landowner and slave

(i. e., "How Buck gained his freedom" or "How Brer Rabbit outwits the fox"). Morrison reverses the pattern present in folklore in that the slave in her novel does not triumph.

Instead, the slave gets the opposite of what he wants in that he gets the bad land, etc.

Sula's opening with its account of the Bottom's creation therefore harks back to trickster lore and stories of origins (etiological tales). Morrison lends an ironic twist to those tales, and the essence of that twist is evident in the tension between oral lore (the novel's antecedent sources) and fiction as a written mode. Morrison's reliance on differences in race and gender here creates a distinctive fictional space. The space is neither white nor black, neither written nor oral. Like the Bottom itself, the space is liminal.

Along similar lines, Tanya Monier, when discussing Corregidora, notes that "the

Corregidora women do not consider the need for certain 'rules' of historical representation"(97), reminding the readers that although the women are part of a brutal past and existence, their Third Space is what will establish their survival. Though Monier concludes her work by suggesting that the blues is an agent by which Ursa Corregidora escapes oppression, Monier avoids a discussion on what more Ursa Corregidora has to accomplish through the blues in order to define herself within her own transcendent liminal location. Like the musical notes in a blues score, the narrative voice in Jones' work becomes the chorus for the reader. Jones disturbs the traditional structure of time by taking the reader back in time to a narrative voice that is not Ursa's. The

6 amalgamation of time and voice defies the barriers of the dominant formation.

Ultimately, Ursa and even her ancestors are free to speak and name without the ensnarement of sexual brutality.

In that same vein, Mae G. Henderson discusses the importance of focusing on the complexity of captivity and sexual atrocity in Dessa Rose. Henderson points to the actual backdrop of slavery and historical accounts as having as much responsibility for Dessa's transcendence as any other element of the story. Although Henderson clearly identifies the "obscene" nature of slavery and the abuse resulting from it, what remains unexplored is how (oral) language has enabled Dessa move beyond this harsh social system.

Language functions as an empowering (or disempowering tool). Even though Adam

Nehemiah thinks he has Dessa "written down in his book," he misreads her, and she escapes from the prison cellar, a gesture suggestive of rupturing a masculine, written text.

Dessa then tells her own story as she moves from being a "Darky" (racist label) to a

"Wench" (sexist label) to the "Negress" (self-defined, black woman). In a sense, the novel has dictated the journey to the Third Space as Dessa is liberated from imposed definitions. Symbolically, the pages of Nehemiah’s racist and sexist book blow away towards the end of the novel, and Dessa is left to pass her story on orally.

Trudier Harris edges closer to my theory when she notes that Dessa Rose and its historical events serve "as a point of entry into a world where women, presumed to be without agency, find ways to act to the benefit of their families and friends, both within and across races"(82). Harris goes on to mention the objectification Dessa has to endure at the hands of Nehemiah as he attempts to record the accounts of her escape. Harris also discusses the fact that "Ruth shares with Nehemiah the language of dehumanization of

7 blacks"(91). Naming, which is relevant, of course, to language, plays a key role, and

Harris acknowledges this when she writes about Dessa, "She discovers liberation in narration, the transcendent power to name and control, and breaks free of a history that would lock her into fear and submission"(100). An instance in the text happens when the slaves want to signify on Ruth Elizabeth. They call her "Miss Ruth" or Miz Ruint," which shifts the power dynamics in the slaveholding system and confers that power to blacks, not whites.

While quite a few literary critics have acknowledged the theme of "flight" and

"connection with the past" in Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, it is also necessary to connect the flight with a Third Space that Avey Johnson has become part of in order to be free of an oppressive society. Karen R. Heim points out the connection with the past when she addresses Lebert Joseph's character, "The character Lebert is based on Legba, originally an African Fon (or Yoruba) trickster that evolved into a Haitian Voodoo god in the Caribbean"(193). Lean'tin L. Bracks acknowledges the lack of Avey Johnson's ability to define herself, "...for Avey the pretense of experience, the inhibition o expression, and the relinquishing of culture and tradition leave her mind clouded and disconnected from the very forces that would help define who she is"(106). How Avey Johnson employs strategies in order to reach a level of Transcendence is worth more examination. An even closer reading would reveal that, when Avey Johnson goes to Carriacou, it is as if she is moving backward in time to a realm that exists outside the West. She "breaks free" of the constrictions of New York and flees to an intermediate Space free of written language and history. The role of Lebert Joseph as Papa Legba emphasizes importance (the necessitation, even) of storytelling. Furthermore, there is much to be said about how

8 Marshall - like Jones, Morrison, and Williams - interrupt a constant flow of objectification doled out by a patriarchal society and arrive at a place free of those political definitions.

To summarize, these particular works by Morrison, Williams, Jones, and Marshall share similar concerns. How does the Black woman respond to an oppressive and patriarchal society? What anti-patriarchal practices are used to combat this oppression?

What are some of the specific agents used by Black women implemented to maintain a defined Space? Is obvious accessibility the only reason folklore and vernacular speech are used as a means of self-definition? While many critics and scholars have identified the importance of Black women escaping oppression and objectification, what remains is a more in-depth analysis of the methods involved as the Black women work to define themselves in their own sovereign space.

The primary texts for my study are Toni Morrison's Sula, Paule Marshall's

Praisesong for the Widow, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Gayle Jones'

Corregidora, but obviously, there is a wealth of texts from which I could have centered my discussion. Some of those novels will likely figure into my overall discussion on some level, though. Such novels as Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and Alice Walker's The

Color Purple, for example, could also apply to my discussion of Third Space that I have proposed in this study.

Regarding the primary texts, I have chosen them because all four have Black women protagonists that are the central focus of the novel; in fact, other than Praisesong for the Widow, the main character and the texts' titles bear the same name. Also, in all of the texts, oral tradition, vernacular lore, or folklore characterizes the alternate realm the

9 protagonists (re)enter in an effort to define themselves in ways that challenge whiteness and maleness. Next, it is not lost on me that all four Black women use movement in order to relocate themselves to an environment that they deem suitable for themselves.

What is most appealing to me, though, is how the authors have situated all four of the

Black women in a setting where the Black women are defined by the language and expression of a larger patriarchal society. The authors of these texts have concerned themselves with creating a Third Space for the oppressed women. Ultimately, this achievement of a designed Third Space serves as a triumph for Black women and oppressed people as a whole.

In terms of organization, chapters One through Four will analyze the four main texts and their characters and discuss how each author uses folklore and language as a tool to achieve the Third Space. My discussion of the primary texts will have a thematic approach. Sula will be discussed first because the novel encapsulates the themes of all the other texts, and the title character functions as a "blueprint" for how the

(O)ther characters operate in their own fixed patriarchal systems. Sula will also help contemporize the discussion as it is the most familiar of all of the primary texts. Next,

Praisesong for the Widow will be explored because, like Sula, Avey Johnson has to traverse geopolitical and cultural boundaries in order to arrive in a liminal space. In the last two chapters, I will discuss Dessa Rose and Corregidora, respectively. I have chosen to discuss these two texts last because the conditions of the title characters' oppression is the most pronounced. Dessa's and Corregidora's eventual achievement of the Third

Space and their reliance upon oral lore and vernacular speech will work as an ideal segue to subsequent discussions on how brutally subjugated Black women can respond to fixed

10 notions of identity. The primary texts under discussion reflect the belief that Black women have always desired to move from a place of objectification to transcendence.

My study aims to show how oral performance and speech can serve as valuable tools used in order to accomplish this liberation. The conclusion will discuss new directions for the Third Space and Black female empowerment and how they may be applied to other artistic and creative texts.

Notes

1 See, Du Bois, WEB. The Souls of Black Folk. Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson

Organization Ltd, 1973.

2 See, Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

3 Collins goes on to identify the sites "where Black women construct independent self- definitions" when she points to "schools, the media, literature, and popular culture" (95).

CHAPTER 1

"BUT MY LONELY IS MINE": ACHIEVING FREEDOM AND A LIMINAL

SPACE THROUGH BLACK FEMALE ORALITY IN TONI MORRISON'S SULA

As a novel, Toni Morrison's Sula1 traces the complete life and coming-of-age of

Sula Mae Peace. As an instrument for vernacular speech and folklore, Sula functions to define a Black woman's independence while affirming the Black woman's role in human and cultural continuity. As a commentary on identity, Sula examines the notion of the

Black woman's self-characterization and her movement toward Homi Bhabha's Third

Space. As Morrison describes, Sula is "...neither white nor male..," so Morrison establishes converse elements of Sula's identity, and through this characterization, the possibility of a Space that complicates and problematizes constructions of “Other.”

Theorizing identity, especially a Black woman's, means to examine the identity in the context of what is chosen and what is given. The achievement depends on whether or not the author can sufficiently acknowledge the epistemic oppression inflicted upon

Black women by the patriarchal structure. Toni Morrison's objective is for Sula to part ways with traditional forms of identity.2 If this is the case, one has to wonder if Sula succeeds in the amalgamous alteration it aspires to through its main character and what effect Sula's success or failure has on the interpretation of identity. Though Sula is generally regarded as a story about a close friendship between Nel and Sula, only cursory concentration will be given to Nel's character in this essay. Instead, focus will be turned to the community and the fascinating roots from which Sula comes.

To consider the possibility of Sula achieving a Third Space, it is first imperative to briefly take into account the historical context and the social environment of the novel and how it may lend itself to the Third Space discussion. The narrative takes place between the years of 1919 to 1965. At the beginning of Sula, readers immediately learn that, every year, Shadrack, a veteran who is obviously mentally besought by the atrocities of World War I,3 marches through the town celebrating a holiday that he has founded,

National Suicide Day. Because Shadrack, whose name comes from the Book of Daniel, can never forget the stench of death and the sight of human carnage that had surrounded him during the war, he decides to designate a day where people could "get it out of the way"(14) and not have to think about it for the rest of the year.

Shadrack's personal journey with National Suicide day and the residents of the

Bottom's subsequent reaction to it is what Homi Bhabha calls an "unhomely moment".

Bhabha writes:

This logic of reversal, that turns on a disavowal, informs the profound

revelations and reinscriptions of the unhomely moment...Such a forgetting

- or disavowal - creates an uncertainty at the heart of the generalizing

subject of civil society, compromising the 'individual' that is the support

for its universalist aspiration...This results in redrawing the domestic space

as the space of the normalizing, pastoralizing, and individuating

techniques of modern power and police: the personal-is-the-political; the

world-in-the home.(15)

Recurring throughout the novel, National Suicide Day positions itself as a folkloric ritual and an integral part of the community's consciousness because it begins and concludes the novel. Lee Alfred Wright asserts that Morrison, "...establish [es] a neighborhood in which folklore and folk life are viable"(113). As a holiday, instead of plaguing the

Bottom community with thoughts of bereavement and suffering, National Suicide Day mocks the thought of death and becomes "part of the fabric of life" for the Bottom. As a result, National Suicide Day stands in binary opposition of the parallel holiday of New

Year's Day by observing the issue of death instead of the newness of life and the future that New Year's Eve represents. However, National Suicide Day goes even farther as it forces the community to recognize and accept it. Through this holiday, Morrison establishes the framework for the discussion of the Third Space in Sula.

It is not entirely clear when the Bottom community is first settled, but the narrative does explain that the neighborhood is no longer in existence:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from

their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was

once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of

Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now,

but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.(1)

This indecisive nature of Space and time assigned to the neighborhood collapses the traditional structure of a community's identity. Homi Bhabha elaborates when he discusses a community:

How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday

and the advent of the epochal…The problematic boundaries of modernity

are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The

language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present

becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. (203)

Thus, this back-and-forth characteristic of the Bottom in regards to its space and time reshapes traditional thought by contesting taken-for-granted uses of space and challenging accepted notions of who belongs where, doing what, in the public and private Spaces of the community. Philip Page argues that the Bottom is, "...a place that is outside and below history, a place, in contrast to the commemorative implications of the white

Medallion..."(79). Trudier Harris takes the explanation of the Bottom even further by saying that the Bottom is without "grounding" and in an unfamiliar place (Fiction 3).

Without the boundaries of space and time, it also becomes necessary for the citizens of the Bottom to become intricately interwoven.

The story of the origin of the Bottom resembles oral/folklore tales with a bit of folkloric reframing from Toni Morrison involving the white landowner and the freed slave. The structure of the tale is reinforced when it goes into detail that the Bottom is a

"nigger joke". Soon after slavery, "A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores"(5). Harking back to the language and style of so many other trickster folk tales,4the incident sets in motion the tone of the entire narrative. Upon completing some difficult tasks on the land, a freed slave is promised some land by a white man. The "nigger joke" comes in when

the freed slave tries to claim "his piece of bottom land." The devious white master

"tricks" the former slave into believing that the fertile bottom land he had won wasn't as good as the "bottom" up on top of a hill. He tells the doubting freed slave, "Oh, no! See those hills? That's bottom land, rich and fertile" (5). When the slave remarks that the land is high up in the hills, the master replies, "High up from us,' said the master, 'but when God looks down, it's the bottom. That's why we called it so. It's the bottom of heave--best land there is'"(5). Here, Morrison reverses the pattern present in folklore in that the slave does not triumph. Instead, the slave gets the opposite of what he wants.

Page asserts, "The Bottom becomes a community that of Blacks who find themselves tricked into believing the promises of white America; and as a result, their lives become a legacy of trouble and travail. Their false hopes lead them to their deaths"(111). In what may be an unintentional quirk of fate, the Bottom literally collapses at the end and the beginning of the novel.

In her telling of the beginnings of the Bottom, Toni Morrison lends an ironic twist to the folklore tales, and the essence of the twist is evident in the tension between oral lore and fiction as a written mode. This pressure established between binary crevasse the oral and the written mode of communication or what Bhabha calls "outside the sentence" creates a fusion of identity, and according to Bhabha, "It opens up a narrative strategy for the emergence and negotiation of those agencies of the marginal, minority, subaltern, or diasporic that incite us to think through - and beyond - theory"(260). This problematic space created by Morrison's folkloric mission collapses the notion of traditional folkloric predictability.

Toni Morrison is also careful to depict Sula's lineage in folkloric terms. In order to execute this, Morrison presents three generations of Peace women.5 Ultimately, Sula becomes a direct and indirect product of her mother and her grandmother. Trudier Harris calls Eva Peace, "...a slap in the face to all traditional matriarchs, for there is no God- centered morality informing her actions; yet she is paradoxically matriarchal in the power she wields as she sits 'in a wagon on the third floor directing the lives of her children, friends, strays, and a constant stream of boarders'"(Fiction 73). Eva Peace, Sula's grandmother, has three children (Pearl, Plum, and Hannah) and no money when her husband, Boyboy, leaves them all. Like the freed slave, Eva is tricked by BoyBoy into following a false dream into the Bottom. After Boyboy's departure, Eva desperately tries to prevent her family from starvation, but she soon realizes that her efforts are exercises in futility.

The account and assumption about Eva's sacrifice to save her family becomes part of the Bottom's oral lore. Eva challenges the traditional lines of demarcation of identity by first leaving her three children with the neighboring Mrs. Suggs. The culmination of her defiance is embodied in Eva's irregular return:

Eighteen months later she swept down from a wagon with two crutches, a

new black pocketbook, and one leg. First she reclaimed her children, next

she gave the surprised Mrs. Suggs a ten-dollar bill, later she started

building a house on Carpenter's Road, sixty feet from BoyBoy's one-room

cabin, which she rented out. (34-35)

Here, Eva Peace has moved into a Third Space and, as a result, recreated her identity.

Homi Bhabha seems to agree with this method of movement when he refers to survival as,"...an emergence that turns 'return' into reinscription or redescription; an iteration that is not belated, but ironic and insurgent. For the migrant's survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on discovering 'how newness enters the world'"(324). The boundaries of motherhood and Black womanhood have had to give way to more complex, convoluted realities.

The loss of Eva's leg points towards a complicated dichotomy: the misfortune is not only the corporeal loss of her leg, but also that her husband has deserted her and their small children, making the sacrifice necessary. The victory is that the sacrifice of her leg for insurance money represents a triumphant playing out of the trickster, of a Black woman somehow "puttin' on the massa'" to the tune of $10, 000. The loss of the limb has also wrought a significant and rather sophisticated modification in point of view towards the Black woman's identity, characterized by the expanding of boundaries and a deepening of understanding. What also bears mentioning regarding Eva Peace's missing leg is the fact that she refuses the traditional branding of beauty:

Whatever the fate of her lost leg, the remaining one was magnificent. It

was stockinged and shod at all times and in all weather. Once in a while

she got a felt slipper for Christmas or her birthday, but they soon

disappeared, for Eva always wore a black laced-up shoe that came well

abover her ankle. Nor did she wear overlong dresses to disguise the empty

place on her left side. Her dresses were mid-calf so that her one

glamorous leg was always in view as well as the long fall of space below

her left thigh. (31)

As a way of rejecting the patriarchal notions of Other(hood), Eva Peace has shown a willingness to take risks, an openness to learning and a conscious and temporary relinquishing of power.

As alluded to earlier, death is a central and stable force in the Bottom. In almost every chapter/year in the novel a death occurs. Eva seems to command the power to give and take life. Hortense Spillers is even more specific when she says, "Eva behaves as though she were herself the sole instrument of divine inscrutable will"(112). Using the hatred she has for BoyBoy, Eva Peace has transcended the ordinary world of judgment and patriarchal scrutiny. Though there is a basic symbolic reference to the Biblical Eve,

Eva Peace’s identity is not determined based on her relationship with a man. Morrison displays this fact in Eva's interaction with her son, Plum. As a young child, Plum suffers from what seemed like life threatening constipation. After attempting to relieve Plum's constipation with stomach massages and castor oil, Eva uses the last bit of food she has to in order to soften her fingers to insert them into Plum's bowels to loosen his stools. Eva relieves her baby of pain and agony as, "Plum stopped crying as the black hard stools ricocheted onto the frozen ground"(34). By sacrificing the last remaining bits of food in order to save her child, Eva Peace (re)genders the role of a Biblical savior who has come to give life.6

In deciding Plum’s ultimate fate, Eva exercises her own principles, and she decides that Plum’s drug addiction is offensive enough for her to take matters into her

own hands. Recalling moments from his childhood, Eva douses her son with kerosene in order to end his life:

He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an

eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism some kind

of blessing, he though. Everything is going to be all right, it said.

Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright

hole of sleep.

Eva stepped back from the bed and let the crutches rest under her arms.

She rolled a bit of newspaper into a tight stick about six inches long, lit it

and threw it onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay in smug

delight. Quickly, as the whoosh of flames engulfed him, she shut the door

and made her slow and painful journey back to the top of the house. (40-

41)

Though Eva's logic seemingly contradicts itself, Eva kills Plum in order to protect herself, her identity, and to prevent Plum from taking a toll on her, "...he wanted to crawl back in my womb and well...I ain't got the room no more even if he could do it"(71).

Though the roles of Black women as mothers were extremely unambiguous in

1923,7 Hannah's confusion with her mother's function culminated in her asking Eva if

Eva loved Hannah and Hannah's siblings. Eva responds that she did not love her children in the same applied way in which Hannah referred. In order to attempt to clarify her inquiry, Hannah gives a point of criteria for motherly love, "Like. Like. Playin' with us.

Did you ever, you know, play with us"(68)? Eva is seemingly incensed at the thought that her self-defined identity is questioned:

Play? Wasn't nobody playin' in 1895. Just 'cause you got it good now you

think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl. Things was bad.

Niggers was dying like flies. Stepping tall, ain't you? Uncle Paul gone

bring me two bushels. Yeh. And they's a melon downstairs, ain't they?

And I bake every Saturday, and Shad brings fish on Friday, and they's a

pork barrel full of meal, and we float eggs in a crock of vinegar...(68-69)

The two women continue talking past each other with Hannah telling her mother that she has heard the stories of the family's struggles before. Hannah insists, though, that her mother had to have an opportunity to playfully interact:

No time. They wasn't no time. Not none. Soon as I got one day done

here come a night. With you all coughin' and me watchin' so TB wouldn't

take you off and if you was sleepin' quiet I thought, O Lord, they dead and

put my hand over your mouth to feel if the breath was comin' what you

talkin' 'bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can't you get that

through your thick head or what is that between your ears, heifer? (69)

Eva is flummoxed by Hannah's inability to see her own survival as an attestation of her mother's love. In this position, Eva clearly disallows the patriarchal (m)Other to define her. Eva's vernacular speech signifies to Hannah through her usage of "heifer" that she is not willing to concede this authority.

Eva continues to push beyond the borders of motherhood when she sees Hannah burning. Notably, Hannah's death is preceded by a number of warnings, folkloric

"strange things," which Eva later realizes should have been an obvious prediction of something threatening: there is a strong wind without rain; Hannah dreams of a red bridal gown; there is Sula's strangeness, now that she is thirteen; and Eva can't find her comb. Perhaps the strangest thing of them all, though, is the aforementioned question

Hannah asks Eva regarding love. Consistent with the sacrifice of her leg, Eva responds to the site of Hannah on fire:

The flames from the yard fire were licking the blue cotton dress, making

her dance. Eva knew there was time for nothing in this world other than

the time it took to get there and cover her daughter's body with her own.

She lifted her heavy frame up on her good leg, and with fists and arms

smashed the windowpane. Using her stump as a support on the window

sill, her good leg as a lever, she threw herself out of the window. Cut and

bleeding she clawed the air trying to aim her body toward the flaming,

dancing figure. She missed and came crashing down some twelve feet

from Hannah's smoke. Stunned but still conscious, Eva dragged herself

toward her firstborn, but Hannah, her senses lost, went flying out of the

yard gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box.(76-77)

Trudier Harris sees Eva's reaction as showing,"...a preference for the woman-centered consciousness that pervades most of the novel"(Fiction 74). However, Harris fails to discuss the overall significance of Eva Peace's endeavor to save her daughter. Eva's

daring attempt through her third floor window (de)centers the overall familiar thought of how a Black woman should interact and speak regarding her children. Eva's blatant disregard of public opinion and her refusal to acknowledge any ethical establishment but her own is the overwhelming legacy she bestows on her daughter and granddaughter.

A major point of contention for Black women and their identity has been the subject of naming. Because Black women have been oppressed by the patriarchal structure, they have had their identity compromised and have had a general inability to convey their own character.8 Hortense Spillers speaks on the topic when she says, "The captivating party does not only earn the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name and "name" it"(210). Historically, Black women have experienced powerlessness because they have not been able to Name themselves. Toni Morrison directly addresses the Naming issues as Eva Peace convolutes the power structure by seizing the power to Name.

In a folk-like neighborhood like the Bottom, Eva's Naming of the deweys and Tar

Baby are prime examples of how oral speech and tradition are used in order for her to force her own identity beyond the perimeter of mundane or traditional. In what many readers can see as a common signification evident in the folkloric tradition, Eva bases Tar

Baby's name on a joke about his ethnicity:

Most people said he was half white, but Eva said he was all white. That

she knew blood when she saw it, and he didn't have none. When he first

came to Medallion, the people called him Pretty Johnnie, but Eva looked

at his milky skin and cornsilk hair and out of a mixture of fun and

meanness called him Tar Baby. (39-40)

Because of Eva's naming of Tar Baby, she has created a folkloric awareness of his character while continuing to posit her identity as one who ignores the limitations of cultural rules. Eva Peace achieves a Third Space by eliminating her own sense of

Otherness and assessing it to the (white male) Tar Baby. Tar Baby becomes the outsider who is left to explain and defend his own identity.

In 1921, Toni Morrison introduces the readers to the three boys who all come to live in Eva's house at separate times:

They came with woolen caps and names given to them by their mothers,

or grandmothers, or somebody's best friend. Eva snatched the caps off

their heads and ignored their names. She looked at the first child closely,

his wrists, the shape of his head and the temperament that showed in his

eyes and said, "Well. Look at Dewey. My my mymymy."(37)

When the second and third children come the same year and Eva names them "dewey" as well, Hannah asks Eva about being able to differentiate between the children. Eva's response is, "What you need to tell them apart for? They's all deweys"(38). In this instance, not only has Eva Peace inverted the cultural practice of Black men naming

Black women with names like "bitch," "wench," and "whore,"9 but she also disregards the names given to the boys by the women who had already named them. Eva further assumes the "goddess-like characteristic" referred to by Trudier Harris (Fiction 66) when

it is discovered by the citizens of the Bottom that "the deweys would never grow. They had been forty-eight inches tall for years now" (84). It should also be noted that Morrison is obviously mindfully helping fortify Eva's presence as Morrison only uses the upper- case "D" once when referring to the deweys. By Eva's naming of the deweys and their subsequent lack of growth, she reverses the role of Adam in the Book of Genesis10 and assumes the role of sovereign "determiner" of her own identity.

In examining Hannah Peace's role in Sula's folkloric identity, the focal point has to be on Hannah's legendary nonconformist approach to sex. Barbara Christian gives a rather accurate synopsis of Hannah's role in Sula's pedigree and the quality Hannah has become heir to when Christian refers to Hannah as, "Widowed young and left with her daughter Sula, she returns to her mother's house, evidently intent on never marrying again, perhaps because she was inherited from mother the love of maleness for its own sake"(159). Biologically and theoretically, Hannah Peace should function as a connection between Eva Peace and Sula Peace; however, like her daughter and her mother, Hannah's identity disturbs the designated space set aside for mothers, daughters, and Black women in the Bottom community.

Reinforcing the binary pattern of Black female identity, Toni Morrison continues to "play" with the reader by running Hannah's character and name parallel to a Biblical one. According to the Biblical narrative,11 Hannah prays to the Lord for a child. As promised by the High Priest, Eli, after hearing her prayer, Hannah conceives and gives birth to Samuel. The Biblical narrative goes on to say how Hannah took Samuel to the

temple after weaning him. Clever still is the fact that Samuel is the anagram for "Sula

Mae" when the letters are carefully rearranged.

On the conflicting side of the binary chasm are Hannah Peace and what the reader discovers about her as a mother. While sitting in a kitchen and talking to two friends,

Hannah is having a conversation that is overheard by Sula. Patsy and Valentine,

Hannah's two friends, are commiserating with Hannah about the behavior of their children. When one friend remarks that she is not sure if she loves her child, Hannah clarifies the definition of "love" by offering up a more vernacular definition and responds by saying, "Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference"(57). Here, Hannah causes tension to the structure that Kevin Everod Quashie argues, "...is a location of otherness, an abject identity both marginal and powerful"(67).

Determined and regulated by a patriarchal composition, motherhood is often oppressive to Black women who are not able to adapt to the rigors of social judgment. Hannah eliminates this barrier and steps into a space without codes by insisting her feelings are valid and outside the realm of the ordinary.

In an article discussing the development of the personality of women and their feminine roles, Nancy Chodorow states, "A woman identifies with her own mother and, through identification with her child, she (re)experiences herself as a cared-for child"(47).

This double-identification attribution is summarily dismissed by Hannah Peace when she asks Eva about the issue of loving her that was discussed earlier in this essay. Instead,

Hannah achieves a Third Space by refusing to accept this "cared-for" identity. Though the outcome with her mother proves to have a rather futile result, Hannah's own character

Transcends the everyday parameters of "daughter," and with the question, she proffers her own identity.

We know that "Hannah Peace" was an actual person from Toni Morrison's childhood who Morrison remembers as a woman people both liked and disliked.12 It should be a little less surprising; then, that the "liked" part created in Morrison's binary construction of Hannah should be a Black woman who is unfettered by matrimonial laws and expectations. In fact, we know relatively little about Hannah beyond her tender, practical nature. The reader is made keenly aware of her actual presence, though, and as

Trudier Harris says, "...becomes an acceptable embodiment of a pleasure principle..."(Fiction 75):

Hannah simply refused to live without the attentions of a man, and after

Rekus' death had a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of her

friends and neighbors. Her flirting was sweet, low and guileless. Without

ever a pat of the hair, a rush to change clothes or a quick application of

paint, with no gesture whatsoever, she rippled with sex...Hannah rubbed

no edges, made no demands, made the man feel as though he were

complete and wonderful just as he was-he didn't need fixing-and so he

relaxed and swooned in the Hannah-light that shone on him simply

because he was. She would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with

someone implied for her a measure of trust and a definite commitment.

(44-45)

As she does with her role as daughter and mother, Hannah deteriorates the walls of a traditional Black woman's identity, especially when it regards morality. Her status as a person who is good and unselfish blends with the knowledge that she has affairs with the husbands of her friends and neighbors. Though she has few women friends, she does not appear abandoned or isolated. Hannah's desire is not far removed in kind from the likes of a trickster tale told in East Africa.13 In the story, the male sex organ is the trickster.

Hannah's affect is much less cunning, but the end definitely achieves a comparable amount of contentment for her.

Like the "Hannah Peace" of Morrison's youth, Hannah Peace is not considered bad or evil. She is sexually self-regulating, and she dislocates the social status quo of the

Bottom. Her rebellious nature, though, elevates her to a mythical status. Instead of the women in the community hating her, they embrace her character and her identity. That becomes apparent in the way the women whose husbands she has slept with take care of her body after she is burned to death, "...the women who washed the body and dressed it for death wept for her burned hair and wrinkled breast as though they themselves had been her lovers"(77). Hannah, then, is like her mother in that she refuses to abide by any established code of conduct. This takes both Hannah and Eva to their respective liminal

Spaces.

In a New York Times Magazine interview, Toni Morrison discusses Sula's self- constructed personality stating, "And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself"(163). In a very real way Sula is the

culmination of her mother and her grandmother because of her free approach to sex and her unbridled self-indulgence, but Sula's profound unwillingness for uniformity in the face of a patriarchal structure is what elevates her to a Third Space.

Even contemporary readers still shower Zora Neale Hurston's Janie with praise because of Janie's development in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In more recent novels like Alice Walker's Color Purple and Tina Ansa's Baby of the Family, a growing sense of feminism is attributed to Celie's and Lena's characters. The two characters grow more self-aware, self-sufficient, and their growth is reflected in those around them. Sula's identity and development do not grow from any keen sense of self-awareness feminism or, not feminism in the traditional sense, anyway. Rather, Sula's qualities stem from the fact that she is able to push her own identity out of the grasp of the space intended for her by the dominant culture. Homi Bhabha speaks on Sula's brand of feminism when he writes:

By making visible the forgetting of the 'unhomely' moment in civil

society, feminism specifies the patriarchal, gendered nature of civil society

and disturbs the symmetry of private and public which is now shadowed,

or uncannily doubled, by the difference in genders which does not neatly

map on to the private and the public, but become disturbingly

supplementary to them. (15)

Sula is daring, and she refuses to be hidden behind the covering of Otherness.

Up to chapter "1922," the novel is dominated by the development of other characters with only a brief mention of Sula. In the beginning of this chapter, readers are given an hint of her budding libido as she and Nel are walking to the ice cream parlor despite the fact that, "It was too cool for ice cream"(49). What is also worthy of noting is an incident involving self-mutilation. Sula cuts off the tip of her finger in what can be interpreted as an occurrence where Sula, like her grandmother, understands that this form of suffering is unavoidable in a Black woman's quest for freedom of identity and independence.

In 1922, Sula is described as "wishbone thin and easy-assed". After hearing her mother's confusing comment about love, Sula flees to the river after getting solace from

Nel. There the two participate in a "Black female language" - a term made popular by

Barbra Smith in her famous essay, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.":

Sula lifter her head and joined in the grass play. In concert, without ever

meeting each other's eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and

down. Nel found a thick twig and, with her thumbnail, pulled away its

bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked

about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed Nel moved

easily to the next stage and began tearing u rooted grass to make a bare

spot of earth....soon [Nel] pled her twig rhythmically and intensely into the

earth, making a small neat hole....Sula copied her....When the depression

was the size of a dishpan, Nel's twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she

threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in

too....[then they added] paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, until all of

the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully

they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.

(58-59)

It appears that Sula and Nel are reflecting each other's thoughts and language in an act that is folkloric in its ritualistic manner. About this ritual, Smith also hints at a fusion of sexual innuendo that could be considered lesbian in nature.

An issue that is under-engaged, though, is the divergent state of mind of the two girls at the time and how this difference disturbs the readers' interpretation. Nel, who is the perfect product of the community, is acting out of future matrimonial obligation. The rhythmic digging is almost literal in the sense that she is foretelling her wifely desires.

Sula, however, is in a state of active disorientation because of what she hears her mother say. Thus, here, and in the future, Sula's only sexual partner is herself. In other words,

Sula's sexuality is neither located in the territory of "moral" construct nor expressed within the institution of marriage that legitimates it for women. Her sexuality is in constant movement beyond the borders and restrictions of patriarchal structures. Sula's self satisfaction in this instance also establishes the fact that she needs to be in a different

"space" from others in order to sustain her Self.

The second part of the novel is more specifically written towards Sula, but this section of the novel is also a study of hybridity and how vernacular speech and folk and oral become agents of the hybridity. One such instance occurs when Sula returns to the

Bottom after having been off to college and traveling the country for ten years. Her first

action is to do battle with Eva, and despite it being contrary to the mores of the Bottom, banishes Eva to an old folk’s home. Eva launches assault after assault, Sula responds in kind:

'When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle

you.'

'I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.'

'Selfish. Ain't no woman got no business floatin' around without no man.'

'You did.'

'Not by choice.'

'Mama did.'

'Not by choice, I said it ain't right for you to want to stay off by yourself.'

'You need...I'm a tell you what you need.'

Sula sat up. 'I need you to shut your mouth.'(92)

In order to achieve a Third Space, Sula becomes a vessel of her own self-liberating narrative. Her desire to make her Self, successfully conveys the fact that she is refusing to let her identity be labeled and defined by anyone else. Here, Sula and Eva are participating in their own version of "playing the dozens".14 Christopher Baker supports the hybrid assessment of Sula when he writes, "The ambivalence and instability caused by the enunciation of experiences and identities from insurgent practices and borderland

voices has created the conditions necessary for the growth of hybridity..."(19).

Traditionally, Sula's voice regarding her body would be out of her own control. Her presence in Eva's house and in the Bottom becomes an undeniable feature of the community.

Later in the novel, there is an instance where Sula is visiting Nel and Nel's husband, Jude, enters complaining about the rigors of work. He is need for comfort and sympathy in the face of racism. Sula refuses to comfort him and cleverly uses oral

"trickery" in order to invert the impact of racism:

'I mean, I don't know what the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the

world loves you. White men love you. They spend so much time

worrying about your penis they forget their own...And white women?

They chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you under every

bed...Now ain't that love?...Colored women worry themselves into bad

health....Even little children - white and black, boys and girls - spend all

their childhood eating ther hearts out 'cause they think you don't love

them. And if that ain't enough, you lover yourselves...So. It looks to me

like you the envy of the world.' (103-104)

By turning Jude's complaints into a joke, Sula attracts Jude's attention which is never truly on Nel. There is a lack of scholarly discussion in what Bhabha calls an

"interrogatory" nature of Sula's comments. Third Space achievement occurs whenever set structures are questioned and even usurped. Though Sula's response to Jude is laced

with humor, and her improvisational skills are on full display, it does carry with it a nature of seriousness that further establishes Sula's Third Space identity.

The final incident from Sula that shows how oral lore and vernacular speech move Sula's identity to a liminal space involves her final conversation with Nel. Death brings the two women together again when Nel comes to see Sula on her deathbed. Their conversation is similar to Eva's conversation with Sula and regards exactly how much

Sula wants to "live." It is obvious Nel is not aware of the fact that she is actually questioning the validity of the Third Space:

'You can't have it all, Sula.'

'Why? I can do it all, why can't I have it all?'

'You can't do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that You can't

act like a man. You can't be walking around all independent-like, doing

whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don't.'

In this instance, Sula is dismissing the apparent inferiority that is supposed to be assumed because of her gender. In fact, Bhabha mentions similar notions when he discusses,

"familiar traditions and ideological Eurocentricity"(31). Sula is no longer going to be the objectified Other.

The exchange between the two women gets personal. Sula says:

'You think I don't know what your life is like just because I ain't living it?

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.'

'What's that?'

'Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me,

I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.'

'Really? What have you got to show for it?'

'Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to

say, I got me.'

'Lonely, ain't it?'

'Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made

by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A second-

hand lonely.' (143)

According to Henry Louis Gates, signifying is, "the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning"(Signifying 82). Sula signifies as she refuses to allow Nel to make her feel guilty regarding bedding Jude. Sula has a sense of self that is determined solely by her and her alone.

As Nel leaves, Toni Morrison employs a rather postmodern practice as she questions the readers through Sula's voice:

'How you know?' Sula asked.

'Know what?' Nel wouldn't look at her.

'About who was good. How you know it was you?'

'What you mean?'

'I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me.'(146)

Consistent with Bhabha's definition of interrogation, Sula questions the issues of good and bad. On a much larger scale, though, Sula is the “Other”, who is questioning every fixed notion that has ever been established by the dominant culture.

As a novel, Sula does not end on an hopeful note for the Bottom community. It ends as it begins - with the destruction of the Bottom in a rather epic fashion. The novel does, however, proffer a much defined theory of how a Black woman's identity can achieve a location unforeseen by the regular gaze. To avoid becoming yet another woman-centered novel that calls for a simple triumph of struggle, Sula must reveal each layer of her own identity, and she must use the agents at her disposal. Because she has learned to master these "selves" without immolating the agencies of the patriarchal structure, she can truly consider herself as an occupant of the Third Space.

Notes

1 Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Bantam, 1975.

2 Stepto, Robert. "An Intimate Conversation With Toni Morrison." The Massachusetts Review, Vol 18. No. 3 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 473-489.

3 Renner, Craig. "Under Arms: The Forgotten Black Regiments of World War I." The World & I 13.11 (1998): 206-213.

4 While I came across quite a few trickster tales in my research, the story of Stagger Lee Shelton seems most valid in this instance because it also harkens to the "bad nigger" seen in blaxploitation films. The most recent account I found is in Everett, Percival L. Erasure: A Novel. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001.

5 The three woman household is also featured in both Song of Solomon and Beloved. See Ladner, Joyce. Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1971. Ladner asserts that the three generation household is a fact of Black life, consisting of grandmother, mother, and young daughter.

6 John 10:10 in the Bible discusses Jesus' message to the Jews. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly(KJV)

7 For a discussion of the roles of Black women in the 1920s, see Robertson, Stephen and Shane White. "The Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s." Journal of Social History 44.1 (2010): 97-122, 308-309. The article follows five families in Harlem and observes how they relate in a family structure to each other and how it translates to everyday life.

8 See Christian, Barbra. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892- 1976. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1980. Smith is rather specific in her discussion of how objectification has its effects on Black women and their identities.

9 For a deeper discussion on the issue of Naming and the misogynistic characterization of Black women, see Adams, Terry and Douglas B. Fuller. “The Words Have Changed But the Ideology Remains the Same: Misogynistic Lyrics in Rap Music.” Journal of Black Studies 36.6 (2006): 938-957. Also see, Shakur, Tupac. “Wonda’ Why They Call You a Bitch.” All Eyez On Me. Death Row Records, 1996. Said to be on one of the best rap albums of all time, “WWTCYB” characterizes the Black woman as a “gold digging,” promiscuous woman who is only concerned with her own enterprise. Another song that rather accurately represents Black female stereotypes and Naming in society can be seen at Simone, Nina. “Four Women.” Wild is the Wind. Phillips Records, 1966.

10 Genesis 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. (KJV)

11 I Samuel 1:11 Hannah's prayer was not merely for a child; it was also for a child of God i.e. I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life (KJV)

12 See Morrison, Toni and Danielle K. Taylor-Guthrie. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. In one of the interviews, Morrison admits that the character, “Hannah Peace” is actually the name of a real person who her mother knew. Because the real life Hannah Peace was beyond admiration or hate, Morrison says she was compelled to use her in a novel.

13 Dorson, Richard M. African Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.

14 Abrahams, Roger D. Playing the Dozens. Indianapolis, Ind: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

CHAPTER 2

RELYING ON THE PAST TO IDENTIFY THE PRESENT: ORAL LORE AND

RITUAL IN PAULE MARSHALLS’S PRAISESONG FOR THE WIDOW

In 1973, Paule Marshall announced that she planned to complete her trilogy of the

Black people's "journey back into the historical self" with a novel which "will in some way be concerned with Africa."1 In Praisesong for the Widow,2though, a thematic subtexture of an "in-between" space strongly stands out through the Caribbean casing as the text centers around the continuing rediscovery and reappropriation of the African cultural legacy that holds the promise for the protagonist - and by extension the Black people in the Americas - of (re)gaining a sense of personal connection and belonging and of a collective cultural system of social (imaginary) signification throughout the Western hemisphere. The protagonist's travel in the novel, however, is often too narrowly read metaphorically and thematically as a spiritual and emotional journey.3 While these critics recognize the importance of the protagonist's personal transformation, the fact that she actually transcends is subordinated. Reading her journey through the lens of a character that collapses the boundaries and borders that were already established before the protagonist was born is more consistent with Marshall's critique of the white patriarchal structure.

If Toni Morrison's, Sula is able to show how oral lore enables a Black woman to establish her identity beyond the constraints of her local patriarchal social structure, then

Paule Marshall is able to show how this same (un)spoken method enables a Black woman to establish her identity beyond any culture defined by the white American structure altogether. Barbara Christian identifies within the structure of the novel a motif that

shows Marshall's logic in presenting in Avey a woman who has several elements that move her beyond a tangible location and into a liminal space:

...Marshall develops Avey Avatara Johnson's journey to wholeness by

juxtaposing external reality with memory, dream, hallucination--disjointed

states of mind--in which the past and present fuse. And Marshall uses

these internal elements to guide Avey back to external reality and back to

earth. The recurrent motif for the novel, that the body might be in one

place and the mind might be in another, is characterized not as

fragmentation but as a source of wisdom, stemming from a history of the

forced displacement of blacks in the West. ("Ritualistic Process," 75)

Specifically, Avey Johnson manages to move backward in time to a realm that exists outside the West (and written language/history). Here, in what seems to be a pastoral realm at odds with urban New York, folklore and ritual prevail with the emphasis on storytelling. Having experienced the advantage of American materialism, absent from the growing body of scholarship and criticism, though, is how Avey Johnson calls on this oral lore as an agent to assist in the construction of an intermediate space in order to assume her own identity.

The emphasis here on the Third Space subtext is not, however, meant to obscure or even deny the crucial significance of the novel's Caribbean setting and context. On the contrary, the latter's tangible presence and sensual impact is enhanced, and Homi Bhabha discusses such a pronounced Caribbean influence on time when he says:

...for me the project of modernity is itself rendered so contradictory and

unresolved through the insertion of the 'time-lag' in which colonial and

postcolonial moments emerge as sign and history, that I am sceptical of

those transitions to postmodernity in Western academic writings which

theorize the experience of this ' new historicity' through the appropriation

of 'Third World' metaphor'...(341-342)

Thus, though one overall interpretation or model of the novel may rely on the symbolic inferiority of the Caribbean culture and American society's assumed superior influence of it, the less discussed discourse involves viewing the result that happens beyond the particular space and time of the two cultures. By constructing the story this way,

Marshall challenges the simple binary presentation of white patriarchal society versus a lesser culture and disturbs the notion that identity is based only on tangible experiences.

Praisesong is dedicated to Marshall's maternal grandmother Alberta Jane

Clement, nicknamed "Da-Duh". We have already made Da-Duh's acquaintance as the protagonist of "To Da-Duh, In Memoriam"4 and know her to be Marshall's prolific model for a wise, older woman character in just about all of her texts. In this one, the protagonist Avey Johnson's great-aunt Cuney is the character endowed with Da-Duh's wisdom, charisma, and spirit, and she is probably the most significant and consequential representative of Marshall's ancestor in all of her work.5 Aunt Cuney's presence in the novel becomes Avey's guide and sets the framework for Avey's transforming identity. As

Stuart Hall writes, Aunt Cuney works to "restore an imaginary fullness or plenitude, to set against the broken rubric of the past"(234). Long since dead and buried, Aunt Cuney was a commanding woman who both named and claimed her great-niece. As a child,

Avey has been in awe of her; yet in her dreams as an adult, she resists her aunt's pleas to join her and even raise her hand against her elder. The dreams stir memories that haunt

Avey's days as well as her nights. Avey remembers that twice a week, with great ceremony, the old woman would don a field hat and put on two belts - one at the waist and the other strapped low around the hips and call her to join her on a walk.

The powerful Robert Hayden poem, "Runagate, Runagate" sets the tone for the beginning of the novel because, as Cheryl A. Wall states, "...Hayden's modernist masterpiece captures swift and disorienting transitions in the fugitive's escape from slavery to freedom"(195). Literally and figuratively at sea, Avey furtively plots her escape from the Bianca Pride cruise ship. Hayden writes in the first stanza of the poem:

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing

and the night cold and the night long and the river

to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning

and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere

morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going

Runagate

Runagate. (128)

Directly recalling the courageous rescue missions of Harriet Tubman, "Runagate,

Runagate" echoes the fears and horrors of American slavery and captivity and the determination needed to confront those feelings of trepidation. The runagate or renegade slave travels the freedom train toward the mythic Northern and "free" United States and beyond.

The name Bianca Pride, admired by Avey because of "All that dazzling white steel"(15) is the less than subtle reference to the dominant patriarchal structure Avey is attempting to escape. In Avey Johnson, who chose a journey of "White" Pride instead of a journey to Africa, she has been divided from her "tribe" and herself. As Eugenia

DeLamotte asserts, "It is not merely that Avey sees herself with the eyes of the (white)

Others but that she has been refashioned, even her face with is now "permanent" strain, so that she is other"(91; italics and parentheses are original). Seeing her unrecognizable self in the mirror in retrospect is a positive sign towards her moving into a space where she is able to claim her identity.

Avey begins to hallucinate and grows more uncomfortable as she sees things that are not there: golf balls go hurling into the water, shuffleboard players begin to brawl, and the sound of quoit, a game being played on deck, strikes her ear "as the sound of some blunt instrument repeatedly striking human flesh and bone" (56). Avey has a significant dream while on the cruise ship that pits her aunt’s ancestral home in Tatem,

SC, on the Atlantic Ocean, against Avey’s current suburban North White

Plains, NY, home. As Avey prepares her things for her departure from the Bianca Pride, one sign of her impending freedom is her body's shift away from this "same facial expression almost, the rather formal way they held themselves" (141), as she finds unexpectedly the "warmth" of a smile "easing the strain from the held-in lip that had become a permanent part of her expression over the years (27-28). Throughout

Praisesong, this visionary stripping away of superimpositions of the patriarchal structure is consistent with WEB Dubois' discussion of double consciousness. On the surface, one may construe Avey Johnson's character as one that is based on a character that sees a

double vision through white masks to Black reality.6 Indeed, it is as if , she thinks, "their eyes immediately stripped her of everything she had on and dressed her in one of the homemade cotton prints the women were wearing" (72). It's imperative to consider, though, that Avey's identity arrives in space that is beyond the arena contained by time and physical structures. Avey Johnson's identity is a both a fusion and a separation of the

African, African American, and Caribbean cultures. Homi Bhabha shares his approach to

Avey's movement towards her own space - a space that disturbs the confines of the traditional white patriarchal structure:

If, in our travelling theory, we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples

of imagined communities - migrant or metropolitan - then we shall find

that the space of the modern nation - people is never simply horizontal.

Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of 'doubleness' in writing; a

temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and

social process without a centred causal logic. And such cultural

movements disperse the homogenous, visual time of the horizontal

society. (202)

Here, Bhabha explains how certain language is beyond tangible explanation making it problematic for traditional boundaries. Because Avey is moving towards this explanation, her achievement of the Third Space is inevitable.

Like the Hayden poem, though, Avey feels "beckoned" by some outside force to leave the ship. Indeed, Avey seems confused by her own sudden decision to depart from the Bianca Pride:

She knew it must come as a shock, her leaving on the spur of the moment

like this, but it couldn't be helped. She ignored the woman's outcry. The

cruise itself she didn't think was to blame. Nor was she sick, although she

hadn't been feeling herself the last couple of days. It was nothing she

could put her finger on. She had simply awakened in the middle of the

night and decide she would prefer to spend the rest of her vacation at

home. It didn't make any sense, she knew, but her mind was made up. If

she was lucky she might get a flight out... (20)

To the confusion and consternation of her two shipmates, Clarice and Thomasina, Avey

Johnson plans to return to her home in New York. It should also be noted here that Avey, like many slaves in America, planned to leave during the night while her two shipmates slept in order to have a better chance at safe passage. As she transitions to her new identity, Avey's method runs parallel to the Hayden poem. Avey's departure from the cruise is also consistent with her beginning to reject the luxuries of her and her husband's material wealth that has managed for her to live comfortably.

As Barbara Christian points out, the folktale of the flying Africans7 (which also informs Morrison's Song of Solomon), "is a touchstone of New World black folklore"(76). Though the inspiration for the beginning of the novel is the Ibo/American folktale, the tale is fused with Avey juxtaposing herself current middle aged self next to a ten year old Avey Johnson who is being influenced by Aunt Cuney:

They just turned, my gran' said, all of em-" she would have ignored the

interruption as usual: wouldn't even have heard it over the voice that

possessed her-"and walked on back down to the edge of the river here.

Every las' man, woman and chile. And they wasn't taking they time no

more. They had seen what they had seen and those Ibos was stepping!

And they didn't bother getting back into the small boats drawed up here -

boats take too much time. They just kept walkin' right on out over the

river. Now you wouldna thought they'd of got very far seeing as it was

water they was walking on. Besides they had all that iron on 'em. Iron on

they ankles and they wrists and fastened 'round they necks like a dog

collar. 'Nuff iron to sink an army. And chains hooking up the iron. But

chains didn't stop those Ibos none. Neither iron. The way my gran' tol' it

(other folks in Tatem said it wasn't so and that she was crazy but she

never paid 'em no mind) 'cording to her they just kept on walking like the

water was solid ground. (38-39)

Aunt Cuney's one moment of impatience with Avey comes when the child questions whether the Ibos had not drowned. With disappointment and regret, Aunt Cuney questions Avey's belief in the (white) Christ's accomplishment of a similar feat, "It was to take Avey years to forget the look on the face under the field hat, the disappointment and sadness there...'Did it say Jesus drowned when he went walking on the water in that

Sunday School book your momma always sends with you?'...'I din' think so. You got any more questions?'"(40-41). Similar to Toni Morrison's postmodernist technique of asking a question to the audience through her character Sula when Sula asks Nel how Nel knew that Nel was the good one, Marshall speaks through Aunt Cuney. Here, Marshall directly questions the white patriarchal structure by challenging the notion that miracles lay beyond the realm of what that structure believes to be true. Avey's decision to no longer

question the story of the Ibo signals a disturbance of the traditional notion of traditional

Christian religion being the portal to freedom and Avey's identity.

The Ibo story’s centrality in Avey’s memories of Tatem positions the Middle

Passage and its attendant formation of the African Diaspora as key to the novel’s reinscription of national identity. Keith A. Sandiford views Ibo Landing as the site of a battle between African myth and Western historicity (373). He argues that Praisesong dramatizes the antagonism for African-Americans between the claims to identity of

African mythology and of Euro-centric historicity. This reading plays out through the conflict staged in Avey’s dreams between her locations in Tatem, in Brooklyn, and in

North White Plains.

The etymology of avatara, originates from the Sanskrit, carries the meaning of passing down or a passing over. Avey, "short for Avatara," is the character who passes down the ancestral knowledge that Aunt Cuney bequeathed before she passed over. Like her foremothers, Avey might remain earthbound, but "her mind [is] long gone with the

Ibos"(39). We later learn that this story, and its climactic line in particular, "had been drilled into her as a child, (...) had been handed down from the woman whose name she bore” (254). Avey Johnson is also introduced to the rituals that preserve the island's cultural inheritance. There is no more important ritual emphasized on the island than

Marshall's discussion of the ring shout.

The ring shout is considered the earliest type of African American religious song and dance, and it was widely performed during slavery.8 After the Emancipation

Proclamation, the ritual survived only in culturally isolated parts of the southern United

States, like the Sea Islands. Consistent with the West African traditions from which it is

derived, the dancers in the ring shout shuffle round and round single file, moving in a counterclockwise direction, clapping out the beat in multifaceted polyrhythms. Rhythmic complexity may be variously enhanced, such as by the stomping feet of those who stand outside the circle or with the participation of a "sticker," who pounds a broom handle on the floor. The tempo and revolutions of the circle accelerate during the course of the movement.9 As Aunt Cuney can attest, the rules governing the ritual are strict. No matter how rapid the movement, participants are forbidden to allow their feet to cross because such a movement denotes dancing rather than shouting; the Protestant churches to which many religious African Americans belonged by the late nineteenth century deemed dancing a sin. More than an accompaniment, singing is integral to the movement. The singing is antiphonal, employing the overlapping call and response characteristic of West African music. The ring shout ritual portrayed in Praisesong exists as a sign. It posits itself as a vestige that binds New World Africans with their ancestors.

In the novel Aunt Cuney rejects the rule against crossing her feet during the ring shout and is put out of the church. Ironically, what we see in the story is Aunt Cuney's longing to reunite with the church for the dance and the music. She has no desire to (re)embrace the Christian religion. This yearning for ritual enables Avey to develop a complicated assessment of her own identity in that it confuses the line between secular behavior and religion.

Regarding the wharf, Bernhard Melchior describes it as "the first space of unorganized encounters with Caribbean reality..." and it "...turns out to be quite disillusioning for Avey" (172). Of the points of irritation for Avey Johnson is the Patois language that is being spoken as an uncompromising ritual before the excursion. Even

the taxi driver is confused by the oral tradition as he empathized with Avey's frustration,

"Oui, Patois, creole, whatever you want to call it" (75). What should garner more discussion, though, is how the vernacular elements of Patois operate as a compliment for

Avey's movement to a space without boundaries. J. A. Harrison notes, "The notable difference of the Creole patois is that it is a dialect that has sprung up almost entirely by ear" (286). Thus, Patois is a language without any barriers, but it is a form of communication that is not able to be "captured" by scholars of the academy. Patois finds itself in spaces among people who have had to create their own space outside of the traditional patriarchal structure.

Lebert Joseph is the figure that continues to facilitate Avey's movement towards a

Third Space. As several critics have remarked, the name "Lebert" evokes the West

African deity called Legba among the Fon in Benin and Esu-Elegbara in Nigeria.10 Gates goes on to describe Legba when he informs, "Each version of Esu is the sole messenger of the gods...master of that elusive, mystical barrier that separates the divine world from the profane...In Yoruba mythology...his legs are of different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world..."(Signifying Monkey, 6). To go on, Robert Farris Thompson refers to Lebert as a trickster figure11 that turns up throughout the Black Atlantic world and calls Lebert "the very embodiment of the crossroads, the point where doors open or close, where persons have to make decisions that may forever after affect their lives. Outwardly mischievous but inwardly full of overflowing creative grace"(18).

Lebert Joseph is described as "a stoop-shouldered old man with one leg shorter than the other" (160). At one moment Joseph looks tall, at another short; he is old and

feeble but walks "with a forced vigor that denied both his age and infirmity" (161); like a trickster character from many folktales in the African American culture, he lies shamelessly and speaks the deepest truth. Thus, for Avey Johnson, Lebert Joseph becomes the very essence of unity. Avey enhances her identity in relationship to Joseph, but not by positioning herself in opposition to him. Instead, she comes to recognize part of herself that she left on Halsey Street in his reverence for his ancestors and his commitment to tradition. Marshall's subversion of her own disorientation and the lack of convenient accommodations locate her outside of the traditional model of "visitor" in the face of Lebert's rum shop and situate her at a crossroads in her identity. Lebert Joseph assumes the role as guide for this portion of Avey's journey. As DeLamotte states, "The journey on which Joseph guides Avey is a process of decolonization that restores her body, her past, and her nation through the mediation of the embodied and embodying spirituality of African and African-American religious ritual"(103).

Christian references continue on as they board the Emmanuel C on the way to

Carriacou.12 The boat is decorated with a carved figurehead of a saint up front, who is holding a crucifix "as though it were a divining rod that had once led the way to a rich lode of gold"(193)- which is a clear symbol of the indistinct role of religion in Avey's journey towards her identity. In addition the two old women are on board, and they remind her of "the presiding mothers of Mount Olivet Baptist (her own mother's church long ago)" (194). These two women because of their respective stoutness and thinness are discursively associated with Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph, as "old people who have the essentials to go on forever" (194). Little does she know that she will need the help of these two women before the end of the trip.

Able to rest from the initial fear of the small boat, Avey settles and is soothed by the conversation and the Patois language of the women on the boat. Her recollections take her back to an Easter Sunday morning service. The pocketbook, shoes, and gloves she was wearing to church on that Sunday create the image of a diminutive Avey

Johnson. The text on that Easter Sunday is taken from Mark 16:1-5, the scripture that details the arrival of Mary, the mother of James and Joses, and Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus only to determine that the tomb is vacant and the stone, on which an angel now sits, has been rolled away. The preacher exhorts his congregation "to roll away the stones sealing up our spirits, our souls from the light of redemption" (200). In this instance, the recalling of the preacher's storytelling pushes Avey's toward that intermediate space, and she is eventually able to cleanse her spirit and embrace her own identity. It becomes apparent that the only way that Avey is going to go onward to her future is to go all the way to her past. Running concurrent to the scene are visions reminiscent of the Middle Passage as Marshall writes:

She was alone on the deckhouse. That much she was certain of. Yet she

had the impression as her mind flickered on briefly of other bodies lying

crowded with her in the hot, airless dark. A multitude it felt like lay

packed around her in the filth and stench of themselves, just as she was.

Their moans, rising and falling with each rise of the schooner, enlarged

upon the one filling her head. Their suffering--the depth of it, the weight

of it in the cramped space--made hers of no consequence. (209)

When considering Avey's experience on the schooner, Marshall continues to disturb the traditional patriarchal belief system. Abena Busia points out, by reliving the original

journey in reverse, "she also, in meaning, reverses the location of the Promised Land, which rather than being the United States as represent in the prosperity of the plantations or the Fulton Street of Jerome's success, becomes Africa as represented by Carriacou"

(40).

The gradually increasing rocking of the boat in the rough waters, "Until finally they began rocking [the church] with a violence her heaving stomach could no longer withstand, and her eyes opening, and a hand flying to her mouth, she was looking wildly around for help" (203). After soiling herself, Avey’s body is finally restored by that supreme physical act of spirit, the "laying on of hands"(217),13 as she recalls being bathed as a child by her Aunt Cuney in Tatem. The laying on of hands as spiritual practice among women is represented in several contemporary texts by Black women.14 For Avey

Johnson, the ritual goes beyond her reviving her flesh. Her identity is resurrected as she emerges from the wash down as a new woman/creature.

Like the ring shout, the Big Drum is a historic ritual and practice. As Christian points out, the Big Drum ceremony "combines rituals from several New World African societies: the Ring Dances of Tatem, the Bojangles of New York, the voodoo drums of

Haiti, the rhythms of the various African peoples brought to the New World" (82). The

Big Drum is another instance of an hybrid practice based on oral history and ritual that captures the true essence of Avey's identity. In order for the ceremony to be successful, a mixture of all races, genders, and tribes have to participate.

The final movement towards claiming her own identity is the usage of her true name. The name represents the link between Avery Johnson's past, present, and future.

Referring to herself now as '"Avey, short for Avatara'"(251), she now has acknowledged

her own transformation and her transcendence beyond the decadent strictures that are set in place for her as a Black woman in America. By the end of the novel, Avey realizes that the voices she hears from her Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph are part of her larger incarnated self. The conclusion of the novel, then, asserts a solution to Avey's deficient sense of self and belonging. Though the African Diaspora has presented a disconnectedness from her own identity, Avey recaptures herself by repeating the refrain of her ancestors and resolving to share this message. Avey Johnson finds her identity more so in line with a Pan-African Diasporic one than the materialistic one that she left in the United States. Avey does not plan to return to the practice of unqualified consumerism and optimism of North White Planes. Instead, she plans to go to Tatem to live, returning to her ancestral home. Through Black female orality, Paule Marshall offers a prescription for Black women who find their sovereignty threatened by the white patriarchal structure. Oral lore, ritual, and vernacular allow Avey Johnson to locate within a continuum of the past and present. Her identity has been resurrected, and she has moved into an in-between space of her own.

Notes

1 John Cook states that "[t]he two novels...will form a trilogy concluded by a novel set in

Africa, a work likely to be largely symbolic since Marshall has had little detailed experience on the continent" in "Whose Child? The Fiction of Paule Marshall." CLA

Journal 24.1 (1980): 15. Marshall's first novel can be seen at Marshall, Paule. Brown

Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House, 1959. In brief, the novel details the protagonist Selina Boyce being torn between her mother who is embracing American values and her father who is holding on to his Bajan culture. The second novel can be seen at Marshall, Paule. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. New York: Harcourt,

Brace & World, 1969. Chosen details Merle Kimbona's life is depicted as her psyche undergoes a transformation one of being heavily influenced by white English supremacist values to one that leads to a journey to Africa.

2 Marshall, Paule. Praisesong For the Widow. New York: Putnam's, 1983.

3 See Scarborough, Pettis, Christian, Sandiford, and Thorsson.

4 Set in Barbados in the 1930s, "To Da-Duh" is a short story about a young girl and her sister from New York visiting their grandmother in Barbados. The charm of the story occurs as the protagonist, who is nine years old, and the 80 year old woman take on a competitive air when it comes to discussing their own homes and cities.

5 Marshall discusses the relevance of Da-Duh in this interview and the inspirational influence Da-Duh has on Marshall's life and Marshall's writing.

6 Without mentioning DuBois, DeLamotte relates DuBois' theory of double- consciousness to Avey Johnson's character when discussing her vision of herself.

7 The historical roots of the flying Africans can be traced back to the spring of 1803, when a group of Igbo slaves arrived in Savannah, Georgia, after going through the horrors of the Middle Passage. For more discussion, see Micheal Gomez's Exchanging

Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and

Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1998.

8 Palmer dates the ring shout to the 1840s.

9 "Run Old Jeremiah" is an accurate example of a ring shout song. It was recorded in

1934, and it uses a West African dance pattern and rhythm.

10 Gates Jr. (Signifying Monkey) describes Legba as a messenger of the gods. Collier also cites how crucial Legba's presence is to language, and Denniston mentions traces Legba's legacy to the New World for Africans in the Americas.

11 Thompson recounts a legend where he explains, "at a crossroads in the history of the

Yoruba gods when each desired to find out who, under God was supreme, all of the deities made ther way to heaven, each bearing a rich sacrificial offering on his or her head." Outsmarting them all, Eshu-Elegbara won the substance of a'she, the force to make things happen and multiply.

12 In Isaiah 7:14, "Immanuel" is translated to mean "God is with us."

13 Christians believe the "laying on of hands" has healing power. Jesus often laid hands on people before healing them. See: Mark 6:5; Luke 4:40; 13:13.

14 See: Bambara, Naylor, and Shange.

CHAPTER 3

(RE)LOCATING THE ‘DEBIL WOMAN’: USING ORALITY FOR

TRANSCENDENCE AND A FREE ‘IN-BETWEEN’ SPACE IN SHERELEY

ANNE WILLIAMS’S DESSA ROSE

No social structure in the country has been more oppressive than the "peculiar institution"1 of slavery. In her Uncle Tom's Cabin,2 Harriet Beecher Stowe sought to fuel the abolitionist political agenda and was rather scathing in her commentary on fugitive slave laws. Harriet Jacobs's autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl3 set out to raise awareness of the evil oppression of slavery and to reinforce the notion that basic survival was a form of resistance. However, as Marisa Anne Pagnattaro suggests, novels4 like Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose5 "use the distance of over a century to comment on the harsh laws of the past while attempting to address concerns of the present"(81).

To endure, or especially, resist such appropriation, assimilation, or oppression requires one to acquire, utilize or even invent another or an "Other" oral and vernacular language. Homi Bhabha straightforwardly asserts that it becomes necessary for the oppressed slave to rely on agency of verbal or spoken language in order to transcend the psychological state of bondage:

Both gentleman and slave, with different cultural means and to very

different historical ends, demonstrate that forces of social authority and

subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred

strategies of signification. This does not prevent these positions from

being effective in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions

of authority may themselves be part of a process of ambivalent

identification. (208)

The critical stipulation here, and what is unexplored, concerns the usage of orality or oral language as a means of in-betweenness, its movement in the gap or rupture both between and beyond a ruling structure. To discuss it differently, oral language, vernacular lore and even musical and rhythmical language dwells in the crossing between written language and an endpoint of an escape from "language" altogether in that it has the ability to "silence, the interrupted, the interminable"(Deleuze and Guattari 23, 26).

Williams elaborates on the importance of oral language in the novel when she writes in the "Author's Note" that "Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth- and made of that process a high art-remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us"(ix). Unlike Toni Morrison's Sula and Paule Marshall's Avey

Johnson who are discussed earlier in this dissertation, Williams's Dessa Rose has no way of expressing herself through the written word. Consequently, Dessa Rose's only means of communication and expression is through oral speech. My intention in this chapter is to illustrate how Williams's Dessa Rose arrives at a place where she is able to destabilize the hierarchical white structure by cleverly usurping the written form that is both deceptive and repressive. This chapter situates itself in the overall dissertation because it answers the question of how a Black woman performs before and after slavery. Dessa

Rose is unable to rely on the nuances of freedom or even soft Jim Crow laws in order to establish her identity. Instead, she uses oral and vernacular language as a means of evading the patriarchal white structure while still remaining within the zone of obvious signification.

Again, alluding to the brief "Author's Note," Sherley Anne Williams explains that

Dessa Rose is a novel based on "two historical incidents," one involving an uprising led by a pregnant Black woman on a slave coffle in Kentucky in 1829. She was apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to be put to death. However, the woman's life was spared until she delivered her baby. Herbert Aptheker elaborates quite a bit on the details in American Negro Slave Revolts6 when he explains that "two male slaves in a coffle or ninety men, women, and children recently bought in Maryland and being led to the South for sale, suddenly dropped their shackles...and began to deal blows to each other" (287). According to a newspaper account, at "this moment, every negro was found to be perfectly at liberty."7 The six rebel leaders, including the pregnant woman, were sentenced to hang. On May 25, 1830, the woman was publically hanged after the birth of her child.8 Aptheker goes on to conclude his description of the triumphant rebellion when he quotes the newspaper, saying, "all maintained to the last, the utmost firmness and resignation to their fate. They severally addressed the assembled multitude, in which they attempted to justify the deed they had committed."9

The other incident involves the harboring of fugitive slaves by a "white woman living on an isolated farm" (x) in North Carolina in 1830. Aptheker does not go into such vivid detail regarding the White woman (probably because of inaccessible recorded accounts), but there is an "outlaw" fugitive slave named Moses who was captured in 1830 who divulged information. Thereafter, arms were located in North Carolina in a place named by Moses "in possession of a white woman living in a very retired situation-also some meat, hid away & could not be accounted for-a child whom the party [of citizens]

found a little way from the house, said that his mamy dressed victuals every day for 4 or

5 runaways, shewed the spot...where the meat was hid & where it was found."10

Dessa Rose signifies on the history it records- both on history as event and on history as text. When Sherley Anne Williams tells the stories, the outcomes of the stories turn out differently: the historical slave, whose name is unknown, and who was indeed not only caught and sentenced to death but also hanged for rebellion, becomes Dessa

Rose, who escapes her captors and goes on to do a great deal more before the novels end, where she is revealed to be an elderly woman thinking back over the story just told. The novel signifies as well on the conventional text of history, partly to enable Williams "to apprehend that other history"(x) - both another history and a history of the “Other.” By taking a little known slave woman Williams "reclaims"11 and reshapes a part of history

(Pa. Williams 218). Williams has created a "place in the American past" where she can

"go and be free" (x). Obviously Williams is precisely aware and is unashamedly defiant when she states that "[h]istory is often no more than who holds the pen at a given point in time. I hold the pen now, and that is what authenticates me and my children" (Lion's

History" 258). Thus Williams, as explained by Stephanie Sievers, "remedies some of the cultural 'forgettings' of female slaves' experiences by providing fictional space in which contemporary readers can begin to imagine what these women's lives might have been like" (83).

Williams has constructed the body of the novel into three parts - the Darky, narrated from Adam Nehemiah's point of view; the Wench, from Rufel's perspective; and the Negress, in first person from Dessa - with the third part signifying upon its predecessors. In fact, Dessa Rose itself is a signification on William Styron's

controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner. This signifying motif is an overarching motif significant to understanding the novel.12 The arch of the novel reaches a crescendo as the story is eventually "said" to the readers by Dessa Rose herself. Focusing on the storytelling aspect recognizes that historiography is a subjective practice. Williams is able to accomplish this revisionary history, and ultimately a blueprint for transcendence and a Third Space for Black women, along with, and partly through a focus on Black orality and its function in slave culture.

The first section of Dessa Rose demonstrates how traditionally historiographers have written American slavery histories that substantiate the historian's agenda.13 Adam

Nehemiah, the white historian who attempts to capitalize on his interviews with Dessa

Rose, embodies the conflicting white patriarchal structure by his use of written language.

Mary Kemp Davis discusses the origins of Adam Nehemiah's name and asserts that "it is no accident that Adam Nehemiah . . . bears the name of that archetypal namer, Adam, whose 'first recorded activity' was the giving of names" (547). As the author of The

Masters' Complete Guide to Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependents, it is clearly obvious that Nehemiah supports slavery on a philosophical and practical level. At work on a second book, The Roots of Rebellion in the Slave Population and Some Means of

Eradicating Them, Nehemiah and his publisher seek to repeat the success of the writer's first book. Planning to make a rather mercenary use of Dessa Rose, Nehemiah's assumed superiority is apparent and follows Saadi A. Simawe's assertion when Simawe writes,

"Nehemiah's pen becomes an instrument of penetration; his writing of her becomes both the instrument and the sign, in his hands, of coercion, possession, and containment" (13).

Bhabha speaks on the catastrophic effects of allowing the "colonists" to define the

"colonized":

Around the same time, from those dark corners of the earth, there comes

another, more ominous silence that utters an archaic colonial 'otherness',

that speaks in riddles, obliterating proper names and proper places. It is a

silence that turns imperial triumphalism into the testimony of colonial

confusion and those who hear its echoes lose their historic memories.

(176)

Nehemiah ignores any pain, physical or emotional; Dessa Rose might be feeling and dismisses her advanced pregnancy as a reason to attend to her comfort and care. He is concerned merely with ascertaining a set of facts that can be interpreted in terms of his own larger framework. Indeed, Nehemiah's writing is continuous with the "marks of punishment inscribed on Dessa due to bitter punishment endured during her enslaved imprisonment. The "marks" on Dessa, Nehemiah reflects, "bespoke a history of misconduct"; he wonders how many others "on the ill-fated slave coffle," "carried a similar history writ about their privates" (13-14). As Carol E. Henderson explains,

Nehemiah attempts to "textualize" various areas of Dessa's body by mapping her psyche and profile in terms of her bodily scars" (67).

The written and historical texts are of a litany of printed or literary documents to which Nehemiah refers early in the novel - each of which may be taken to represent one or more of the singular yet interconnected organizations of power that serve toward taking away Dessa's freedom: the "coffle manifest" of Hughes in which Williams refers to in her "Meditations on History" (Williams 1990, 240) and court records (DR 19,37)

(representing the legal and penal systems); newspaper reports of slave unrest (20) and advertisements for runaways (the press); the Bible (47) (the White Church); a "literary gazette" containing "tales of the Old South" that attract Nehemiah to Southern aristocracy

(the socioeconomics of land/property); and English literature (18) (education, and more generally, the economics of literacy). By including these texts, Williams reveals the connections between the political system of a slaveholding society and the devices the dominant structure implements in order to enforce its own definition of Dessa Rose. In order for Dessa Rose to reside within a space where literacy is accessible is illegal.14

This fact makes it necessary for her to create her own tools in order to achieve a place for freedom.

The main focus for accomplishing the completion of his second book for Adam

Nehemiah focuses initially on notebook entries. These entries consist of his transcriptions of Dessa's voice, his immediate commentary, and his evening comments after transcribing the day's notes. This multi-layered white male-authored narrative is preceded by a (day-) dream, in which Dessa is imagining herself back on the plantation amidst the family and friends she lost when she got sold to a slave trader, more specifically she is remembering spending time, the love of her life, Kaine:

The laugh was choked out of her; she had looked into his eyes. They were

alive, gleaming with dancing lights (no matter what mammy-nem said; his

eyes did so sparkle) that turned their brown to gold. Love suffused her;

she had to touch him or smile. She smiled and he grinned. 'Don't take

much, Dess - if you got the right word. And you know when it come to

eating beef, I steal the right word if it ain't hiding somewhere round my

own self's tongue.' He tugged her up the steps to their cabin. She laughed

despite herself; he could talk and wheedle just about anything he wanted.

'And I pulled some new greens from out the patch and seasoned em with

just a touch of fatback.' (130)

This reminiscence stands in sturdy contrast to what is to come, and signals a first destabilizing challenge to the white man's interpretation. Nehemiah is circumspect and meticulous with his dates and locations - marginalizing terms generally associated with journal or diary writing. There is thus no mistaking Adam Nehemiah's journal for an oral form of narration, despite the first-person point of view in which it is written.

It is not without irony that Nehemiah's tendency for exactness makes it possible for Dessa Rose to strive towards a place of freedom. Unwittingly, Nehemiah's perfect transcription reveals Dessa's perception as well as his own. The observations illustrate, for example, that her relationship with Kaine takes precedence, and, specifically, the harsh experience of seeing him killed by master was for her resolution to claim sovereignty for her own body and take an active part in the coffle uprising: '"I kill that white man,' she said, [...] 'I kill that white man cause the same reason Mas kill Kaine. cause I can.' And she turned her head to the dark and would not speak with me anymore"

("Mediations" 225). This show of defiance, of breaking the parameters of submissiveness and passivity imposed on the slaves was, despite its bitter consequences, decisive for Dessa's self-image. "I bes" are, importantly, the first words the white man hears her utter:

"I bes. I bes." Just those two words on a loud, yes, I would say, even

exultant note. Her arms were now at her side and she stood thus a moment

in the light. Her face seemed to seek it and her voice was like nothing I

had ever heard before. 'I bes. I. And he in air on my tongue the sun on

my face. The heat in my blood. I bes he; he me. And it can't end in this

place, not this time. Not this time. But if it do, if it do, it was and I bes. I

bes.' (216)

Through her own brand of the "to be" verb and orality, Dessa Rose claims her subject position. Henry L. Gates Jr. in Signifying Monkey comments on what he sees as the

"curious tension" that lies in the space between Black vernacular and the literate white text.15 Adam Nehemiah and even the reader immediately are confronted with the fact that Dessa Rose does not depend on either for her existence.

Nehemiah is frustrated that his "attempts to get the darky to talk had not been particularly fruitful" in convincing Dessa to reveal to him the "facts" about the uprising

(23). Having serious reservations regarding Dessa's capability to have rational thoughts,

Nehemiah cannot seem to fathom that a Black woman is capable of meaningful, self- directed behavior. Dessa's legitimate despair over her condition as a slave, as well as her final decision to resist, remain incomprehensible within Nehemiah's frame of reference.

Eventually, Dessa must speak and display a privileging of voice in order to establish her own identity - one that is different than the one ascribed to her by the white author. Nehemiah speaks frequently of the effects of Dessa's voice, to the issues he has in understanding, recording, or "capturing" it. When she speaks of Kaine's hitting master and the subsequent killing of White men in the slave uprising, Nehemiah records, "'I kill white mens,' her voice overrode mine, as though she had not heard me speak" (13; emphasis mine). Here, Dessa Rose's own form of orality takes priority over Nehemiah's

written word and eventually the dominant status of white patriarchal structure. If her voice does not "override," it otherwise disrupts the fissures of assumed identity that

Dessa is supposed to accept: "It is obvious," he writes of trying to determine "how those darkies escaped," "that I must speak with her again, perhaps several more times; she answers questions in a random manner, a loquacious, roundabout fashion - if indeed she can be brought to answer them at all" (16; emphasis added). It is not easy to "get the darky to talk," and her expression sometimes comes without words, as "humming or moaning," "impossible," he says, "to define... as one r the other" (23). This kind of humming recurs; Nehemiah regards it, variously, as inscrutable, "absurd" (30,31) and

"monotonous" (30,36,48), but it clearly prevents, disrupts, and resists his

"comprehension" of her:

From time to time she hummed, an absurd monotonous little tune in a

minor key, the melody of which she repeated over and over as she stared

vacantly into space. Each morning Nehemiah was awakened by the

singing of the darkies and they often startled him by breaking into song at

odd times during the day....thus far, Nehemiah reflected sourly, he had

heard nothing but moaning from this darky. (30)

When she starts "humming again, that absurd tune," "he raise[s] his voice so as to be heard over her humming" (31), and when the humming resolves into a song, "Lawd, give me wings like Noah's dove, it "burst[s] in upon [his] reflections" (32). It becomes apparent that Dessa Rose has insisted that her space, self-subjectivity, and her own identity be recognized as Nehemiah is forced to grow "accustomed to these tunes," and

his response is to naturalize her humming as part of Dessa's persona (it seemed "like a natural part of the setting" [48]).

Having been given the name "debil woman" because of her daring role in the slave uprising, Dessa Rose's escape harkens to the African trickster as she is able to utilize oral communicative codes with the other slaves on the slave plantation through

Christian song. The song is, of course, Dessa's signal that the others are about to come for her and take her to freedom:

Good news, Lawd, Lawd, good news.

My sister got a seat and I so glad;

I heard from heaven today.

Good news, Lawdy, Lawd, Lawd, good news.

I don't mind what Satan say

Cause I heard, yes I heard, well I heard,

I heard from heaven today.16 (67)

Williams's inclusion of this song of joy and confirmation is in direct response to

Nehemiah's question and comment: "[H]ow else could a nigger in her condition keep happy save through singing and loud noise...a loud nigger was a happy nigger" (29).

It is only ironic that Dessa Rose escapes on July, 4, 1829 - an holiday that represents freedom for the United States while the United States is still maintaining its strict views on slavery. For Nehemiah, there are "no signs of Odessa"; her "tracks disappeared," and the rain came up "washing away all trace," "even the smallest clue...no broken twig..., no scent...just gone" (277). Here, Dessa has moved to an "imagined"

zone outside space, time, and "discourse" (Simawe 21). Dessa's freedom and her identity depend on a system of signs-- a secret code that master cannot read.

At the opening of part II, Dessa finds herself in a position where she is even more confused and terrified than when she was in captivity in the hot cellar. Though she is not having to confront the reality of death, Dessa is unable to access the agency of her oral devices in order to make sense of her surroundings:

I didn't have no words to make sense of what my eyes was seeing, much

less what I'd been doing. I was someone I knowed and didn't know, living

in a world I hadn't even knowed was out there. So that bed was grave and

birthing place to me.

Referring to her house guest as "the wench," Rufel, along with the bedroom that was foreign to Dessa Rose, perpetuates the "Otherization" of Dessa Rose. Rufel initially operates from a superior position as she barely takes notice of Dessa Rose who is sharing

Rufel's same space. The place where the plantation is located, though, Sutton's Glen, is consistent with the Third Space. Though it is 1839, Dessa Rose is a free Black woman.

The White woman is nursing the Black woman's baby (it goes against everything [Dessa] had been taught to think about white women" 123) and has taken a Black free man as her lover.

Nicole R. King outlines how difficult the process is that Dessa Rose has to undergo in order to psychologically free herself from slavery:

The abandonment of a familiar order carries with it the loss of previously

available forms of agency. Dessa Rose has achieved her goal of freedom

for herself and her son. And yet, in her flight, she too left behind much

that was familiar in her world, most importantly, easily identifiable

constructs of power. And although Dessa is experienced in confronting

bastions of power, she is unaccustomed to their absence...[B]y specifying

how and where her mother, her sister Carrie, herself, and Dorcas fit into

the white power structure, Dessa manages both to disrupt its power for

Rufel and retain its ordering principle for herself. (363)

Indeed, it takes a long before Dessa is able to gather enough information about Ruth before she is able to trust her and reconcile with Ruth's relationship with Nathan.

The most tenuous threat of identification - and one that foregrounds the issue with signification - is "Mammy," Dessa's and Rufel's the "name" of Dessa's mother and of

Rufel's slave (Dorcas) who has assumed the role of mother in Rufel's fondness and attachment. Dessa Rose and Rufel stand "in the place" of the other because each woman re-calls "Mammy," through her voice. Part of Dessa's identification is her possession of

"Mammy" and her own history. Dessa Rose refuses to release control of it. The refusal causes a direct verbal confrontation between the two women: "Didn't you have no peoples where you lived?" she demands angrily of Rufel. " 'Mammy' ain't nobody name, not they real one" (118-119). Prepared for the battle over possession and her own identification, Rufel responds by saying, "She just had me! I was like her child" (119).

Dessa Rose, however, is armed with her own oral history; Dessa Rose's voice "overrides"

Rufel's crying baby as she heaves herself to her knees and flings her words at Rufel:

'Mammy gave birth to ten chi'ren that come in the world living.' She

counted them off on her fingers. 'The first one Rose after herself; the

second one died before the white folks named it. Mammy called her

Minta after a cousin she met once. Seth was the first child lived to go into

the fields. Little Rose died while mammy was carrying Amos - carried off

by the diphtheria. Thank God, He spared Seth.' Remembering the names

now the way mammy used to tell them lest they forget, she would say lest

her poor, lost children die to living memory as they had in her world.

(119)

Dessa's recollection of her own history and her ability to orally convey it, resists the de- legitimization at the hands slavery which often negated kinship. By referring to her specific family and their names, Dessa interrupts Rufel's (white patriarchal structure's) positive fiction of her own past. As a child, Rufel felt neglected and unloved and had received attention and compassion from "Mammy" whenever it was needed. King discusses the effect this revelation through the argument has on Rufel:

Rufel's entire being crumbles when she realizes that her construction of

herself rested upon a construction of "Mammy" as incomplete and faulty

as the stairway of her house which leads to nowhere, to the never built

second floor. In effect, once her construction of "Mammy"is made

problematic by Dessa, and Mammy's name, Dorcas, is revealed, Rufel is

bereft of any assuredness about a single aspect of her life. With that

foundation gone, the previously unshakable knowledge that Mammy loved

her unconditionally evaporates. (363)

Though Rufel's departure from the room and the argument abbreviates the overall effect of knowing Dessa through Dessa's own words, Rufel seems to be satisfied with her knowledge of Dessa through Harker and Nathan. Though Dessa's identity and freer

definition of self are developing, she only reaches true "freedom" in part III. We are able to observe Dessa's development in part III from Dessa's point of view.

In contrast to the preceding sections, the third section is narrated in the first person by Dessa in the vernacular. Of note is the fact that Dessa is no longer located at

Sutton's Glen while she is telling the story. Clearly, the reader is not the primary audience. As Sievers explains:

By making us eavesdroppers in a narrative not altogether meant for us,

Williams ingeniously deals with a predicament every writer has to

confront: that s/he cannot control who is actually going to read the text.

Defining an internal audience for whom (oral) storytelling is a privileged

means of learning, the writer effectively decenters the expectations of

readers who might want to deny the validity of a private, oral narrative.

(110)

Dessa Rose, "The Negress," has arrived in an authoritative space because, instead of displaying her impulsive reactions while or shortly after events take place, the retrospective narrative allows Dessa to participate in a process of revaluation and revision of her own.

Because of her intentional antagonism and neglect to establish a friendship with

Rufel, Dessa Rose finds it difficult to participate in the trickster scheme of selling Nathan and Harker back into slavery in order for them to make money. Both women have to

"act" in the very system they have resisted (each in her own way), indeed to play the very parts they have rejected. Rufel "was a little repelled by the scheme...that she do the very thing she wanted to keep Bertie from doing" (162): "play the master" (183). Similarly,

Dessa finds it a "scary thing" "to flirt so close with bondage again" (211), even to pretend that she 'was 'Mammy' now, taking care of little Missy" (213). But mixed with fear and repulsion, all along, is a sense of amusement (Rufel, 162) and joking (Dessa).

Dessa Rose's friendship grows stronger when she and Rufel have to defend Rufel against a drunken Mr. Oscar who has made his way to Rufel's bed. Dessa's realization that "the white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me" to the same "use"

(220) in a structure that is reliant upon the exchange of African Americans but of all women, Black and White. Because of Mr. Oscar's attempt at assault, Dessa Rose feels a bond with Rufel owing to their mutual structure against the white male patriarchal power structure.

Dessa's trickster behavior is highlighted when she is identified by Adam

Nehemiah and held pending a physical examination to confirm the presence of scars on her hips and thighs. After she is taken to jail, it becomes clear that Nehemiah has been hunting Dessa Rose sincer her escape. Nehemiah even boasts of his containment of

Dessa when he brags to the sheriff that "I got her down here in my book (231). When

Rufel arrives she is greeted by the sheriff, who tells her, "This the law job. Ma'am this darky cuse of being a scaped criminal with a price on her head" (248). Dessa fears that she will be abandoned by Rufel because Rufel still does not know her. Dessa admits:

I had done some things to make her think the worst of me. I guessed she

was membering that, too. And she knowed about my scars, about the

coffle something about how the white folks done me; Nathan had told her.

But these things I'd never spoke about to her. If one thing was true, I

knowed she must be wondering what else was, too. (230)

When Nehemiah demands that the sheriff examine (O)dessa for the marks that identify and will denounce her - "branded..., R on the thigh, whipscarred about the hips" (244),

Dessa's survival depends first on Ruth Elizabeth's playacting, the lie that Dessa has no scars, and that she is Rufel's slave (252); it depends ultimately, on the "word" of Aunt

Chole, who finally doesn't "see" Dessa's scars.

Dessa's escape from jail signals another collapse of a boundary that the white patriarchal has established in order to compromise her freedom and identity. Dessa and

Rufel display a final show of solidarity when they participate in their own naming ritual:

'My name Ruth,' she say, 'Ruth. I ain't your mistress.' Like I'd been the

one putting that on her. 'Well, if it come to that,' I told her, 'my name

Dessa, Dessa Rose. Ain't no O to it'' ... 'That's fine with me.' We was

both testy. Clara started petting me in the face and I hugger to me. I

wanted hug Ruth.... [T]hat night we walked the boardwalk together and

we didn't hide our grins. (256)

Ultimately, Dessa Rose is able to tell her own story as she moves from being a "Darky"

(racist label) to a "Wench" (sexist label) to the "Negress" (the self-defined, Black woman). In other words, Williams's novel maps Dessa's journey to a complex, fluid self not bound by imposed definitions. At the novel's end, the pages Adam writes on blow away with the wind, and Dessa is left to pass her story on orally. Finally, however, she frees herself by means of the logic of signification that her orality provides, using strategies for negotiation with and in the dominant White culture.

Notes

1 "Peculiar institution" is a term used to characterize slavery and the brutal practice's blatant contradiction of the US Constitution when the Constitution states that "all men are created equal." Kenneth Stamps' text is an excellent discussion of slavery as he provides counterarguments to historians who had characterized slavery as benign and help to

Africans in America.

2 Originally published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin is the best selling novel of the 19th century (The Bible). The book inspired abolitionists so that President Abraham Lincoln credited it for starting the American Civil War.

3 Originally published in 1861 under the name "Linda Brent," Jacobs chronicles the life of Harriet Jacobs as a slave and the oppression she had to endure because of her race and her gender. Though the text can be categorized as a slave narrative, many feminists have included it in their feminist literature selections.

4 Pagnattaro also uses Morrison's Beloved as an example.

5 Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: University Press,

1988.

6 Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International

Publishers, 1969.

7 "Affray and Murder," rpt. in Aptheker, One Continual Cry, 87.

8 Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 287.

9 Portsmouth, Virginia Times and Richmond, Virginia Enquirer, 28 January 1830, qtd. in

Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 287.

10 Aptheker Slave Revolts.

11 In the chapter "On Being the Subject of Property," law professor Patricia J. Williams considers the importance of this issue of reclaiming heritage in connection with her own family's history with slavery.

12 Mae Henderson discusses how Williams "repeats in structure and subverts in meaning" the premises of The Confessions of Nat Turner, 639.

13 The most famous example of this is D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. Daniel Leab has an excellent discussion on how the film influenced American history.

14 William Goodell discusses the operation of slave codes and how they were set in place in order to disenfranchise slaves. One of the main offenses in some states was to teach a slave or an indentured servant to read.

15 Gates, Signifying Monkey, 131.

16 Kashatus' work discuss how songs like "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and "Wade in the

Water" were used by slaves to communicate their intention of escaping.

CHAPTER 4

WHEN ORALITY IS THE ONLY MEANS OF SURVIVAL: RELYING ON THE

BLUES FOR A LIBERATING AND TRANSCENDENT SPACE IN GAYL

JONES’S CORREGIDORA

Whenever Black women use oral lore, oral vernacular, ritual, and rhythmic oralities as agents in order to establish their identity, their oral narratives often house painful traces of violence and deep grief that are ongoing, considering the lack of political and social redress. More specifically, for Black women in African American culture, the blues have historically been the intermediary for the discourse and an analytical tool for many Black women's most personal concerns.1 Accessing the blues as an oral agent for identity not only helps ensure survival in the present for Black women, but the blues enables a consolidation of processes of identity that are always more expansive than the explanation of a simple psychological determinism. Sherley Ann

Williams, the author who writes Dessa Rose, states that blues is "a basis of historical continuity."2 It is perfectly understandable, then, that blues is the form to which Ursa

Corregidora (named for the slave master who was her great-grandfather and grandfather, not for her own father) in Gayl Jones's Corregidora3 turns to identify with, explain, and give shape to her experience.

In her novel, Jones creates a family legacy of remembering trauma determined and perpetuated by the family members’ collective instruction about the past.

Remembering becomes a collective and selective mediation for passing down the family’s legacy. The Corregidora family matriarchs carry a history of brutality and slavery in their minds and bodies. In fact, it will be Ursa’s responsibility to engage in a

recuperative and authorial control over the past, but this can only happen once she confronts her family’s bitter narrative of enslavement. Deborah E. McDowell asserts that black women write the majority of contemporary novels about slavery. She contends that

“these novels posit a female-gendered subjectivity, more complex in dimension, that dramatizes not what was done to slave women, but what they did with what was done to them” (McDowell, “Negotiating” 146). Although McDowell’s conclusion applies to

Jones’s creative project, Corregidora complicates the ways in which the Corregidora women attempt to recuperate their subjectivity, which reveals slavery’s catastrophic effects on an individual. Consequently, much of the criticism on Corregidora addresses the haunting nature of slavery for the Corregidora women.4 In her text, Jones convincingly demonstrates what critic Hazel Carby concludes regarding the impact of slavery on the literary imagination: “The economic and social system of slavery is thus a prehistory … a past social condition that can explain contemporary phenomena” (Carby

126).

Corregidora begins with Ursa "falling" down the stairs after a performance as a blues singer at her job at Happy's Cafe'. She is injured at the hands of her drunken husband, Mutt. Eventually the result is her losing her fetus, and undergoing a hysterectomy. This accident and her resulting sterility, severe for any woman, are compounded by the injunction that the women of Ursa's family have passed down from generation to generation - bear witness by bearing generations. Thus the Corregidora women have a possession of a genealogy based not on blood origin but on the oral transmittance of the suffering. For Ursa Corregidora, the blues becomes both the political rubric that she uses in order to recollect her family's injuries and trauma and the

basis for her survival and call for rectification. The opening crisis in the novel signals a movement from the Corregidora women's sexually commodified body and the distress that the women endure to a new and necessary form of testimony that focuses on escape and transcendence. Even without the forced hysterectomy, Homi K. Bhabha seems to believe that Ursa's transformation is necessary in regards to her identification. Bhabha explains that, whenever a marginalized group questions the traditions of the past and present, the balance of power is disrupted:

These feminist and postcolonial temporalities force us to rethink the sign

of history within those languages, political or literary, which designate the

people 'as one'. They challenge us to think the question of community and

communication without the moment of transcendence: how do we

understand such forms of social contradiction? (221)

Though many critics have primarily read Ursa's journey to liberation through her performance as a blues singer, my intention in this chapter is to demonstrate how Ursa

Corregidora turns to blues and the agency of oral constructions in order to disrupt the harrowing narrative that she has inherited through patriarchal structures. I will illustrate

Ursa Corregidora's emergence by discussing the women in her three preceding generations and her interaction with Mutt, her ex husband. Ultimately, Ursa's utilization of oral structuring enables her to progress beyond the strictures of her past and immediate oppression into a liminal area where she has the ability to exercise her own identity. Up to this point of the dissertation, the main characters of interest have had to implement the agency of orality based mainly on the fact that the written word, though somewhat accessible, does not serve as a flexible enough tool in order for the characters to assert

their own identities beyond the established white patriarchal boundaries. Ursa

Corregidora, though, is unique in that she is not only the most immediate and obvious descendant of white patriarchal structure, but any written verification that Ursa

Corregidora may desire has been destroyed by fire. Thus, Ursa is the only discussed character in this dissertation that is compelled to another form of empowerment because the assistance of the written word or language is not existent.

In an interview with Charles H. Rowell, Jones discusses how the history of the

Corregidora women has a direct impact on Ursa Corregidora.5 In that same interview,

Jones goes on to explain that Brazil figures so prominently in Corregidora because exploring Brazilian history and landscape helped her writing by "getting away from things that some readers consider 'autobiographical' or 'private obsessions' rather than literary inventions....In addition, the Brazilian experience (purely literary and imaginative since I've never been there) helped to give a perspective on the American one" (51).

Next to the United States, Brazil was the largest slaveholding nation in the

Western Hemisphere. More than five million Africans were sent to Brazil to work mainly on sugar cane plantations from the 16th to the 19th century. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the African Diaspora in Brazil spread to the interior of the country with the discovery of gold mines. A number of Portuguese colonists rushed to these mines, and along with them they brought African slaves. The Corregidora women's memories evoke the eighteenth century slave revolts in Palamares (which is in the present

Brazilian state of Alagoas) and the Africans who waged them. The Palmares settlement consisted mainly of escaped slaves and free-born enslaved African people. As early as

1602, Portuguese settlers complained to the government that their captives were running

away into this inaccessible region and building small communities. The overwhelming majority of enslaved people in these Portuguese colonies were male. In what should be read as an attempt at freedom and liberation outside of the oral framework of the

Corregidora women, is the instance when the slave runs away to Palmares after he is seen talking to Great Gram by the white slave owner. When Corregidora decides that a relationship is developing between Great Gram and this young man, Corregidora decides to end it. Even then, though, Great Gram considers the contrast of freedom and her present mortifying state at the Corregidora plantation. Great Gram reflects on the young man's decision:

But maybe he did the right thing to run anyway, because maybe if he had

stayed there, the way Corregidora was looking when he seen us talking the

might've had him beat dead. I ain't never seen him look like that, cause

when he send them white mens in there to me he didn't look like that,

cause he be nodding and saying what a fine piece I was, said I was a fine

sepeciment of a woman, finest speciment of a woman he ever seen in his

life, said he had tested me out hisself, and then they would be laughing,

you know, when they come in there to me. (127)

Upon a surface reading, one may view the event as tragic simply because the man was found drowned three days later. What is even more peculiar is that the slave is running to a settlement that had been disbanded in 1694 - two hundred years earlier. Upon a deeper reading, though, the instance should be interpreted as an empowering one for the man because it is obvious that he has stepped into that imaginary space that is beyond both the past and the present. Ashraf Rushdy supports the discussion on liminality by stating,

"The slave boy who wishes to escape the Brazilian plantation in the mid-19th century in order to join a community destroyed in 1694 gives us a sense of how an idea of a resistant community exceeds its historical placement" (Rushdy in "Relate Sexual and Historical"

285). It is also important to note that women of all racial backgrounds were welcome in

Palmares and that over time mixed race children increased the diversity of the city-state's culture.6

The family oppressor and patriarch Corregidora is a Portuguese slave owner in

Brazil. Through Great Gram, Jones informs the reader of the imposing size of

Corregidora. His stature is in direct correlation to the impact that he has on the lives of the generations of Corregidora women:

. . . He was a big strapping man then. His hair black and straight and

greasy. He was big. He looked like one a them coal Creek Indians but if

you said he looked like an Indian he'd get mad and beat you. Yea, I

remember the day he took me out of the field. They had coffee there.

Some places they had cane and then others cotton and tobacco like up

here. (11)

Upon Brazilian emancipation in 1883, a young Ursa learned that the patriarch,

Corregidora, burned all slave plantation records in an attempt to hide his abusive treatment of slaves. By directing Ursa to make generations to preserve the memory of their sexual abuse, Great Gram and Gram convert the Corregidora women's wombs into forms of documentation:

And I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your

children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the

evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That's why they burned all

the papers, so there wouldn't be no evidence to hold up against them.

I was five years old then. (15)

In order to combat the disappearance and deletions of the history, the Corregidora women orally pass the horror story from one generation to the next.

In her Something Akin to Freedom: the Choice of Bondage in Narratives by

African American Women, Stephanie Li suggests that the Corregidora women "enshrine a legacy of victimization"7 Despite this oppositional view towards the Corregidora women's transcendence, their uncensored oral account of truth demonstrates that there is at least an attempt at resistance. To go on, by identifying themselves with oral constructions rather than resolving to allow their histories to be erased, the Corregidora women have escaped their own objectification and are able to claim and wrestle their own identities from the grasp of the white patriarchal structure. The voices of the

Corregidora women locate them in a space where they are able to continually repeat the abuse, even as they accept the charge to create more witnesses.

Like a song and dance from a blues song, the rhythmic back-and-forth motion of

Great Gram's rocking chair and perspiration on her palms demonstrate, through a physical enactment, the vertically oral connection of the Corregidora women. Great

Gram holds on to the child's body on her lap as she recollects what waits to be said:

Great Gram sat in the rocker. I was on her lap. She told the same story

over and over again. She had her hands around my waist, and I had my

back to her. While she talked, I'd stare down her hands. She would fold

them and then unfold them. She didn't need her hands around me to keep

me in her lap, and sometimes I'd see the sweat in her palms. (11)

These instances of orating the past before and after school, the drowning in worn down words, all form part of this the oral legacy established by Great Gram to hold up the

"evidence" and to move towards a space beyond the humiliation, grief, and embarrassment of a past whose written pages have been burned: "It was if the words were helping her, as if the words repeated again and again could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory. As if it were only the words that kept her anger” (11). Great Gram uses these ritualistic practices in order to step outside of the injurious existence. Here, she not only goes beyond the location of her own violent history, but she has also taken to orality as a means of reaching beyond the narrative itself.

Through Great Gram, Gayl Jones uses a codified language in order to place Great

Gram in the gap of African and African American language. The speech patterns used are consistent with the cadence, syntax, slang, and rhythm. The repetition of the word

"Naw," which appears on the page nine times operates like a chorus. The return to the familiar sentence pattern is the quintessential blues song:

Naw, his wife didn't do that. She sleep with you herself . . . That hot

climate. Nose like a baby hawk. Naw, she couldn't do a damn thing.

Naw, she didn't give him nothing but a little sick rabbit that didn't live but

do be a day old . . . Naw, she couldn't do a dam thing. (28)

The "Black English" used here by Great Gram is in direct opposition to the white patriarchal structure in that its usage runs counter to the same written word that

Corregidora has had burned. Great Gram's vernacular signifies on the white patriarchal structure as it demonstrates her refusal to be retained within the boundaries of that same structure. As Hershina Bhana Young states, "Through the orality of the blues and through Jones's use of the vernacular to write the novel, the women resist the erasure of their injuries and the ghosts that haunt them" (104). It is through expressing through their rage in vernacular and the artistic medium of the blues can movement into a Third Space begin.

Eventually, Great Gram fashions her own act of resistance. Gram tells Ursa that

Great Gram lived with Corregidora "until she did something that made him wont to , and then she run off and had to leave me" (79). Unable to gather the information of what happened from either Great Gram or Corregidora, Gram was left with unanswered questions: "What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can't get her out of his mind the next?" (173). In the interim, her daughter has taken her place as Corregidora's lover. For

Ursa, the mystery of what Great Gram has done is the last memory to be unlocked:

It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great

Gram did to Corregidora . . . In a split second I knew what it was, in a split

second of hate and love I knew what it was . . . A moment of pleasure and

excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not

sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before

it breaks the skin. (184)

Because of the punishment endured by slaves for any act of rebellion, Great Gram's violent act has to be seen as a significant moment of empowerment. Great Gram's castration of Corregidora through fellatio adds a rather realistic dimension to the power of orality used by Black women in their quest for freedom and self identity.

Gayl Jones introduces Gram through Ursa by stating that she "looked tall then, because I was little . . . she wasn't no more than five feet" (23). That the white

Portuguese master impregnates her and fathers Gram, locates her in a duality of sexual violence and physical oppression. Through Gram's oration to Mama, Ursa is confronted with what would become part of the depth of her relationship with Black men. The issue of emasculation is proffered in Gram's stories:

There were two alternatives, you either took one ore you didn't. And if

you didn't you had to suffer the consequences of not taking it. There was

a woman over on the next plantation. The master shipped her husband out

of bed and got in the bed with her and just as soon as he was getting ready

to go in her she cut off his thing with a razor she had hid under the pillow

and he bled to death, and then the next day they came and got her and her

husband. They cut off her husband's penis and stuffed it in her mouth, and

then they hanged her. They let him bleed to death. They made her watch

and then they hanged her. (67)

From an exterior view, the reading of the emasculated Black men certainly establishes an antagonistic relationship between Black men and women that results from white male hegemony. Examining the passage a little more closely, though, we can view the woman who is the subject of the passage as an exemplification of the ineffectiveness of the

documents and rituals of the white patriarchal structure to protect Black women. Anne

DuCille views slave marriage as the primary signifier of freedom and humanity when referring to marriage in William Wells Brown's novel, Clotel.8 Yet, Gram's message suggests that marriage is a state of pointlessness and defenselessness when measured against a dominant slave/master environment.

What should be observed as Gram's ability to step beyond the white patriarchal structure is her reference to the white slave owner's penis as a "thing." The animalistic treatment of the Black men and women is well documented.9 Gram is obviously a product of slavery; however, Gram turns to orality as a means of subtly reversing her place as a "non-human" being in the institution. In her Toward a Feminist Theory of the

State, Catherine A. MacKinnon briefly discusses the "thingification" of women.10 In

MacKinnon's text, she speaks of the irrelevance and the "nonpersonhood" of women who attempt to survive in a dominant male system. The reference to the white slave owner's penis as "thing", which identifies him as a man - a human-confronts notions of objectification and is rejected by Gram's execution of the word. Thus, the white slave owner in the passage, though, empowered by the dominant paradigm of slavery, is marginalized when the story is told through the words of Gram.

Mama is the first of the Corregidora women not to experience the horrors of physical enslavement and Corregidora's perverse cruelties. Despite the fact that she does not experience the firsthand violence, Mama embodies all the pain and grief that has been bestowed upon her by her grandmother and mother. Earlier in Corregidora, Mama claims to Ursa, "Songs are devils. It's your own destruction you're singing. The voice is a devil"

(53). In response, Ursa mention that Gram listens to the blues, Mama replies,

"[L]istening to the blues and singing them ain't the same" (103). This difference points to the fact that Mama is not yet comfortable to articulate her own pain. The verbal language used reflects Corregidora's abuse that is a result of his sexual exploitation and cruel actions towards Great Gram, which is movingly represented in the following passage.

Black men were not allowed to have sexual intercourse with Great Gram:

He didn’t send nothing but rich mens in there to me, cause he said I was

his little gold pussy, his little gold piece … But he said he didn’t wont no

waste on nothing black… some of us he called hisself cultivating us, and

then didn’t send nothing but cultivated mens to us, and we had these

private rooms, you know. But some of these others, they had been three or

four or five whores fucking in the same room. But then if we did

something he didn’t like he might put us in there and send trash into us,

and then we be catching everything then. So after that, first time he just

talked to me real hard, said he didn’t wont no black bastard fucking me …

He was real mad. He grabbed hold of me down between my legs and said

he didn’t wont nothing black down there. He said if he just catch me

fucking something black, they wouldn’t have no pussy, and he wouldn’t

have none either. And then he was squeezing me all up on my pussy and

then digging his hands up in there … he was just digging all up in me till

he got me where he wonted me and then he just laid me down on that big

bed of his and started fucking me … (124-125)

An imperative point that should be acknowledged from this passage is that Mama is re- telling the story as Great Gram told it to her. Ursa becomes aware that as Mama tells the

story "it wasn't her that was talking, but Great Gram" (124), recognizing that the oral narrative overwhelms the family members' identities regardless of how each experienced slavery.

The incident when Ursa and Henry "play doctor" is particularly telling as well. In a game of sexual exploration, Henry lifts up Ursa's dress Mama intervenes at once, yelling at Ursa that Henry "was feeling up your asshole" (42). Ursa insists that she didn't feel it, but Mama's notion of the past as evil essence overrides her experience. The incident with Henry ends in a blues song; "I bet you were fucking before I was born. /

Before you was though. / 'Ursa, what makes your hair so long?' / 'I got evil in me.' /

Corregidora's evil. / Ole man, he just keep rolling" (42). Though she is not raped by the white slave owner, she still feels the remnants of the injuries of the past. Mama struggles to show meaning to the experiences of life. At first, she avoids a proper response when

Ursa asks about her father when she says, "Corregidora is responsible for that part of my life. If Corregidora hadn't happened that part of my life never would have happened"

(111). Mama is in the space that consists of the present, past, and future. Her life is crowded by Corregidora's story:

It was as if my mother's whole body shook with that first birth and

memories and she wouldn't make others and she wouldn't give those to

me, though she passed the other ones down, the monstrous ones, but she

wouldn't give me her own terrible ones. . . .Not her private memory. . . .

She was closed up like a fist. . . into the world, her incomplete world, full

of teeth and memories, repeating never her own to me. Never her own.

(103-4)

For Mama the importance of her life lies not in her experiences, but in her continuation of

"their" story by bearing generations. Raised upon stories that present men as domineering rapists, Mama fears men even as she is drawn to Martin so that she can fulfill her family's charge:

But still it was like something had got into me. Like my body or

something knew what it wanted even if I didn't want no man. Cause I

knew I wasn't looking for none. But it like it knew it wanted you. It was

like my whole body wanted you, and knew it would have you, and knew

you'd be a girl. (114)

When discussing Martin, Mama tells Ursa how she would sit at the restaurant in which he worked:

I had to go there, had to go there and sit there and have him watch me like

that. Sometimes he'd be cleaning the counter and watching me, you know

how men watch you when they wont something. It don't have to be to

open your legs up, though most time it is. Sometimes I think he wonted

something else, and then sometimes I think that's all he wanted. (112)

Here, we can observe that Mama approaches the initially kind and patient Martin strictly through relations of objectification. Deliberately presenting herself as a sexual object,

Mama is unable to speak when Martin asks for her name and is not abusive. In their primary exchange, Martin addresses Mama as "woman," a reference that is strange to her.

She later explains to Ursa, "I wasn't lookin for no man, cause I didn't feel like no woman then. Sometimes even after I had you I still wouldn't feel like none" (115). Mama's acceptance of womanhood is awkward even after Ursa's birth because she remains part of

the lineage of the Corregidora women. Her rejection of the word "woman" is a result of the dehumanization she feels while living under the white patriarchal structure.

A crucial turning point occurs when Ursa goes home to challenge Mama to share

Mama's own story. Before returning to her family home Ursa imagines dialogue with

Mutt in which she tries to make sense of her confounding childhood memories of her mother. Ursa reminisces:

I never saw my mama with a man, never ever saw her with a man. But she

wasn’t a virgin because of me … when I look back, that’s all I see. Desire,

and loneliness. A man that left her. Still she carried their evidence,

screaming, fury in her eyes, but she wouldn’t give me that, not that one.

Not her private memory … She was closed up like a fist. It was her very

own memory, not theirs, her very own real and terrible and lonely and

dark memory. And I never saw her with a man because she wouldn’t give

them anything else. Nothing. And still she told me what I should do, that I

should make generations. But it was almost as if she’d left him too, as if

she wanted only the memory to keep for her own but not his fussy body,

not the man himself. Almost as if she’d gone out to get that man to have

me and then didn’t need him, because they’d been telling her so often what

to do. (Jones 101)

She returns to Bracktown, Kentucky, needing to make sense of her life. Ursa explains,

"I have to make some kind of life for myself" to which her mother responds that she is aware of "how situations was with you and Tadpole" (111). Ursa, who is overwhelmed by memories of the family story, wants an answer to the question: "How could she bear

witness to what she'd never lived, and refuse me what she had lived?" (103). Though

Ursa, has turned to the blues as the medium for her voice and freed space, she is keenly aware that her mother's story will fill the gap of confusion that Ursa currently confronts with her own interaction with men. Ultimately the mother complies and begins telling the story of Ursa Corregidora's father.

Ursa's father, Martin, "wasn't a man I met at no depot," Mama declares in her own vernacular. The exterior surface of the narrative would indicate that Mama is simply preparing to tell the truth - a truth that she knows is owed to Ursa. A more intimate reading will reveal that Mama's ancestral lore has been revised, and her control of her own words gives Mama the ability to pass the truth and on to her daughter. Given

Mama's liberated space, in the story the reader learns Mama's name - Correy. In the account of her interaction with Martin, Mama reveals her own desire for Martin and that

Mama is not simply procreator for her daughter. In relating the violent act that culminates the relationship, Correy remembers saying to Martin, "'Don't hurt me' . . .I said, 'Help me Martin, but don't hurt me'"(119). Not only does Martin beat Correy, but he rips her clothes and sends her out on the street "lookin like a whore." This in turn is how the men who accost her on the street perceive her. But, before she leaves, Correy turns the gaze back on Martin and sees "all that hurt there" (121). Though Mama finally chooses a life of isolation, her oral exchange with Ursa frees her and allows her to be wholly herself. Unlike the "songs of the devils" that Mama had referred to earlier, her own blues assists her in achieving a transcendent space.

While Ursa and Mutt are married, their sexual intimacy eventually erodes into another venue for control and psychological abuse by a man. Madly envious of Ursa

when other men watch her perform at Happy's Cafe', Mutt demands that Ursa quit her job as a singer. He only offers the fact that he is her husband as justification giving his character a compelling parallel to Corregidora's power over Great Gram and Gram. Ursa refuses his instructions, and Mutt retaliates by refusing Ursa sex when she craves it and calling her "my pussy" (156). While Ursa is fixated between a place of pleasure and pain, Mutt's responses to her overtures are confusing and frustrating. Mutt's domineering actions and crude language only help to enhance Ursa's already jaded sense sexual intimacy.

Shortly after her fall, Ursa enters into an imagined dialogue and questions herself,

"What do the blues do for you?" (56), to which she responds, "It helps me to explain what

I can't explain" (56). For Ursa Corregidora, the blues becomes the form of orality wherein she is able to express the pain she has experienced. As a blues singer, Ursa moves beyond the role of a Black woman who submissively receives to one who actively participates in the telling of the story. As mentioned earlier, Ursa becomes part of the legacy/lineage of many Black women who turn to the blues as a form of liberation.

Hazel Carby offers an in depth explanation of the issue:

What has been called the "Classic Blues" the women's blues of the

twenties and early thirties is a discourse that articulates a cultural and

political struggle over asexual relations: a struggle that is directed against

the objectification of female sexuality within a patriarchal order but which

also tries to reclaim women's bodies as the sexual and sensuous subjects of

women's song. ( "'It Just Be's Dat Way Sometime'", 333)

Ursa can no longer "bear witness" through childbirth, and she has to testify in her own way: "Then let me witness the only way I can. I'll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee to rub inside my eyes. When it's time to give witness, I'll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee. I'll stain their hands" (54). Here, Ursa is conscious of the fact that she has reached back to the horrors of her family's past in order to reappropriate it into a space of her own choosing. Ursa refuses to allow the brutal and violent memories of the coffee grounds to stay on the Corregidora Plantation; instead, the coffee is placed under her control and in her new song.

A rather symbolic song that Ursa performs is "Trouble in Mind". It is considered by blues scholar William Barlow as the anthem of classical blues.11 "Trouble" is regarded as a folk blues song with verses that alternate between despair and hope:

Trouble in mind, I'm blue

But I won't be blue always

'Cause the sun is gonna shine

In my back door some day

Say trouble in my mind, I'm blue

But I won't be blue always

'Cause the sun is gonna shine

In my back door some day (Hill and Austin)

Ursa's actual performance and the lyrics of the song combine to express a combination of pain and pleasure.

Though some of Ursa's songs are traditional blues songs like "Trouble in Mind" and "Open the Door, Richard," and "See See Rider,” Ursa, like the generations before hers, compose her own version of the blues. More than once does Jones refer to two of these songs. A particular song tells of a train traveling through what seems to be an endless tunnel as the tunnel tightens around the train like a fist. The other song is about a bird woman whose eyes were deep wells who would take a man on a journey, and the man would never return. Through the blues, Ursa has subverted male dominance by placing the woman in control of the male figure. The train and the tunnel are metaphors for the male sex organ being dominated by the female sex organ, and the bird woman's eyes become the symbol of control of a woman over a man.

Although Ursa has a yearning for love and affection, her final imaginary dialogue with Mutt ends with an expression of hatred. Ironically, this made up interaction does not signal the end of their relationship; instead, her ability to vent her frustration opens the door for possible reconciliation:

"Do you still hate me?"

"Yes. In the hospital, standing over me. You. I hated you. I cussed you.

And I've far more hurt now than then. How do you think I feel? Why did you come back, anyway?"

"I came to get you."

"He made them make love to anyone, so they couldn't love anyone."

"You'll come back."

"If I do, I'll come with all my memories. I won't forget anything."

"I'd rather have you with them, than not have you."

"Mutt, don't."

In order for Ursa to achieve true liberation she has acknowledged that the pain and abuse of her past will be unable to be extracted from herself. Also, it is obvious that Mutt must also reconcile himself to living with that part of her history in which she cannot escape.

Madhu Dubey suggests that the ending is a moment of triumph for Ursa: "The act of fellatio enables Ursa to not only exercise her sexual power over Mutt but also to recapture the source of Great Gram's mysterious sexual power over Corregidora" (257).

My interpretation of the final episode stands in stark contrast to Dubey's.

Obviously, Ursa is aware through Great Gram how the act of resistance can serve towards her own detriment. She also knows the impact and power the cycle of brutality wreaks on one's identity because she has physical evidence of the results. Her required hysterectomy carries a physical mark as she says that surgery is "going to leave a bad" scar (17). Ursa, indeed, injures Mutt by biting his penis while performing fellatio, but she is already aware of the fact that this is a destructive pattern between herself and Mutt.

Her confrontation with her family's cruel history and her own painful scar has placed her in a space beyond one of sexual reclamation and empowerment. For Ursa, during the sexual conclusion, her oral position cedes deference to her own orality. This becomes evident during the novel's end when Mutt and Ursa participate in their call and response pattern. Ursa rejects physical violence as a means of communication and behavior:

I don't want the kind of woman that hurt you, he said.

Then you don't want me.

I don't want the kind of woman that you hurt you.

Then you don't want me.

I don't want a kind of woman that hurt you.

Then you don't want me.

He shook me till I fell against him crying. I don't want the kind of man

that'll hurt me neither, I said.

He held me tight. (185)

The blues-like repetition of this act does not indicate that Ursa plans to return to the behavioral pattern of violence, but they rather point to a different reality. Ursa and Mutt have chosen love over destruction. Ursa is in a transcendent space - one where it is not acceptable for either men or women to hurt each other.

Notes

1 Davis, in Blues Legacies, delineates the multidimensional dynamic between blueswomen and their relationship to gender and race issues. In Bessie, Chris Albertson specifically details the plight of Bessie Smith and how she responded to gender and race bias.

2 Tate, Black Women Writers at Work, 208-209. In her interview with Tate, Sherley Ann

Williams refers to blues as " a ritualized way of [black people] talking about ourselves and passing it on."

3 Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. New York: Random House, 1975.

4 See Claudia Tate's "Corregidora: Ursa's Blues Medley"; Melvin Dixon's "Singing a

Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones;" Anne DuCille's

"Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical 'I.'" and Madhu

Dubey's "Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition.

5 Rowell, "Interview with Gayl Jones," 45. Later in the interview Jones reaffirms the fictionality of her work by noting that "Nothing in the Corregidora story really happened"

(51).

6 Andrien, The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America.

7 Li, Something Akin to Freedom (91). Li also goes on to discuss how the desire to make generations also "erases female sexual pleasure."

8 DuCille sheds light on the Brazilian circumstance by shedding light on slave marriages in the United States.

9 See Berlin, Elkins, and Fogel. All three texts have chapters and passages devoted to the mistreatment of the Black men and women during American slavery.

10 Unlike the application being used for Gram, MacKinnon discusses thingification being the result of women who have been "pampered and pacified" (8).

11 Barlow, "Looking Up at Down," 142. According to Barlow, there are different versions of the song. Ursa Corregidora's paradoxical state is analogous to the song.

CONCLUSION

At the core of Sula, Praisesong for the Widow, Dessa Rose, and Corregidora is the issue of how the encounter with social, psychological, and physical captivity influence the lives of Black women. The presence of a form of bondage, almost always permeating throughout the lives of Black women, informs Black female oral resistance.

For the female protagonists in these works, the journey to liberation and transcendence requires a confrontation with personal and inherited struggles however excruciating this proves to be. These women, who approach their own oppression from a position of a

"neo-briar patch", combine ritual and lore with exclusive Black female orality and vernacular in narratives that fight and challenge the voiceless, unidentified, presence of

Black women in the white patriarchal structure.1 According to Maxine L. Montgomery, the neo-briar patch is, "The unique vantage point afforded by the interplay between a multitude of diverse, often contesting positioinings owing to the complexities of race, class, and gender" (75). Using orality as a weapon to combat the pressure from the weight of the dominant structure, Black women who dwell within the location of the neo- briar patch are able to traverse borders of oral and writing practices, traditional perceptions of good and evil, and presumption and actual procedure. What is more,

Black female orality dissolves the margins of fact and fantasy which makes the past more significant and functional for modern readers.

Morrison, Marshall, Williams, and Jones show that overcoming legacies of violence and injustice require Black women to engage actively in confronting repressive and cataclysmic violence. Readers of these novels actively share in narratives that summon them to consider the nature of humanity and what kind of connection these

accounts institute between readers, authors, their characters, and the past and the present.

As the Black women uncover their emotional realities, they enter into their own quest for freedom by imagining and engaging in ways that external communities of listeners

(especially the readers of these novels) may help them reach a deeper appreciation of how the inherited and/or directly felt experience of oppression shapes who they have become.

Through the guise of Black female orality, the novels often interweave themselves into historical occurrences and present not only optional histories to the officially sanctioned narratives but also unofficial stories about the past. The usage of Black female orality allows these authors the imaginative space for conjecture about and restoration of the gaps and silences for which conventional historical accounts do not typically allow.

Jacqueline Fulmer and Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown are two of the growing number of critics who advocate an examination of orality as an agent for the traversing of repressive borders.2 Fulmer's discussion of the effectiveness of oral examination regarding African American and Irish women is certainly applicable to my overall interrogation of all four of the authors' desire to create a liberated space:

References to oral and other folk traditions as they resurface in a culture,

especially in literature, allow women authors to push the image of woman

away from the edges . . . .Thus, the value of pairing African American and

Irish women authors is that, when placed together, these works can

destroy both halves of the degraded/reified binary and produce a third

entity in the literature: vivid, complicated, humorous, imperfect, self-

aware female characters whose actions carry the stories and whose inner

thoughts capture the readers' sympathies. (10)

100

In furthering the notion of a transcendent area of existence for Black women, Morrison,

Marshall, Williams, and Jones write against the limiting assumptions held by white patriarchal society. Their novels evoke new concepts of independence and self- determination for Black women.

In Sula, Morrison disregards the notion that Black women should assume a position of inferiority because of their gender. Sula's desire to assert her own individuality demonstrates her refusal to be defined by someone else. By employing

Black female orality, Sula dissembles the male dominated structure of the Bottom and moves beyond common misogynistic strictures. Morrison, through the clever usage of ritual, oral lore, and vernacular establishes the Bottom as a liminal space that moves beyond the boundaries of gender, race, and even time. Though the novel ends with Sula's death, the subsequent negative change of the citizens and the climate of the Bottom is

Morrison's nod to the rebelliously accomplished life of Sula Mae Peace.

Just as Morrison relies on orality to accomplish transcendence for Black women in Sula, Marshall experiences a similar achievement through ritual and oral lore in her

Praisesong for the Widow. Through Avey Johnson, Marshall subverts the boundaries of the white patriarchal structure by returning "back" to a place that is removed from the parameters of time and beyond the framework of written expression. Storytelling becomes the prevalent agent for liberation for Avey. Her rejection of traditional western possessions and preoccupations allows her to assume her own identity in the median location framed just beyond her American and Caribbean locations.

Through her preoccupation with Black female orality, Williams demands a rethinking of history by resurrecting and recuperating the forgotten and silenced voice of

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a Black woman in her Dessa Rose. Through Williams's signification on the actual slave revolt involving a pregnant Black woman, Williams is able to create an imaginary space where oral language takes precedence over written language and the larger dominating paradigm - American slavery. The names of each of the three chapters ("The Darky,"

"The Wench," and "The Negress") are in line with the trajectory of Dessa's identity, and the arc demonstrates that the journey to a liberated space from slavery is riddled with pain, obstacles, and danger. Yet, out of Dessa's oral narrative, emerges both the inscription of her own identity and personal freedom as well as the inclusion of her re- worked narrative into the larger story of American history.

Jones shows, through Corregidora, that Black female orality has the power to imaginatively disrupt the traditional structure of what is past and what is present by often proffering a voice other than the main character's - the blues singer, Ursa Corregidora.

This rejection of the prevailing structure of time enables Ursa Corregidora to create her own space where she can come to terms with her brutal past and her chaotic present.

Though Ursa does not have firsthand experience of the violent and incestuous cruelty perpetrated on her female ancestors, her charge to create "generations" in order to provide evidence of the cruelty, nonetheless, immerses her in it. The impact of these malicious acts on her is evident in her textual fixation with issues of power, violence, domination, and social critiques in many of her blues songs, oral interactions, and her relationship with her husband.

The authors in my project point to Black female orality as the integral agent for achieving a liberated Third Space. Sula, Avey, Dessa, and Ursa are all positioned by their respective authors in the gaps between the past and present, oral and written

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accounts, and fact and fiction. Black female orality constitutes a way of accessing and confronting objectionable histories, painful memories and oppression. Morrison rejects masculinist privilege and "Otherization" by allowing Sula to roam freely through the

Bottom while asserting her own identity in the face of a traditional community. Marshall achieves a liminal space by enabling Avey to go beyond the west and to be led by the figure of Papa Legba. Williams facilitates a space wherein Dessa can reject the overriding and immediate force of white patriarchy through the written word and physically and psychologically escape slavery. Through the blues Jones's Ursa turns from the stories that have been recited to her and creates her own liberating identity through the blues.

These four writers reveal to readers that their texts do not subsist in a vacuum, but rather they challenge, inspire, and move long after they are read. By crystallizing the

Black female orality, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Sherley Ann Williams and Gayl

Jones echo the stories that are often not able to be told. By exploring the avenues of

Third Space achievement, this dissertation also suggests how Black women can transcend and overcome oppression.

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Notes

1 I borrowed the term "neo-briar patch" from Maxine Lavon Montgomery's The Fiction of

Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resist8ance.

2 Jacqueline Fulmer, Folk Women and Indirection in Morrison, Ni Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin (Aldershot, England: 2007) and Alma J. Billingslea-Brown, Crossing Borders

Through Folklore (Columbia, MO: University of MO Press, 1999).

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ceron L. Bryant received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Talladega

College in 1993. He received a Master of Arts degree in English from Kent State

University in 1996. Ceron received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in English

Literature from the Florida State University in 2012. He is currently on the faculty at

Florida Agricultural &Mechanical University. Ceron is a native of Kingsland, Georgia.

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