THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE

DEPARTMENTS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES, ENGLISH, AND WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES

LIVING HISTORY: READING TONI MORRISON’S WORK AS A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICA

ELIZABETH CATCHMARK SPRING 2017

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in African American Studies, English, Women’s Studies, and Philosophy with interdisciplinary honors in African American Studies, English, and Women’s Studies.

Reviewed and approved* by the following:

Kevin Bell Associate Professor of English Thesis Supervisor

Marcy North Associate Professor of English Honors Adviser

AnneMarie Mingo Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s Studies Honors Adviser

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies Honors Advisor

* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i

ABSTRACT

Read as four volumes in a narrative retelling of black America, A Mercy, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Love form a complex mediation on the possibilities for developing mutually liberating relationships across differences of race, class, and gender in different historical moments. The first two texts primarily consider the possibilities for empathy and empowerment across racial differences, inflected through identities like gender and class, while the latter two texts unpack the intraracial barriers to building and uplifting strong black communities. In all texts, Morrison suggests the most empowering identity formations and sociopolitical movements are developed in a coalitional vision of black liberation that rejects capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as mutually constitutive systems. Central to this theme is Morrison’s sensitivity to the movements of history, how the particular social and political contexts in which her novels take place shape the limitations and possibilities of coalitions.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

Chapter 1 Birth of a Race: A Mercy, Beloved, and the Construction of Racial Boundaries 1

A Mercy and Tenuous Intimacies ...... 4 Beloved and Un-crossable Boundaries ...... 13

Chapter 2 Death of a Movement: Love, Song of Solomon, and the Transition from Civil Rights to Black Power ...... 22

Love and Power ...... 24 Song of Solomon and Fractures ...... 37

Conclusion ...... 45

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 48

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Dr. Courtney Morris, whose encouragement and mentorship brought me to Black

Studies, Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, who showed me that English scholarship can change the world, and Dr. Crystal Sanders, who altered the shape of my career by inspiring my love of history.

To my family who has always given me unconditional support.

To Dr. Kevin Bell, whose feedback strengthened and deepened my scholarship.

And to Toni Morrison whose work reminded me how dearly I love to read.

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Introduction

Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison’s work is remarkable in both beauty and scope. The

novel set in the earliest period, A Mercy, considers North America in the 1600’s, exploring the

relationships built across differences during the racially and politically unstable colonial period.

The novel that takes place in the most recent period, God Help the Child, is set in the present day

and considers colorism in the contemporary moment. Her other novels are positioned between

these two moments, spanning the scope of US history and exploring diverse events including the

abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the integration of the US military during the

Korean War, the widespread desegregation of public accommodations in the mid-twentieth

century, and the emergence of Black Power politics in the mid to late twentieth century. This

vast temporal scope results in a body of work that, when read together, forms a complex,

nuanced image of black American history that makes vivid and experiential some of its most

significant events.

In this work, I read four of Morrison’s texts together, A Mercy, Beloved, Love, and Song

of Solomon, to uncover how reading Morrison’s work as “volumes” in a narrative history of

black America exposes the central themes and political critiques of her corpus in ways reading

the novels individually cannot. Divided into two sections, “Birth of a Race” and “Death of a

Movement,” this thesis positions two central transitions in American history as the contextual

backdrop for understanding the novels, the transition from a racially unstable, colonial America

to a cohesive nation-state built on race-based, heritable slavery, and the transition from integrative, liberal visions of black liberation to separatist, Black Power visions of black liberation that occurred in the mid to late twentieth century. Though the four novels each depict a v different component of these key moments, read together they present a powerful case for moving towards a coalition-based politics of black liberation.

Grounded in the development of black feminist political movements in response to marginalization by both feminist and black empowerment activists, but with a far longer theoretical trajectory, the concept of coalition is vital in understanding the implications of

Morrison’s novels. Coalition building is a social justice practice that acknowledges the interconnectedness and mutual dependency of systems of domination, including capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, the interdependency of all people, the mythological nature of the individual, and the uniqueness and complexity of identity. Coalitions are groups of diverse people that respect the social and political significance of their differences, but work together for mutual empowerment, recognizing the connectivity of their oppressions and their responsibility to acknowledge and root out their own oppressive behavior. In depicting the beauty and intimacy of the interracial relationships possible in the colonial moment in A Mercy, the collapse of those possibilities in Beloved, and the various fissures within the black community in Love and Song of

Solomon, Morrison mounts a sensitive, complex argument for the value of coalitions and the ways different historical moments present obstacles to their construction. 1

Chapter 1

Birth of a Race: A Mercy, Beloved, and the Construction of Racial Boundaries

Morrison’s elaborately historicized texts offer opportunities for exploring the influence of key events on the development of racial categories, particularly on the solidification of whiteness and blackness as socially and economically significant identity markers. The two texts that occur chronologically first, based on their settings rather than their publication dates, provide a particularly rich depiction of the influence of race-based, heritable slavery on racial identity.

Read together, Beloved and A Mercy demonstrate the racial instability of the colonial moment that enabled coalition building across racial and classed lines, which yields to rigidly defined identities following the emergence of chattel slavery. This shift colors even sympathetic interracial interactions with paternalism and prejudice and creates racial identities so strong they meaningfully persist in the present day.

A Mercy, which occurs predominantly from 1682-1690 with flashbacks to earlier periods, vividly engages the social and physical landscape of colonial America. It depicts the emergence of whiteness as a cohesive identity that transcends class, gender, culture, and religion to isolate otherwise diverse people with conflicting interests, like wealthy Portuguese landowners and Irish indentured servants. Because whiteness is not yet fully formed in the text, but rather in the process of becoming, the text demonstrates the carefully constructed nature of the category and the complex power relations of the period that challenge easy racial classification. As white farmer Jacob Vaark notes of a conversation between himself and a wealthy landowner that illuminates the insignificance of class boundaries, “Where else but in this disorganized world 2 would such an encounter be possible” (A Mercy 29)? Though explicitly referencing the influence of class and, to a lesser extent, religion on a person’s possibilities, the quote reflects the text’s larger project of depicting a “disorganized world” where interactions that destabilize traditional hierarchies are the norm and each person is actively constructing his or her identity in response.

Similarly, Valerie Babb comments in her analysis of A Mercy as a historical commentary on the

American origins narrative, “‘Mess’ is an apt characterization of the prenational landscape, reflecting a cultural moment when categories of race, gender and class were in flux, not fully solidified into a social order” (151). I historicize this text with the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, a multiracial, cross-class uprising that inspired the ruling elites to impose stricter boundaries between groups, which “separated and protected all whites from all others forever” (A Mercy

12).

In contrast, Beloved depicts US race relations in 1873, with flashbacks to characters’

earlier experiences, demonstrating the devastating impact of slavery on cross-racial coalitions and the development of individual identities. In this historical moment, blackness and whiteness are solidified as mutually constitutive, oppositional categories that create profound obstacles to flourishing and building relationships. The tragic but complex multiracial alliances punctuated with moments of real compassion and empathy that characterize A Mercy are replaced by distorted relationships and insurmountable traumas. I historicize this text with the 1857 Dred

Scott decision, which formally enshrined the belief that people of African descent “had no rights

which the white man was bound to respect” and cast slavery as first and foremost an issue of

white men’s property rights (Van Evrie 18). I also contextualize the text with the passage of The

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which, in addition to being instrumental to the plot of the novel,

explicitly criminalized obstructing slaveowners’ efforts to retrieve escaped slaves or aiding or 3 concealing fugitive slaves, tasking the country as a whole with policing the boundaries of slavery

(U.S. Cong.). Both instances are part of a long legacy of the US government’s active role in shaping blackness as a limiting, oppressive identity and whiteness as an identity that affords unearned privileges, irrespective of the other identities with which it intersects, in the tradition of the strong legal backlash to Bacon’s Rebellion. In his article reading Morrison’s works as historical novels, Bo G. Ekelund quotes the Swedish Academy’s claim Morrison had “given the

Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece” (138). A Mercy and Beloved are two distinct pieces of this rich historical tapestry.

4 A Mercy and Tenuous Intimacies

The colonial period, which A Mercy takes as its subject, was fraught with complex power

relations that cross geography, class, and race and challenge the strict racial classifications of

later periods. This complexity is demonstrated through the life of Anthony Johnson, who, along

with his wife Mary Johnson, became the first free people of African descent in the Virginia

colony in the early 1600’s. Not only did he temporarily create an independent black community

of twelve homesteads, but he also successfully petitioned to turn his black indentured servant

into a lifelong slave, the first recorded case of such an evolution from temporary to permanent

servitude (Rodriquez 3). This stunning juxtaposition, envisioning and working towards an

independent community and successfully ensuring the perpetual enslavement of another man,

signifies the permeability of racial and classed lines. Though racial distinctions were already

under construction, as evidenced in a Virginia statute that forbade people of African descent

particularly from carrying firearms, dreams of self-determination for individual black people were more realistic than they would be in the coming century. This permeability of classification,

which manifested in similarly situated African, native and European exploited laborers, opened

possibilities for solidarity that manifested in revolts. One of the most significant such moments is

Bacon’s Rebellion. This instance of cross-class, cross-race solidarity brought together indentured

servants and property owners, African and European, in the interests of overthrowing a small

political elite. It is important to note that Bacon’s Rebellion was in part inspired by anti-native sentiment, the belief the Virginian government was too lenient with native tribes, notably with respect to retaliatory attacks by the Doeg and Susquehannock tribes and the protection of some native land claims, so it cannot be uncritically positioned as a racially transcendent uprising

(Rice) (Danver 3). However, it was undoubtedly an instance of solidarity among black and white 5 people of diverse class backgrounds, from landowners to indentured servants, which frightened

the ruling elite and resulted in severe backlash in the form of racially divisive policies that

abrupted the possibility for any such coalitions in the future. As Gerard Horne remarks of the

period, “there was the developing notion of ‘whiteness,’ smoothing tensions between and among

people hailing from the ‘old continent’…propelled by the need for European unity to confront

raging Africans and other indigenes” (3).

Morrison takes great care to explore these historical tensions. She explicitly gestures to

the emerging influence of interracial rebellions on racial categories when she writes of one such

uprising, it “spawned a ticket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating

manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting license to

any white to kill any black…they separated and protected all whites from all others forever” (A

Mercy 11-12). Here, she indicates the ways the threat of cross-racial solidarity spawned profound

backlash that consolidated culturally and economically diverse European peoples by affording

them privileges refused to African peoples, like the right to bear arms. Babb notes that this

passage reflects the actual language of antiblack statues in the late 1600’s, citing one such

document that determined, “it shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himself with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence” (152).

Politically powerful settlers recognized the utility of cultivating kinship across cultural and

religious lines by making European descendants a privileged class, discouraging poor whites

from agitating in their own economic interests by convincing them the interests of the powerful,

wealthy elite were their own. However, at the time of the text, this process is far from complete.

She first introduces the racial instability of the colonial moment through the powerful religious

divisions that characterize the text, divisions that emerge as particularly salient because the 6 diverse colonial settlers are not yet incorporated into whiteness. Horne notes, “the colonial project unfolded alongside a kind of Cold War between Catholics and Protestants…The chaos of colonialism combined with this defining religious rift ironically created leverage for Africans as they could tip the balance against one European power by aligning with another—or with the indigenous” (3). These religious divides are noted by multiple characters throughout the text;

Jacob articulates strong anti-Catholic sentiments in the journey across the East Coast that opens the text, Rebekka expounds on her hostile relationship with the surrounding Christian sects,

Florens stumbles into a harsh Puritan community, and Lina pieces together a spiritual tradition that draws on native traditions and the religion imposed on her by “kindly Presbyterians” (A

Mercy 55).

Though not strongly religious himself, Jacob struggles throughout the journey that opens the text to conceal his disdain while engaging with the wealthy, Catholic Ortega and navigating the predominantly Catholic region. The narrator remarks of Jacob’s experience, “Priests strode openly in its towns; their temples menaced its squares; their sinister missions cropped up at the edge…He was offended by the lax, flashy cunning of the Papists. ‘Abhor that arrant whore of

Rome’” (15). He later notes his concern that he will experience religious prejudice by suspecting the local judiciary would be, “disinclined to favor a distant tradesman over a local Catholic gentleman. The loss, while not unmanageable, struck him as unforgivable” (26). The intensity and longevity of his disdain for Catholics, a disdain that starkly contrasts with his intimacy with and empathy for racially marginalized peoples like Florens and the blacksmith, indicates the ways different frameworks for understanding personhood and difference were operative in this moment than in future moments. Similarly, deep hostility is cultivated between Rebekka and the 7 neighboring Anabaptist villagers, who refuse to baptize her children at birth, which she believes

consigns them to hell.

A particularly powerful instance when religion manifests is in Lina’s forced assimilation

to European religious and cultural practices at the hands of the settlers who take her in following

the death of her tribe. The hybrid spiritual practices Lina develops, which “cobbled together

neglected rites, merged European medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or

invented the meaning of things” (A Mercy 56) and Jennifer Terry positions as intrinsic to her

survival (135), bear witness to the ways boundaries of identity were wedded to cultural and

religious difference, rather than “racial” difference, in the colonial moment. Lina’s “savagery” is

located in her cultural practices; from the Presbyterians Lina “learned that bathing naked in the

river was a sin…that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse…covering oneself in the

skin of beasts offended God…They clipped the beads from her arms and scissored inches from

her hair” (A Mercy 56). They indicate that it is these practices, not her biological or racial

background that marks her difference. The narrator remarks, “They named her Messalina…but

shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope,” indicating that though they disapprove of her

current state, they believe it is possible for her to achieve salvation through belief in the Christian

god and appropriate behavior (55).

This moment of instability allows for the development of coalitions that transcend racial

boundaries and for complex, racially destabilizing power relations. As Tessa Roynon notes in her

exploration of the relationship between Milton and Morrison, A Mercy is populated by allusions

to a lost paradise that recollects Adam and Eve’s fall from grace as outlined in Paradise Lost

(593). This tragic fall can be seen in the collapse of a space largely hospitable to diverse peoples precipitated by Jacob’s death. Jacob, the most powerful and easily situated of the major 8 characters, experiences empathy for women and people of color that transcends paternalism.

Drawing on his own experiences as a “ratty orphan” upon whom wealth was unexpectedly thrust in the form of a patroonship in the Americas, he feels an intimacy with many of the women and nonwhite people he engages with throughout the text. The narrator remarks in one moment, as he ponders Florens, who he recently accepted as payment for his debt, “From his own childhood he knew there was no good place in the world for waifs and whelps…Even if bartered, given away, apprenticed, sold, swapped, seduced, tricked for food, labored for shelter or stolen, they were less doomed under adult control” (A Mercy 37). In this passage, he equivocates several types of coerced labor experienced by children, slavery, indentured servitude and sex work, and positions

Florens as a “whelp” like himself whom he seeks to aid, not from a place of paternalism or superiority, but from a place of mutual understanding. His painful childhood as an abandoned, impoverished orphan, and his present experience of discrimination enables a kinship with other discarded, maligned people, including Sorrow and Florens. The narrator remarks, “The acquisition of both could be seen as rescue” (40). As Jennifer Terry notes, Jacob also holds respect for indigenous peoples, writing, “[he] quickly shows an unexpected respect for the rights and ways of life of indigenous inhabitants, his narrative view instilling a sense of an existing

‘human geography’” (133), referencing Jacob’s surprising claim that the land “all belonged” to

“certain natives” and the care and thoughtfulness in his engagement with native peoples on his journey to and from Maryland (A Mercy 12). Though as Terry notes later in her article, the initial image of Jacob as a sensitive, self-aware figure is complicated by his later decision to participate in the slave trade he initially castigates (“Jacob sneered at wealth dependent on a captured workforce that required more force to maintain” [32]) and to instigate “the death of fifty trees”

[43] in the interests of building “a profane monument to himself” [44]), he is capable of 9 experiencing genuine empathy across the uncertain but still significant categories of gender, race, and class on the basis of shared experiences of marginalization. Though his privileged identities are powerfully operative and significant to his experience of the world, for example, Terry fruitfully compares Jacob’s journey through the American landscape in “the relative safety of his skin” to Florens’s traumatic venture (137), they don’t overdetermine the tenor of his relationships.

This capacity for coalition across difference is also manifested in Lina and Rebekka’s unlikely friendship, which develops from an initial hostility, and in Florens’s relationship with women on her travels. A particularly poignant moment of compassion and intimacy occurs when

Florens seeks shelter in a village during her journey to fetch the blacksmith. The mother and daughter that welcome her into their home are coping with their own experience of religious oppression; the Puritan villagers suspect the daughter, Jane, is a witch. When they return to further inspect her, their attention immediately shifts to Florens; “each visitor turns to look at me.

The women gasp…One of the women covers her eyes saying God help us…I have never seen any human this black” (A Mercy 131). Suspecting she is the devil’s minion, they force her to strip naked and inspect her body; “they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition. Swine look at me with more connection” (133). As Roynon notes, the violating exploration of her naked body by the villagers forms “an uncanny foreshadowing of a slave auction” (602). However, in stark juxtaposition to a slave auction, rather than be purchased by an inspecting slaveowner, Florens is carefully spirited away by Daughter Jane before the villagers can harm her any further. This instance of empathy and rescue is enabled by their shared experience as objects of scrutiny and violation at the hands of the elders in the community. Like

Florens, Jane is violated, presumed evil, and held in a type of bondage, though the terms of her 10 captivity differ from that of a slave. Though the council’s attention shifts to Florens due to her visual dissimilarity, Jane is not incorporated into the community as a result. Additionally, this kinship is reinforced when in Florens’s dream later in the text, it is Jane, rather than Lina, she envisions comforting her, offering, “Oh, Precious, don’t fret…you will find” your face (A Mercy

162).

Recollecting Anthony Johnson, the blacksmith symbolizes the possibilities for black men accruing wealth and power that transcended the circumstances of many poor whites in the period. The blacksmith is a property owner, a skilled laborer, and a loving father who travels to perform the work he choses. Jacob perceives him as something close to his equal, with Lina remarking, “Sir behaved as though the blacksmith was his brother…she saw Sir slice a green apple…Then Sir…tipped a slice of apple on his knife and offered it to the blacksmith” (71). The similarity between Jacob and the blacksmith is further emphasized in Florens’s recollection. She notes, “You are my protection...You can be it because you say you are a free man from New

Amsterdam and always are that. Not like Will or Scully,” the two white indentured servants that often work on the farm, “but like Sir” (81). Though Willard initially respects him for his skill and charm, the knowledge that the blacksmith is paid for his work, while he and his comrades are indentured and perform labor for no wages, drives a wedge between them. The narrator notes, “He admired the smith and his craft. A view that lasted until the day he saw money pass from Vaark’s hand to the blacksmith’s” and later, “Although he was still rankled by the status of a free African versus himself…No law existed to defend indentured labor against them” (176-

177). The former quote emphasizes the basis of Willard’s hostility, his own economic exploitation, while the latter emphasizes the possibilities available to men of color in this period that are permanently foreclosed in the future. Both quotes expound upon the reality that 11 European indentured laborers were not yet fully incorporated into the type of whiteness that

entails a set of economic and social privileges that distances all white peoples of diverse class

backgrounds from all nonwhite peoples.

The absence of concrete, clearly defined racial boundaries manifests in the obsession with looking at the self that preoccupies several characters. In the absence of definitive racial identities to define personhood and situate each character within a new, hostile environment, many become obsessed with seeing themselves reflected and making sense of their reflections.

This desire to see the self is most poignantly reflected in the scene that considers Florens looking into a lake in her dreams. As she gazes into the water, “Right away I take fright when I see my

face is not there. Where my face should be is nothing…I am not even a shadow there” (162).

This absence of self is precipitated by her mother’s choice to give her away, a choice Florens

cannot understand and irrevocably colors her life. A different type of self-reflection is evidenced

in Sorrow’s creation of Twin, her imaginary friend. After the trauma of being stranded on a ship

at sea alone, the remaining crew dead around her, Sorrow creates a mirror image of herself,

“Twin,” to keep her company. Twin remains with Sorrow for most of the text, her sole

companion. After Sorrow gives birth to her baby girl, “Twin was gone, traceless and unmissed

by the only person who knew her…‘I am your mother,’ [Sorrow] said. ‘My name is Complete’”

(158). In seeing herself reflected in her daughter, Sorrow not only symbolically changes her

name from an indication of the suffering of her past to an indication of the wholeness and

happiness of her future, but also became a productive, focused member of the farm and no longer

needs to see herself in Twin. Similarly, at one point in the text, Rebekka is overcome with the

desire to see her mother, “Rebekka wondered what her mother might look like now” (111). In all

three instances, without the racial referent with which to form an independent self-identity the 12 women are unmoored and seeking an other to define them. It is no accident that the search for

self-image is frequently tangled with motherhood and mother-daughter relationships. In both

Beloved and A Mercy, the love of mothers for their children becomes a lens through which historical traumas are made visible.

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Beloved and Un-crossable Boundaries

A gap of nearly two hundred years and incalculable historically significant moments

separates the events of A Mercy from the events in Beloved. The latter opens in the

Reconstruction moment, in 1873, with flashbacks to the characters’ experiences of slavery on the

Sweet Home plantation. Central to the plot of the text is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which

enables schoolteacher’s fervent pursuit of Sethe, resulting in the murder of her child. Though this

act was anticipated as much as 231 years prior, when the Virginia House of Burgesses

criminalized harboring runaways at a fine of “20 pieces of tobacco per night of refuge granted,”

(Rodriguez 3) the act of 1850 responded to widespread resistance to other fugitive slave

provisions by forcing civilians to participate in returning slaves to their masters and increased

penalties for refusing to do so. This particular act and other such legislation conscripted the

entire country into policing the boundaries of slavery, which, in this moment, were also largely

racial boundaries. The sedimentation of these racial boundaries was further set with the 1857

court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, where Scott, an African slave, argued for his freedom on

the basis of a stay in a free state. Transcending the boundaries of the case as argued, whether or

not living in a free state provides a black slave with his freedom, the ruling determined people of

African descent, whether slaves or freed, could not become citizens, and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit” (Van Evrie 18). In a telling introduction to the Dred ruling, John H. Van

Evrie, a medical doctor and infamous proponent of slavery, unpacks the meaning of the ruling 14 for those who endorsed the race-based slavery as a natural, biologically informed practice foundational to Western democracy. He writes,

this decision, except the Declaration of National Independence in 1776, is the most

momentous event that has ever occurred on this continent, and the results destined to

flow from it can be second only in importance to those which have followed that

memorable event. The Declaration of 1776 announced a truth…the Dred Scott decision

confirms a principle essential to the preservation and success of the former. (iii)

Equally significantly, he quotes the Declaration of Independence with a parenthetical, noting,

“The doctrine of 1776, that all (white) men are ‘created free and equal’” (iii). His claim that the

Declaration of Independence establishes the freedom and equality of white men reinforces that

the freedom of white men and the enslavement of people of African descent are mutually

constitutive. This striking analysis of the ruling and of the principles that undergird the

construction of the United States of America argues that the supremacy of white citizens over

black slaves is the keystone of American democracy, as foundational to its development as the

Declaration of Independence. He suggests that the US, as a nation state, was constructed

intentionally to place nonwhite people and women outside the boundaries of citizenship and that

the freedom and “equality” of white men is contingent on the subordination and inequality of

people of color and women. Dred Scott is significant in this vision of American citizenship

because it clarifies and affirms the country’s commitment to white supremacy, rejecting

arguments from abolitionists like Frederick Douglass that framed the abolition of slavery as a

step in perfecting the union and achieving the vision of democracy offered by the founders. By

linking the supremacy of all whites over all nonwhites to the preservation of democracy, Dred

Scott contributes to the sedimentation of racial boundaries, the erasure of significant differences 15 among whites of various ethnic, religious, and classed groups, and the prevention of the development of compassionate, mutually liberating relationships among exploited white laborers, exploited black laborers, and black slaves.

As Rodriguez notes, mistreatment of recently freed indentured servants “resulted in a discontented class of poor white ex-servants that backed Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, but ironically as the number of slaves grew, these poor whites became vital allies for planters against the danger of slave rebellion” (345). Far from ironic, the former indentured servants’ increased identification with the planter class demonstrated their desire to distance themselves from the degradation of slavery as much as possible. Not only was the increasingly hostile racial ideology and racist legislation of the period influential in shaping poor white consciousness about cross-racial solidarity, but also the desire to transcend one’s circumstances and become independent, wage-earning laborers, a small possibility for an indentured servant but virtually impossible for a slave, encouraged distance from slaves and identification with property owning whites. These key events, along with many others that occur between the events of A Mercy and the events of Beloved, altered the racial landscape of the US dramatically, foreclosing the possibilities for personhood and solidarity present in the earlier text. It is also important to note that Beloved, a novel about US slavery, opens and takes place primarily during Reconstruction.

This emphasis on the post-Abolition moment and the resonances of slavery troubles easy celebrations of abolition and progress and demonstrates that the social meaning of race established under US slavery persists.

The vast differences between the blacksmith’s and Paul D’s articulations of personhood indicate the foreclosed possibilities of the slavery and abolition periods for black Americans. The blacksmith has a clearly articulated, self-defined identity enabled by his free status and property 16 ownership, despite the presence of slavery as an institution. Paul D is deeply traumatized in a

way the blacksmith is not, which hinders his capacity for a complex, self-affirming vision of

personhood. As Lynda Koolish notes, “Paul D, haunted by the consequences of what he sees as

Halle’s, and later, Sethe’s, ‘too thick love,” is determined to love small and suffers enormously

for the consequences of his decision” (170). Manifestations of his trauma are diffused throughout

the text, most clearly evidenced in the scene Paul D locks his heart in a tin box in his chest. The

narrator notes in one moment, “He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin

buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut” (Beloved 86). Paul D’s need

to cloister his heart in his chest to endure the suffering he experienced, his nomadic lifestyle, and

his fears of intimacy all demonstrate a personhood deeply impoverished by his traumas. In one

instance the blacksmith claims of Florens, “You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and

over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice” (A Mercy 167). This

philosophical evocation of slavery, abstracted from the real conditions of enslavement, is enabled

by the blacksmith’s distance from the reality of slavery. Paul D and the other enslaved characters

complicate and refute the blacksmith’s claim that slavery could be a state of mind rather than an

external condition, that there are “slaves freer than free men” (A Mercy 187). As Sethe, Paul D,

Halle, and others detail through their traumas and painful responses to race-based, heritable, chattel slavery, it is a set of material conditions impossible to endure unaltered.

Paul D is not the singular character whose capacity for love is twisted under the iron fist of slavery. Stamp Paid finds he can no longer love his wife after their master rapes her and she begs him not to protect her, fearful that he will be killed in retaliation. Halle is so traumatized by his experiences he forgets his family altogether, rendered mute and immobile (“Halle loves too much and ends up with his face in the butter” [Koolish 170]). However, the emotional 17 centerpiece of the novel is the perversion of Sethe’s love for her children. A theme that

resurfaces in Morrison’s novels time and time again is the distortion of motherly love under

white supremacy. As Andrea O’Reilly writes, “Motherwork, in Morrison, is concerned with how

mothers, raising black children in a racist and sexist world, can best protect their children,

instruct them in how to protect themselves” (1). In A Mercy, Beloved, Sula, The Bluest Eye, and

God Help the Child, she details the exceptional circumstances that twist the expression of maternal affection into something dark and foreboding. Particularly in A Mercy and Beloved, the maternal trauma haunts the text, either literally in the physical manifestation of Beloved as a malevolent ghost, or figuratively in Florens’s inability to cope with her mother’s “abandonment,” which shapes all her choices. These traumas, which are dramatically revealed towards the end of the text, and the failure of both daughters to generatively cope with their respective mothers’ fraught decisions, though similar, differ in magnitude. Where Florens’s mother gives her daughter up to a master she expects will be kinder than her own, Sethe tries to kill all of her children with a saw, successfully ending the life of her youngest daughter she then christens

Beloved. In each instance, the meaning and shape of motherly love is changes in the particular historical contexts Morrison considers, in the late 1600’s love is sacrificing the opportunity to raise one’s daughter oneself, while in the 1850’s love is killing one’s daughter so she need not endure the agony of enslavement. The brutality of slavery and colonization turns acts understood as atrocities in other contexts, like the murder of one’s child, into demonstrations of a mother’s love and care, the desire to spare one’s child from the torture and dehumanization of

enslavement. As Paul D and Ella reiterate to Sethe in separate moments, “motherlove was a

killer,” foreshadowing the reveal of Beloved’s death but also indicating the way love for another

under slavery will torture the lover as much as the person loved (Beloved 155). 18 In Beloved, there are instances of interracial coalitions that alter the material conditions of

the black characters lives, however these interactions are irrevocably tainted by the solidification

of whiteness and blackness as cohesive, meaningful identity formations. Rather than the genuine

empathy across difference demonstrated in A Mercy, the instances of cross-racial alliance in

Beloved are troubled and troubling. One such instance occurs when Amy Denver tends Sethe’s

wounds and helps deliver her daughter, whom Sethe also names Denver in Amy’s honor. Though

undoubtedly positive, as Amy saves Sethe’s life, the tenor of this relationship is dramatically

different from the interracial interactions that proliferate in A Mercy. Nicole Coonradt’s claim

that Amy functions “as a bridge between black and white, racism and understanding, destruction

and renewal” (169), equivocating Amy’s bondage and Sethe’s and positioning Amy as distinct

from the other white characters, is belied by the vast differences between their relationship and

the types of white-black relationships in A Mercy. The character of their interactions is in part

foreshadowed, in part explicated, by Denver’s narration of the birth story to Beloved. Frequently

referencing Amy as “whitegirl” and others as “whitepeople,” Denver notes the remarkable nature

of the interaction by informing Beloved “you could get money if you turned a runaway over”

(Beloved 90). Referring to Amy as a “whitegirl,” a composite word that renders Amy’s whiteness

inextricable from her personhood indicates the solidification of racial categories that were

permeable and in formation in A Mercy. Referencing the numerous fugitive slave provisions

operative at the time of Sethe’s escape, Denver further notes the legislative and institutional

barriers constructed to keep racial boundaries intact. The vast gap between Sethe and Amy’s

experiences is further explicated when Amy remarks in the flashback on seeing Sethe’s mutilated

back, “I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this” (93). Though as an indentured servant Amy’s exploitive employer brutalizes her, his recognition of Amy’s humanity 19 and subsequent rights is evidenced in his restraint in his punishment, a restraint not afforded to the sub-human Sethe.

Unlike Will’s response to the blacksmith, Amy is confident in her superiority over Sethe and other black people despite her poverty and servitude, marring the ostensibly compassionate choice to tend Sethe’s wounds with oppressive overtones. She conversationally remarks to Sethe,

“We got a old nigger girl come by our place. She don’t know nothing. Sews stuff for Mrs.

Buddy—real fine lace but can’t barely stick to words together. She don’t know nothing, just like you. You don’t know a thing. End up dead, that’s what. Not me” (94). The black woman she references is clearly a skilled laborer with expertise in a valuable trade, lacemaking, a stark contrast to Amy’s unskilled labor as a farm hand, which echoes the contrast between the blacksmith’s independent metalworking and Will and Scully’s indentured servitude. Rather than feeling intimidated and inferior in her presence, a complex that plagued Will and Scully in the presence of the blacksmith, she confidently asserts the woman, “knew nothing,” just like Sethe and further distances herself from them both with “not me” (94). The construction of institutional and social barriers between racial castes enables Amy to confidently articulate her superiority over people of African descent, irrespective of the similarities in their circumstances or their accomplishments.

The other interracial relationships are characterized by explicit, grotesque violence or racist paternalism, predicated on the economic, social, and political distance between whiteness and blackness. Tellingly, Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin, a white abolitionist who rented the house to her family, for schoolteacher, the cruel slaveowner who brutally violated her, towards the end of the text. The narrator writes, “she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is 20 coming for her best thing…Above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the

man without skin, looking” (308-309). Mae Henderson reads this moment as Sethe successfully resolving her trauma over killing her daughter by directing her violence towards a surrogate for the slaveowner (81), while James Berger suggests there could be “a hidden connection recognized by Sethe, between the white abolitionist and the white slave owner,” a connection he identifies as the racism of white liberalism, less visible but no less insidious, particularly “a view of 1960’s liberalism” (416). Bodwin need not be linked to 20th century liberalism to make this

point; he functions as a scathing indictment of white participation in the black freedom struggles

across time. Sethe’s inability to distinguish among white men, men as ostensibly divergent as an

abolitionist and a slaveowner, indicates the instability of white benevolence generally and the

interchangeability of white people, irrespective of their professed morals.

The theme of white American’s homogeneity is also elaborated in the lengthy description

of a coin bank in the Bodwin’s household. Denver notices while leaving the house, “sitting on a

shelf by the back door, a blackboy’s mouth full of money…Bulging like moons, two eyes were

all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced

dots…he was on his knees…His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins…Painted across the

pedestal he knelt on were the words ‘At Yo Service’” (Beloved 300). Reflecting the historical

reality that supporting abolition did not mean abolitionists supported or believed in the full

social, political, and economic equality of black and white people, the Bodwins delight in a racist

caricature of a black man, features grotesquely altered, on his knees, forced to swallow what they

place in his mouth. The positioning of the bank recollects the white men who forced Paul D and

the other black prisoners to kneel and orally raped them, again blurring the distinctions between

white “benevolence” and white violence (127). Alex Zamalin further suggests that Bodwin’s 21 “assistance” is in itself exploitive, and not only the attitude he takes towards freed slaves.

Zamalin argues, “his assistance actually tethers aid to work, available to recipients only on the condition that individuals adhere to the moral standards of conduct that he defines. For these characters to receive assistance to help meet their most basic needs, Bodwin keeps them entirely dependent on his authority and low-wage labor” (208). In Beloved, even the most ostensibly hospitable, mutually beneficial relationships across racial boundaries are handicapped.

22

Chapter 2

Death of a Movement: Love, Song of Solomon, and the Transition from Civil Rights to Black Power

Morrison furthers her project of exploring the development of racial identity throughout

United States history in her careful depiction of the mid-twentieth century in many of her novels.

Two texts in particular, Song of Solomon and Love, consider the tumultuous mid-twentieth century moment and its impact on black American definitions of community and belonging by depicting the transition from a civil rights framework for dismantling white supremacy, which emphasized integration and civic participation, to a Black Power framework, which emphasized self-determination and empowerment through the building of strong black institutions. With subtlety and nuance she depicts the impact of the desegregation project on black institutions, the subsequent disillusionment with the possibilities for uplift through integration, and the development of an alternative politics of self-determination that drew on a rich nationalist tradition. She also, through her artfully mounted critiques of the gender and class politics of both movements, gestures towards the emergence of black feminism as a response to the gendered and classed limitations of earlier movements. She mounts an astute, detailed criticism of the class, gender, and racial politics of different visions of black liberation, exposing the flaws in definitions of liberation politics that uncritically endorse white, middle-class respectability as an ideal, that uncritically reproduce misogynistic definitions of black masculinity predicated on the subordination of black women, and that rely on essentializing definitions of blackness that exclude portions of the community. Ultimately, both texts turn towards a black feminist image of 23 black empowerment, one that is predicated on the building of coalitions across difference,

sensitivity to the multiplicity of black experiences, and rejection of interlocking systems of

domination including capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Where Beloved and A Mercy

contemplated the possibilities and limitations of interracial coalitions, Love and Song of Solomon

look inward to consider the possibilities and limitations of intraracial coalitions, the fissures that rupture along lines of class, gender, age, and sexuality as diverse portions of the black community produce differing articulations of liberation in the mid to late twentieth century.

24 Love and Power

The central events of Love occur in the 1990’s, but the text is populated with flashbacks that date back as far the early twentieth century, and particularly consider the late 1950’s and

1960’s, after efforts at dismantling de jure segregation on the part of organizations like the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee achieved some success. As Lucille Fultz notes, “Morrison invites a studied critique of the promises, successes, and failures of desegregation and urges those on all sides of the issue to consider the unintended, perhaps unanticipated, consequences of desegregation” (94). Desegregation, its profound impact on black-owned, black-run institutions,

and its impact on black communities is the central historical moment around which the novel’s

events turn. Many of Love’s characters, including Vita, Sandler, May, and Bill Cosey himself

demonstrate nostalgia for the period prior to desegregation, when Cosey’s Resort, employing and

catering to an exclusively black clientele, prospered and provided a space for building

community and for being treated with a dignity and respect integrated spaces did not afford. As

Susana Morris notes of Vita’s transition from working at the Cosey hotel to seeking alternative

employment in an integrated workspace, “working in black owned, black operated

establishments afforded a dignity, if not a salary, white establishments could not” (4).

The destabilization of black communities through desegregation is dramatized in Cosey’s

daughter-in-law, May’s, psychological collapse in the wake of increasingly militant civil rights

organizing. Morrison describes that May once was an advocate for “colored-owned” institutions,

“Then she discovered her convictions were no longer old-time racial uplift, but separatist…Not

sweet Booker T., but radical Malcolm X. In confusion she began to stutter, contradict herself.

She quarreled endlessly with those who began to wonder about dancing by the sea while children 25 blew apart in Sunday school” (Love 80). The culminating phrase, “children blew apart in Sunday school,” references the September 1963 terrorist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in

Birmingham, Alabama, which caused the deaths of four black girls (Gaillard 195-198). This anxiety culminates in an intense fear of a militaristic race war, complete with grenades and land mines, to which she responds by stealing and squirreling away supplies; “she went underground, locking away, storing up” (81). The language of going “underground” indicates May’s belief she must protect herself and her loved ones from white violation, a violation she believes will result from agitating for integration. May hoards the benefits reaped from black-owned, black-operated institutions, frightened all will be lost in the Civil Rights Movement.

It is important to note that Morrison does not present the period of Cosey’s Hotel and

Resort’s peak success as an uncritical celebration of a black separatist project, as envisioned by either Washington or Malcolm X. Cosey’s successes, though resounding in his heyday and somewhat distributed for the good of the community, are “blood-soaked,” inherited from his father who cultivated wealth by betraying his community to the police as a “Courthouse informer” (68). The younger Cosey, despite his efforts to distance himself from his father’s cruelty and self-interest, is not entirely free from problematic entanglements with white power structures either. As Fultz notes of Cosey’s interracial parties on his boat, where he orchestrated interactions between white police officers and black female sex workers, “Bill Cosey thus accedes to white power in hopes of accruing economic power to himself and some social capital for those seeking a playground of their own” (96). This moment also indicates his willingness to sexually exploit black women to ensure his own social and economic advancement, again exposing the failures and limitations of his vision of black uplift. Both instances, the inherited wealth cultivated through the betrayal of one’s community to white elites and Cosey’s strategic 26 accommodation, which are vital to the success of an ostensibly independent black institution,

indicate the difficulty of fully disentangling from white power structures to produce truly

independent institutions in the United States.

His successes are also predicated on class, as Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber notes, “Although

Bill Cosey builds a space where black people can ‘walk in the front door’ and hold their heads

high, only wealthy and educated blacks have access” (92). His aid to the black poor, though

tangible in his payment for burials, medical expenses, and college funds, is colored with

paternalism and superiority and clearly marks his difference from the working class, what Morris

notes is an instance of “the complicity of black leaders with white supremacy and instances of

African American elites eschewing racial solidarity in favor of class differences” (321). The

paternalistic, self-serving element of his generosity is dramatized through his framing of his marriage to Heed, at the time an eleven year old child young enough to be his granddaughter, as an act of recompense for his complicity in his father’s cruelty to local black people. Cosey recites to Sandler the reason for his guilt, his childhood assignment from his father to monitor when a man leaves his home. After he reports the man’s behavior to his father, the man is

“dragged through the street behind a four-horse wagon” (Love 44). Cosey comments, “Bunch of kids ran after the wagon, crying. One was a little girl. Raggedy as Lazarus. She tripped in some horse shit and fell. People laughed.” When asked what he did, he replies, “Nothing. Nothing at all” (45).

Later in life, he constructs marrying Heed, which also meets his pedophilic desire for prepubescent girls, as reparations, lifting one little girl out of the muck in retribution for the one he watched fall. To consider an act as self-serving and violating as a man in his mid-fifties engaging sexually with a prepubescent girl as generosity to the poor is indicative of his 27 profoundly exploitive nature, self-interest, and his paternalistic image of community accountability. The fissures among classes and generations are also demonstrated through his refusal to sell his land to local black people who, “planned some kind of cooperative: small businesses, Head Start, cultural centers for arts, crafts, classes in Black History and Self- defense,” as he was more interested in selling to “a developer cashing in on HUD money” (45).

In response, “A kid leapt forward with a pail and tossed its contents on Bill Cosey…Such was the rift between generations in 1968” (149). This scene, which details the intergenerational conflict over black liberation strategies, also recollects Cosey’s shameful memory of refusing to help the little girl as she stumbles through dirt and excrement. In a tragic reversal, he is covered in filth, which marks him as a self-interested, exploitive capitalist who hoards his wealth at the expense of his community’s welfare. Morrison constructs younger characters that critique

Cosey’s leadership, which Morris classifies as within the tradition of “charismatic leadership”

(331), and the cost of desegregation into the fabric of the novel.

This depiction of Cosey’s slow gains through strategic accommodation to white power structures reflects a body of scholarship unpacking similar moves by white and black economic elites throughout history. In Kevin Kruse’s groundbreaking White Flight, he carefully details how the rosy image of Atlanta, Georgia as the “city too busy to hate” was not indicative of a community untouched by racial prejudice, but instead the result of a carefully developed coalition of elite white and black businessmen. He writes, “these two elites, white and black, had worked together to create something in the city…a political system that saw racial progressivism and economic progress as inseparable. The close cooperation of Atlanta’s elites did not mean that racism or racial politics did not exist” (20). This surface-level display of racial harmony, which involved smaller concessions to a civil rights agenda, masked a deep and abiding 28 segregationist, white supremacist sentiment on the part of the white majority, which erupts at key moments in Atlanta’s history and becomes highly visible when the elite partnership collapses under pressure from more radical organizations like SNCC, predominantly comprised of young people. Similarly, the close cooperation between Bill Cosey and the white elites, which is troubled by younger, more radical members of the community, is not indicative of a truly liberating, racially harmonious moment and is not an intimacy from which the black people in his community reap equal benefits.

Morrison is also critical in her depiction of the emergence of Black Power activism. As

Morris notes, “she does not suggest that [Bill Cosey’s] civil rights and Black Power successors are necessarily less problematic” (330), detailing the ways Black Power organizers in the novel, male and female, were complicit in the rape of a young party member. Morrison adeptly summarizes the sacrifices to personal dignity black women made as participants in male-headed, male-centric organizations by noting of Christine’s silence regarding the rape of a young woman by a party member, “Eventually Christine shut up about it and the good work of civil disobedience and personal obedience went on” (Love 167). When a young student volunteer is raped by a “Comrade,” Christine tells her fellow party members, anticipating they will treat the woman with the dignity and respect she deserves and agitate for justice. Instead, they make empty promises and ultimately condone the other man’s behavior. She notes, “The girl’s violation carried no weight against the sturdier violation of male friendship. Fruit could upbraid, expel, beat up… any jive turkey over the slightest offense. But…this assault against a girl of seventeen was not even a hastily added footnote to his list of Unacceptable Behavior” (166). In this way Morrison is both appreciative and critical of the possibilities of civil rights, particularly 29 through integration, and Black Power to secure true liberation and demonstrates the current of misogyny that threads through both.

The thematic core of Love is power, the types of power characters hold over each other and how they chose to exert it. One particularly significant character arc concerned with the use and abuse of power is Romen’s, which considers his evolution from a reliance on patriarchal definitions of power, affirming one’s self worth through violence against women, to more radical definitions of power, one’s capacity to care for one’s community. Morris traces Romen’s progress throughout the text, from disgust at his own empathy for a victim of rape to his realization that “the old Romen, the sniveling one who couldn’t help untying shoelaces from an unwilling girl’s wrist, was hipper than the one who couldn’t help flinging a willing girl around an attic” (Love 195) and concludes that Romen constitutes “what Mark Anthony Neal has identified as ‘the new black man,’ a type of masculine identity that ‘acknowledges the many complex aspects, often contradictory, that make up a progressive and meaningful black masculinity’” (Morris 333). This transformation culminates in Romen’s decision to condemn

Junior’s cruelty in abandoning Christine and the wounded Heed and to aid them in escaping.

Romen’s transformation from shame at his resistance to gang rape to embracing his capacity for care indicates a radical shift from conceptualizing black men’s empowerment through asserting dominance over black women to conceptualizing black empowerment generally through compassion for one’s community and the building of coalition. Morris notes the similarities among Cosey’s pedophilia, Fruit’s complicity in rape, and Romen’s shame over refusing to rape, suggesting that even though the “post-civil rights era” in Love “might seem markedly different from previous eras…Morrison suggests that there are important similarities that link the community, a stand-in for African American communities across the United 30 States…while Cosey and Fruit may be mere specters…the legacies of their styles of leadership

remain, especially concerning practices of exploitation and sexual violence” (332). Romen

overcomes those legacies to define for himself a more radical, loving manhood.

Similarly, the interplay of violence, aggression, and resentment among the Cosey women

demonstrates the devastating influence of patriarchy on the capacity for intimacy and care among

women. As Christine notes of the various spaces she occupies, including the hotel and the

“whorehouse” she temporarily inhabits, “all were organized around the pressing needs of men”

(Love 92), because the pressing needs of men were key to their survival. In all spaces, intimacy

with men provided social, political, and economic benefits difficult to accrue in isolation from

men. For both Christine and Heed, a hospitable, loving relationship with Bill Cosey is their

primary method for maintaining or acquiring social and economic security. As Mary Carden

identifies, Cosey’s “marriage and its consequences further reveal the ways in which patriarchal

hierarchies constructed around male ownership produce restricted identities rooted in dependence on an all-powerful father” further arguing he “disrupts their love relationship by

insisting that they identify themselves as his wife and his granddaughter,” which “redirects their

passion into vicious competition” (137-138). Though undoubtedly true that the conflicts among

the three characters, Cosey, Heed, and Christine, play out on the level of patriarchal identities, it

is equally significant to note that Christine’s anxiety over Heed’s marriage reflects not only her

fear over losing her position as beloved granddaughter, which provides her with self-worth and

legitimacy, but also her fear of a threat to her material survival. Catharine MacKinnon details

how capitalism and patriarchy collide to produce a uniquely vulnerable female caste, noting, “A

woman’s class position, whether or not she works for wages, is as much or more set through her

relation first to her father,” or father-figure in Christine’s case, as Cosey is her grandfather but 31 functions as a father following her biological father’s death, “then to her husband. It changes

through changes in these relations, such as marriage…Through relations with men, women have

considerable class mobility” (34).

The ways relationships with men can be women’s singular or most readily available

method for the betterment of their material circumstances is dramatized in Cosey’s relationship

with Heed. Heed, a member of the Johnson family, who evokes for May “The fool on German

Syrup Labels. The savage on Czar’s Baking Powder. The brain-dead on Alden’s Fruit Vinegar,

Korn Kinks Cereal, J. J. Coates Thread, and the fly-blown babies on Sanford’s Ginger” (Love

138), was sold by her parents to Cosey for “two hundred dollars…and a pocketbook” (193). Her marriage to Bill Cosey immediately lifts her from poverty and its stigma and alters the course of her life with a speed and profundity her own hard work and tenacity could not. In part to absolve

Cosey from responsibility for his pedophilia, the community recognizes the ways relationships with men function as methods for survival and hold her responsible, they “ resented the child because she stayed married to him, liked it, and took over his business. In their minds she was…a gold digger unable to wait for her twelfth birthday for pay dirt” (147). Thus, Christine and Heed’s conflict is not destructive squabbling that takes down a good man, as Vita and others in the community read it, or a simple conflict over identity, but rather a conflict over resources and power, which are most easily achieved through intimacy, familial or romantic, with men.

Heed’s marriage threatens Christine’s claim to the resources of her grandfather, particularly his inheritance, which shifts to the heart of their conflict after his death. Tellingly, after Cosey’s death, Christine chooses a relationship with an older, wealthier man, who provides her with

“Complete freedom, total care, reliable sex, reckless gifts…and a satisfactory place in the pecking order” (84). As Anissa Janine Wardi notes, the chapter headers depict Cosey’s divergent 32 roles to the women at the center of the narrative, “Portrait,” “Friend,” “Stranger,” “Benefactor,”

“Lover,” “Husband,” “Guardian,” “Father,” and “Phantom,” indicating the dynamic of necessity and dependence (205).

The ultimate irony in the text is that none of the Cosey women’s fighting rewarded them with the material security they anticipated. Disgusted by the desperation and infighting he cultivated by marrying a child and pitting his daughter-in-law and granddaughter against her,

Cosey viciously rejects all the women in his family and chooses his mistress, Celestial, as the sole inheritor of his estate. This move is particularly ironic and cruel on Cosey’s part, as he intentionally positions himself as the savior of an impoverished girl, lifting her from her degradation through marriage, demonstrating a cognizance of the ways men’s wealth is vital to women’s material stability. He then cruelly and brutally rejects Heed and his granddaughter for demonstrating an awareness of that fact and fearing a return to poverty. Though L secretly subverts his wishes and preserves the women’s inheritance, it is through her subversion, rather than Cosey’s affection, that they remain secure. L notes, “Whether what he believed was true or no, I wasn’t going to let him put his family out in the street” (Love 201). In other words, it is the sense of justice and devotion of a woman, rather than the passing affection of a man, that enables

Heed and Christine to inherit.

The culminating scene, where Heed and Christine reject Cosey and recover their capacity to uplift each other is similar to Romen’s evolution regarding sexual violence. They reject definitions of power that tie their capacity for success and fulfillment to relationships with men, and seek a new kind of power based on mutually beneficial, loving relationships with each other.

The process begins with owning their complicity in Cosey’s violation, by blaming each other for his cruelty rather than holding him accountable for his choices. Christine finally admits of his 33 marriage to Heed, “You were too young to decide.” In response, Heed admits, “when things got

bad I relied on May and you to explain it. And when that didn’t work I blamed everything on

when we started losing money. I never blamed him” (186). Holding the man upon whom they are

reliant responsible for his exploitive behavior would threaten their access to his resources and

social capital, which cultivated their own conflicts. Finally, Christine mournfully acknowledges,

“We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy

everywhere.” She then asks, “We make him up?” to which Heed responds “He made himself

up,” and Christine notes, “We must have helped” (189). This exchange is vital because it couples an acknowledgement of Cosey’s exploitation with an ownership of their own power to push back and subvert him. Like Romen, they work to transcend patriarchal definitions of power, for them, power through the favor of men, and start to build a coalitional power based on mutual love and respect.

In essence, Heed, Christine and Romen all ask what new ways of belonging, what new methods for empowerment and uplift they can create. Heeding Audre Lorde’s renown call to reject the master’s tools (112), all three characters discover individual uplift through the

exploitation of patriarchal and capitalist systems of power, sexual violence, toxic masculinity,

classism, and competing for the tenuous, mercurial affections of men, is ultimately untenable.

Love compassionately depicts all three’s journeys to self-awareness, demonstrating the

circumstances that make patriarchal and capitalist power seductive and politically useful, but

ultimately destructive. True liberation is more radical than appropriating preexisting systems of

power for one’s own use. As Mar Gallego notes of Heed and Christine’s ultimate reconciliation,

“This kind of love is thus seen as the perfect paradigm, transgressing racial, gender, or class

barriers” (98). More significantly, this kind of love, which is also demonstrated through Romen’s 34 rejection of sexual violence and embrace of community responsibility, is a roadmap to a new kind of black empowerment politics. The text offers a politics of love that transcends boundaries to produce powerful coalitions, transcends exploitive representational politics that demand excusing the violating behavior of “charismatic leaders” (Morris 331) in the interests of the community good, rejects allowing the wealthy and educated to occupy leadership positions exclusively, demands accountability and ethics from all community members. In this way, the text’s final turn is reflective of the emergence of black feminism as a strategy for dismantling all types of exploitation and oppression, including capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Morris tentatively links Romen’s personal evolution from a violent, dehumanizing ethic to an “ethic of care” (321) to black feminism by citing a passage from Toni Cade Bamara’s “On the Issue of Roles.” This passage, as Morris depicts it, criticizes the hypocrisy of “revolutionary” activity juxtaposed with “retrograde intimate practices,” ultimately suggesting that

“revolutionary interpersonal relationships are key to social transformation” (331). Though it is undoubtedly true that linking personal and political experiences and holding men accountable for their misogyny is a key similarity between black feminist critiques of patriarchal power and

Romen’s shifting identity, the comparison is much further reaching and encompasses the development of Heed and Christine’s relationship. It is important to note that May’s poisonous resistance to Heed and Christine’s friendship is, in part, based on class and that economic instability is fundamental to their conflict. Each woman experiences personal and systemic marginalization in black communities due to her gender. Each is also sensitive, to varying degrees, to the ways white supremacy shapes their potential futures and their experiences of violation. In this way, the culminating moment where Romen, Heed and Christine are united in 35 care and compassion indicates a turn to a broader black liberation project equally sensitive to

concerns of race, gender, and class, and intimately aware of the ways those systems intertwine.

The Combahee River Collective Statement, a foundational document in the development

of black feminism as a cohesive political movement, clearly and adeptly indicates the black

feminist project, and is therefore useful in illuminating the black feminist implications of Love’s

poignant conclusion. The statement opens with the claim, “we are actively committed to

struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular

task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major

systems of oppression are interlocking” (Combahee 232). The “coalition” Romen, Heed, and

Christine form based on mutual respect transcends boundaries of class and gender and is

predicated on a rejection of racial and sexual oppression. The Collective later notes of their

trajectory, “Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black

liberation, particularly those of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Many of us were active in those

movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers)…our…disillusionment within

these liberation movements” inspired their development of a radical politics that tackles

oppression through an intersectional framework (233). Morrison takes great care to depict Heed,

Christine, who herself is an active participant in Black Power politics, and Romen as all

grappling with methods for self-empowerment in the wake of the black liberation movements of

the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Significantly for understanding Heed and Christine’s developing consciousness, the

Collective writes, “We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human is enough” (234). As mentioned, Christine, Heed, and

May’s respective investments in securing the favor and affection of Bill Cosey, and Christine’s 36 subsequent romantic relationships, were in part shaped by sexist ideology and equally formed by material necessity. The notion of power, economic, social or otherwise, secured through relationships with men, through being placed on a pedestal, regarded as a queen, or relegated to a subservient position in freedom struggle movements, is a framework for black women’s empowerment Christine and Heed ultimately reject. By finally holding Cosey accountable for his violation of a young girl and rebuilding their loving connection with each other on the basis of their equal personhood, they create the foundation for a different kind of liberation politics.

37 Song of Solomon and Fractures

In Song of Solomon, which occurs largely between 1931 and 1963, Morrison more explicitly explores competing frameworks for liberation. As Dana Medoro writes, “Her characters” in Song of Solomon “seem to represent or embody different positions from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conjuring in both oblique and explicit ways the words of its prominent spokesmen: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X” (32). Depicting various characters that represent different political approaches to dismantling white supremacy allows Morrison to sensitively explore the possibilities and limitations of each framework, as she does in Love.

As scholars compare Bill Cosey’s vision of racial uplift through strong, separate institutions to Booker T. Washington, the same comparison is made between Washington and

Macon Dead II (Medoro 1). Also, as in Love, “Washingtonian accommodation drifts easily into the territory of the Du Boisian Talented Tenth” (Carden 137). With Macon, as with Cosey,

Morrison critiques definitions of black uplift reliant on black leaders operating within preexisting capitalist, white supremacist systems. Though Macon participates in the same cultivating of resources as Cosey, he is far more transparently self-interested, demonstrating more clearly the flaws of exclusive reliance on representational politics that hierarchically value the voices and leadership of the black economic elite. Macon is a cruel, unfeeling landlord who thrives off the systemic poverty of the local black people he exploits. His practices are dramatized early in the novel, when one of his tenants responsible for raising her grandchildren, Mrs. Bains, seeks an extension on her rent payments. When she notes, “I do know” that she is behind on her rent “but babies can’t make it with nothing to put in they stomach,” he replies, “Can they make it in the street Mrs. Bains? That’s where they gonna be if you don’t figure out some way to get me my 38 money.” In response, she plaintively asks, “What’s it gonna profit you, Mr. Dead, sir, to put me

and them children out,” a plea for which he has no sympathy. When asked by her grandchildren

what happened, she remarks, “A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see” (Song of Solomon

21-22). In his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which details a lengthy

study of a particular region of home insecurity in Milwaukee, Matthew Desmond demonstrates

how the exploitive housing system that keeps the poor locked into high-rent residences with substandard accommodations persists, irrespective of the race of the landlord. Morrison depicts a similar situation, demonstrating the ways the second Macon Dead slips neatly into a preexisting white supremacist, capitalist housing system that keeps his community impoverished and suffering and reaps significant economic benefit from preserving it.

The corrupt nature of his wealth is demonstrated in his expensive, perfectly-kept Packard.

On observing it, some members of the community note, “Macon’s wide green Packard belied what they thought a car was for. He never…gunned his engine, never stayed in first gear for a block or two to give pedestrians a thrill…never ran out of gas and needed twelve grinning raggle-tailed boys to help…He hailed no one and no one hailed him…There was never a sudden braking…to shout or laugh with a friend.” In reference to his misuse of the vehicle, “they called it Macon Dead’s hearse” (Song of Solomon 32-33). The people in the community see wealth and its manifestations, like a beautiful, expensive car, as a method of community building and black empowerment. What a car “is for” in their minds, is cultivating the bonds among community members through enjoyable shared experiences. “Gunning the engine” and “staying in first gear for a block or two” is fun for the driver, but also provides the passers-by with entertainment, allowing them to participate in a small way in his wealth. If he runs out of gas, the boys in the neighborhood have the opportunity to join together and push it off the road, demonstrating how 39 supportive and welcoming character of the local black community. And, most importantly, they note that a car is a vehicle for transporting a person to the people he or she cares for; Macon only drives to demonstrate his wealth or accumulate more, not to reach out to friends and neighbors to build relationships. In response, they refer to the car as a hearse, demonstrating that his wealth is effectively dead. Rather than doing the work of building community, sustaining meaningful relationships, providing moments of joy and pleasure for his neighbors, his wealth languishes in a metaphorical coffin, lifeless and stagnant.

Similarly, his career as a landlord is a “dead” position, rather than using his power and social capital to empower his community, distributing his wealth and restructuring exploitive practices, he is obsessed with accumulating it at all costs, only draining from others or keeping it cloistered among a small black elite. The desire for exclusivity and distance from the black poor is also indicated in his interest in expanding his business to accommodate summer homes for the wealthiest blacks in his community. When his daughter, Lena, notes, “There’s no colored people who can afford to have two houses,” his second daughter recites two men in the professional class in the community. When Lena then suggests a woman who owns a bar as a potential buyer,

Corinthians confidently replies, “Daddy wouldn’t sell property to a barmaid” (33-34). Rather than investing in any number of profitable projects that contribute to community development,

Macon seeks to establish a more exclusive black professional class by selling expensive properties only in use part of the year, and only to black people who accumulate their wealth through “respectable” professions.

Morrison also explores the development of Black Power organizations like the Black

Panther Party for Self Defense through the fictional organization, the Seven Days, of which

Milkman’s friend Guitar is a member. The Seven Days ensures “the numbers” of black and white 40 people “remain static” by responding to the murder of black people with the killing of a white

person in a similar manner (158). When Milkman articulates his discomfort with Guitar’s

retributive justice model, noting “If you do it enough, you can do it to anybody…You can off

anybody you don’t like. You can off me,” Guitar confidently replies “We don’t off Negros”

(161). A clear feature of the Seven Days, as Guitar articulates it, is their commitment to never

killing a black person. However, Milkman’s anxiety is prescient, as Guitar ultimately does mark

him as a target, and the final chapters of the text are shadowed by Guitar’s deathly pursuit.

Scholars read the reasons for Guitar’s ostensible betrayal of one of his closest held principles

differently, but I suggest his choice to murder Milkman is based on the fact that Milkman’s

politics, wealth, and ultimate “betrayal” (Guitar erroneously believes Milkman has cheated him

out of money, tellingly the impetus for the final break in their friendship is wealth) mean that he

is no longer black. The carefully policed boundaries of blackness emerge in Christine’s

participation in Black Power organizing in Love. When she meets Fruit, “He clarified the world

for her,” teaching her that her family members are bourgeois traitors, handkerchief-heads, field

hand wannabies, sellouts and chumps. To participate in the movement “her obligations” included

apologizing for her “light skin, gray eyes, and hair threatening a lethal silkiness,” changing “her

clothing to ‘motherland,’” sharpening “her language to activate slogans,” hiding her “inauthentic

hair in exquisite gelés,” hanging “cowrie shells from her earlobes” (Love 164). Guitar’s turn to trying to murder Milkman using the official slogan of the Seven Days, as though he is a white man, contributes to this critique of notions of “authentic blackness.” As she does in Love, in

Song of Solomon, Morrison is both sensitive to and critical of the possibilities of different political frameworks for securing liberation. 41 The community Pilate creates with her daughter and granddaughter, like the intimate

relationship Christine and Heed recover, is indicative of a radical type of liberation politics that

contrasts with Guitar’s and the second Macon Dead’s. Many scholars emphasize Pilate as the

most sympathetic character in terms of politics, in contrast to the retributive justice framework

offered by Guitar, the colleting of resources for individual uplift practiced by Macon, and the

apathy demonstrated by Milkman. Laura Dubek notes, “Pilate exemplifies a realistic ‘by any

means necessary’ politics of love” “an ‘alternative’ in the same way that Ella Baker and Fannie

Lou Hamer represented alternatives to the models of leadership provided by Martin Luther King

and Malcolm X” (106) and Medoro suggests Pilate is “an ethical ideal” (1). I argue that just as, if

not more significant than Pilate herself, is the community she creates together with her child and

grandchild, a capitalist-resistant, woman-affirming space predicated on the radical politics of

love that Love ultimately endorses.

Song of Solomon is particularly sensitive to differences of class throughout, as elaborated

through the conflict between Guitar and Milkman, in the second Macon Dead’s landownership,

and in Guitar’s father’s death. Medoro notes that Guitar’s speeches “summon a history of white

violence, including…the dangerous work relegated to black labourers,” gesturing towards

Guitar’s father’s brutal death at a saw mill (6). After his death, the foreman gives the children a large batch of divinity candy. Guitar notes, “It wasn’t the divinity from the foreman’s wife that made him sick. That came later. It was the fact that instead of life insurance, the sawmill owner gave his mother forty dollars ‘to tide you and the kids over’” (Song of Solomon 225). Guitar’s sense of injustice and the devaluing of black life can be traced to the formative experience of a sawmill company reducing the value of his father’s life to forty dollars and a bag of candy. The economic exploitation of his family is inextricable from the racial exploitation. Cognizant of the 42 destructive power of capitalism and deeply wary of Macon’s greed, Pilate, Reba, and Hagar live as distantly from capitalist production as they can, a significant source of Macon’s shame over his sister. He notes with disgust,

Pilate lived in a narrow single-story house…She had no electricity because she would not

pay for the service. Nor for gas. At night she and her daughter lit the house with candles

and kerosene lamps; they warmed themselves and cooked with wood and coal, pumped

kitchen water into a dry sink…from a well and lived pretty much as though progress was

a word that meant walking a little farther on down the road. (27)

He further notes that they “ate like children…what they had or came across or had a craving for,” made what little money they had through making wine in their home, and spent it carelessly when they had it on objectively worthless things that brought them pleasure (11). What Macon reads as a backwards, retrogressive life is in fact a life free from economic exploitation, where the women are as self sufficient as possible and find pleasure and joy through each other’s company and their freedom from economic entanglements with others, rather than through the accumulation of wealth. Even Reba’s prolific luck at winning money and things, which should enable the family’s “upward mobility” in the traditional sense, is transformed from a method of earning wealth to an enjoyable pass time. Hagar notes, “Everything she win, she give away,” to which Pilate replies, “To a man…That’s what she want to win—a man” (47). Reba does not care for the value of what she wins in terms of dollars, she uses her gift to build and maintain relationships, which she feels are more valuable. This community mounts a uniquely poignant challenge to Macon’s model of black leadership and advancement, that places primacy on achieving middle class respectability and economic security and devalues relationships and community bonds. Pilate, Reba, and Hagar’s vision of black uplift is exclusively relational, about 43 the cultivation of meaningful love relationships that transcend capitalism, white supremacy, and

patriarchy and are sensitive to the interdependency of communities.

Another feature of Pilate, Reba, and Hagar’s choices Macon finds abhorrent is their

sexual freedom. He notes his deep fear that white people would discover “That the propertied

Negro that handled his business so well…had a sister who had a daughter but no husband, and

that daughter had a daughter but no husband” (20). Pilate is aware of her daughter and

granddaughter’s sexual behavior, from Reba’s many boyfriends to Hagar’s lengthy, passionate

affair with Milkman, but feels no need to police or restrict their sexual expression, given it is

freely chosen and mutually pleasurable. Their home is sexually liberating, rejecting a

respectability politics that demands black women silence their sexuality and embracing the

possibilities for pleasure and fulfillment through relationships and desire, and Pilate also

demands the space is free from men’s violation and severely polices abuse. When Reba’s

boyfriend turns violent and beats her, Pilate picks up her knife, “positioned the knife at the edge

of his heart. She waited until the man felt the knife point before she jabbed it skillfully.”

Following the powerful speech she delivers with her knife partway through his chest he pants,

“Lemme go. I… wont never…put a hand on her” (93-95).

The collective meaning of the space is demonstrated in Pilate’s grand pronouncement of

Hagar at her funeral, “And she was loved!” (319). Like the turns at the conclusions of Love, Sula, and A Mercy, where principle women in the novels realize the love, nourishing, and fulfillment they were eternally seeking in the sexual and romantic affections of men was always present in their platonic relationships with other women, Pilate indicates the travesty of Hagar’s death from heartbreak over Milkman’s abandonment was that she had been richly, truly loved by her mother and grandmother all along. The kind of love Pilate, Reba, and Hagar cultivated, free from sexual 44 and domestic violence, free from the constraints of capitalism, and predicated on the belief that

“you can’t just fly off and leave a body” (332), that each person is deeply responsible to his or her community, is the kind of love Milkman ultimately adopts.

45 Conclusion

This thesis has parsed out only a small portion of Morrison's work, A Mercy, Beloved,

Love, and Song of Solomon, and only in relation to fragments of black American history. The richness and expansiveness of her work lends itself to a longer, more complex and detailed analysis that incorporates all of her novels and more layers of historical analysis than offered here. A fuller project would develop a periodization of black American history that included, along with colonialism, the development of race-based heritable slavery, the emergence of civil rights and black power organizations like SNCC, SCLC, and the Black Panther Party, and the development of black feminist frameworks for organizing and understanding black liberation, key events like the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North and the cultural and artistic explosion it prompted. This larger work would draw from all of Morrison’s texts that consider a particular period, to produce a definitive reading of Morrison’s engagement with the historical moment across novels. Such an expansion of this project would further unpack the several themes that frequently recur in her work, including the heritability of trauma across generations and the significance of mothering as a practice of liberation, demonstrating the ways

Morrison’s corpus takes up similar themes and adapts them to the particularity of each period she considers.

Morrison’s most recent work, God Help the Child, which takes place in the present day, gestures towards the possibilities for further analysis beyond the texts and historical periods analyzed. God Help the Child meditates on the central concerns of mothering, the perversion of the relationships between women under white supremacy, and the development of coalitions across difference in a highly visible way, clearly following a progression from texts like A 46 Mercy, Love, Song of Solomon and Beloved by taking up those themes as they manifest in the

contemporary moment. The text explores the experiences of the central character, Bride, whose

childhood was characterized by her mother’s repulsion at her dark skin. Sweetness, Bride’s

mother, remarks of her birth, “something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared

me…Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color” and the aftermath of her birth, “I

thought I was going crazy when she turned blue-black…once—just for a few seconds—I held a

blanked over her face and pressed,” an eerie contemporary echo of Sethe’s choice to kill her

children rather than allow them to be returned to enslavement (God Help the Child 3-5). The strength of her mother’s revulsion is profoundly felt, with Bride noting, “I always knew she didn’t like touching me…Distaste was all over her face…I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch” (31). Sweetness’s struggle to love her daughter through layers of shame and social conditioning strongly recollects the ways Sethe’s love for Beloved, May’s love for Christine, and Florens’s mother’s love for Florens is distorted under contextually specific experiences of patriarchal, white supremacist violence. Morrison’s thoughtful exploration of colorism (Sweetness remarks, “Some of you probably think it’s a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color—the lighter the better…But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?” [4]) exposes another barrier to intraracial coalition, as earlier demonstrated in

Romen’s struggle to define his manhood outside of patriarchal definitions of empowerment and

Macon Dead’s gluttonous hoarding of wealth that exacerbates the poverty of his community and isolates him from his neighbors. The thematic centers of Morrison’s work echo in all her texts, making reading the novels together vital to understanding her overarching project.

Read as four volumes in a narrative retelling of black America, A Mercy, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Love form a complex mediation on the possibilities for developing meaningful, 47 mutually liberating relationships across differences of race, class, and gender in different historical moments. The first two texts primarily consider the possibilities for compassion and empowerment across racial differences, inflected through identities like gender and class, while the latter two texts more deeply unpack the intraracial barriers to building and uplifting strong black communities. In all texts Morrison suggests the most empowering identity formations and sociopolitical movements are developed in a coalitional vision of black liberation that rejects capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as mutually constitutive systems that interlock to produce the oppression of all marginalized people. Central to this theme is Morrison’s sensitivity to the movements of history. History is the living heart of Morrison’s works. Her reverence for the discipline bubbles up through her novels, manifesting in her meticulous renderings of setting, in her incisive references to political and historical developments, and in her attentiveness to the complexity of racial identity as politically and socially constructed in particular moments.

Through this attentiveness to historical accuracy and through fantastical images like Beloved’s gluttonously expanding flesh and Bride’s flattening chest and retreating hair, Morrison reminds us of the persistence and visibility of history, personal and ancestral, the way pushes it up against us, demanding to be acknowledged, demanding to be reckoned with.

48

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ACADEMIC VITA

Elizabeth Catchmark [email protected]

Education The Pennsylvania State University Graduation Date: May 2017 Schreyer Honors Scholar; Paterno Fellow; Phi Beta Kappa; Phi Kappa Phi; Ankh Maat Wedjau Honor Society English (B.A.) Philosophy (B.A.) African American Studies (B.A.) Women’s Studies (B.A.) Studied abroad in London, England Summer 2015

Teaching Experience DC Social Justice Fellow Spring 2016-Summer 2016 Designed a curriculum for teaching social justice issues to high school students; taught these lessons in DC public schools in Summer 2016. Prepared for this experience through a teaching preparation course in Spring 2016. Designed a four-week poetry workshop for high school aged women that emphasizes cultural competency, inspiring empathy across differences, and writing as a method for coping with traumas.

Teaching Assistant for Sociology 119, World in Conversation Spring 2015 Facilitated dialogues on the topics of race, gender, class, global issues, and sexual orientation. Prepared for this position through the Sociology 119 course and extensive training in facilitation skills including reflective listening, productively neutralizing conflicts, and open ended, nonjudgmental questioning.

Writing Center Tutor, Penn State Learning Spring 2015 Worked with students to enhance writing skills using nondirective, collaborative learning techniques. Prepared through practicum experience.

Poetry Teacher, Kennedy Dance Center Arts Camp Summer 2010, Summer 2011 Developed and implemented a poetry curriculum for K-8 students.

Research Experience Grant Writer, Bellefonte Art Museum for Centre County Summer 2015

Researched and selected grant opportunities well suited to the institution’s needs; individually developed, wrote, and was awarded a $2,500 PPA Project Stream Grant.

Research Assistant Summer 2015 Researched dementia to tailor a poetry course to older students; catalogued and organized texts; entered texts into electronic citation systems.

Research Assistant Summer 2014 Identified and selected articles for classroom use based on reading level, complexity, and topic; created citation lists; identified extramural research grants.

Activist Experience Second Vice President, Black Caucus Fall 2016- Spring 2017 Planned and organized events to meet the needs of diverse students at Penn State, notably planned and moderated a Town Hall style debate among student leaders representing all four candidates running for president in 2016, developed topics for student discussion forums, designed promotional materials, among others.

PHREE, Center for Women Students Fall 2014-Spring 2017 Trained as a facilitator for sexual assault education and dialogues to stimulate awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and inspire activism within the student body; wrote programming to be utilized in sexual assault trainings.

LGBTQA Coalition Fall 2014- Spring 2016 Raised awareness regarding issues facing LGBTQA peoples, both in the US and global contexts, and helped build community among LGBTQA students at Penn State.

Committee Experience Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Undergraduate Matters Faculty Committee Fall 2016 Provided feedback on issues significant to undergraduate Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies students as a student advisor. Topics discussed by the committee include persuasively advertising the major to incoming freshman in a manner that emphasizes potential employment and dual degree possibilities and incorporating WGSS courses into new general education requirements, among others.

Publishing Experience Kalliope Literary Arts Magazine Fall 2014-Fall 2015 Selected works for publication; developed criteria for selection; encouraged submission.

Presentations “Reflections in Black: How America Reads Obama’s Race” March 10, 2017 Delivered a talk at the Forty First Annual National Council for Black Studies Conference based on my paper, which won second place in the Terry Kershaw Student Essay Competition. Was also inducted in the Ankh Maat Wedjau Honor Society.

“Women Folk: Black Women as Folklore Texts in Cane and Mule Bone” October 29, 2016 Delivered an oral presentation at the Celebrating African American Language and Literature Conference at Penn State University, State College, PA.

“Kindred Spirits: Reading Relationships Through Embodied White Supremacy” October 1, 2016 Delivered a poster presentation for the Africana Research Center Undergraduate Exhibition at Penn State University, State College, PA. Presentation earned first place in the poster competition.

“Women Folk: Black Women as Folklore Texts in Cane and Mule Bone” July 16, 2016 Delivered an oral presentation at the Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Conference at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, MA.

Life After Prison- A Week in the Life of a Former Offender May 2016 Lesson plan I designed was chosen for use in enacting policy change for former offenders reentering society by Dr. Charisma Howell, Deputy Executive Director of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council in Washington, DC.

#DiversityMatters: An Open Forum on Diversity in Education April 19, 2016 Organized and advertised an open forum event that gathered student leaders from diverse political, social, and religious organizations for the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at Penn State University. This event was canceled three days before the scheduled date due to a speech by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders occurring at the same time as the event.

Bellefonte Moth Sept. 19, 2014 Crafted and presented a reading for a local rendition of The Moth, a national storytelling series.

NVSC Young Playwright’s Festival July 10, 2013 Wrote an original play, Almost Perfect, which received a reading and was reviewed by a critical audience.

Graduate-Level Coursework Completed as an Undergraduate History 551: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Twenty-First Century Fall 2016 African American Studies 503: Sexual and Gender Politics in the African Diaspora Spring 2015

English 567: Thematic Studies in African American Literature Fall 2015

Conferences/Development Experiences National Young Feminist Leadership Conference March 25-27, 2016 Attended a Feminist Majority Foundation sponsored conference in Arlington, VA designed to educate young activists on diverse, intersectional issues related to women’s rights to develop organizing strategies.

The 22 Annual Black Solidarity Conference at Yale February 16-19, 2017 Attended a student-run undergraduate conference in New Haven, CT dedicated to analyzing issues related to the African Diaspora. The 2017 conference theme was blackness in the digital age.

PNC Leadership Assessment Center February 4, 2017 Participated in a leadership assessment designed to simulate challenges students will face as leaders in their fields, assess their performance, and provide them with comprehensive feedback on areas of strength and areas of potential development, coupled with a personalized program for enhancing one’s leadership ability.

Accomplishments/Awards College Marshal for the College of Liberal Arts, delivered Commencement Address 2017 Dean’s List Fall 2013- Present Jabir Shibley Memorial Scholarship in Philosophy 2017 Third Place, Mathew Mihelcic Poetry Award 2017 Second Place, National Council for Black Studies Terry Kershaw Student Essay Competition 2017 First Place, Africana Research Center Undergraduate Exhibition 2016 Mimi Barash Coppersmith Endowed Scholarship in Women’s Studies 2016 Bole-Selzer Thesis Award 2016 Ann Good Moore and Howard R. Moore Jr. Undergraduate Scholarship in English 2015 Paterno Fellows Enrichment Funds 2015 Schreyer Ambassador Travel Grant 2015 Valedictorian of the Bellefonte High School Class of 2013 2013