Making Black Girls Real: Reconstructing Black Girlhood in the U.S., 1861-1963

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Tammy Cherelle Owens

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Roderick A. Ferguson, Adviser

June 2016

© Tammy Cherelle Owens 2016

i Acknowledgements

After witnessing the toll of academia on the creative spirits, minds, hearts, and bodies of so many people of color that I have called colleagues and “real friends,” I now know that it is nothing short of a miracle that I made it to the other side (the end of the graduate program and dissertation journey) alive. Being able to stay alive throughout the process in order to write my own acknowledgements is a gift that I will cherish forever.

However, this gift of living long enough to write my acknowledgements will cause grief from time to time when I think of my friend and others who did not live to write their own acknowledgements. So, I want to begin my acknowledgements by thanking Jesús

Estrada-Pérez —a brilliant scholar, activist, writer, and teacher. Thank you for assuring me that I could make it through my preliminary exams, thank you for coming to my first

“real” presentation on my dissertation, and thank you for allowing me to read your work when we worked together in the Center for Writing. There are so many other important moments that I want to name, but for now, I want to be sure to thank you for supporting me and the goals of so many students of color at the University of Minnesota.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot complete a graduate program(s) or a dissertation without three essentials: supportive faculty, amazing friends/family who will go to the ends of the earth for and with you, and money (i.e. financial support from institutions). Because of God’s grace, I have had a modest amount of all three. I will forever be indebted to Doveanna Fulton and Brittney Cooper. I have no earthly idea of where I would be today if I never met you two in the Women’s Studies program at the

University of Alabama. I know that you know that I really did not have a clue of what

ii graduate school was or the faintest idea of how to succeed in academia. The only thing that I knew for sure was that I desired to use my writing to help black girls and women live better. Dr. Fulton, I thank you for admitting me into the Women’s Studies program. I also thank you for introducing me to the idea of studying and recovering black women’s voices in the nineteenth century. You and your courses taught me that I can be creative in my search for black women and girls’ histories. After years of being afraid of the deep- seated secrets of my own family history, working with you and learning how to unearth black women’s stories made me brave enough to go back in time and search the past. I would not know that I could study black girls historically if I never met you. I thank you for sharing your brilliance. I also thank you for always sharing your time. It’s amazing to me how no matter when I reach out to you for advice, you always make time to give me concrete strategies on how to move from point A to B.

Dr. Cooper, I would literally be writing my acknowledgements for the rest of my life if I tried to put everything you have done for me into words. You were the first teacher to ever tell me that I was brilliant. You told me multiple times, but the two that stand out the most include the first time you told me (at the Sarah Lawrence College

Women’s History month conference) and when you said it in front of our entire African

American Intellectual Thought class. Teachers have shamed me in front of the class throughout my life for “being loud, fast, and country.” But no one had ever said that I was brilliant. No one had ever told me or believed that I could or should strive to be

“tight” in my delivery of all my brilliance in the form of public speaking or writing.

Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for introducing me to Black Feminism. Thank you

iii for teaching an independent study course on black girls in the summer time. Thank you for introducing me to the work of Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, and Ruth Nicole Brown.

Thank you for listening to me, allowing and encouraging me to be myself. Thank you for picking up the phone and guiding me through my first year at the University of

Minnesota. I was “low-key” terrified, but so excited about being in American Studies. I also thank you for your scholarship. I would reread your “Back-to-School Beatitudes: 10

Academic Survival Tips” like the bible throughout graduate school. I have secretly been trying to be “tighter” and make you proud since I graduated from the University of

Alabama.

I was extremely excited about entering the University of Minnesota, but I was also terrified about leaving the South without my friends/family and advisers who had truly changed my life. I could not have asked for a better adviser than Roderick A.

Ferguson for the next step in my academic career. As I began to really learn the politics of graduate school and academia, I realized that my genuine excitement about learning and creative approaches to scholarship were presumed to be markers of my lack of training at the top ten schools. I learned that I was, in fact, not considered “creative,” but undisciplined in thinking, methods, and even speaking. Rod, I thank you for challenging me, but never seeking to discipline the creativity out of me. Thank you for great advisement and practical strategies for how to “assume power” no matter where I am, distance the voices of others from my writing space, and to never stop writing. I thank you for your patience and for not shaming me as I learned the ropes. Thank you for taking the time to do mind maps with me for new projects and chapters. I thank you for

iv your scholarship. Thank you for always answering my questions regardless of how well I articulate them in the moment when I am filled with excitement about new ideas or theories. Thank you for always allowing and encouraging my excitement about the work.

My graduate school journey would not be as successful if I did not have support from the other members of my committee— Jennifer Peirce, Zenzele Isoke, Ruth Nicole

Brown, and M.J. Maynes. Jennifer, I am so happy that I took your personal narratives course. Your course had a huge impact on the way I read and think about texts, especially personal narratives. Because of your course, I am almost certain that I will write a book on poor southern black women’s personal narratives someday, and I will definitely send you a copy and thank you again in the acknowledgements. But for now, I want to thank you for your unmatched commitment to students. Thank you so much for always taking the time to listen to me, read my work, and offer amazing feedback. I also thank you for supporting me during two really tough times—my first year in the American Studies program and my transition to the University of Virginia. Thank you for helping me feel like I belonged and had support in the American Studies program (even when I was away on fellowship).

Zenzele, I will never be able to repay you for your honesty and kindness during my first campus visit at the University of Minnesota. While I thank you for your scholarship and teaching, I also thank you for helping me learn how to survive/thrive in the Twin Cities as a woman of color. I thank you for helping me identify good people in

Minneapolis to be a part of my community. The Sister Circles you invited me to were some of the most important steps in my journey to get free from years of baggage around

v being black, southern, and poor. I needed those Sister Circles at that particular moment like I needed water. I’m not free yet, but because of those Sister Circles, I am bold enough to admit that black southern poverty has held me hostage and I want to be free.

Dr. Brown, I think I have been thanking you non-stop since I met you! I have been thanking you for your scholarship, commitment to black girls, and for supporting me and my work. And, there is a good chance that I will write you several more thank- you emails because I would never have enough space within an acknowledgements section to express my gratitude for everything you have done for me. Thank you for inviting me to the inaugural Black Girl Genius Week in 2014. Thank you for believing that I needed to be there. Witnessing your relationship with your students and the way you do SOLHOT in schools with black girls took care of my soul when I returned to

Charlottesville to finish writing my dissertation. Thank you for taking the time to send me words of encouragement to get through the dissertation. Thank you for telling me that my work is important. As cliché as it sounds, I am genuinely thankful for your existence, commitment to being human, or for you simply being you at all times.

MJ, I thank you for supporting my work and offering incredible feedback on how to think about age, class, and childhood. Your scholarship and our conversations about age really influenced my thinking about black girls historically and in our present moment. I am almost certain that I will write a book on age and the black female body from birth to death, and I will be sure to send you a copy and thank you in the acknowledgements. But, in my acknowledgements for the dissertation, I want to thank you for inviting me to participate in the Childhood and Youth Studies across the

vi Disciplines collaborative at the University of Minnesota. The support that I received from you and the participants in the collaborative to keep pursuing my historical research on black girls meant the world to me.

There are so many other faculty and staff that I would like to thank at the

University of Minnesota, and I know I will never be able to remember the names of everyone. I sincerely thank the American Studies faculty and staff, especially Zac Rakke and Melanie Steinman. I am truly grateful for the support of the University of

Minnesota’s Graduate School, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, the Department of African American and African Studies, the Center for Writing, the

Literacy and Rhetorical Studies program, and the Community of Scholars program

(COSP). I will never be able to thank Noro Andriamanalina enough for supporting me and other graduate students of color in (COSP). Noro, I thank you for advocating for me.

Beyond the University of Minnesota, I am truly grateful for the support that I have received from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in

Black Culture, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, University of Virginia’s

Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. I am grateful for the two years of support and inspiration that I have received at the Woodson from

Deborah E. McDowell and Maurice Wallace. I am also thankful for the support that I received from the other fellows and Woodson faculty and staff, especially Debbie Best.

Ava Purkiss, I cannot thank you enough for your time and amazing feedback and support of my work. Because of the Woodson, I had an opportunity to meet and have my chapters

vii read by both Marcia Chatelain and LaKisha Simmons. I am so grateful for the experience to share my work with both scholars and receive incredible feedback.

In addition to institutional support, I have to thank my network of friends/family who have supported and encouraged me daily to keep pushing towards the finish line. I thank Spencer Willis, Abby “Skittles” Beasley, Sonya Boyd, Rashonda Smith-Manning,

Alexander Parks, Donnie Jones, Rev. Dr. Ralph and Alika Galloway, Jasmine K. Tang,

Katie Levin, Porshe Garner, Jessica Robinson, Durell Callier, Erica Goldsmith, Jules

Dirsa, Annie Artino, Lyda, Raki, Toya Caston, and John Campbell.

As I mentioned earlier, in order to complete graduate school and a dissertation, you must have someone who will go to the ends of the earth with and for you. My mama,

Charlotte Owens, let me know that she would be ready to travel to the ends of the earth with me or on my behalf way before I entered graduate school. I have never in my life known anyone who is more invested in my happiness or my dreams, including the ones that I can’t even put into words, than my mama. I appreciate you loving me fiercely and unconditionally. Your love for my dreams inspired me to run, write, get out of bed, speak, live another day, and refuse to allow shame to deter my ambition. We were both so happy about school when we attended my undergraduate orientation weekend. Neither of us (as parent or prospective student) knew what we were doing at the University of

Southern Mississippi, but we were happy and just felt like we belonged in school. I’ve been trying to keep you happy about school since that weekend. I love you so much, ma.

Finally and most importantly, I thank God for believing that I am worthy enough of living, accomplishing my dreams, and being successful. God, I thank you for loving

viii me even when I run from my purpose. I appreciate you more for the past two years than I will ever be able to explain to another person. Thank you for keeping me clothed, fed, healthy, and in my right mind. I said if I lived to make it to the other side, I’d never run from my purpose again. I made it, I’m here now, and I’m ready to do your will and inspire other students, black girls, and people to move barriers and be successful in the academy. It’s on.

ix Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to Charlotte Owens and other black girls who were never meant to survive or thrive in Mississippi.

x Abstract

From the 1861 publication of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking alongside U.S. marshals to integrate her elementary school in 1960, the black-girl figure and performances of black girlhood are present within popular texts, images, archival materials, and cultural work produced in the U.S. Yet, black girls and their girlhoods are noticeably absent in dominant historical conversations of childhood, and thus Jacobs’s narrative of slave-girl life in bondage or Ruby Bridges’s integration of her school are not read as constituting a visible history of black girlhood or a significant period in the formation of black female political as well as intellectual identity in the U.S. History scholars of the U.S. Civil War through Civil Rights Movement have begun to recognize children as important historical actors and childhood as a key site of cultural knowledge. However, these scholars have failed to examine the epistemological, historical, or theoretical importance of black girls or their girlhoods. As a result, the historical record endorses racialized ideologies of childhood that render black girlhood illegible and black girls exempt from the analytical category of children or girls in U.S. culture. My dissertation addresses the exemption of black girls from the socially- constructed categories of childhood and girlhood by recovering black girls as historical actors and illuminating constitutive elements of black girlhood in the U.S. from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that within historical discourses of childhood and in the dominant visual field, the intersections of race, class, gender, and age render black girls illegible, or incapable of being read or “seen” as girls with valuable girlhoods. To make black girls and their lived experiences legible, I draw on Black Feminist and Queer theories to inform my discursive, literary, and visual cultural methods of investigating a diverse collection of nineteenth-century slave narratives, popular novels, images in popular press, children’s literature, and archival sources including the unpublished autobiography of black-girl Civil Rights activist Brenda Travis.

xi Table of Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………xii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………24

Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………………84

Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………………..…127

Chapter 4………………………………………………………………………………..164

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...236

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....243

xii List of Figures

Voice of Jackson Movement advertisement…………………………………………….214

Daily News photo of Anne Moody…………………………………………………...... 217

1 Introduction

Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar œstrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.1 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia 1781

Black girls are seemingly illegible, monstrous, and mystical figures in U.S. past and contemporary culture. They have managed to survive as undefined, nameless, and displaced liminal subjects. Racial and gender ideologies manufactured in racial projects such as slavery and Jim Crow have placed them outside of the realm of human or worthy citizens. They are removed from age-specific categories of development—childhood, girlhood, and adolescence. As a result, black girls, similar to black women like Sojourner

Truth and others, have found themselves embodying anomalies that require them to prove their humanity, cultural production, intellectualism, and political significance. In fact, contestations of black girls’ humanity and ability to produce anything of cultural value beyond manual and sexual labor can be traced back to poet Phillis Wheatley in 1772. As a young girl, Wheatley was summoned to court to prove that she had not stolen the intellectual property of a white author, and was, in fact, capable of writing poetry as an enslaved “African” in the U.S. Though Wheatley received significant recognition as a poet since she was seventeen as a result of the letters she penned to popular figures, her

1 Jefferson misspelled Wheatley’s name in his notes. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 240, emphasis mine.

2 blackness, and I would argue, combined with gender were considered to be “biological” and socially-constructed factors which refuted her intellectualism as a black girl and later young woman. Echoing literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., one can only imagine the feelings that a young Phyllis Wheatley must have experienced when she and her work were “orally examined” by an appointed authoritative body consisting of eighteen of

Boston’s most prominent figures such as John Hancock and Governor Thomas

Hutchinson, and still later hailed as a fraud and “below the dignity of criticism” by

Thomas Jefferson.2

Though Wheatley survived the violence of being captured around the age of seven or eight in Africa, the gruesome journey to the colonies, and later became a poet, her life is not studied as part of a genealogy of black girlhood in the U.S. Nor does it stand as a testament of black girls’ agency, survival, and literary histories despite enslavement, colonization, and indentured servitude. Rather, she is generally read as an exceptional figure of the “more privileged” slave woman. Moreover, the difficulty in naming

Wheatley or her cultural work as constitutive of black girlhood during this time period illuminates the problem that my project addresses. Any indication of a conceptualization of black girlhood was impossible in the public sphere because such acts of naming were antagonistic to the dichotomous relationship that essential age, racial, and gender ideologies relied upon to maintain racial formations and white supremacy from childhood through adulthood. The innocence and purity of white childhood and girlhood validated its supremacy by way of reifying the deviance of its antithesis—an illegible culture of

2 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Editor’s Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 1–20, 7.

3 black girlhood—similar to black womanhood that was figured in the U.S. imaginary as synonymous with aberrance and immorality. Moreover black girls, as young citizen- subjects, were illegible figures in the most prominent sources of interpellation for child subjects in early U.S.—state, legal, and medical discourses of childhood. The state, legal, and medical rhetoric did not name black girls in the definition of children or adolescents, or those in need of state welfare and protection. Thus, national rhetoric which emphasized the welfare and protection of the child figure was socially understood as the rights of white children and their families. This was especially pertinent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics heavily influenced the ideal that childhood or youth—understood to be white—was a period of innocence, and the child was a figure of deep wisdom.3

Seeking to name this lack of recognition and absence of engagement with the rich histories and lives of black girls in the U.S., Toni Morrison suggests that they are “a group of people ‘never taken seriously by anybody—all those peripheral little girls.”4

Yet, considering the substantial amount of cultural work and texts produced by women such as Harriet Jacobs and Maritcha Rémond Lyons that documented black girlhood during the nineteenth century; the creation of industrial schools for black girls by black clubwomen like Janie Porter Barrett during the twentieth century; the literature produced for black youth by figures such as W.E. B. Du Bois and Jesse Redmon Fauset in their

3 Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Malden: Polity, 2001), 21-5. 4 Toni Morrison stated this when questioned about her reasons for writing the novel The Bluest Eye—a fictional story about the psychological and material effects of racism in the lives of black girls. This is quoted in John Noel Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 31.

4 magazine The Brownie’s Book; and black girls like Anne Moody articulating their political organizing during the civil rights movement, it is nothing short of a travesty that black girls have remained in the periphery of discourses of childhood. Moreover, until recently black girlhood has not been central to theorizing of early black female ontologies during the era that is examined in this dissertation: 1861 to 1963.

It is crucial to our historical understanding of female personhood, political agency, black intellectualism, and literary traditions in the U.S. to understand all historical actors in shaping an era, particularly the many ways black girls and women collectively pushed back against the racial systems that vehemently refuted their existence at different periods in their lifespan. Scholars of the period from the U.S. Civil

War through the Jim Crow era such as Wilma King, Robin Bernstein, and James Marten recognize children and youth as historical actors. However, their diversification of voices informing the historical narrative has failed to critically acknowledge the epistemological and theoretical significance of black girls or their girlhoods, in particular.5

As mentioned previously, a significant number of black women’s narratives emerged throughout this period which suggest that their childhoods and youth

5 Recently scholars such as Marcia Chatelain (2015) and LaKisha Simmons (2015) have published historical scholarship on black girlhood. See Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); LaKisha Michelle Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015). My work has been greatly influenced by scholars such as Ruth Nicole Brown, who use black feminist epistemological frameworks to study black girlhood. Although Brown’s work focuses on contemporary narratives of black girlhood, the scholar’s intersectional analysis of black girls’ lived experiences influence my analysis of black girls’ creative performances of black girlhood as well as the ways in which black women remember girlhood. See Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

5 experiences are foundational to their understanding and practice as change agents. For example, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) or post-slavery autobiographies such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). At the same time, their narratives reveal that whiteness functioned as a social determinant of one’s ability to have “biological” or psychological access to childhood or girlhood, and thereby validate Robin Bernstein’s claim that childhood—understood as period of vulnerability and innocence—“was raced white.”6 Such being the case, I argue that black girls were not understood as having a childhood because they were incapable of being read or seen as girls in the U.S. political and social imaginary. Furthermore, the negation of black girls as subjects with girlhoods was deliberate and oftentimes mobilized by the state and local bodies of power to uphold socially-constructed norms around the purity among white women and girls and the rhetoric of innocent childhood, and was also used to disguise pathological desires of these systems of power during slavery and throughout

Jim Crow. While researchers such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine,

Tera W. Hunter, and Angela Davis have provided thorough accounts of the manner in which the state and slave systems utilized black women’s bodies and labor, a critical history of the systemic abuse black girls’ experienced on their own terms has yet to be written. Consequently, the measures black girls and women took to creatively push back

6 Building on Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s claims that nineteenth-century childhood represented the “idea” of innocence and dependency, Bernstein extends this analysis further by noting that this childhood “innocence was raced white.” Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4. Also see Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiv-xxi.

6 against these systems by using their alternative ideals of girlhood as a mode of survival, have not been studied significantly.

Moreover, pioneers such as Ida B. Wells provide extensive research on how black boys and men became objects of state and community obsession, and were subsequently killed as a result of discourses which relied on racial stereotypes proclaiming them to be hypersexual beasts in pursuit of white women and girls. Specifically, anti-lynching discourses elaborated on the racial discourses used by whites to justify the torture and murder of black males. This political work revealed how stereotypes and false images of black males as hypersexual beasts circulated among whites in service to anti-black racism. However, these important efforts to dissect the logic of racial terror in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries failed to account for how these same racial stereotypes framed racial violence against black girls. My dissertation reveals that black girls were also targeted for abuse by state and local powers, not just to maintain racial subordination but also to protect the image of whiteness as pure, and to signify the heteronormative sexual superiority and dominance of white men. One of the black girlhood narratives that

I explore in Making Black Girls Real is that of Endesha Ida Mae Holland, a young civil rights worker in Mississippi, who recounts the abuse that poor black girls endured while working in the homes of white families. Holland notes that on her eleventh birthday, she

“had already learned the secret of invisibility all black folks knew,” when the woman she worked for, Ms. Lawrence, forced her to have sex with her husband Mr. Lawrence, and then paid her a five-dollar bill for a birthday present.7

7 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 82-85.

7 In addition to Holland, Anne Moody, and earlier narratives of black girlhood such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl all point to the abuse that black girls, in particular, underwent as a result of intersectional forces and their illegibility. I argue that their illegibility positioned them within a liminal space that was barred from normal(izing) conceptions of childhood and girlhood. Further, their stories outline the violence that led to many black girls or women such as Ethel Waters to retrospectively declare: “I never was a child. I never was coddled, or liked… I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.”8 Here lies another contribution of my research. Through this work, I show how this rhetoric of “outsider” implies that black girls understood, at a very early age, that they were excluded from discourses of childhood innocence, which defined the child as inherently, worthy, and thereby deserving of communal protection. In contrast, black girls were a part of a different girlhood that was sacred and designed for their material and psychic preservation (memories, bodies, spirits, and stories).9

My work is significant because it takes a systematic assessment of how the intersection of particular social forces positioned black girls as aberrant and illegible figures in the U.S. cultural imaginary. I show how the interrelationship of race, class, gender, and age forced black girls into being for the pleasures of the dominant class. It is widely acknowledged that since the mid-nineteenth century, age as a social category of analysis has functioned as a social determinant of one’s need for protection or period of dependency by the state in the form of local rhetoric, laws, educational policies, material culture, and cultural mythology. However, in the U.S., age combined with race, class, and

8 Ethel Waters, His Eye is on the Sparrow: An Autobiography. (New York: Jove, 1982), 1. 9 In my dissertation, I also provide a thorough discussion of how childhood and child figure rhetoric are understood by black girls as well as black adults during the periods that I cover.

8 gender, had the opposite effect for black girls, and, in fact, made them transitory objects until the desires of others were cast upon them.10 In many ways, the irony of black girlhood mirrors what Spillers notes of black women in the slave trade within her pioneering essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book:” “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”11That is, prepubescent black females were excluded from the rhetoric and material culture of childhood. However, they had to be invented as invisible or perhaps even non-existent within popular discourse in order to uphold rhetorical innocence and the racial “purity” of whiteness. Blacks were transitory objects among the state and other social systems of power looking for bodies to inflict sexual, social, and physical ills upon without remorse or potential to be detected. In a sense, black girls’ illegibility made them resourceful, usable.

Under careful scrutiny it becomes clear that racial and gender ideologies that black feminist scholars such as Hazel V. Carby and Deborah Gray White note originated in slavery not only marked black female bodies and sexualities as deviant and outside of proper womanhood.12 They also, I argue, placed black girls outside the normative realm

10 For more on age as a culturally-constructed concept and its emergence in mid-nineteenth- century America, see Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Also See Corinne T. Field and Nicholas Syrett, eds., Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2015). 11 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, 65. 12 For more on Hazel Carby and Deborah Gray White’s investigations of racialized gender ideologies that originated in slavery and influence images of black women’s bodies and sexualities, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1985).

9 of childhood and girlhood while oddly inscribing them as aberrant, (subhuman) black women. Ironically, twentieth-century black women’s political need to claim and later defend “respectable womanhood” on a national level in their political organizing initiatives during Jim Crow reproduced the illegibility of black girlhood. The lack of visibility of black girls, combined with the racial discourses that made black girlhood inconceivable within the larger political imaginary, caused social and psychological confusion as to whether black girls were in fact fully-grown women. This effacing network of discourses ultimately offers an incomplete understanding of black female personhood, political agency, and African American literary and intellectual genealogies, which I submit black girls had a substantial role in shaping from their triply-marginal

(age, race, gender) positions.

Making Black Girls Real provides a new narrative of black girlhood by investigating the lived experiences of black girls through a fresh historical approach that is informed by a mix of black feminist and queer theories. Specifically, I uncover a rich genealogy of black girlhood in the U.S. from 1861 to 1963. This genealogy contributes significant insights into the ways we conceive of black female personhood in the U.S. historical record and the social construction of girlhood in the fields of History of Child and Youth Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and

Black Feminism. My interdisciplinary work stands apart from other historical childhood studies in these fields as it intentionally crosses genres of writing and academic fields by placing several scholarly discourses in conversation with each other (historical and

10 contemporary) in order to excavate the liminal black girl-figure as the focal point to investigate age, race and gender relations, intellectual and political history in the U.S.

The central goal of my research is to recover black girls as historical actors and their girlhoods as sites of knowledge that undergird their counterhegemonic agency in a multiplicity of ways. Through my archaeology of this sociology via archival materials and literary texts across genres, but primarily first-person narratives by women who reflect on different phases of their lives, from girlhood to adulthood, I answer the following questions: How is black girlhood imagined in literary and visual culture?13

How do black women—in terms of embodied agency, subaltern knowledge, material and psychic capacities, and political insights—render black girlhood? How might black girls and black women have strategically negotiated and mobilized the legibility of black girls and their girlhoods at particular historical moments in response to racial and gender ideologies? What factors motivated black women and girls to remember and write about their girlhoods at varying historical periods?

By recovering black girls’ histories, my research complicates the monolithic narrative in literary and filmic productions that has vaguely defined black girlhood as a period of sexual and physical trauma, labor exploitation, early pregnancy, and severed kinship.14 Nevertheless, these representations in literary and film culture have shed light on issues of racial and gender violence that black women and girls have experienced in the U.S., but the lack of images and narratives of other aspects of black girlhood causes

13 My usage of the word archaeology is derived from the work of black feminist archaeologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste. See Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Black Feminist Archaeology (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2011). 14 These representations of black girlhood dominate twentieth-century literature and films on black life.

11 the audiences to concede that black girlhood is either lost or a symbolic of a period of abuse. Examples of these literary and later filmic representations include, but are not limited to, The Bluest Eye, For Colored Girls, The Color Purple, and Push. The strength of these twentieth-century representations is magnified with the outpouring of contemporary faith-based films, which recycle the same narrative. These experiences, unfortunately, are in fact a part of black girlhood, but they are certainly not a component of every narrative of black girlhood. Black women writers in the twentieth century such as Paule Marshall who capture the complexities of black girls experiencing pleasure as liminal subjects navigating urban geographies during World War II, clearly demonstrates in Brown Girl, Brownstones that racialized violence exists but there is more to black girlhood than experiencing violence. And, though I investigate occurrences of violence and trace racialized images and discourses around black girls, I argue for a more nuanced analysis of black girlhood.

Making Black Girls Real examines black girls and women’s creative negotiations of illegible black girlhood identities at particular historical moments in two ways: the queering of time and space (producing girlhood in physical and psychic spaces by inscribing a girl identity or recalling being a girl through orality and writing of personal narratives and semi-fictional autobiographies), and political organizing.15 That said, my work does not seek to forcibly place black girls back into age-based categories that have

15 Abdur-Rahman notes that literary scholars use nonlinear, “…artful, misshapen maneuvers”…to get the unspeakable acts—incest—on the page. Though I agree with Abdur-Rahman’s point, my project forges a new queer place on the page to understand the usefulness of “scrambling time and space” when studying black girls by illuminating the manner in which this allows them to piece together alternate realities beyond incest/violence. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closest: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 126-7.

12 denied them the rights to childhood and girlhood. Dominant temporalities of childhood and age do not afford black girls any privileges or protection. Rather, deeply influenced by the scholarship and activism of Ruth Nicole Brown, in my work, I identify black girlhood as both a valuable period of black female life that transcends the boundaries of age and chronological time as well as a sacred politicized act of resistance among black women and girls in the performing, sharing, remembering, and writing of girl stories.16 It understands age as a social category of analysis, but since it has existed outside the normative realms of linear and value-laden Western spaces and temporalities privileged for the performance of dominant childhood and youth material and psychic realities, black girlhood extends beyond the restraints of Western time as well as the proper period of childhood and adolescence. Historically, black girlhood has been fluid and liberating as it offers spaces to come into existence as holistic subjects, with a child and youth historiography, despite the linear Western ideologies, which deem that girlhood is not accessible to everyone, particularly poor black females. My research disrupts the narrative of the normative construction of childhood and girlhood in the early U.S., and offers a fresh perspective that sheds light on how black girls and women challenged racialized discourses of childhood and defined black girlhood as a valuable period of black female life.

16 This conceptualization of black girlhood as fluid and resistant to Western temporalities is influenced by Ruth Nicole Brown’s study of contemporary black girlhood cultures and M. Jacqui Alexander’s conceptualization of palimpsetic time. See Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). Also see, M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

13 A few scholars have taken on the task of speaking directly to black girls in order to explore their lived experiences at defining moments. Some of these scholars include sociologist Joyce Ladner (1971) in Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman, Rebecca

Carol (1997) in Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America, Kyra Gaunt

(2006) in The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-

Hop, and Ruth Nicole Brown (2009) in Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-hop

Feminist Pedagogy. Following Ruth Nicole Brown’s lead, other scholars such as Adilia

E.E. James and Bettina L. Love have engaged Hip-hop and black feminist theory to investigate aspects of black girls’ lives. History scholars such as Marcia Chatelain and

LaKisha Simmons have recently placed black girls in historical conversations of defining moments in U.S. culture such as the Great Migration and the era of legal racial segregation in New Orleans. Making Black Girls Real is in conversation with the aforementioned works—both historical and contemporary. 17My engagement with scholarship on black girlhood that is historical and contemporary is intentional, not simply because of the dearth of sources which focus specifically on black girlhood, but because I want to illuminate how the absence of black girls’ historiographies presents complex problems that traverse multiple generational lines and time periods, and thereby require a more creative, interdisciplinary approach to scholarship.18 Further, my creative approach to scholarship, unfortunately, but for important generative purposes in scholarly

17 Since 2010, the amount of scholarship on black girls has grown significantly. Granted, most of the scholarship is about contemporary black girls. But, the growth of scholarship around black girls has led to more scholars insisting that studying black girlhood warrants serious scholarly consideration and constitutes an emerging field of study—Black Girlhood Studies. 18 My approach to reading across times and disciplines is influenced by what Jack Halberstam calls the “scavenger methodology.” See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity / (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 13.

14 conversations of black girlhood, reveals that many of the problems that black girls faced during slavery are still haunting the lives of black girls in the present moment, or the afterlife of slavery.

Yet, returning to the limited sources on the historical study of black girlhood and black girls’ lives, the most accessible materials which are available to researchers to glean black girlhood experiences despite its presumed absence consist of autobiographies and personal narratives written by black women. Some of the more popular sources include Harriet Jacobs’s widely-read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Anne Moody’s

Coming of Age in Mississippi, and bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.

While these narratives provide rich terrain for studying black girlhood historically, leading scholars in the field of the History of Childhood and Youth Studies such as Colin

Heywood contend that studying the autobiographical accounts of childhood authored by adults do not provide adequate representations of youth experiences. Heywood writes:

Furthermore, there is once again the risk of treating various texts as windows into reality. Autobiographies, for example, might appear a secure point of entry to the world of the child. Closer inspection reveals that one is dealing with a literary form, complete with its own conventions. Above all, it is a ‘review of a life from a particular moment’, and hence it inevitably involves some shaping of the past. One can hope for some interesting insights, but they are likely to reveal as much about the author at the time of writing as about his or her past.19

Though Heywood rightly reiterates the risks involved with trying to obtain youth voices and experiences in particular source materials, his views on the generative space of autobiographies which document the histories of black people and other black diasporic communities in the early U.S. is limiting. Heywood does not recognize the importance of

19 Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood, 7.

15 archival materials, storytelling, bodies, writing, and other sources that serve as sites which aid in the memory projects that these communities are constantly engaging in order to (1) remember their histories with limited source materials, and also (2) make sense of their identities as belonging to “imagined communities.”20 Hence, Heywood may see the autobiography as too risky because conventional forms of writing have influenced the narration of experiences, but this form of writing has served as material proof of black existence, survival, and literary sites of memory.21 If there are limited, but accessible, sources that exist to study black girls during slavery, should we not listen to a black woman, who was once a black girl, and has survived to tell her experiences of being a girl in bondage? Or, should we leave the gap unfilled and ignore what she has to say about being young, black, and female? Further, should we ignore what she has to say about being young, black, and female even if her experiences prior to the abolishment of slavery mirror the experiences of black girls in our contemporary moment—a period when two black girls came of age in the White House, but are still largely illegible as girls in dominant culture?

Furthermore, African American Studies and Black Feminism discourses point to black women’s early years of life as essential to the formation of racial, sexual, and political elements of their identities. In “Adding Color and Contour to Early American

Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women,” through an

20 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). My usage of “memory projects” is influenced by Marita Sturken’s work on collective memory. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 21 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth : The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 101–24.

16 investigation of black women’s nineteenth-century slave narratives, literary scholar

Frances Smith Foster suggests that these authors shifted African American literary traditions, as they elaborated more on the early years of their lives, provided detailed descriptions of family histories or heritages in a manner that was not often articulated in the narratives of black men, and sought to offer an image of multiple dimensions of black female life and American cultural experiences. 22 Aligning their political organizing and scholarship along similar lines, black feminist scholars developed epistemologies such as intersectionality, standpoint theories, and literary criticisms to not only investigate black women’s early cultural productions, but also explore the myriad layers of black women’s lived realities that were affected by racial, class, gender, and sexual oppression. These frameworks have all been invaluable to black feminist criticism and the understanding of black women’s ontology and social locations, but they have rarely been utilized to study how black girls and their girlhoods, in particular, are figured historically within the U.S. imaginary or outside of literary and filmic productions.

There have been significant interventions in the field of History on the experiences of black children in slavery and post-Emancipation. These studies present limitations as scholars do not critically engage black women’s writings that surfaced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that were concerned with the conditions of black girls and documenting their early years as evidenced by the surge of black women who began referring to chapters and titles of their autobiographies or narratives as “trials of

22 Frances Smith Foster, “Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 27-8, 31-3, 37.

17 girlhood” or “slave girl” in the 1850s forward. The lack of historical materials authored by black youth during this period coupled with the social positioning of black girls, which inscribes them as aberrant subhuman black women, seriously impedes the ability to explore black female life trajectories holistically or shed light on the creative ways black women and girls have historically constructed and performed girlhood without engaging black girls, black women, or discourses around black womanhood. This engagement is crucial to not only reimagine black girlhood, but also because racial projects such as slavery and Jim-Crow have (1) blurred the line between the point at which one is first a black girl and then transitions into a black woman, and (2) wreaked havoc on the lives of black girls and women in a way that they may not have had the luxury of articulating or remembering their girlhood until far removed as an adult, examining their lives retrospectively.

Essentially, my research advances an epistemological shift as well as a critical rereading of early texts and images that surfaced during the twentieth-century recovery work of black women’s lives and writing, and suggests that researchers not only

“theorize” black womanhood, but also its developmental prerequisite—black girlhood.

Therefore, I address the gaps in scholarship, recover black girls’ history within America from 1861 to 1963, and most importantly, unearth and map black girlhood genealogies as historical sites to critically investigate aspects of black culture, political organizing, literary and intellectual trajectories, and the cultural negotiations of the performance of black female identities throughout the lifespan.

18 The dates that I have chosen for my project—1861 to 1963—indicate important turning points for black culture in general, and black girls, in particular. For example, the images and racial stereotypes that can be traced to slavery and continually oppress black women today, have also impacted the lives of black girls. Racialized images of black girls as Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s savage slave-girl character Topsy during the nineteenth century are critical for investigating the history of black girlhood in the U.S.

Topsy is to scholars unraveling racialized discourses around black girls as Saaartjie

Baartman is to scholars unraveling racialized discourses around black women. Further, the burgeoning reconstruction era meant new ways of understanding black identity and life, and also new ways of engaging in the U.S. as “legally” freed persons. The turn-of the century and the influx of mass populations of blacks fleeing to the cities is important to explore how black girlhood was performed and created during this migratory period. The movements of black girls in the bustling city and how they changed and claimed the urban landscape and geographies for the telling of their migratory lives is an essential part of my narrative in the second of half of Making Black Girls Real. I intentionally create a space in the narrative to add the lived experiences of the black girl who comes of age in diasporic communities of the rapidly changing American city, as she, too, represents an important part of the historical narrative of black girlhood. But, not all blacks migrated to the North, some stayed in the South. Thus, Making Black Girls Real also follows black girlhood down to one of the most violent landscapes of the Jim Crow south—the Mississippi Delta—to offer a revisionist narrative of the civil rights movement, which included the emergence and shaping of political subjectivities of black

19 girls like Anne Moody, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, and Brenda Travis. All of their stories offer new insights about southern black girlhood politics of resistance, gender, age, class, race, and space in the Jim Crow south. These girls illuminate fearless politics that are rarely made visible in narratives of Civil Rights history in general, or youth activists in particular, as the focus is largely male-centered.

Uncovering girlhoods that have been so intricately hidden in the dark creases of the fabric of U.S. history requires creative approaches that are steeped in critical analytics of geography, performance studies, feminist and queer scholarship on the intersections of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, I employ Roderick A. Ferguson’s queer of color analysis alongside Black Feminist scholarship to inform my discursive, literary, and visual cultural methods of investigating black girlhood through an archive I assembled—nineteenth-century slave narratives, oral histories, children’s literature, published and unpublished personal narratives, and visual images. A queer of color analysis is “made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique” that allows researchers to engage the queer dimensions of the usable past that manifest in the form of cultures and racial groups deemed aberrant as they “compe[l] identifications with and antagonisms to the normative ideals promoted by state and capital.”23 Queering black girls and women’s agency in examinations of both now-canonized nineteenth-century slave narratives, lesser known works, new types of cultural texts, and archives, involves a critical reading practice of disentangling normative scripts around gender, race, class, sexuality, age, time, and space which seek to

23 Roderick A Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 3,15,149.

20 police black girls, women, and adolescents’ material realties, in order to make their performances of girlhood and girl-identities visible in the margins during an era that made their existence socially, psychologically, and materially impossible.

Using a queer of color analysis to explore black girlhood from the 1861 publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—a seminal text detailing black girls’ experiences in slavery—through the murders of the four little girls in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, I illuminate a long history of black girlhood in the U.S. that has been concealed due to intersecting forces of youth, race, class, gender, and sexuality that renders them illegible, or incapable of being read or “seen” as “girls” in the heteronormative visual field, which Judith Butler notes as being a “racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.”24 In chapter one, “Never a Black Girl, Always a

Topsy: Race, Gender, and Age in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Nineteenth-Century U.S.

White Cultural Imagination,” I place Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular slave-girl character Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly in conversation with dominant cultural and medical discourses around enslaved black females. I map the racialization of black girls at the intersections of race, gender, and age within white cultural imagination during the nineteenth century. Doing so, the chapter illuminates contradictions in the author’s antislavery rhetoric as well as the profound differences between Stowe’s fictional representation of enslaved black girls and actual slave women’s narratives of girlhood in bondage. Close analysis of Stowe’s depiction of Topsy alongside racialized discourses show how the institution of slavery was conceptualized as

24 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17.

21 a racial project that constructed black girls as “ambiguously-aged” subjects who were outside of normal childhood, girlhood, and chronological time. The ambiguously-aged slave girl, as Topsy demonstrates, is simply rendered a small, subhuman slave woman who is used for labor from birth to death in the white imaginary, as no clear line exists to indicate the point at which the enslaved black female is a “girl-child” or “woman.”

Hence, scholars must investigate how black women and girls are impacted by the ideological weight of ambiguously-aged Topsys along with other racialized gender stereotypes in American culture.

In chapter two, “But Some of Us Remember we Were Girls: Reclaiming Girlhood in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I shift the focus from the discourses that proliferated dominant culture and rendered black girls and their girlhoods illegible, to the voices of those who actually experienced an enslaved girlhood. Through a critical rereading of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I draw on

African American Women’s literary criticism to re-imagine the female-authored slave narrative as one of the earliest archives documenting the life histories of enslaved girls in the U.S. More specifically, I argue Jacobs uses sentimentalist rhetorical strategies in the slave narrative to challenge racialized discourses around childhood and the young enslaved female. Doing so, Jacobs defines and reclaims girlhood in bondage, humanizes slave girls, and places slave girls’ liberation from slave masters within the existent antislavery and women’s rights movements’ discourses.

Following the turn of the century, I focus on the ways in which black women are remembering and writing black girlhood post-enslavement. The second half of the

22 dissertation pays particular attention to how racialized spaces in the urban city and Jim

Crow south impact how black girlhood is imagined among black women who must undo the work of Topsy’s image in the lives of black girls in their fiction and personal narratives. In chapter three, “Yearning for a Place to be a Queer Black Girl in the City:

Towards a Theory of “In-Betweenness” in the Study of Queer Black Girlhood in Paule

Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones,” I read Paule Marshall’s semi-autobiographical, pioneering novel Brown Girl, Brownstones as one of the earliest iterations of queer black girlhood in the U.S. I argue the ten-year old black-girl character Selina uses her “in- betweenness” as a queer girl/woman to create an entirely different world and resist the social forces of black and white heteropatriarchy which seek to both punish her for not aspiring to the aspects of white girlhood that are unattainable due to her race and a respectable Barbadian black girlhood that is within reach, but unbearable. Further, using

Afro-Caribbean lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s theory of the “erotic as power,” I show how

Selina not only survives between girl and woman and creates an entirely different world, but she also, unlike most black-girl protagonists of the twentieth century, experiences pleasure as an in-between, liminal subject.25

In the final chapter, “Black Girls were Never Meant to Survive the Jim Crow

South: Black Girlhood in the Narratives of Young Civil Rights Movement Leaders Anne

Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland,” I use the published and unpublished autobiographies Anne Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland to investigate the political subjectivities of black girls in the south. I argue that Moody,

Holland, and Travis tell a story of black girlhood that is entangled with the civil rights

25 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1984), 53.

23 movement and the racialized geography of the Jim Crow south. More plainly, their coming-of-age stories are not grounded in gendered expectations or familiar iterations of dominant performances of white girlhood. Rather, their articulations of the transition from girl to woman challenge gender and age ideologies by aligning their stages of youth with their political growth and youth activism in the Jim Crow south.

24 Chapter One

Never a Black Girl, Always a Topsy: Race, Gender, and Age in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Nineteenth-Century U.S. White Cultural Imagination

TOPSY stands as the representative of a large class of the children who are growing up under the institution of slavery…26

Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

An Episcopal Clergyman of New York, writing from Cambridge, England, on the 3d [sic] of November, thus speaks of the excitement caused by this work in all circles. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is still selling. It is a marvelous book—a revolutionary book…The music shops are full of songs and melodies about and from “Uncle Tom.” The great run at the Theaters is owing to the representation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The windows are full of beautiful illustrations of the various scenes in it; and, by the way, the book is full of pictures. Passing thro’ [sic] Cheapside the other day, all of a sudden, I saw in a window, a sable face, with bright eyes, shining teeth and a most quizzical, comical expression undersigned in large letters—“Topsy.” 27

Bangor Daily Whig & Courier, 1852

We add to the above testimony of a gentleman who lived many years at the South. Looking at a copy of “Uncle Tom” he remarked, “It is true to life. There is not a character there that I have not seen. We once had a Topsy in our own family.” 28

The Ohio Observer, 1853

Noted by her son Charles Stowe as having said, “The Lord himself wrote it

[Uncle Tom’s Cabin],” nineteenth-century antislavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, acting as “the humblest of instruments” in the Lord’s hands, introduced readers around the world to impoverished black girls through her eight or nine year-old slave-girl

26 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (London: T.Bosworth, 1853), 50. 27 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in England,” Bangor Daily Whig & Courier, December 8, 1852. 28 Author Unknown, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Persia,” The Ohio Observer, May 4, 1853.

25 character Topsy.29 Stowe explains in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that Topsy “is a character which may be found at the North as well as the South,” and the slave girl

“stands as the representative of a large class of the children who are growing up under the institution of slavery…”30 Firmly entrenched at the intersections of age, race, and gender,

Stowe’s representative of slave children transcended the pages of her novel, and became a favorite transnational pastime in homes, reading clubs, and theatres. Further, since the emergence of Stowe’s wildly successful book, black girls have been a fixture in the white cultural imagination as “Topsys” who, like black women, were racialized as “goblin- like,” deviant, and excessive. They have, as literary scholar Michelle Ann Abate asserts, stood in “sharp opposition to women’s gender roles in general and those for middle-and upper-class white figures in particular.” 31 Readers who believed Stowe’s slave-girl character was such a thoroughly compelling representation of slave children were moved to publicly claim that the characters portrayed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were, as The Ohio

Observer reader declares, “true to life.” One such reader supports his claim further by noting, “We once had a Topsy in our own family.”

At the same time, however, Stowe claims that her representation of slavery was

“inadequate” as the realities of slavery were “too dreadful for the purposes of art.” Still,

Stowe vigorously and publicly defended her right to reach beyond the realm of the art of

29 Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: compiled from her letters and journals (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890), 156. Stowe’s text was serialized in newspapers (National Era) prior to the publication of her book. However, I focus on the book because it garnered the most critical acclaim from transnational audience. 30 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (London: T.Bosworth, 1853), 50. 31 Michelle Ann Abate, “Topsy and Topsy-Turvy Jo: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and/in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” Children’s Literature 34, no. 1 (2006): 59–82, 62.

26 sentimental fiction, and thus claimed to have represented the facts and truthful images of little slave girls like Topsy and others who were laboring daily under the harsh conditions of slavery.32 As literary scholars Jane Tompkins and Joan D. Hedrick have shown in their work on Stowe’s writing, it was the nineteenth-century author’s rhetorical strategies in which she ingeniously drew upon familiar cultural ideas and “established patterns of living and traditional beliefs” that facilitated her ability to greatly influence mass culture.33 Drawing upon Tompkins and Hedrick, in this chapter, I want to illuminate how

Stowe’s imaginative rhetorical strategies allowed her to seamlessly integrate familiar ideas, beliefs, and, I add, dominant anti-black racial discourses through her character

Topsy. Stowe’s rhetorical strategies not only had, as Hedrick notes, “a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics,” but they a profound effect on the image of black girls and their absence of girlhood in the nineteenth-century U.S. white cultural imaginary. Stowe’s novel consolidated the racialized figure of the black girl in American popular culture.

Additionally, these so-called “true to life” images that Stowe presents in Uncle

Tom’s Cabin were accessible beyond the novel for anyone of means and desire to both consume and enact their ideal Topsy. The girl, who Stowe writes was “the blackest of her race,” with “shining teeth,” and an “odd and goblin-like” appearance was only eight or nine, but her fungibility as subhuman property made it reasonable and entertaining for white performers of all ages to enact the role of a negro girl in both their anti and

32 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (London: T.Bosworth, 1853), 5. 33 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 145; Joan D. Hedrick, The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.

27 proslavery pursuits. 34 Despite the feverish acclaim the performers received for meeting readers’ demands and desires to, in a sense, witness a staged Topsy in the flesh and hear songs about her wickedness, as a cultural production, Stowe’s novel was unmatched in terms of its rhetorical power in antislavery literature during the nineteenth century. The novel was believed to have dealt a mighty blow to the institution of slavery through its use of “true to life” characters like angelic Eva and “wicked” Topsy, as indicated by the frequently quoted reference to President Abraham Lincoln supposedly referring to Stowe as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war!”35

Examining performances of childhood from slavery to the civil rights era in mass culture, Historian Robin Bernstein argues that Stowe dealt another blow that has had profound effects on the image of children in U.S. culture. Bernstein argues Stowe created a “black-white logic in American visions of childhood” using two of the most popular child characters in the novel—Topsy and Eva.36 Bernstein elaborates further suggesting that through the polarizing of angelic white child Eva and the “wicked” black girl Topsy,

Stowe successfully “defined black children out of innocence and therefore out of

34 Stowe introduces Topsy as the “one of the blackest of her race” and “goblin-like.” I discuss Topsy’s descriptions extensively throughout my analysis. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 243. Well-known families such as the Hutchinson Family Singers and the Howard Family Company traveled the world performing songs such as “Little Topsy’s song” and “Oh, I’se So Wicked. For more on nineteenth-century theatrical performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Thomas L. Riis, “The Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Music 4, no. 3 (1986): 268–86; Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); John W. Frick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 35 Cindy Weinstein, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 36 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 15.

28 childhood itself.”37 Other scholars have made similar claims about Stowe’s usage of

Topsy and Eva to signify racialized difference between black children and white children.

However, minimal inquiry has been extended to critically reading Stowe’s depiction of

Topsy to glean a deeper analysis of what the author suggests about young slave girls, in particular, or the intersection of race, gender, and age.

Building on Bernstein’s insights in this chapter, I shed light on what being defined out of childhood and innocence meant for black girls like Topsy, according to Stowe, in white cultural imagination. In this chapter, I examine popular cultural and medical discourses during the nineteenth century to shed light on the racialization of black girls in dominant culture. Specifically, I place Harriet Beecher Stowe’s iconic slave-girl character

Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life among the Lowly in conversation with the medical writings of southern physician Samuel A. Cartwright. It is important to note that in order to capture the complexity of the historical racialization of black girls in the U.S. white cultural imaginary, I take an interdisciplinary approach to looking closely at traditional historical materials and Stowe’s rhetorical strategies through contemporary theoretical lenses. That said, using aspects of social theorist Roderick A. Ferguson’s queer of color critique to analyze these discourses, I argue, similar to Bernstein, that Stowe’s depiction of Topsy suggests that the institution of slavery or slave economy was conceptualized as a racial project. However, in my own analysis of the ways in which Stowe articulates slavery as a racial project, I contend that the author suggests that the system of slavery constructed black girls as “ambiguously-aged” racialized subjects who were outside of dominant ideals of childhood, girlhood, and age. The racial project slavery reconfigured

37 Ibid, 16.

29 age around black female bodies. Specifically, Ferguson’s critique of historical materialism and the extent to which “capital—“a site of contradictions” that “compels racial formations that are eccentric” to gender and sexual normativity, enhances my reading of Topsy as an aberrant, racialized subject who was produced in the slave economy, and thus embodies deviations from dominant ideals of childhood, girlhood, and age.38 However, in line with Ferguson’s critique of material capitalism, Topsy, though a

“strange bedfellow” or deviation from dominant ideals of white childhood, girlhood, and the social construction of age, is still rendered usable for sustaining white supremacy through her eccentricity in terms of racialized appearance, body, labor, and sub- humanity.

Since Topsy is ambiguously-aged, Stowe suggests that dominant ideals of childhood and girlhood are directly related to linear or chronological time and feelings or emotion. I support my analysis by drawing on feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander and

Historian Walter Johnson’s readings of temporality to examine Topsy’s displacement from chronological time. Alexander’s reading of the palimpsestic character of time, or the

“scrambling” of the past and present in order to reveal the “ideological traffic between and among formations that are otherwise positioned as dissimilar,” complements my reading of the rhetorical moves that Stowe makes in order to do the antislavery work of revealing the horrors of slavery on Topsy, or her past, while also sustaining the supremacy of white childhood and girlhood by keeping utterances of her deviance, as a

38 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward A Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 21.

30 result of slavery, ever-present.39 Additionally, in Johnson’s analysis of temporality in the

Atlantic slave trade, he argues “time became an important medium for the elaboration of white supremacy,” as slave owners believed they owned slaves as well as their “time.”40

Johnson uses this theory of time to explore slave labor and the slave trader’s constant manipulation of the ages of black bodies in attempts to garner more profits. I use

Johnson’s reading of time in the slave market and labor in my reading of how the lack of a clear line between slave girl and slave woman facilitates slippages in Stowe’s depiction of Topsy.41 These slippages cause the ambiguously-aged girl to be imagined as simply a small slave woman in white cultural imagination. Extending Alexander and Johnson’s analysis of time to explore the medical discourses of Samuel A. Cartwright in which he details the differences between slave children and whites as well as the presumed elasticity of the subhuman slave body, it is clear that as a consequence of Topsy’s placement outside of time, she is also outside of any hegemonic time-based social constructions such as social dependency, emotion, and the right to “feel” or experience pain—ideals increasingly associated with white childhood, girlhood, and a particular

39 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 190. 40 Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 45, no. 4 (2000): 485–99, 492. 41 Johnson contends that slave traders “instructed slaves to give ages that accorded with their polished bodies and to hide pasts that might make buyers wary.” I use this analysis of the ways bodies were presented in the slave market to theorize Stowe’s rhetorical strategies in presenting Topsy as an ambiguously-aged subject who is outside of childhood, girlhood, and linear time. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul : Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 130.

31 stage of one’s youth.42 However, Topsy is fully capable and expected to experience shame and humiliation.

Unlike most nineteenth-century white abolitionists who, as Historian Mary Niall

Mitchell argues, used the images of “white-looking slave girls as living metaphors for slavery’s evils” to appeal to Northern white audiences on behalf of enslaved children,

Stowe deviates from the trend, and elects to use a motherless slave girl who she states is the “blackest of her race” and “wicked.”43 This deviation from popular abolitionist propaganda along with the limited studies on the historical role Topy has played in articulating racial discourses of black girls in the U.S. beckon scholars to return to

Stowe’s text with a more nuanced queer and intersectional literary lens to examine the roles that race, gender, and age play in the construction of slave girls outside of childhood and girlhood, or what Bernstein notes as the innocence of childhood that “was raced white.”44 It is at the site of Stowe’s powerful and instructive characters, especially the black-girl Topsy, where Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s abolitionist agenda is less clear. Topsy embodies a host of racial, gender, and age ideologies that do not align neatly with either proslavery or antislavery discourses.

Topsy is one of the earliest and most notable black-girl figures whose image transgressed both the boundaries of the slave institution and the U.S. in the form of

42Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), 26. Ariès suggests that since the seventeenth century, “the idea of childhood was bound up with the idea of dependence…” I extend this idea of dependence further in my argument to explore its relation to the senses and emotions, or the lack thereof, in terms of black childhood and girlhood. 43 Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 55. 44 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 4.

32 images, dolls, stage performers, silent films, and songs. Thus, understanding her presumed “making” in the slave economy as imagined by Stowe is of utmost importance when examining the cultural history of black girlhood. Much like their mothers carrying the symbolic weight of the intersection of race and sex in dominant cultural discourses, they too, carried the ideological burden of Topsy.

My analysis of Topsy is structured around Stowe’s descriptions of the girl’s appearance, origins, treatment and assigned duties as the subhuman property of slave owners. In discussing Stowe’s descriptions of Topsy’s appearance and body, I show how the child’s body becomes an intergenerational text in which wickedness, filth, and the whipped black body mark what Black Feminist literary scholar Hortense J. Spillers describes as “hieroglyphics of the flesh.” These hieroglyphics serve as physical and symbolic (semiotic) evidence of the perpetual violence that enslaved female bodies were subjected to as punishment for their presumed sexual deviance which, not surprisingly, also closely mimicked the larger pattern of racial violence that rendered black women less than human.45 Although my analysis is primarily focused on placing Alexander and

Johnson’s investigations of temporality in conversation with Stowe’s representation of ambiguously-aged slave girls who are outside of the dominant construction of childhood,

I briefly engage literary scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s analysis of incest tropes in

African American women’s writing. Abdur-Rahman argues that the incest trope presents the black girl and single black mother as subjects who “exist along a continuum of black female representation, morphing into and out of each other, revealing one aspect of black

45 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, 67.

33 women’s lives while occluding others.” 46 I use Abdur-Rahman’s theorizing of the continuum of black female representation to read Topsy’s flesh markings and origin story as generating “slippages” in which Topsy morphs into a slave woman. I support this assertion of Topsy being a small slave woman and defective further by integrating the analysis of Samuel A. Cartwright on the differences of slave children and whites and their inabilities to feel. Bearing no difference between slave women and children and lacking the ability to feel or receive nurture and care, I contend that Topsy is viewed as capable of performing gendered labor in a manner similar to slave women, as she is not a normal child or girl, and though she is brought into better conditions in her new master’s home, her past and being “made” in the system of slavery is an ever-present reminder of her sub-human status.

Of Slave Girls and Slave Women “It is your system [sic] makes such children.”47 Miss Ophelia, Uncle Tom’s Cabin When Miss Ophelia, a northern abolitionist responsible for determining the extent to which Topsy is salvageable, runs out of ideas on how to discipline the girl, given the child’s history of being severely beaten by previous owners, she expresses her frustration to Augustine St. Clare and proclaims, “It is your system [sic] makes such children.”48

Agreeing with Miss Ophelia, and pushing her to think more critically about how best to discipline and educate Topsy, St. Clare responds to Miss Ophelia, and affirms, “I know it;

46 Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 116. 47 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 252. 48 Ibid., 252.

34 but they are made, —they exist, — and what is to be done with them?”49 Through my analysis in this section, the “making” of Topsys—ignorant, dirty, and undisciplined slave girls—and the purposes for which they exist, or are made within the system of slavery, become evident in Stowe’s descriptions of Topsy’s appearance and body, origins, assigned duties, and treatment in the St. Clare home.

The moment Stowe introduces slave-girl Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, readers are made privy to the girl’s “wickedness” and curiously inhuman appearance. Her new owner

Augustine St. Clare reveals to his cousin Miss Ophelia later in the novel that his intentions for buying the child were to both remove her from the harsh conditions of her previous owners and also use the child as an experiment to see if his cousin, with all of her education and antislavery ideals, could “make something” out of Topsy—the child

“made” by the system. However, Topsy is initially introduced to readers as Augustine St.

Clare’s new “purchase” that he thought was “a rather funny specimen in the Jim Crow line.”50 Stowe writes:

He pulled along a little negro girl, about eight or nine years of age. She was one of the blackest of her race; and her round shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved quick and restless glances over everything in the room. Her mouth, half open with astonishment at the wonders of the new Mas’r’s parlor, displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her wooly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction…Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance,—something, as Miss Ophelia afterwards said, “so heathenish,” as to inspire that good lady with utter dismay; and turning to St. Clare, she said, “Augustine, what in the world have you brought that thing here for?”51

49 Ibid., 252. 50 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 243. 51 Ibid., 243.

35 Like most children who enter new spaces, Topsy begins to study the room and as Stowe writes, has “her mouth, half open with astonishment at the Mas’r’s new parlor…” But this astonishment or childish wonder is quickly subsided by Stowe’s return to Topsy’s appearance that incites even the “good lady” Miss Ophelia to declare that there is something “so heathenish” about the child. Here, Stowe presents Topsy as something small like a girl-child and has similar desires and wonders for new environments. But

Stowe quickly closes the gap that may invite readers to consider Topsy’s similarities as evidence that she is normal or anything like Augustine St. Clare’s angelic daughter Eva by relying on racial and gender ideologies that emerged in slavery or the “system” that made the young girl knowable as deviant in white cultural imagination. Stowe echoes claims made by well-known Southern proslavery physician Samuel A. Cartwright and slave traders alike who believed “the blackest” slaves were “the ugliest,” but the most useful for the hardest and most inhumane forms of labor.52

Interestingly, though the slave-girl character that Stowe choses to introduce to readers draws upon racialized discourses about enslaved females, the author does not reiterate the methods of popular white abolitionists that Historian Mary Niall Mitchell argues routinely consisted of using the images of fair-skinned or “white-looking” slave girls to appeal to Northern white audiences on behalf of enslaved children. Mitchell writes:

The usefulness of white-looking slave girls as living metaphors for slavery’s evils sprung from stories about race and slavery already familiar to northern audiences: harrowing tales of white people enslaved in the South, popular representations of

52 Echoing published writings of influential nineteenth-century physicians such as Samuel A. Cartwright, Historian Walter Johnson notes that the “blackest” slaves were believed to be the “healthiest” See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, 138-9.

36 white and black children in the nineteenth century, and tragic antislavery stories about light-skinned slave girls and women forced to sacrifice their virtue.53

Rather, Stowe uses Topsy, a girl whose ungodly ugliness is suggested upon her first appearance in the antislavery novel as she is “one of the blackest of her race,” heathenish, odd and goblin-like.54 Topsy’s ugliness and filth as a small slave girl is considered repulsive to white Miss Ophelia and the black chambermaids alike. Topsy’s “goblin-like” appearance is depicted as something strange and “cunning.” Hence, Topsy’s unusual combination of ugliness, childish wonder and eager willingness to gaze around her new environment stand in as evidence of the girls’ wicked desires to engage in mischief and foreshadow her future attempts to steal from the chambermaids and little Eva.

Considering Topsy’s introduction as the unusually ugly and strange new

“purchase” for the St. Clare home, the child is imagined as property to be used, and thus slavery is also imagined as a system that negates the possibility of the young slave girls’ humanity, child status, and girlhood. Ironically, despite the racialized discourses that are being used to construct an image of the slave girl, it is the system of slavery that Stowe wishes to project as responsible for Topsy’s appearance and lack of access to childhood or girlhood in order to engender readers’ empathy for enslaved children. Despite Stowe’s abolitionist agenda or intentions, the image that is constructed presents a child who shows no similarities or markers of the dominant and legible ideal of whiteness let alone ideal embodiments of white femininity like Eva St. Clare that would be capable of engendering

53 Mary Niall Mitchel, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 55. 54 The chambermaids Rosa and Jane are described as “white as many a woman,” and pretty, and at times, Rosa is noted as “little” in the novel. But, both chambermaids are suggested to be older than Topsy and they are not as central to the text or in mass culture, in terms of popular characters, as Topsy. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 321-2.

37 empathy from readers. Thus, Topsy is cast out of the imaginable possibilities of girlhood.

But, at the same time, Topsy bares all of the racial and gender markers that make her familiar or knowable as part of a subhuman female slave population. For example, Eva

St. Clare is the perfect image of white femininity and cleanliness. Eva is introduced to readers as a five or six-year old little girl whose “form was the perfection of childish beauty...”55 Eva always wears white and has a head full of “long golden-brown hair that floated like a cloud around it, the deep spiritual gravity of her violet blue eyes, shaded by heavy fringes of golden brown.”56 While Topsy, on the other hand, is the epitome of the racial and gender ideologies that conceptualize enslaved black women as outside of the cleanliness of white femininity. Topsy is “the blackest of her race,” filthy ragged clothes, and has a head of “wooly hair.”

As the perfect child and little savior, Eva represents the dominant ideal of white childhood, or what Robin Bernstein notes as “racial innocence.”57 The innocence and purity of white childhood that Eva signifies is not sullied by slavery—the system that

Miss Ophelia and St. Clare suggest “made” Topsy. And Eva, with “St. Clare blood in her, and the ability to speak, for all the world,” unlike Topsy, is certainly a hegemonic ideal of white girlhood, femininity, and humanity. 58 Stowe writes:

55 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 151. 56 Ibid., 151. 57 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 4-6. 58One of St. Clare chambermaids Rosa, Stowe describes as “the pretty young quadroon,” stated that Eva has the “St. Clare blood.” See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 251. Historian Barbara Welter’s conceptualization of the four “cardinal virtues” of “True Womanhood—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”—guides my reading of this

38 Eva stood looking at Topsy. There stood the two children representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!59

Similar to slave owners’ justification for constructing black women’s bodies as subhuman in order to perform a particular duty—sexual, emotional, or physical labor—

Stowe, too, heaps all of the racial and gender ideologies around female slaves and children proliferating in dominant cultural and medical discourses in her deployment of

Topsy to appeal to the senses of whites in hopes of abolishing slavery.60 Like the slave woman whose status as sexual property makes her the antithetical counterpart to white mistresses, and thus removes her from dominant ideals of white femininity and womanhood, Topsy stands under the gaze of Eva as a small representative of similar aberrance.61 Borrowing from Hazel V. Carby and Ann DuCille, Robin Bernstein contends that such extensions of aberrance between black women and girls like Topsy are possible because “innocent childhood resembled the cult of true womanhood in that each discourse attached sexual innocence to white children and women, respectively.

particular passage and Stowe’s depiction of Eva as an image of proper white girlhood during the nineteenth century. See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74. 59 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 251. 60 Patricia Hill Collins notes that in the process of trading and exploiting black bodies in chattel slavery, the “dehumanizing black people by defining them as nonhuman and as animals was a critical feature of racial oppression.” See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005), 55. 61 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 29-32.

39 Antebellum black children, like black women, were assumed to be ineligible for sexual purity…”62 Stowe’s rhetoric in this scene speaks to Bernstein’ claim.

When the two girls are standing close to each other, the defective nature and lack of refined girlhood that Topsy represents and the ideal image of girlhood and white femininity that Eva embodies are suggested to be both characteristics of their “biology” and socialization. The discourse of biology coupled with a distinctive genealogy and socialization suggests that Topsy is innately subhuman and can ever only approximate ascendency to the dominant ideal of femininity that Eva inherits from her whiteness and socialization. Literary critic Kerry Sinanan asserts that this moment between Topsy and

Eva suggests that there is “a racial difference between white and black not to be overcome by the abolition of slavery itself.”63 Agreeing with Sinanan, the language of

“born of ages” is used in the text in a manner that suggests that Topsy can be brought into the space of the St. Clare home, disciplined by Miss Ophelia, and removed from the dreadful conditions of slavery. But the system of slavery that has invented Topsy as inferior and outside of the refined space of girlhood cannot be removed. The biological markers inscribed in her blackness will never cease to exist. And, though Topsy is only eight or nine years old, as a result of the history of socialization that she has experienced as a slave combined with that of her ancestors, she cannot rise to the level of intelligence, cultivation, physical and moral eminence that Eva embodies.

62 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 42. 63Kerry Sinanan, “The Slave Narrative and the Literature of Abolition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 61.

40 Hence, standing as a representative of enslaved girls, Topsy, even as a small girl, inherits both the physical and ontological abjectness of the black race, especially that of black women. As “the Afric” she has inherited the negating discourses of blackness, which make her not only just inferior to whiteness as a result of her skin color, but also forever removed from the category of human (child). Furthermore, as a discursive object,

Topsy has inherited the long history of racial and gender ideologies around the people of

African descent in the U.S., thus making it utterly unimaginable that the child could truly move from a space of the subhuman slave to full human irrespective of the abolition of slavery or the paternalism shown to her by whites. Topsy is still black and female; therefore, the status of fully human, child, or girl—all conceptualizations deemed the privilege of whites—are suggested to be biologically and psychosocially impossible for her to attain in white cultural imagination. Topsy has been made defective, and her defects are always present as they are bound in her corporeality, genealogy, and social conditions. Contrast Topsy’s status with that of Eva’s positioning in the novel, it becomes clear that the slave girl is steeped in a relentless cycle of deviance that is virtually inescapable. Though Eva’s father owns slaves including Topsy, the white child is not marred by the system of slavery, as she has the “St. Clare blood” of her ancestors who were not created or socialized as inferior and subhuman by the system of slavery.

Biology and psychosocial differences between Eva and Topsy are also suggested in Miss Ophelia’s worries that Topsy’s “wickedness” or filth will rub off on Eva and the abolitionist herself. Despite Miss Ophelia’s worries, Augustine St. Clare is confident that

Topsy’s wickedness will not rub off on Eva because of biology, as he states, “evil rolls

41 off Eva’s mind like the dew off a cabbage-leaf, —not a drop sinks in.”64 Extending aspects of Barbara Welter’s analysis of purity as a value of true womanhood and Nancy

Cott’s revised concept of purity as “passionlessness,” Historian Robin Bernstein posits that this scene speaks to the power of Eva’s embodied performance of “innocence” that can be extended to Topsy and others.65 Innocence, as conceptualized by Bernstein, is an

“active state of purity that is manifested through embodied performances of passionlessness.”66 But, considering the language used in the text implying Topsy’s deviance is the result of being made defective in the system of slavery, I challenge

Bernstein’s claim here to contemplate the extent to which the transference of racial innocence that Stowe suggests in this scene is more or less about Topsy as it is about assuaging white parents’ fears who are reading a story about a “heathenish” black girl to their children. This black girl is one who repulses white ladies and is in close proximity to the purity of white girlhood, or to the children of white parents reading the novel.

Similar to literary scholar Yael Ben-Zvi who contends that Stowe’s first book in

1833, Primary Geography for Children, illuminates the author’s “stance on the civic futures of African Americans,” here, I want to argue that this scene provides an opportunity to think critically about Stowe’s goals as an abolitionist and one concerned about the socialization of white children, especially girls, for their future as responsible citizens.67 In using literacy to help raise other “fair, high-bread” and spiritual children

64 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 253. 65 Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 219–36, 220. 66 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence. 67 Yael Ben-Zvi, “The Racial Geopolitics of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Geography Textbooks,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29, no. 1 (2012): 9–36, 9. Stowe’s first published

42 with “prince-like movements,” Stowe could speak to white youth and their parents with her text and characters who speak from two sides of their mouths—one side illuminates a people abused because of slavery and deserving to be free because they are subhuman, and the other side stating that because slavery (and God) has rendered them subhuman, they are still less than the young white child, especially the pious girl, and thus still in need of your direction and discipline. To the prospective young, white abolitionist who reads her novel, Stowe says that essentially children like Topsy will need you, as the small white child born of ages of refinement and cultivation, to be responsible, pious, and pure. Slave children will need the small white child to do what you are told, as your becoming a good citizen, much like your ancestors and parents, will be the only thing that salvages a wicked Topsy. But above all, Topsy will need you to always be morally superior—just as your biology, economic conditions, and God himself have positioned you. Therefore, considering Stowe’s investment in nineteenth-century children’s literature, the scene could also be read as one of the defining moments in which Stowe reaches beyond the text to ensure white parents of the North whom she desires to reveal the horrors of slavery, to rest assured that their children—as a result of their biology combined with their social conditions—cannot be negatively affected by Topsy’s race.

Perhaps the implication that this scene has multiple goals, especially around race and gender, is evidenced by the fact that Miss Ophelia is not so sure that she, as a white book was a textbook for children 1833. See Catherine and Harriet Beecher, Primary Geography for Children, on an Improved Plan: With Eleven Maps and Numerous Engravings (Cincinnati: Corey & Fairbank, 1833). As Ben-Zvi points out, this textbook was revised in 1855. Stowe’s concern for the socialization of children is evidenced by her publications for children and rhetorical style that appealed to children. There are many scholars who have used the journals, letters, and diaries of young people detailing Stowe’s influence on their young minds during the nineteenth century.

43 woman, can escape being marred by the small girl Topsy, who again embodies the same racial and gender ideologies ascribed to black women and their sexualities which make her blackness innately sexual, deviant, and most importantly “excessive.”68 In an illuminating passage involving Topsy and little Eva, the slave girl implies that she is aware of racial and gender ideologies that construct her as aberrant and excessive in ways similar to black women by stating Miss Ophelia is afraid to touch her because of her blackness. When Eva, who is dying, asks Topsy why she is so bad and if she loves anybody, Topsy reminds the child that she has never had a mother or a father and does not have any memory of ever being loved. Topsy tells Eva she “Donno nothing ‘bout love; I loves candy and sich, that’s all…Couldn’t never be nothing but a nigger, if I was ever so good. If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.” 69 The young savior

Eva insists that Miss Ophelia—the northern abolitionist—could possibly love her if she were “good.” Topsy refutes Eva’s claim, as she is aware of Miss Ophelia’s belief that she is inherently flawed and different than little girls like Eva, as she explains, “No; she

[Miss Ophelia] can’t bar me, ‘cause I’m a nigger!—she’d ‘s soon have a toad touch her!

There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do nothin’!”70 Affirming Topsy’s observation upon hearing her explain this to Eva as she and Augustine St. Clare clandestinely watched the girls from another room, Miss Ophelia, reveals, “I’ve always

68 Terri Kapsalis notes that “Black female sexuality, constructed as heathen, lascivious, and excessive” was used in “nineteenth-century scientific culture to counter its constructions of fragile and frigid (and also pathological) white female sexuality.” See Terri Kapsalis, “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 274. 69 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 288. 70 Ibid., 288.

44 had a prejudice against negroes. [A]nd it’s a fact, I never could bear to have that child touch me.”71 Seeking to comfort and help her make sense of what Topsy reveals to Eva,

Augustine St. Clare explains to Miss Ophelia: “It puts me in mind of mother. It is true what she told me; if we want to give sight to the blind, we must be willing to do as Christ did,—call them to us, and put our hands on them.”72 Yet, as the child explained, placing hands on her is unfathomable, and therefore, if St. Clare’s mother’s words were perceived to be true, Topsy, a child not deserving a gentle touch, could never be saved.

Topsy’s initial unwavering belief in this moment that Miss Ophelia cannot bear to touch her, but would rather touch a toad because of her race, is important in terms of thinking critically about the tensions that emerge in Stowe’s antislavery goals on behalf of slave girls like Topsy. As mentioned previously, the text makes the case that slavery is responsible for Topsy’s defects, and liberating the girl would allow her to, in line with sentimental literature, change her life, accept and adhere to proper religious or moral standards. But, the suggestion that Topsy’s race and gender are biological and social factors that have caused her deviance and lack of ability to be touched by even the pious white woman who espouses antislavery rhetoric, obscures the abolitionist goals of the text, especially the sort of liberties that black girls like Topsy are presumed to deserve in nineteenth-century white cultural imagination. Granted, the antislavery goals of Miss

Ophelia’s character consist of illuminating the hypocrisy among Northern abolitionists who oftentimes harbor feelings of the slaves’ inherent inferiority while also fighting against the institution of slavery. But, Augustine St. Clare—the blood father of Eva, and

71 Ibid., 288-9. 72 Ibid., 289.

45 the benevolent, slave owning paternal figure of Topsy and other slaves—is positioned in this scene in a way that absolves Miss Ophelia and other whites who desire to sustain their racial supremacist ideologies while also joining antislavery efforts.

Taken together, both of these scenes in the text assure Stowe’s target audience of readers that their whiteness and that of their children will continue to be protected as St.

Clare reminds Miss Ophelia of the impermeability of whiteness and its legacy of racial supremacy and innocence that Eva naturally inherits. This whiteness and legacy of racial superiority and innocence act as an impervious shield of protection from the

“wickedness” of Topsy and other black children that she represents. Clearly, St. Clare functions as a symbol of irony as he, too, is defined by the hypocrisy in his owning of

Topsy and other slaves. But, again, St. Clare’s placement in both of these scenes from the text as the quintessential white patriarchal figure who has significant power in the slave economy and within the larger white cultural imaginary due to his wealth helps to materialize why he is needed. That is, St. Clare’s presence is needed in this particular exchange between characters (and the slave institution) to reiterate Eva’s whiteness and perfection as an innocent girl impervious to Topsy’s racialized defects. Augustine St.

Clare is a slave master invested in a particular sort of cruel paternalism in order to sustain the racial order. St. Clare, like the southern physician, is endowed with a perverse sense of culturally prescribed arrogance that permits him to be in close contact with the “filth” of black excess, without soiling his whiteness. The southern slave owner, as Historian

Mark Smith asserts, is an essential figure that associated the act of “touching” slaves as proof of their (meta)physical and moral imperviousness to blackness, which helped to

46 sustain “their own cherished view of slave-master relationship.”73 St. Clare’s “wisdom” that he draws upon to explain the function of whiteness and touch to Miss Ophelia also points to what Historian Smith notes as whites’ beliefs that they must utilize all of their senses, especially touch, to demonstrate their expertise in knowing or being able to assess black bodies, behaviors, and changes to sustain racial categories.74

Like Stowe’s choice to use a small female child who is the “blackest of her race,” these two scenes continue to demonstrate the author’s diversion from abolitionists’ political trends, as she makes Miss Ophelia—the figure with the antislavery ideals— fearful of Topsy’s touch. Referring to Historian Mark M. Smith again, “good abolitionists, showed no revulsion at the prospect of touching black skin.”75 Though Miss

Ophelia vehemently opposes the institution of slavery, she explains that she has “always had a prejudice against negroes.”76 Miss Ophelia states: “I don’t know how I can help it, they are disagreeable to me,—this child [Topsy] in particular…”77 I argue here that causes for Miss Ophelia’s repulsion of Topsy, in particular, are related to the intersection of the slave girls’ race and gender which is indoctrinated with the same markers of sexual deviance as slave women.

By strategically placing Topsy in close proximity to the symbolic ideal of a perfect girl in the young, white Eva, Stowe manages to do the abolitionist work of revealing the harsh conditions of slavery while also staunchly projecting a representation

73 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 74 Ibid., 25. 75 Ibid., 37. 76 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 289. 77 Ibid., 289.

47 of the slave girl—similar to the black woman outside of proper womanhood—as aberrant and intellectually inferior. The slave girl, as Stowe depicts, is deserving of being free from enslavement, but not deserving of being valued as a normal, girl child, as she was made within the institution of slavery, a site in which the purity and innocence of white girlhood could not exist.

Exposing the Young Black Female Body in Sentimental Literature

Topsy’s aberrant appearance that signifies her placement outside of the realm of childhood and girlhood are exposed again, literally, when Stowe invites readers to pause and fully appreciate the filth and flesh markings that speak to the character’s deviance.

Specifically, the gaze upon Topsy’s body intensifies when Miss Ophelia and

Chambermaid Jane commence to clean the young girl. While remarking on Topsy’s body as being “disgusting” and “dreadfully dirty,” they inspect her further and find that the child’s back and shoulders are covered with “great, welts and calloused spots, ineffaceable marks of the system under which she had grown up thus far…”78 Stowe’s abolitionist goal in this scene is to employ Topsy’s naked body to function as a sort of text that illuminates the violence of the slave economy. The marks on Topsy’s body are ineffaceable, and thus cannot be trivialized or forgotten—they are Topsy. The child will forever bear the markings of the system in which she was produced and exploited. But,

Stowe’s choice to reveal Topsy’s body or remove the young girls’ tattered clothing, and explain to readers what lies beneath suggests that the child bares a “hieroglyphics of the

78 Chambermaid Jane calls Topsy “disgusting” like other “nigger youg uns!” Miss Ophelia calls Topsy “dreadfully dirty” on pg. 245. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 245-6; emphasis mine.

48 flesh,” that Hortense Spillers notes of the captive bodies of African females and males.79

The slave system is once again suggested to have made the child defective and out of the place of a child as her body and the flesh markings that are present speak to the same sort of commodification process of adult female slavers—severing, ripping, marking or branding of the slave body in order to make its property value and inhumanity ever- visible.80 Moreover, drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of the frequent exposure of the “mutilated [black] body” to show the “brute materiality of existence and suffering,”

Stowe encourages readers to briefly imagine themselves or their children in the slave girl’s body.81 However, as I extend aspects of Hartman’s analysis further, the out-of-body experiences that Stowe encourages by exposing Topsy’s pained flesh still fall short of inciting empathy in the white reader. Stowe establishes the unquestionable immutability and supremacy of whiteness through Eva, in order to define Topsy’s raced black body, all the while reassuring the white reader that they can remain untainted if they imbue the slave girl’s horrific existence with their own abolitionist passions.82

Yet, again, considering Stowe’s antislavery goals for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the author may have wanted to use this scene to give readers a more intimate gaze into the brutality of slavery that has no regard for the humanity of slaves, including that of little children. In fact scholars Richard H. Brodhead and Robin Bernstein support this claim as perhaps one of Stowe’s motivations for undressing Topsy in this scene. Brodhead and

79 “Hieroglyphics of the flesh.” See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67. Though the markings are illegible, I am arguing here that they articulate a particular racialized deviance in white cultural imagination. 80 Ibid., 67. 81 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 21. 82 Ibid., 21.

49 Bernstein contend that during this scene, Topsy becomes not simply a child who is susceptible to violence, but also “the child”—that is, a “paradigmatic case” of the physically hurt sentimental child.”83 According to Bernstein, Topsy’s ability to be recovered by the racial innocence and touch of Eva enables her to be “healed” and restored “to humanity, natural Christianity, and childhood.”84 But, extending a Black

Feminist literary critique to this scene, I challenge Bernstein and Brodhead’s claims that this moment of undressing Topsy reveals that she is, in fact, “the” sentimental child, if we consider the interconnected social forces of race, class, gender, and age ideologies in the lives of black females during the nineteenth century. For example, in this scene, Stowe’s antislavery goals are unclear as the author jettisons the politics of sentimental literature and the potential to humanize Topsy by aligning her with an image of white femininity, and instead bares Topsy’s naked body.

As I mentioned previously, Bernstein uses aspects of the Black Feminist literary critiques of DuCille and Carby to support her claim that the same racial and sexual ideologies of black women were attached to the bodies and sexualities of black girls. That said, to read Topsy as inheriting the material and discursive conditions of black women, one must also consider how these racialized discourses played out in white cultural imagination. Meaning, if Topsy’s race and gender are considered to be markers of her racial and sexual aberrance, removing her clothes—and essentially placing the body of a small black female on display—has very limited potential to incite ideals of humanity, vulnerability, innocence, or the purity and cleanliness of white childhood. Furthermore,

83 Richard H. Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations, no. 21 (1988): 67–96, 84-5; Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 45. 84 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 45

50 as many scholars investigating nineteenth-century physician’s racist practices have noted, the naked black female body garnered no sympathy, as it was largely deemed filthy, accessible, and an embodiment of lascivious sexual desire. For example, in “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,” scholar Terri Kapsalis in her analysis of influential nineteenth-century physician J. Marion Sims, recounts a scene during which dominant race and gender ideologies reveal that exposed black female bodies were not believed to be in need of privacy. Kapsalis notes that when Sims treated a white woman who sustained injuries after being thrown from a horse, he made sure she

“was covered with a sheet during examination.”85 On the contrary, Kapsalis notes that slave woman Lucy whose slave master sent her to Sims to be treated, was given “a bed in his homemade backyard hospital for “Negroes”…“while about a dozen male spectators watched.”86The slave woman was not provided with a sheet or any privacy, as Kapsalis notes, “the experimenting physician believed that he need not worry about protecting the slave’s modesty.”87

Likewise, Historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz recounts an incident in which another popular nineteenth-century physician W.H. Gantt’s belief that a nine-year-old, prepubescent slave girl was pregnant eventually led to the child’s death, as he would not

85 Terri Kapsalis, “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 274. 86 Ibid., 268-9, 273-4. 87 Ibid., 274.

51 consider other causes of the girl’s symptoms or distress. Following the child’s death,

Gantt found that she had a “large abdominal tumor instead of a fetus.”88 Schwartz writes:

Apparently in self-defense, Gantt observed that it was “the undivided opinion of all who saw her that she was pregnant.” He further rejected any responsibility for her death by noting that grapes brought to the patient by some black children triggered the convulsions that led to it. The preconceived notion of black promiscuity evidently persuaded the girl’s owner and doctor that no cause other than precocious sex need be considered—even in the face of evidence to the contrary (the impenetrable vagina and the child’s age).89

In light of the dominant racialized ideologies around the black female body and sexuality in white cultural imagination during the nineteenth century, it is difficult to consider Stowe’s rhetorical strategy or removal of Topsy’s clothing through the lens of

Black Feminist criticism in the ways that Bernstein contends as an indication of the child’s innocence and humanity. Specifically, this idea that Topsy is capable of, as Eva suggests, obtaining Miss Ophelia’s love if she were “good” while black and female or without being “skinned and come white,” becomes especially hard to believe if we foreground the fact that black girls are understood to be burdened by the same racialized discourses around their sexualities and bodies as black women.90 And, to acknowledge that black girls like Topsy are perceived to, in a sense, be small black women in white cultural imagination, means that we must also acknowledge the limited possibilities of

Stowe’s rhetorical strategies and depiction of Topsy as being defective could also do the work of her being fully recovered and cast as an innocent girl-child.

88 Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 115. 89 Ibid., 115. 90 Eva tells Topsy Miss Ophelia could love her if she were good. Topsy explains to Eva that no one can love her unless she was “skinned and come white.” See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 288.

52 Simply put, considering Stowe’s goals to reach beyond the realm of fiction to position Topsy as a representative of her race alongside the aforementioned scholars’ claims that Topsy carries the markers of lasciviousness and racial inferiority in the same way as black women, then this sort of analysis cannot be divorced from the reality of the historical legacy of violence that the naked black female body has experienced in white cultural imagination. Again, Stowe’s text invites readers and critics alike to examine the impact of larger social forces and racialized experiences that girls like Topsy underwent as a result of her claims to have stretched beyond fiction in A Key to Uncle Tom’s

Cabin.91

Therefore, Topsy is, like I mentioned earlier, deserving of being emancipated from slavery, but is not deserving of being removed from the deviant markers of the interplay between race and sex that have circumscribed her in the system of slavery.

Understanding the constellation of racialized discourses that construct Topsy in white cultural imagination beckons us to consider the undressing of Topsy—perhaps as not so much about removing her layers to reveal that she is human—reifies the supremacy and immortal character of whiteness as the highest representation of humanity. For instance

Eva and Miss Ophelia can touch the body understood in popular and medical culture as deviant and excessive, but they are so pure, pious, and angelic that they can come in contact with the wickedness of black children and remain unscathed. The childhood naïveté of race relations granted to Eva, perhaps, yields more protection from blackness, but the interplay of race and sex that Topsy embodies is made visible through the pious white womanhood of Miss Ophelia.

91 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 50.

53 Much like Bernstein and Brodhead in their reading of this scene, Stowe, too, positions the narrator, to sort of direct the ideological traffic around Topsy’s body, and states:

It is not for ears polite to hear the particulars of the first toilet of a neglected, abused child. In fact, in this world, multitudes must live and die in a state that it would be too great a shock to the nerves of their fellow-mortals even to hear described.92

Still hoping to direct the readers’ gaze and evoke sympathy for the child who the author has disrobed, Stowe follows this discussion of Topsy’s “first toilet” by detailing how the child’s body causes Miss Ophelia’s heart to become “pitiful within her.”93 But, the remarks of Chambermaid Jane about Topsy’s body being “disgusting” and not worthy of being purchased by a more humane master such as Augustine St. Clare, resonate more vividly as they echo the racialized discourses around the black female body and sexuality.

There is no clear articulation from the author that Topsy is, in fact, an injured child, during this scene. Thus, the black female body, deeply immersed in racial and sexual ideologies that Stowe also reiterates in discussing Topsy’s appearance, are recast in this scene as just another marker of Topsy’s aberrance as a result of being made in the slave system rather than a testament of the child’s humanity and abuse. Additionally, considering popular nineteenth-century slave narratives of women such as Elizabeth

Keckley and Harriet Jacobs who speak poignantly about the myriad forms of physical and sexual abuse they experienced as enslaved girls without having to remove their clothing, the author’s choice to bear Topsy’s body to humanize slave children and reveal that the system of slavery is brutal enough to reach even the small female child, also

92 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 246. 93 Ibid., 246.

54 thickens the idea that Stowe understood the institution of slavery as making girls defective and simply small slave women.94

A Slave Girl is(n’t) Born: Temporality, Age, and the Right to Feel in the Slave

Economy as Imagined by Stowe

At this point in my analysis, I illuminate how the rhetorical strategies that Stowe employs to do the antislavery work of positioning Topsy as deserving of emancipation, but not deserving of being imagined as a “girl” like Eva in white cultural imagination are grounded in the social construction of temporality and age. Using scholar M. Jacqui

Alexander’s analysis of the palimpsestic character of time to read the narrative being told via Topsy’s flesh through ineffaceable marks shows how the markings on Topsy’s body keeps the history of her embodied deviance, as a result of racial and gender ideologies that emerged in slavery, present even though the child is now in the care of a more humane slave-owning family. Alexander notes that modernization discourses and practices, which are produced to sustain “investments in the political and psychic economies of capitalism,” construct time as linear and hierarchical, and depicts an image of ideological distance between old and new forms of oppression.95 Stowe’s goal of saving Topsy by keeping her deviance present by associating it with her appearance helps to distance old and new forms of racial and gender oppressions inflicted upon Topsy in the text.

94 I explain Keckley and Jacobs further in the next section. Granted, the ex-slave author writing about her experiences has to adhere to a certain performance of modesty and does not have the sort of authorial privileges as Stowe, but these genres of literature and antislavery goals between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the female slave narrative bear commonalities in rhetorical strategies that make these particular texts essential to understanding both racialization and its effect on slave girls like Topsy in white cultural imagination. 95 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 189-90.

55 The gaze upon the hieroglyphics of the flesh that Topsy embodies as illustrated in this scene can also be read as a moment in which a slippage occurs or the discourses around the child’s body and those written in the child’s flesh suggest that no clear line exists between the time one is a slave girl or slave woman. This slippage between black girl and black woman is perhaps what literary scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman identifies as a characteristic of the incest tropes in African American women’s writing.

Abdur-Rahman argues that the incest trope presents the black girl and single black mother as subjects who “exist along a continuum of black female representation, morphing into and out of each other, revealing one aspect of black women’s lives while occluding others.”96 Using this theory, I argue Topsy’s flesh markings and origin story generate slippages in which Topsy morphs into a slave woman.97 The markings on

Topsy’s naked body suggest that the girl is not vulnerable, her age as an eight or nine year old affords her no privilege, and her body can be placed on display like that of black women. This displaying of bodies—old and young—mirrors practices in the slave market and medical culture that have no regard for the vulnerability of enslaved female youth.

As Historian Walter Johnson notes, oftentimes slaves in the market were “stripped” of their clothing in order to provide spectators and potential buyers a closer look.98 Rather than a mark of humanity, the flesh markings on Topsy, in accordance with her appearance, present her as Chambermaid Jane and Miss Ophelia note, a disgusting “limb” or “heathenish,” respectively. Her body speaks the same narrative as a slave whose flesh

96 Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet, 116. 97 Ibid., 116. 98 Johnson, Soul by Soul, 144.

56 markings render them “hard to control” wild and unruly.99 And, loaded with the ideological weight of Stowe’s lofty abolitionist goals, Topsy is once again represented as a deviation from the privileged space of childhood and girlhood.

As I have argued in the first half of this chapter, Stowe uses Topsy’s body to articulate that she is deserving of being free from slavery, but is not deserving of the privilege of childhood or girlhood such as safety, dependency, or experiencing pain as a result of her being made in the slave system. Though Topsy is distanced from the brutality of her previous owner and is now with St. Clare, she is still defective as a result of the slave system. I turn next to Topsy’s origins or narrative of birth in which Stowe suggests that the conditions under which Topsy was made or the “system” of slavery caused her to physically and emotionally grow improperly, and thus exist outside of linear time. Though Stowe’s intentions in her antislavery text is to demonstrate that the system made Topsy “hardened” and that she can be saved, it is Topsy’s origin story that makes the girl who is a representative of thousands of slave children, seem unlikely to have been redeemable.100 Specifically, this doubt is evident when we consider Topsy’s narrative of birth, Stowe’s antislavery agenda, and rhetoric of nineteenth-century slave narratives. For example, when Miss Ophelia requests that Topsy reveal her origins, the child is unable to recall her place of birth or parents. Stowe writes:

99 Johnson notes buyers "thought they could read slaves' backs as encodings of their history." They believed that they could learn about the slave's behavior or unruliness based on the markings on their backs letting them know the intensity of previous owners' punishment. Ibid., 145. 100 Augustine St. Clare explains to Miss Ophelia that Topsy is a familiar type of child in the slave system who has experienced a “gradual hardening” process as a result of masters consistently increasing the brutality of their disciplining methods when slaves seemed to develop a high level of tolerance for the abuse. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 252.

57 Sitting down before her, she [Miss Ophelia] began to question her. “How old are you, Topsy?” “Dun no, Missis,” said the image, with a grin that showed all her teeth. “Don’t know how old you are? Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Who was your mother?” “Never had none!” said the child, with another grin. “Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?” “Never was born!” persisted Topsy, with another grin that looked so goblin- like…101

Here, Stowe suggests that Topsy and the slave girls she represents are outside of normative temporal boundaries of childhood and the human lifespan. She was, as Topsy states, “never born.”102After Topsy implies that her very existence departs from the dominant ways of narrating the human lifecycle, that is, she is trapped within aberrant temporalities because she cannot know her age, Chambermaid Jane reminds Miss

Ophelia about the effects of the system on the other little Topsy’s who are bought

“cheap” in large quantities or “heaps” by speculators when they are little and “raised for market.”103 Jane declares, “Laws, Missis, those low negroes,--they can’t tell; they don’t know anything about time,..they don’t know what a year is; they don’t know their own ages.”104 The chambermaid clarifies that Topsy’s struggle with her age is essentially an incapacity to situate herself within logical (read white) ways of experiencing time or any other straight-forward understanding of the progression of dominant childhood by virtue of their enslavement. In the essay “Possible Pasts: Some Speculations on Time,

Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” Historian Walter Johnson argues “time became an important medium for the elaboration of white-supremacist ideas about racial

101 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 246. 102 Ibid., 246. This discourse of “being born” is important to nineteenth century slave narratives. I explain this noticeable pattern further later in this section. 103 Ibid., 247. 104 Ibid., 247.

58 difference and hierarchy. On the surface, at least, slaves were being dragged into their masters’ history, forced into temporal frames of reference defined by slavery and race.”105 Using Johnson’s analysis as a theoretical guide, I read Topsy’s inability to recall her age and origins as a point at which her improper growth, subhuman status, and permanent exile from dominant understandings of childhood and girlhood signify her placement outside of the dominant construction of linear time, which are organized around white cultural ideals about age and youth.

Based on this scene, the system of slavery that Miss Ophelia and Augustine St.

Clare contend made Topsy can be understood as having the power as a racial project to reconfigure the discourse of age for black bodies within the U.S. Normative age coupled with whiteness was a socio-politically constructed indicator and heteronormative classificatory scheme that evoked ideals around dependency during a specific period in one’s life.106 It implicated both biological and psychosocial ideals around development, emotion, the needs for survival, and protection for white subjects. Largely historians have led the discourse on recognizing age as a category of historical analysis.107 They have pointed out that age is an equally important social construct that individuals use to develop notions about specific groups as other social forces such as gender, class, and

105Walter Johnson, “Possible Pasts,” 492. 106 Ariès suggests that since the seventeenth century, “the idea of childhood was bound up with the idea of dependence…” I extend this idea of dependence further in my argument to explore its relation to affect or emotions, or the lack thereof, in terms of black childhood and girlhood. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), 26. 107 For more on age as category of historical analysis see Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 114–124.; Steven Mintz, “Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 91–94.

59 sexuality. But, what has not been engaged as frequently is the interconnection of age, gender, and race, in terms of the process of constructing social meanings for black subjects like Topsy that are outside of dominant linear temporalities.108 This limited inquiry into the interplay of these intersections in slave girls lives makes studying

Stowe’s literature to examine the ambiguity around slave girls’ ages in white cultural imagination even more critical. Further, the lack of engagement with these intersections is particularly interesting considering the trends in slave narratives in which those who came of age in slavery also reveal ambiguity around their ages. For instance, being examined in a similar fashion as Topsy about her origins, former slave girl Mary

Overton, tells her inquirer, “I’s born in Tennessee but I don’t ‘member where and I don’t know how ole I is.”109

Again, since slavery was largely about labor, the reconfiguring of age around black girls can reasonably be considered as a means to a particular end in the slave economy in a similar way as constructing other racial and gender ideologies around black bodies to meet the demands of labor as I mentioned earlier. Immediately following the narrative of her origin, Miss Ophelia asks Topsy about the duties she could perform.

Thus, from Miss Ophelia’s decision to ask the eight or nine-year old girl Topsy what duties she could perform when she was unsatisfied with the child’s narrative of her origins, it appears that it was essential that slave children, like Topsy, understood their roles as little laborers and also seemed to be ready and “made” for the market in white

108 Interestingly since as early as Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a significant trend in black women’s writing has engaged age directly or indirectly in discussions of girlhood or lack thereof due to the intersections of poverty, race, class, gender, and sexuality. 109 Federal Writers’ Project, U.S. WPA Slave Narrative Project, Texas Narratives, Volume 16, Part 3 Mary Overton, p. 162. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, mesn 163/167162

60 cultural imagination.110 And, keeping to “true to image,” Topsy informs Miss Ophelia that she can “fetch water, and wash dishes, and rub knives, and wait on folks.”111 Topsy is soon discovered to be the best in her duties. Stowe writes: “Mortal hands could not lay spread smoother, adjust pillows more accurately, sweep and dust and arrange more perfectly, than Topsy….”112 Topsy was made to perform labor. Associating the slave child’s age with a particular form of labor as evidenced in Miss Ophelia and Topsy’s exchange echoes Historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz argument in which she notes the slave child is conditioned for the “world of work.” Schwartz writes:

By the age of five or six, children were initiated into the world of work through education and training intended to enhance a slave’s economic worth. During this stage of development, harsh punishments were introduced to prevent children from performing duties poorly.113

In line with the goals of slaves’ conditioning for their lives as property, slave girls may not have known their ages or remember the specifics of their birth, but when asked about what sort of labor they could perform, like Topsy, they knew that slave girls their size could “fetch water, and wash dishes, and rub knives, and wait on folks,” as these tasks were consistently taught as well as enforced.114 This enforcement of one’s expected duties as a slave child is also visible in Elizabeth Keckley’s discussion of her enslaved girlhood. In Behind the Scenes, Keckley notes, in her attempts to perform nursing duties

110Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14. Schwartz notes that slave children begin small tasks to earn economic profits for slave masters around the age of 5 or 6. I say bodies “ready for market” here to imply both that they were always up for sale as property and they must also be able to carry out their expected and profitable forms of labor in their everyday lives whether they are going up for sale or not. 111 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 247 112 Ibid., 254 113 Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 14. 114 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 247.

61 adequately as a four-year-old slave, she was punished severely following an incident during which she mistakenly dropped her mistress’s newborn baby on the floor and attempted to “shovel up” the child.115 After this innocent attempt to clean up or pick up an infant in the way a child would perhaps clean up a mess, Keckley states her mistress

“ordered that I be taken out and lashed for my carelessness.”116

In addition to size and harsh conditions, in her slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs suggests that slave girls were informed of their embodied differences despite their limited knowledge of their ages, linear time, or lack of “thought for morrow,” because they could glean some narrative of their subhumanity from the often eavesdropped conversations among slave mistresses.117 The slave mistress’s discourse, like that of the chambermaids, Mrs. St. Clare, and Miss Ophelia, reinforced racial and gender ideologies around the bodies of adult female slaves working within the same vicinities as enslaved girls. After enjoying an unusual period of what Jacobs refers to as “happy days—too happy to last,” during her early years as the property of a “kind” mistress, she is forced into the normative conditions of the slave child, and as a result notes, “[t]he slave child had no thought for morrow; but, there came that blight which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.”118 And, it is when she is catapulted into these enslaved conditions, those that I argue inscribed slave girls with their positions as little laborers and raised them for market, that Jacobs goes on to

115 Elizabeth Keckley. 1868. Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999, 20-1. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/keckley/keckley.html. 116 Ibid., 20. 117 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 28. 118 Ibid., 7, 28, emphasis mine.

62 contend, “the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones.”119 The slave girl, like Topsy, as Jacobs notes, will become “prematurely knowing in evil things.”120

Sustaining hegemonic age ideologies around the racialized child slave body was key in the slave market as well as the larger institution in and of itself as Stowe’s character Chambermaid Jane notes it was common practice for “[s]peculators [to] buys

‘em up cheap, when they’s little, and gets ‘em raised for market.”121 Though Historians have well documented that slave owners rarely knew the correct ages of slave children due to fabrication and faulty record keeping, they worked to inundate slave children with a sense of their placement outside of normative age as well as the sort of labor their little bodies should be capable of performing at different stages through punishment and manipulation.

Despite the author’s introduction of Topsy as an eight or nine-year old slave girl,

Stowe chooses to depict the slave girl as unaware of whether or not she was born and her exact age. The inclusion of this passage is telling because it resonates with the narratives of ex-slaves who came of age in slavery, in terms of not knowing their ages as well as the manipulation of time in the slave market. Yet, the rhetorical move in which Stowe positions Topsy to reveal to readers that she was never born strays from antislavery goals

119 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 28, emphasis mine. 120 Ibid., 28. 121 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 247.

63 of humanizing slaves often illustrated in nineteenth-century slave narratives. For example, Topsy states she was never born, but the language of “being born” in popular nineteenth-century slave narratives as literary critic James Olney notes was an essential rhetorical strategy for authors to establish their legitimacy and humanity, aspects they, for obvious reasons, imagined would be challenged by readers. Olney writes:

“Written by Himself,” and the standard opening “I was born,” are intended to attest to the real existence of a narrator, the sense being that the status of the narrative will be continually called into doubt, so it cannot even begin, until the narrator’s real existence is firmly established.122

Stowe, too, as evidenced by her publication of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin following the release of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (as a novel) was privy to claims refuting the humanity of slaves. Therefore, her choice to divert from the usual form of the slave narrative—the quintessential text which illuminates the “ills of slavery” while also demonstrating one’s humanity—for Topsy makes the goals of her antislavery text less clear for slave girls, in particular. Not only is Topsy’s appearance suggestive of her placement outside of childhood and girlhood, but now her origins also imply that she is not human, and unredeemable as she was “never born.” The young girl who stands in as a representative for other slave children in Stowe’s text is unreal.123 On the other hand, in meeting the goals of an antislavery text, Stowe reveals the ways in which the ambiguity around Topsy and other slave girls’ ages benefited slave owners as the children could be used for labor at early ages since the intersection of race, gender, and age removed them

122 James Olney, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Callaloo no. 2 (1984): 46–73, 52. 123 Perhaps, this can also be read as Stowe’s engagement with comedy to lighten the harsh reality of slavery as illuminated in the text using Topsy. The comedic aspects of Topsy certainly resonated in the long history of stage performances in which Topsy became one of the most popular characters.

64 from dominant ideals of childhood, girlhood, and linear time. Supporting this insight,

Historian Wilma King notes that slave owners oftentimes withheld any information they knew or estimated about slave children’s ages from slave children, especially during instances in which the fabrication and malleability of the slave body might yield a greater profit.124 Extending King’s analysis, Schwartz observes two common instances when the fabrication of slave ages yielded benefits—slave owners wished to avoid paying taxes on their taxable human property or “recording adult slaves as younger than they were” in the selling of human labor.125

Bearing in mind the benefits stakeholders could accrue on behalf of the fungibility of slave bodies and their deliberate displacement in aberrant temporalities to fit laboring demands, it is reasonable to infer that all laboring bodies were susceptible to such manipulation, including slave girls like Topsy. Consider former slave and abolitionist

William Wells Brown’s instructive scene in his novel Clotel, during which the slave speculator forces the adult slaves in his lot to shave their grey “whiskers,” tells them to state an age that is 10 to 15 years younger, and “grease dat face an make it look shiney,” in order to get a higher profit for the owners.126 If they are more powerless than the adults forced to present themselves as 10 to 15 years younger, to what extent can slave girls like

Topsy be imagined as protected from similar manipulation tactics? As property, they had

124 King notes slave children were “kept ignorant deliberately” of information pertaining to their ages, but were privy to using information such as “events and their size.” See Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), xx. 125Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 15. 126 William Wells Brown, 1853. Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004, 66-8. http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/brown/brown.html.

65 no substantial protection from any of the desires inflicted upon their bodies. The power of racial and gender discourses which circulated the cultural and medical realms ensconced the black female body as fungible in the social fabric, and thus it is likely that ambiguously-aged slave girls may have been victims of manipulation, particularly given their future as reproducers of more slaves.

Explaining the frequency of fabricating slaves’ ages in the market further, Brown states “[f]ew persons can arrive at anything like the age of a negro, by mere observation, unless they are well acquainted with the race. Therefore the slave trader very frequently carried out this deception with perfect impunity.”127 With desires to simply use the slave girl for racially-gendered labor, it is likely that she could be presented to potential buyers as being older or younger, unless vivid signs of contestation were available on the body—pregnancy, breasts, or lack thereof. Further, stakeholders in the slave economy went to great lengths, Chambermaid Jane notes, to buy children cheap and get them ready for market.

Slave children, specifically those assigned to duties in the domestic spaces of whites, could recognize their size similarities to white children, but they would have limited spaces to imagine themselves as being a part of the same dominant age groups.

This narrative of slave girls being ambiguously-aged in Stowe’s text is not only significant as it pulls from dominant ideologies placing them outside of childhood, girlhood, and linear time, but also because the author may have been privy to conversations of the burgeoning age-stratifying culture in the U.S. educational system

127 Ibid., emphasis mine.

66 that was emerging shortly before she published her book, as her husband Calvin Stowe was a part of the national conversations to organize schools according to age.128

Though St. Clare and Miss Ophelia recognize that the system makes racialized child subjects under violent conditions, they, in line with slave owners and speculators, understand that indeed Topsy is a deviation from the norm of whiteness, but she can still be used as a source of labor for her new owner St. Clare. In the making of Topsy, as one

“true to image,” and usable like the slave girls she represents, her entrapment in aberrant temporalities incites productive slippages during which, despite being a small girl, her race and gender cause her to be imagined as ambiguously-aged, and thus capable of embodying the same racial and sexual deviance of enslaved women. Like black women, slave girls’ bodies could be used to meet the desires of spectators. Hence, from the moment Topsy enters the St. Clare home, her “wickedness” and abnormal appearance are put on display. These aspects and testaments of her innate aberrance are used by

Augustine St. Clare—the paternal figure and new owner—as a source of entertainment.

St. Clare, by “giving a whistle, as a man would to call the attention of a dog” orders

Topsy to perform. He calls out, “Here, Topsy,” and beckons her to “give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing.”129Stowe writes:

The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd and

128 Calvin Stowe was among the educational reformers chosen in Ohio to observe the age-graded education system in Prussia in 1836. As quoted in Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989), 31. 129 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 243.

67 unearthly as that of a steam-whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which she shot askance from the corners of her eyes. Miss Ophelia stood silent, perfectly paralyzed with amazement.130

Topsy’s odd, preternatural appearance is entertaining to St. Clare. The emphasis on

Topsy’s body or ability to keep a “fantastic sort of time” with her hands and feet, move swiftly, spin, turn a summerset as well as make “guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race,”131speaks to how the different parts of her youthful body— voice, hands, feet, legs—with all of its perverse oddities can be employed as sources of entertainment at the age of eight or nine.

Readers are consistently redirected to consider Topsy’s “goblin-like” appearance and racialized body. Each of the pieces of Topsy’s “heathenish” appearance are emphasized as animal-like, excessive, and made of several fragmented parts in ways similar to how black women’s bodies are imagined as quantifiable fragments in the slave economy. Topsy’s difference is fetishized and readers are drawn closer to see her difference in action when she is beckoned by St. Clare to “show some us some of your dancing.” Topsy’s strangeness continues to be a source of entertainment for St. Clare as he often amuses himself by utilizing the child to frustrate his cousin Miss Ophelia or stands by to watch the girl fail in her pursuits to perform duties adequately.

In fact, the discourse figuring Topsy as a wild, strange, excessive, animal-like sound similar to scholar Barbara Omolade’s description of how European conquerors perceived African women captives. Omolade writes: “To him she was a fragmented

130 Ibid., 244, emphasis mine. 131 Ibid., 244.

68 commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina.”132As Topsy dances and amazes spectators with her blackness, strange sounds, and unnatural bodily movements, no legible transition from slave girl to woman is present. She bares the same flesh markings, and is thus fragmented and made knowable as a female source of labor like slave women.

Contrasted with Topsy, children like Eva constructed within dominant temporality have access to life-cyclic privileges such as normative age expectations and protection from specific forms of sexual and labor exploitation that the innocence of whiteness and youth warranted. Whiteness provided children with spaces to express particular emotions during distinctive moments in their life course, as the expression of such emotion was deemed “age appropriate.” For black female bodies, normative age was not applicable, and any sort of reference to stage of life was not about dominant time and human development, needs, emotion, or survival, but rather as Topsy illustrates, an indication of one’s ability to perform a particular form of labor. The constitutive elements of being ambiguously-aged that are supported by faulty scientific claims around the slave mind and body do not tell spectators anything, essentially, about biological or emotional needs as it relates to normative stages of life. Being ambiguously-aged tells spectators the estimated years the property has existed, what it should be capable of performing, and probable length of time the property will be capable of performing the duties associated

132 Barbara Omolade, “Hearts of Darkness,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 366.

69 with its base value.133 It is much like the appraisal of a piece of furniture or animal. Thus, as Harriet Jacobs implies when she notes that her father was frowned upon by his master and mistress because he “had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings,” slave girls had no rights to feelings.134 Insisting that little black bodies had rights to feel, “was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.”135

Since black girls were exempt from life-cyclic privileges, small laboring slave girls such as Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who were around the ages of five to nine, may have indicated their abilities to fetch items for slave masters, greet guests, and perform songs and dances. Older slave girls who were around the ages of ten to sixteen, may have nurtured children, those of their owners as well as other slaves, completed cooking, sewing, and sexual tasks.136 But, again, since slave girls were not afforded normative life- cyclic privileges, their laboring roles were always influx depending on the desires of their owners. That is, though little slave girls may have not reached puberty or the onset of menarche to meet the reproductive demands of slavery—a system built on sexual terror and violence—it is reasonable to infer that they, as Harriet Jacobs exclaims, were

“prematurely knowing in evil things.” 137 Therefore, black girls may have been employed for sexual labor irrespective of their abilities to bear children, since racialized age

133 Walter Johnson notes that slave trader put “a body in time” in order to “measure the price a buyer would pay.” From Johnson, I conclude that though age was accruing social meanings around dependency, emotion, and particular stages of life for dominant culture, age during the nineteenth century did not have the same meanings for blacks. See Johnson, Soul by Soul, 140. 134 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents, 10, emphasis mine. 135 Ibid., 10. 136 This is a brief idea of what forms of racially-gendered labor their bodies may have been expected to perform. I will discuss these performances in more detail later in this chapter. 137 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents, 28.

70 ideologies would not allow them to ever be protected by the same social ideals around sexuality, consent, or labor and biological factors that normative aged-subjects could embody. To make this racialized age ideology and the sort of discourses that it conjures more concrete, the common application, reference, or summoning of slave bodies by the racially-gendered terms “girl” or “boy,” be they around the age of 5 or 50, had nothing to do with child status or youth, but rather engendered a mode of marking, to inform both the beckoned slave and the gazing spectator, of one’s absolute authority over slave bodies for an impenetrable continuum of utilities and pleasures.

This aberrant temporalizing allowed for the ambiguously-aged slave body and its myriad forms of labor to yield ceaseless benefits because its construction outside of normative age and time evinced an ever-malleable terrain for the demands of a flesh- trading economy. Being able to trade an ambiguously-aged, emotionless slave child, or picaninny, as they were commonly referred to during the 1800s in the south, was a prominent part of the slave economy as Jayna Brown notes:

The term picaninny comes from picayune, a coin of small value circulating in the United States during the 1800s. The derivation of the term picaninny signals the interchangeability between the black child bodies and the small bits of money required for their acquisition. Not always purchased but often “made” on the plantation, they embodied the very public marketplace politics of sexualized subjection at the heart of the domestic sphere. Slave children were living currency. The picaninny was a key symbol of the conflation of sex and commerce, which defined the peculiar institution.138

Although the “making” of a picaninny, or more specifically, a slave girl, who would come to symbolize “living currency” as she moved around the plantation, as I argue here, involved reconfiguring age, it also required that small slaves knew their roles,

138 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 24.

71 or what sort of tasks their bodies should be capable of performing at different stages in their lives, as they were always up for sale or facing the probability of being taken to market.

Stowe projects Topsy as ambiguously-aged and knowledgeable of her role as small slave. Topsy’s character is taken a step farther to convey to readers how her placement outside of childhood and girlhood causes her to be rendered emotionless and underserving of experiencing compassion from others. This disavowal of slave child emotion that Stowe presents in Topsy reifies larger ideologies about the defectiveness of slaves as well as the difference between white children and slaves that is evident in medical discourse during antebellum slavery. Picking up on Mark M. Smith’s notion that race and the solidifying of racist ideals during slavery was not simply about “seeing” race, but also “sensing” it via tactility, sound, taste, smell, and touch, the racialization of black girl’s bodies and the resulting exclusion of them from normative ideas about age and life cycle, meant that their small and obviously young bodies never evoked positive affect or feelings of attachment or intimacy that white children could evoke in adults or display amongst themselves. Smith notes, “the senses facilitated the rule of feeling and made men and women unthinkingly comfortable with their racial worlds…Sensory associations helped animalize blacks, who would not feel anything anyway, what with their poor sense of touch.” 139

The sizes of small children like Topsy mattered and could possibly make sustaining racial ideologies negating the emotions and vulnerability of slave children during their early ages difficult with slave youth in close proximity to white children.

139 Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made, 4, 19.

72 However, in 1851, one of the most influential southern proslavery physicians Samuel A.

Cartwright, was able to carefully obscure similarities between slave children’s capacities to feel particular emotions and normative white feelings through medical discourses. In so doing, Cartwright argued that there were significant differences between slave children and white children while at the same time aligning slave emotions and dependency with mental disease. Cartwright notes:

There is a difference between infant negroes and infant white children; the former are born with heads like gourds, the fontinelles being nearly closed and the sutures between the various bones of the head united, –not open and permitting of overlapping, as in white children.140

Cartwright nuances the variances more by pointing out the differences in the veins of white children and slaves. He writes:

Negroes, moreover, resemble children in the activity of the liver and in their strong assimilating powers, and in the predominance of the other systems over the sanguineous; hence they are difficult to bleed, owing to the smallness of their veins. On cording the arm of the stoutest negro, the veins will be scarcely as large as a white boy’s of ten years of age.141

Furthermore, Cartwright argues that slaves writ large, irrespective of their age, are inherently dependent upon the “white man” in order to fully develop. But, this dependency is not the same as that of normative white children, who he explains, benefit from the forced labor that the slave is made to perform in order to function in light of his innate slothfulness and inability to get blood to his brain without picking cotton.142

Cartwright implies that the dependency and emotions that slaves exhibit is by default, and

140 Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (New Orleans: S.Woodall, 1851), 697. History of Medicine Collections (Duke University). Hathi Trust Digital Library. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103099164;view=2up;seq=4 141 Ibid., 695-6 142 Ibid., 714.

73 not by actual human emotional needs as expressed by white children. Hence, slaves do not possess the mental sophistication to exercise any distinction among their emotions.

They love whoever disciplines them. And, most importantly, it is implied that the slave will forever be trapped in this defective stage of dependency.

In addition to learning their roles outside of dominant childhood, as Harriet

Jacobs proclaims, little slave girls, in line with my previous theory about black-age and

Cartwright’s differentiation between slave children and white children, also had to understand that they were not a part of dominant constructions of girlhood and childhood, and thus their emotions or feelings were not valid. They had no emotive agency or authentic displays of feelings that warranted any privileges as young children within the slave economy. Slave girls like Topsy, “without father or mother,” as Jacobs illuminates,

“could not expect to be happy.”143

Adding further to the ideal that slave girls were outside of childhood, and thus outside of life-cyclical privileges of emotions, one can consider two illuminating scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the first instance, Miss Ophelia instructs Topsy to study a hymn, but later finds out that Topsy—attempting to experience some form of emotive agency through play—chose to cut bonnets into dolls jackets instead. Miss Ophelia drags the girl into the room with Augustine and Marie St. Clare to inform them of Topsy’s actions. Topsy’s mistress Mrs. St. Clare reminds Miss Ophelia of Topsy’s inhumanity and need for harsh punishment to make her remember her role as little property as she notes “you’d find out that these creatures can’t be brought up without severity. If I had

143 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents, 18.

74 my way now, I’d send that child out, and have her thoroughly whipped; I’d have her whipped till she couldn’t stand!”144

Seeking to gain clarity around Topsy’s actions, Augustine St. Clare calls her to him by telling her to “[c]ome here, Tops, you monkey.”145 When questioned about her actions, Topsy reveals to her owners that she is aware of her displacement from dominant childhood and her innate “wickedness” as she acquired this knowledge from Miss

Ophelia’s discourse as well as from the actions of her previous master. Topsy states:

Spects it’s my wicked heart, Miss Feely says so…[O]ld Missis used to say so, too. She whipped me a heap harder, and used to pull my har, and knock my head agin the door; but it didn’t do me no good! I spects, if they’s to pull every spire o’ har out o’ my head, it wouldn’t do no good, neither,--I’s so wicked! Laws! I’s nothing but a nigger, no ways!146

Another instance when Topsy attempts to display emotions of perhaps gratitude, sympathy, and grief secretly by picking flowers for her dying, little owner Eva, because of her presumed wickedness and inability to feel—let alone possess the psychic capacities to express—empathy for a dying white child, her mistress Marie St. Clare becomes furious when she notices the girl, and assumes she is doing something wrong.

Questioning Topsy, Mrs. St. Clare demands that the little “baggage” and “good-for- nothing-nigger,” come clean about the “new piece of mischief” she is engaging, and proceeds to slap her.147 Upon hearing Topsy profess to Mrs. St. Clare, “they’s [flowers] for Miss Eva,” the goldish-brown haired, blue-eyed little savior Eva rushes to the scene to beg her mother to believe that Topsy is capable of being tender-hearted, as “God is her

144 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 286. 145 Ibid., 287. 146 Ibid., 287. 147 Ibid., 291.

75 father” and he’s capable of making Topsy good.148 However, Mrs. St. Clare appears to be content with her rationale that Topsy is “just so ugly, and will always be; [because] you can’t make anything of the creature!”149 As a result of Eva’s extension of what Robin

Bernstein notes as “racial innocence” to Topsy prior to her death, Miss Ophelia, through her reverence for the wishes of little Eva, would later learn to not be repulsed by Topsy’s touch, and go on to purchase the slave girl from Augustine St. Clare, and “make” a good

Christian woman of her.150 Yet, Marie St. Clare, as one could easily assume from her perceptions of Topsy’s inability to rise above her defects of slavery (read biology and social conditions) continues to adhere to the dominant racial, age, and gender ideologies in cultural and medical discourses in her beliefs and treatment towards Topsy and her other slaves.

Topsy is an important representation of slave girls, as she was born in literature, but constitutive elements of her creatively, semi-fictionalized character and resulting

148 Ibid, 291-2. 149 Ibid., 292. 150 Robin Bernstein contends that during the nineteenth century Little Eva was the “emblematic child-angel” and the embodiment of childhood innocence. This embodied innocence, Bernstein claims, can be performed and extended to people and things, and thus made it “politically usable” for racial projects. Little Eva’s innocence and holiness could help others slip between social categories. Thus, in line with Bernstein’s argument, Eva’s innocence could be extended to Topsy and help further Miss Ophelia’s abolitionist project so that she would no longer be repulsed by Topsy, but rather commence to purchasing her from Augustine, and make a Christian woman out of her. I find Bernstein’s argument useful in examining cultural ideals around childhood during the nineteenth century, but I do not wholly agree with her claims about the “transcending power” or the extent to which the performance and extension of childhood innocence could be politically useful for black girls in the nineteenth century, as they were still largely imagined as well as legally understood to be property. Granted, readers and spectators who were exposed to the scenes between Eva and the black figures on stage or within the pages of Stowe’s text may have suspended their racial ideologies temporarily to fully immerse themselves in the sentimental work, but at the end of the stage performance and end of the book, black girls,’ like Topsy, social and material conditions largely remained the same once beliefs alongside medical and cultural discourses resumed. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 4-8.

76 legacy can be witnessed in the material lives of girls figured in her image.151 Stowe’s social position and antislavery activism made her privy to numerous slaves’ accounts of their experiences. Ironically, though Stowe’s text is her attempt to shed light on the brutality of the slave system by honing in on the experience of a slave girl, as Jean Fagan

Yellin notes, she refused to work with Harriet Jacobs on her narrative Incidents in the

Life of a Slave Girl. Rather, Yellin contends, Stowe explained that she would send

Jacobs’s narrative out for “verification,” and if her story “was true, she herself would use it in her forthcoming Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—a follow-up to her text, which added to the legitimacy of the characters and events depicted her novel.152 Considering the popularity of Stowe’s novel, in general, and the black girl character Topsy, in particular, alongside the author’s goal of reaching beyond fiction and presenting “facts” about

151 It is important to note that Jayna Brown engages Topsy and considers her as an exemplar of a body that is outside of normative time registers. However, Brown explores Topsy’s relationship to time in terms of the performing raced body, and argues that rather than simply contending that black bodies are “governed by a simpler concept of time,” their forms of black expressivity “was formed in a complex web of time registers.” Simply put, her analysis of time engages the body in motion, and its “articulations of diasporic movement, of technologies of displacement.” Whereas my argument is about the small female raced body being constructed in cultural and medical discourses outside of age and time in efforts to remove them from childhood and the temporal privileges that accommodate that of normative childhood, one of which is the exemption from the institution of slavery. See Brown, Babylon Girls,58-9. I also challenge Brown’s suggestion that lesser races were largely considered by the dominant social body to have been “governed by a simpler concept of time.” I think Brown may be conflating the simplicity with its presumed aberrance, or deviation from the normative discourses of time that circulated around the dominant social body. Considering the multiple negating discourses that emerged within the social, political, and medical realms of nineteenth-century society proclaiming the inhumanity among blacks, I do not think they thought of it as so much as simple as it was a deviation, because the removal of black bodies from time and age was skillful and complex. The manipulation of a body was meticulous, and getting people to reorient their gaze upon a child or an elderly body was not simple at all. As I have pointed out, traders and slave masters were routinely engaged in cons or clever attempts to make the slave body appear a different age or more youthful, in terms of ability to produce labor. These sophisticated schemes are very much related to time. 152 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), xix.

77 slavery, instances in which the author refuses to work with a woman who has actually experienced enslaved girlhood are important tensions that warrant further inquiry. This tension and Stowe’s rhetorical power signifies that the image of inherently deviant and ambiguously-aged Topsys in white cultural imagination may perhaps function as another stereotype that reveals particular racialized cultural truths about young black female subjects and their lack of childhood and girlhood that may very well have survived in the afterlife of slavery. Topsys constitute a racial category bequeathed by Stowe that, unfortunately, must be dealt with post-slavery.153

Conclusion

Slave girls as imagined by Stowe in her wildly-popular character Topsy, were made in the slave economy and constructed according to the demands of the system and its abolition by whites. Therefore, the formative years of their lives do not constitute normative conceptions of childhood or girlhood, but rather illumines the manipulative strategies slave owners and other stakeholders engaged to amass the greatest profit on behalf of their bodies, which were rendered ambiguously-aged, outside of dominant temporality and feelings. Using queer of color analysis to analyze Uncle Tom’s Cabin alongside a diverse mix of secondary texts, I illustrated how investments in slave girls as capital and reproductive technologies served as the catalyst behind the displacement of slave girls from dominant conceptions of childhood and girlhood. Black girls were essential modes of production and reproduction for the slave economy. From this position, black girls as the site of historical knowledge, shed light on and offer a

153 This idea of Stowe bequeathing a persistent racial category is influenced by James Baldwin’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. See James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

78 historiography of the untold story of child labor or capitalism’s engagement with black girlhood that was sophisticated and deliberate in leaving no remnants of its process. And, slave girls—steeped in powerlessness—were the ideal investment, as their ability to be considered human or in relation to humanity was so far beyond the scope of visibility or awareness. They constituted the “nothingness,”—severely compromised life at the intersection of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality. But, it is at this space of nothingness that they were provided with a unique vantage point from below to offer knowledge on the darkest corners of U.S culture.154

In this chapter, I used Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to not only complete a literary analysis of the text and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s rhetorical strategies, but also to explore the racialization of black girls as subjects “made” defective in the system of slavery within white cultural imagination. In a sense, Topsy provides a way to examine both popular literature and slavery as sites of making black girls. Exploring the processes that have strategically figured the black female body in U.S. cultural history and memory is an essential task in removing the layers of racialized ideologies, which have come to signify black girls as illegible figures whose corporeal materialities are entangled with that of black women. These racialized ideologies that emerge in literature and medical discourses around the black female body and sexuality signified to spectators that little black girl and black women’s bodies were one in the same in white cultural imagination, and thus they could perform all of the tasks that black women’s bodies were believed capable of performing. Although black girls and women shared positionalities were

154 Barbara Christian, New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000, eds. Gloria Bowles, M. Giulia Fabi, and Arlene Keizer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 20-1.

79 entangled in a web of racial ideologies that collapse the category of black woman and girl, researchers have not afforded substantive scholarly inquiry into exploring the historical trajectories of black girls’ bodies in U.S. culture in the same manner that black women’s bodies have been traced to uncover their subjectivities and counter claims against black womanhood.

In fact, despite Stowe’s critical engagement with Topsy’s appearance and body, no research as of the present moment, has engaged the black girl body in U.S. culture directly in an extensive study during slavery. The black girl body has also been elided in studies investigating one of the most pivotal eras in which newly freed slaves were engaged in an intense battle of negotiations on behalf of their humanity and identities as new citizen-subjects within both dominant culture—the Reconstruction era. Emphasizing the lack of engagement with black girls during both periods, particularly within the

Reconstruction era is essential as this marks the beginning of black women and girls’

“legal” right to perform and shape their identities outside of slavery as women and girls.

However, the social and political ideologies which negated both black womanhood and black girlhood that emerged during slavery and the impoverished conditions that shaped the lives of newly-freed black women and girls ensured that their bodies continued to be envisioned as accessible and hyper-sexed. Though slavery ended, the imprint of slavery inundated their bodies with the task of carrying the weight and ideologies of the female slave. The permanency of this cultural narrative around their bodies is also apparent in the reality that many black girls and women were simply freed slaves, but then forced

80 into becoming indentured servants immediately thereafter whose life experiences mimicked that of their duration as slaves.

It is also important to acknowledge that similar to studying the bodies of black women, it is also risky to study the black girl body in early U.S. culture. Considering their position, it is important not to further marginalize or exploit their bodies by putting them on display and adding to the list of individuals and fields of study or science that have historically utilized and exhibited their bodies as spectacles. Reflecting on hegemonic cultural taboos, studying the body of any individual runs the risk of making the subject vulnerable and open to voyeurism, especially illegible children. To choose not to study the corporeal materialities of black girls is also risky for those lost in the archive and in our contemporary moment.

In addition to acknowledging the risk to the subject in the study of black girls’ corporeal materialities, it is also essential to illuminate a unique risk to researchers that is presented when studying illegible children, particularly those whose lives were deemed unworthy or insignificant—psychic terror. For instance, psychic terror can emerge in the study of vulnerable subjects such as black girls whose lives and bodies were trampled and placed at the very bottom of the social hierarchy alongside their parents. In the midst of excavating a narrative of girlhood, one is forced to imagine the “unspeakable” violence and the presumed justification for crimes against vulnerable children. But, in order to disrupt tales of benevolent slave owners, expose the darkness of enslaved girlhood, and illuminate the efforts and complex thoughts of slave children who had unimaginable access to the slave quarters alongside the domestic spheres of slave owners and their

81 families, the study of black female life must engage black girls as historical actors and sites of critical investigation of U.S. history. And, in this chapter, I have demonstrated one of the ways of doing this type of study by engaging popular historical literature through contemporary theoretical frameworks that both acknowledge the era the cultural production was created while also exploring the important themes around black girls that are often simply overlooked.

I would argue that Historian Robin Bernstein’s analysis of African American childhood, especially her investigation of Topsy, racial innocence, and the sentimental child is an important contribution in the study of the particular racialization that black girls experienced. However, Stowe’s rhetorical power and desire to create images that would move beyond the realm of fiction requires that we explore other racialized discourses around the black female body and sexuality during the nineteenth century that may call for scholars to employ other literary theories that can account for the complexities of understanding how black girls like Topsy lingered between black woman and girl in white cultural imagination. Doing so reveals how the possibility of Topsy and other black girls like her may have had very limited space in white cultural imagination to truly be redeemed or considered innocent as result of the intersection of race, age, gender, and sexuality. Hence, reading racialized medical discourses alongside Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, may allow one to imagine Topsy as being innocent or the sentimental child briefly as a result of Eva’s touch, but by the end of the text, it is hard to imagine that the slave girls that she represents are capable of benefiting from this innocence or will ever be understood as the sentimental child. Though it is shunned upon to carry the symbolism

82 of the novel beyond the pages of the novel, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the rare art of fiction that the author, herself, blurred the lines between real and fiction, text and mass culture. And, as many scholars of Stowe’s life and literature have attested, this rhetorical skill of making “true to life” images was one of the key aspects that made the author and her work groundbreaking and relevant for generations.

Furthermore, approaching black girls as sites of knowledge and historical actors allows researchers to reclaim or uncover the gaps/silences that simply cannot be engaged thoroughly by imagining black female subjects throughout every period of their lives as black women or enacting constitutive elements of black womanhood. For instance, how might we presume that black women, though their bodies were conceived as adult-like from birth to death in the slave economy, understood themselves as being “adults” as a result of the accessibility of their bodies and the intersection of race, age, sexuality, and gender? When or to what extent did black women visualize or imagine themselves as black girls and later black women? What cultural or physical markers did black women and girls consider indications of a shift from girlhood to womanhood? How did black women define or identify black girlhood and womanhood during slavery? How did black women try to protect themselves as girls? How did black women work to protect other black girls with significantly limited opportunities to protect themselves? What are the constitutive characteristics of black girlhood during early U.S. culture? These questions and others are all a part of the narrative of black women and girls’ lives that are critical in historicizing the full range of their experiences given their shared positions.

83 In order to answer these questions and others that center black girls as subjects, a paradigm shift must occur that privileges age alongside the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender to shed new light on the black female subject in the early U.S. cultural landscape. In addition, the paradigm shift must also insist and work to sustain the logic that black girls did survive and exist alongside black women; and therefore, investigating their corporeal materialities in literature is essential to the study of black female life in particular, and U.S. culture, in general. Since I have presented a lens to theorize the existence and ways that black girls were figured during slavery in white cultural imagination using Topsy in this chapter, within the chapters that follow, I engage black girls themselves and black women who have experienced black girlhood to uncover the worlds they created in light of being constructed outside of dominant childhood and girlhood at defining moments in U.S. culture.

84 Chapter Two

But Some of Us Remember we Were Girls: Reclaiming Girlhood in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world.155

Harriet Jacobs’s claim that slave girls “will become prematurely knowing in evil things” is perhaps one of the most frequently cited lines from her now-canonized slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.156 Interestingly, though this line, and

Jacobs’s text as a whole, have become one of the most important literary sources illuminating the particular racial and sexual violence that enslaved black women and girls experienced during the nineteenth century, the actual stages of girlhood that Jacobs so vividly recalls for readers within the body of the text are rarely engaged. Granted, slave narratives are largely tied to the ideology and goal of abolitionism; however, I want to place them within an historical discourse of black girlhood in the U.S.157 I see this being possible because of Jacobs’s meticulous recalling of slave girls’ experiences. Her details of slave girls’ experiences provided U.S. culture with an early intersectional analysis of race, sex, and I would add, age. Jacobs was among the first black women authors to explain the meaning and function of age within the institution of slavery in relation to young black females, in particular. Furthermore, Jacobs used popular sentimentalist rhetorical strategies to carefully construct and represent an image of a vulnerable slave

155 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 54. 156 Ibid, 28. 157 James Olney, “ I Was Born,” 51.

85 girl that was strikingly different than Stowe’s fictional representations of slave girls as ugly, wicked, and insensate.

The 1861 publication of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl represents a critical moment in the historical invention of black girlhood. The text is one of the earliest sources which gives voice to enslaved girls in the U.S., and offers important insights into the coming of age within bondage during the nineteenth century.

More importantly, due to the lack of sources authored by slave girls during the antebellum period, Jacobs’s text fills a gap in American literature and archives that focus on African American girls’ experiences and contributions to U.S. culture. Considering the important gap that Jacobs fills, in this chapter, I draw on literary scholar James Olney’s reading of the slave narrative as part symbolic memory and part “an act of creative imagination” alongside Frances Smith Foster’s analysis of the female-authored antebellum slave narrative in order to reread Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as both

American girlhood literature and a creative archival source documenting the life histories of enslaved girls.158

The critical rereading of Jacobs’s text as literature and archival source on girlhood, I argue, requires a paradigm shift that encourages us to rethink both the definition and purpose of the slave narrative. To do this, rather than read Jacobs’s text through the frequently used lens of African American womanhood and citizenship, I read the narrative through the lens of African American girlhood and citizenship. Further, I redefine and repurpose the slave narrative as a space in which espousing the cause for one’s humane existence revolves around “full personhood”—childhood and adulthood—

158 James Olney, “I Was Born,” 65-7.

86 rather than simply being recognized as always-already a fully-grown, adult citizen. Here it is important to note that the intersections of race, sex, and age during the nineteenth century presented particular risks to the antislavery and women’s rights movements’ agendas. Specifically, antislavery activists were met with racialized discourses of childhood that negated the slaves’ humanity due to beliefs of their status as dependent, feeble-minded children. While women’s rights proponents challenged patriarchal ideologies that rendered young and older women similar to infants or small children, thereby justifying their need for male domination.159 Yet, Jacobs makes an intervention within her narrative as both slave and woman to challenge racialized discourses of childhood and girlhood on behalf of the girl, and later THE woman, as valuable, fully human.

In chapter one, I examined the methods deployed during slavery to use black girls’ bodies as sources of production from birth to death. I argued that as a result of the racial project slavery, black girls’ were constructed not only outside but in opposition to white childhood and girlhood, and thus rendered ambiguously-aged and fungible property that was accessible for the demands of capitalism during and throughout the afterlife of slavery. Building on this analysis, in chapter two, I extend aspects of Frances Smith

Foster’s examination of sentimentalist heroines in nineteenth-century slave narratives to argue that Harriet Jacobs used traditional literary figures and rhetorical strategies to challenge racialized discourses around childhood, girlhood, and the young female

159 Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 2.

87 slave.160 In so doing, Jacobs defined and reclaimed girlhood in bondage, humanized slave girls, and placed their liberation from slave masters within the existent discourses of antislavery and women’s rights movements.161

I illuminate the constitutive elements and three stages of enslaved girlhood that

Jacobs suggests exists in the lives of slave girls during the nineteenth century. Similar to literary scholar Nazera Sadiq Wright, I too, read Jacob’s texts as providing an analysis of the stages or periods of girlhood, two of which constitute the slave girl’s initial moment of recognizing her racialized and sexualized difference.162 However, unlike Wright, in my analysis of the stages of girlhood in bondage, I argue Jacobs recalls another period—the liminal period—in addition to those in which girls become aware of their particular differences. During the liminal period, the slave girl’s life hangs in the balance between the dead and the living, and this constitutes the first period of enslaved girlhood. This stage occurs during the first few years of the slave girl’s life, and begins at birth to around the age of six. This is a period of contemplation for the slave mother when she reflects on fears of her daughter experiencing the same forms of racial and sexual violence that she faced in slavery as a young girl or witnessed on behalf of others during girlhood. The

160 Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 59. 161 It is important to mention that Raymond Hedin also argues that female slave narrative authors such as Harriet Jacobs used strategies found in the sentimental novel, as the genre provided readers with familiar characters. Hedin also notes that the “notion of woman as slave tapped the incipient, feminist indignation that was already linking the women’s rights movement and the anti-slavery movement.” See Raymond Hedin, “Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative,” in The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory, eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1982). 162 Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life’: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art.,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40, no. 3 (2015):1-26.

88 second stage, when slave girls are around the ages of six to twelve, is marked by the young female’s burgeoning and oftentimes abrupt awareness of her racialized difference as a slave. The last stage of girlhood is the period during which the slave girl becomes aware of her role as racialized sexual property.

Remembering Slave Girls as Valuable Girl-Citizens and Challenging Racialized Discourses of Childhood and Girlhood

I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history…But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is.163

One of the primary goals of Jacobs’s narrative is to offer “virtuous reader[s]” a closer look inside the slave system. 164 Following a similar model and deploying the typical language and tone of other popular slave narratives and sentimental literature, her foremost objective is to expose the abuses of slavery as well as the racial and gender ideologies around the enslaved female body and character. Examining these goals further, one is also exposed to Jacobs’s underlying task within her desire to tell what

“Slavery really is”—to illuminate the harsh conditions, which shape the lives of enslaved girls, in particular, by emphasizing their humanity and presence as vulnerable and accessible bodies. Jacobs works to humanize and challenge the racial, gender, age, and sexual forces that served as affirmations of slave girls’ illegibility and lack of childhood and citizenship.

163 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1. 164 Jacobs refers to her audience as “virtuous reader[s],” in her narrative. See Ibid., 55.

89 Jacobs’s text provides one of the earliest views into the defining elements of enslaved girlhood that did not simply concede that childhood was absent or loss during the era of slavery, but rather complicated and frequently imposed upon by structural forces. Jacobs, herself, illustrates the presence and unfortunate burdens of this period as the reader watches her struggle between proclaiming the slave girl will “be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child” while at the same time noting that there are specific

“trials of girlhood” that a slave girl experiences.165 But, even with her struggles around articulating the complexities of being a slave girl or the period of girlhood, Jacobs’s narrative points to the existence of both, as they were pivotal to the shaping of her identity and ideas of liberation or escaping slavery.

From the beginning of the narrative, Jacobs emphasizes the humanity of enslaved girls by reclaiming the term “girl” and rejecting the ambiguously-aged discourse that emerged around the image of Topsy. She suggests that slave girls have “origins” unlike

Topsy, and that they also have a traceable history of “incidents” or life experiences that shape their personhoods and ideals of citizenship. Besides naming the narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs also uses the word girl in the titles of her chapters devoted to childhood experiences to illuminate and index critical periods of time in the lives of slave girls —“The Trials of Girlhood” and “A Perilous Passage in the Slave

Girl’s Life.” I will discuss the actual periods of girlhood that Jacobs indexes in the next section. However, here, I want to explore the author’s usage of the word girl in the public sphere to indicate a particular period or ages in the life of a slave girl. At this historical

165 Jacobs notes that the slave girl will “be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child” in her chapter titled “The Trials of Girlhood.” See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 28.

90 moment in dominant racialized discourses, the term “girl” coupled with blackness was not used to describe youth; it referenced a body’s usability such as a working girl or her youthfulness, in terms of ability to perform particular kinds of labor. By contrast,

Jacobs’s usage of the term retains the humanity of the enslaved girl by emphasizing that she is in fact a “girl” and not an ambiguously-aged woman. Further, similar to scholars such as Walter Johnson and James Olney who contend that each part of the slave narrative was strategic and purposeful for proving the humanity of slaves in order to abolish slavery, as I will argue, these same elements were dire to proving that enslaved girls were, in fact, girls and human.

Jacobs, like other authors of slave narratives, who were seeking to demonstrate their literacy and humanity while also shedding light on the harsh conditions of slavery, was conscious about the weight of her words and the particular manner that she narrated her life in bondage to readers, most of whom she and her editor Lydia Maria Child assumed to be white.166 Ensuring that they remained within the boundaries of sentimentalism in their tone and writing, authors of slave narratives, especially slave women, had to be careful not to further denigrate themselves, which oftentimes required that they discuss their encounters with sexual violence, or perhaps, similar to Jacobs, provide the reader with enough context from which they could infer the outcome based on the details provided without her having to deliberately state the actual violent act.

166 Frances Smith Foster contends that “[t]he audience for the slave narratives was assumed to be literate, white, northern, religious, and socially concerned, alien to the social context of slavery, yet not entirely without some of the same racial attitudes of the slaveholders.” See Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery, 74.

91 Jacobs’ usage of the name Linda Brent and other “first-person/third-person” rhetorical strategies to tell her narrative is often understood by scholars such as P.

Gabrielle Foreman to place distance between herself and the acts of violence as well as

“physical sin” that she is describing in order to prevent further aligning the slave girl with the sexual perversities of southern slavery.167 Though I agree with Foreman, centering

Jacobs’s goals of reclaiming girlhood for enslaved girls, I want to add a new vein of analysis for the author’s usage of the character Linda Brent. The use of an alternate name throughout the text also suggests that perhaps Jacobs may have had some inclination about potential risks associated with the word girl, and I argue, attempted to mitigate it by using her limited autonomy as the author of her own narrative to reclaim the word.

Jacobs’s editor Lydia Maria Child, similar to other influential white abolitionists who attest to the authenticity of the slave narrative, assures readers that the events described in the narrative are true, but she also speaks to the author’s rhetorical skills that can be traced to Jacobs’s girlhood. After Child assures readers that she did not have a

“reason” to change Jacobs’s “ideas” or “language,” she provides three explanations for the author’s rhetorical skills which permitted her to demonstrate a “lively and dramatic way of telling her own story.”168 Child tells readers that Jacobs has natural talent for words and insights, or “nature endowed her with quick perceptions,” was taught to read and spell early in her girlhood by a kind mistress, and has been around “intelligent persons” in the North.169 All three of Child’s observations about Jacobs’s ability to, as

167 P. Gabrielle Foreman, “The Spoken and The Silenced in Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (1990): 313–24, 318. 168 Ibid., 3. 169 Ibid., 3.

92 she notes, “write so well,” suggest that Jacobs may have understood the power of her words and rhetorical strategies to shift ideologies around the black female in discourse by using the word girl.

If Jacobs was aware of the power of her words and rhetorical strategies to challenge racial and gender ideologies around the slave girl, due to “natural” talent and the skills she was taught by whites during her girlhood, then it is reasonable to consider that the slave narrative author also recognized the political importance of working with an editor such as Lydia Maria Child, an antislavery and women’s rights advocate who was deeply invested in the current conditions and futures of poor women and their children, especially girls. Perhaps, one might argue that Jacobs would have not been able to publish her narrative without Child. And, this is partly true. The authoring of slave narratives required white sponsorship. Yet, Lydia Maria Child was not the only white sponsor available to Jacobs. Reconsidering the slave narrative author’s aligning of herself with a white editor as a method of attaining discursive autonomy, Jacobs’s decision to work with Child, author of books and children’s magazines that urged girls to be educated is no coincidence. 170 In fact, in one of Child’s texts, The Girl’s Own Book, a

170 As James Olney and many other scholars have observed, the slave narrative followed a particular template and was the product of “a triangular relationship—[white] sponsor, audience, and ex-slave.” Therefore, Jacobs did not have complete control of her narrative. And, I am not arguing here that she had complete control over who she could collaborate with to produce her narrative. Rather, I am advancing a different way of reading Jacobs’s decision to work with Lydia Maria Child that takes the author’s attempt to work with a figure such as Harriet Beecher Stowe as a sponsor into account when considering ex-slave writers’ political strategies. Instead of simply reading the white sponsor and ex-slave author relationship as one that helped to prove the authenticity of the text to readers, my analysis suggests that we investigate the ways in which slave narrative authors found methods to exercise political autonomy, humanize other subjects such as slave children, and link themselves to other movements in addition to antislavery causes. In essence, my analysis pushes scholars to look at other ways the sponsor/ex-slave relationship

93 girl’s manual on how to play and shape one’s character throughout girlhood, the author, like Jacobs, uses the word girl in the title and indicates from the beginning that girls are worthy enough to have a body of literature that is her “own book.” In Child’s preface to the seventh edition of The Girl’s Own Book, she continues to express her investment in the excellence of girls, and writes that “in all countries, it is particularly necessary that daughters should be educated as to enable them to fulfil [sic] the duties of a humble station, or to dignify and adorn the highest.”171 Given Child’s investments in girls, it is reasonable to claim that Jacobs’s decision to work with this particular editor in order to authenticate her text which boldly reclaims and represents enslaved girlhood, beginning with the title of the text, while taking creative license to challenge ideologies and discourse around the slave girl.

One might infer that Jacobs, like many other authors of slave narratives, did not have the resources to choose an editor of her choice, or the editing relationship between

Child and Jacobs may have been about manipulation, convenience and necessity rather than a conscious decision to have a well-known abolitionist edit and acknowledge the veracity of the text to whites. However, even if that were the case, Jacobs could have used a different title for the text, refrained from using the word girl and emphasizing girlhood. On the other hand, Lydia Maria Child, who was immersed in the lives of girls and the abolitionist and women’s rights movements of the period, could have opposed the

may have been useful to the slave narrative author. For “triangular relationship,” see James Olney, “ I Was Born,” 65. 171 Lydia Maria Child, The Girl’s Own Book 7th edition (London: William Tegg & Co., 1856), vi, http://archive.org/details/girlsownbook00chilgoog.

94 naming of the text. But, they both, as advocates for girls and women, chose to stand by the text as an account of the incidents in the life of a slave girl.

Child was also familiar with some of the incidents that slave girls experienced. In fact, a few short years before the publication of Jacobs’s text, in 1859, Child wrote a letter in response to Senator James Mason’s wife, who accused her of being a “hypocrite” because of her participation in the abolitionist movement following John Brown’s raid on

Harpers Ferry.172 Within the letter, Child supports her argument against slavery by noting two incidents of sexual and physical violence that slave girls and women frequently experience. Child reminds Mason of the laws which forbid the marriage between slaves and whites and also require that the slave children follow the legal and social status of their mothers. While discussing the laws of the land, Child beckons Mrs. Mason to consider that the presence of several slaves who are “brown or yellow,” would not be possible “unless their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been white men.”173 Child then goes on to discuss one particular incident involving a thirteen year- old slave girl that a fellow well-known abolitionist Angelina Grimké witnessed. Child suggests this incident was a critical moment that added to Grimké’s belief that the fight against slavery was “worth dying for.” Child writes:

Among the horrible barbarities she enumerates is the case of a girl thirteen years old, who was flogged to death by her master. She says: “I asked a prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be indicted, and he coolly replied that the slave was Mr. ____’s property, and if he chose to suffer the loss, no one else had anything to do with it." She proceeds to say: “I felt there could be for me no rest in the midst of such outrages and pollutions. Yet, I saw nothing of slavery in its

172 Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1883), 120, http://archive.org/details/lettersoflydiama5855chil. 173 Ibid., 126.

95 most vulgar and repulsive forms. I saw it in the city, among the fashionable and the honorable, where it was garnished by refinement and decked out for show. It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, that this is a cause worth dying for.”174

Child’s decision to narrate these incidents to the senator’s wife, as a means to support her claims about the evils of slavery speak to her familiarity with the abuse against girls and women in bondage and her attempts to place them at the center of the antislavery and women’s rights causes.

Attempting to humanize slave girls further, Jacobs challenges racialized discourses of childhood and girlhood by using another strategy in sentimental literature— allegories—that illustrate how the purity of the white girl is entangled with that of slave girl. In so doing, Jacobs beckons the reader to look directly at the stark social differences, but biological similarities, between white girls and slave girls. Within these allegories,

Jacobs raises awareness around the conditions that infringe upon slave girls’ lives by discussing the slave institutions potential threats to white girlhood. Jacobs places white and enslaved girls in close proximity and offers readers a glimpse into aspects of early girlhood that are synonymous for both.

In one of the stories, Jacobs narrates a tale of two sisters, one white and one a slave. Both girls share the same slave master as their father. Jacobs uses this tale to point to the humanity of both, as they were born of the same white bloodline. However, social forces and the immorality of the slave system will eventually erode the humanity of the slave girl while her sister, who also owns her, will enjoy the transitions of childhood, girlhood, and young womanhood. Jacobs writes:

174 Lydia Maria Child, The Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 130.

96 I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave’s heart...The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning. How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She also was very beautiful; but flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.175

Within this tale, Jacobs suggests to her largely white audience that there are important and identical life transitions—“childhood to womanhood”—that occur in the lives of both white girls and slave girls. The tale also suggests that the slave girl’s lack of protection during her youth transitions will prevent her from enjoying what Jacobs indicates as a proper close of girlhood and entrance into womanhood—marriage. Much like her antislavery counterparts, Jacobs appeals to Northern white audiences by comparing the likeness of the white girls to “fair-skinned” slave girls. On the contrary, Jacobs does not follow the exact strategy of her antislavery counterparts because she does not seek to provoke solely based on the sexual violence that may occur to the fair-skinned slave girls.

Instead, Jacobs reveals to readers how race and the institution of slavery disrupt the girlhood bond and innocence that all girls share. The girls do not know the differences entangled in their respective social locations. Race is not a biological factor that challenges the bond between the two blood sisters. Rather, they love and embrace each other in their girlhood until the institution of slavery impedes, and teaches them their respective roles as mistress and slave girl.

175 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 29, emphasis mine.

97 Moreover, Jacobs purposefully works with two important themes within this tale that are essential to conceptualizations of white girlhood during the nineteenth century— beauty (in terms of looks, but also refined, moral character) and purity.176 Knowing that words such as beautiful were not usually deemed characteristic of female slaves, Jacobs suggests to readers that both of the girls are beautiful in their girlhood years, and they shared the characteristics of cultural innocence and purity in their youth. Adding to this,

Jacobs reveals that during their early girlhood years, they both have similar dreams about their futures—to be pursued and loved within a heteronormative relationship. Jacobs is clearly aware of the markers of white girlhood and what is considered to be the pinnacle of white womanhood.177 By aligning these girlhoods, Jacobs instructs the reader to imagine that the slave girl, who is as beautiful as the white girl and also loved by white girls, may also be human and have similar girl-to-woman transitions and goals as the white girl.

One might also consider this tale to be part of Jacobs’s girlhood or that of her mother, as they both, experienced a similar plight and were robbed of the opportunity to end girlhood properly. When Jacobs was around the age of eleven, her mistress died, and she was bequeathed to a five year-old girl.178 Furthermore, Jacobs explains that her mother’s mistress was the daughter of her grandmother’s mistress, and thus the young

176 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (July 1, 1966): 151–74. 177 For more on ideas of beauty and purity among white girls during the nineteenth century, See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997). Also see, Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, eds. The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 178 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 8.

98 girls grew up as foster sisters. As children, they played together and loved each other as if they were equals, though Jacobs’s mother was essentially her slave, and “a most faithful servant to her whiter foster sister.”179

Jacobs continues this rhetorical strategy of comparing and contrasting the lives and humanities of white girls and slave girls by inciting fear in whites about the possibility of their daughters being soiled by the institution of slavery in a similar way as the black female. Jacobs warns readers that “the cup of sin, and shame, and misery,” that the slave girl is compelled to partake during her girlhood also works to refute the purity and innocence of the white girl. 180 Jacobs purposefully insists that the slave institution breeds a culture of deviance and sexual perversity or “an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear,” of which no one is free from exposure.181 The “unclean influences everywhere” infiltrate the moral senses of everyone from the slave girl to the master’s children and wife.182 And, as Jacobs notes, slavery, “makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.”183

Indicating her knowledge of the power of words again, Jacobs uses the language that is exchanged between the slave master and his wife around female slaves coupled with the daughter bearing witness to her father’s abuse of slave girls—once her playmates and possibly bearing resemblance to her—as the catalysts behind the detriment of the white girl’s purity and innocence. Though the characteristics of purity and

179 Jacobs, Ibid., 7. 180 Ibid., 29. 181 Ibid., 51. 182 Ibid., 51. 183 Ibid., 52.

99 innocence are largely presumed innate among white girls, Jacobs, essentially, challenges these assumptions, and places them in an unviable position due to the culture of immorality that is embedded within the institution of slavery. Jacobs clearly outlines the generational cycles of immorality and exploitation that spread from father to daughter, and tells readers that “[t]he white daughters early hear their parents quarrelling about some female slave.”184 Similar to the “foul talk of slave masters and his sons” that awakens the slave girl to her unfortunate fate as sexual property, this quarreling awakens the white girl’s “curiosity.”185 But, the girls are not curious for long, as “[t]hey are attended by the young girls whom their father corrupted; and they hear such talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears.”186

Jacobs makes the spread of immorality among white girls even more vivid for readers by narrating an incident that involved a slave master’s daughter engaging in sexual acts with a slave. Jacobs insists that the daughter, like the son, will also try to emulate the father’s sexual exploitation of slaves that they hear of as well as witness throughout their young lives. Using another revealing allegory, Jacobs illustrates how one particular white girl caused her father’s head to be “bowed in shame; for it was known in the neighborhood that his daughter had selected one of the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first grandchild.”187 Jacobs writes:

She did not make her advances to her equals, nor even to her father’s more intelligent servants. She selected the most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised with less fear of exposure. Her father, half frantic with rage, sought to revenge himself on the offending black man; but his daughter,

184 Ibid., 51-2. 185 Ibid., 52. 186 Ibid., 52. 187 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 52.

100 foreseeing the storm that would arise, had given him free papers, and sent him out of the state.188

Jacobs continues inciting fear in whites by suggesting that their bloodline will also meet the fate which each slave is faced as she notes:

In such cases the infant is smothered, or sent where it is never seen by any who know its history. But if the white parent is the father (slave master himself or his son), instead of the mother, the offspring are unblushingly reared for the market.189

In this tale of an affair between a slave master’s daughter and his property, centering the risks inflicted upon the purity and innocence of white girls during their youth, Jacobs adds the white family, and the daughter, in particular, to the drama of lasciviousness and sexual exploitation that is embedded within the fabric of slavery. Considering patriarchy’s reliance upon access to female bodies, it was presumed to be natural for the son and future slave master to inherit the same access to land and rights to exploit female slave bodies. Many scholars have explored the dark realities of slave masters’ sons developing their sexual literacy by way of sexually tormenting slave girls.190 For example, Historian Wilma King contends that during the era of slavery white men believed that “sleeping with a woman was an informal rite of virilization.” And, this “rite

(right) involved learning sexual “know-how” from a supposedly “experienced” black partner.” King observes that oftentimes enslaved girls “were assumed to be

188 Ibid., 52. 189 Ibid., 52. 190 This is a tradition that continued post-slavery and has been detailed extensively within studies of lynching and the Jim Crow south.

101 experienced.”191 Jacobs, herself, also alludes to this dark reality as she notes slave masters, their sons, and overseers will all work to “bribe” fourteen or fifteen-year old slave girls into submitting to their sexual requests.192 If they fail to succeed in bribing the slave girl, Jacobs reveals that “she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.”193

Therefore, echoing Jacobs, slave masters and their sons are well-known generational perpetrators of violence against slave girls. However, the lens of girlhood uncovers the role of white girls as well. Jacobs suggests that both white males and females have unmitigated access to enslaved bodies. Granted, the angst among white women for slave women and girls has been studied, but limited insights have been extended to interrogating how slavery affects white girls. Jacobs scrambles the family order by way of the daughter. The daughter, like her father and brother, becomes stepped in lasciviousness and eagerly join in the orgy of violence and sexual exploitation that comprise plantation culture.

Jacobs scrambles the white family further by not only narrating the unfathomable—white girls engaging in sex with slave men—but also bearing children and granting the child’s father humanity, citizenship, and freedom. She reveals the daughter’s power to re-arrange the family order. Jacobs makes readers aware of the power of the daughter and the disruptions or threats that she can pose to the slave-holding family, and then informs the reader of the daughter and her child’s fate. Although the offspring was produced by way of the daughter, and slave laws of the period required the

191 Wilma King, “‘Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things’: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and freedom,” The Journal of African American History 99, no. 3 (2014): 173, 174. 192 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 51. 193 Ibid., 51.

102 child to follow the condition of the mother, the tangible proof the white girl’s inescapable sexual deviance as a result of being reared by a slave-holding father and threat to the family order never meets the light of day, as the child is smothered or sent far away.194

The antislavery and women’s rights movement agendas were centered on appealing to white emotions through speeches, propaganda, and sentimental texts on behalf of the immorality of the slave institution and the inequality of patriarchal system.

Jacobs furthers these agendas by extending them to include slave girls as victims of similar vices. Jacobs challenges racialized discourses of childhood and girlhood by using allegories to present instances in the slave narrative that illustrated the immorality imposed upon both the white girl and enslaved girl. By recalling these incidents in the slave narrative, Jacobs refutes the slave masters’ goals of slavery which seek to remove slave girls from any legible configurations of humanity, citizenship, girlhood, and innocence.

The Stages of Girlhood in Bondage

In addition to challenging racialized discourses of childhood and girlhood to humanize slave girls as well as place girls’ liberation within existent antislavery and women’s rights movement discourses, Jacobs also defines the constitutive elements of enslaved girlhood. My reading of the stages of black girlhood that I identify in Jacobs’s text is in conversation with scholars such as Nazera Sadiq Wright who also explore stages of girlhood in black women’s writing during the nineteenth century. The stages that I explore in Jacobs’s text differ from Wright who argues that during the antebellum period, black women writing slave narratives and fiction on black girls sought to represent the

194 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 52.

103 black female as having experienced a youthful period or childhood. Yes, black women were writing to affirm black girls’ youthfulness and rights to girlhood, but Wright’s claims about the rhetorical functions of the stages of youth and age do not fully account for the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality during the nineteenth century.

Wright’s argument that “identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies,” would be hard to support, as slavery was largely an economy built upon the sexual violence and exploitation of black female bodies. 195 The construction of “age” as a social determinant of one’s ability to be considered “youthful or childlike” was not applicable to enslaved girls, particularly during the nineteenth century when age-stratification began to emerge in the U.S. For example, suggesting that a black female slave who has reached puberty could be imagined in dominant culture as something other than an ambiguously-aged black woman is a stretch if we take the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age seriously. Thus, from a black feminist and critical race perspective, when we take these intersections seriously, then the idea that “sexual suggestion” can be removed from black girls—subjects largely deemed illegible as children—through the protests of equally pathologized black women is nearly impossible. But like Jacobs, we can use the ages of white childhood to challenge racialized discourses and illuminate the age-based privileges afforded to children who are legible as youthful, and thereby denied to black girls who are deemed ambiguously-aged.

195 See Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life’, 1.

104 Contrary to Wright’s claims, I do not argue that black women writers simply use age as a rhetorical function to place black girls back into the same age-based categories that used the troubling intersections of race, sex, and class to justify their placement outside of childhood. Rather, based on my argument in chapter one and the robust afterlife of Topsy, I see black women writers complicating the idea of Western temporality and chronological age to reclaim the ambiguously-aged black girl on her own terms and within her own time in the recalling of the stages of girlhood. That said, in my reading of the stages of girlhood that Jacobs suggests exist, I argue there are two common themes that run through the author’s memories of girlhood. One theme, as I have explained until this point, consists of humanizing slave girls by using the dominant construction of girlhood as a lens to reflect on the particular racial and sexual violence that young slave girls experienced. Second, Jacobs, in the remembering of her life, assembled her early years into a critical period of girlhood that, though not identical to white childhood or girlhood, is familiar to the reader as an important transitional period of youth for slave girls. In the construction of this narrative, Jacobs reclaims her own girlhood.

In the previous section, I discussed the first theme in my analysis of Jacobs’s discursive moves to achieve the goal of humanizing slave girls through the strategic use and placement of the word girl from the title and throughout the text in key focal points, which redirected the reader to focus on time passage or particular moments in the development of slave girls’ lives. In this section, I explore these key moments that Jacobs points to in the humanizing of slave girls. Specifically, I parse the details of these

105 transitional periods that she highlights for readers, and the narrative of enslaved girlhood that manifests from the ages of six to fifteen.196 Jacobs’s narrative of girlhood speaks to her awareness of both the historical discourses of chronological age and the cultural meanings it entails for white girls, and thus the inherent exclusions for girls in bondage.

The discussion of these transitional periods suggests that Jacobs recognizes enslaved girls are aged differently, but sustaining her rhetorical strategies in sentimental literature, she continues to use dominant ideologies around ages of girlhood to reify the violence that slave girls experience during the periods when they are supposed to be vulnerable young children. Therefore, she places the ages, which are understood to be reserved for innocent white children, in conversation with the sort of cultural meanings that differently-aged subjects—like ambiguously-aged black girls.

From Jacobs’s discussion of girlhood in bondage, she suggests the cultural meanings that mark or symbolize her girlhood development correlate with three larger events around labor and violence in the slave system. One, as the slave girl ages and nears puberty, she becomes increasingly valuable in the slave economy as reproductive property. Second, the risk of experiencing sexual, emotional, and physical violence from slave owners, their families, and traders increases with her age. And, third, she becomes more prone to scrutiny and angst of the slave mistress, in particular, as her body matures.

In addition to physiological changes, these events configure parts of the psychic realities from which slave girls derive meaning for their stages of youth, as their growth from

196 It is important to mention that I am reiterating Nazera Sadiq Wright’s claim that black women writers of the nineteen century often introduce the beginning of black girlhood at the age of six. See Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life,’”7.

106 children throughout adolescence centers on cultivating them for a particular form of labor.197

Though Jacobs provides specific elements of enslaved girlhood from the age of six, it is important to explore what I argue is the liminal period, or first stage of girlhood in bondage, which begins from birth to the age of six and involves both the slave girl and her mother. This is a period of contemplation for the slave mother, when she reflects on fears of her daughter experiencing the same forms of racial and sexual violence that she faced in slavery as a young girl or witnessed on behalf of others during girlhood. The first stage is characterized by the mother’s fears for her daughter’s gendered future in slavery.

Slave women and girls experienced similar racialization. Thus, the young black female inherited the discursive and material conditions of her slave mother. As a result, to consider the girlhood of the young female slave, one must also consider the ways in

197 This correlation is important to consider when interrogating the different cultural meanings that are attached to the maturation of slave girls and it also offers a new vein to the study of enslaved girlhood because it challenges a common theme, which often uses Jacobs to argue that racial and sexual violence prevent one’s ability to experience childhood. The recurrent themes of lack, loss, or absence of youth that proliferate discourses of black girlhood due to prematurely knowing illuminates violence and its weighty impact on the lives of young slave girls, but it also forecloses the potential for nuanced investigations into other aspects of how they may have experienced girlhood, or what were the constitutive elements of the culture of girlhood in bondage. In other words, the language of lack, lost, or absence are undergirded with foreclosing power in discourse due to sexual violence, and thus leave no room to actually engage the characteristics of early black girlhood. Jacobs, even in the midst of violence and constant challenges to her own beliefs of whether or not she was experiencing girlhood still manages to speak to the transitions. Admittedly, enslaved girlhood is not inundated with the same culturally- gendered privileges and protections as white girlhood, but formerly enslaved women are still recalling a girlhood. There must be a place to recall and examine what this period of girlhood entails. Nevertheless, girlhood in bondage is rife with challenges that white childhood discourses presume are not aspects of childhood, and thus it becomes the embodiment of what childhood is not. But, the battle between whether or not one can experience childhood is in of itself a distinctive characteristic of the young lives of those who are situated in violence and poverty. And, thus the liminality—in between woman and girl, again, as I discussed in chapter one— becomes a part of the discourses of black girlhood, not the foreclosing factor.

107 which her mother or other adult female slaves engaged with newborn and small slave girls whom they knew too well would soon endure a similar plight of gendered violence.

This is the period that is suggested more frequently among slave mothers with daughters, as one marked by desires to liberate the young girls from what former slave Bethany

Veney notes in her own slave narrative as “certain doom,” or the sexual violence of slave owners. In her narrative, Bethany Veney states:

[Y]ou can never understand the slave mother's emotions as she clasps her new- born child, and knows that a master's word can at any moment take it from her embrace; and when, as was mine, that child is a girl, and from her own experience she sees its almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slave- owner, and feels that the law holds over her no protecting arm, it is not strange that, rude and uncultured as I was, I felt all this, and would have been glad if we could have died together there and then.198

Jacobs, making a similar claim as Veney, admits, she too, was overwhelmed with fear upon the birth of her newborn daughter. She explains:

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own…When I lay down beside my child, I felt how much easier it would be to see her die than to see her master beat her about, as I daily saw him beat other little ones.199

In the recalling of feelings experienced upon birthing girls into slavery, both

Veney and Jacobs provide readers with a glimpse into the conditions which shape the mother-daughter relationship. Their memories are undergirded with a sense of loss despite the fact that they have recently given birth. This loss—a consequence of not owning one’s body or offspring in the slave economy—is an important factor in the lives

198 Bethany Veney. 1889. The Narrative of Bethany Veney: A Slave Woman. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997, 26, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/veney/veney.html. 199 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 77, 86-7.

108 of slave women and girls. One of the dehumanizing objectives of slavery as illustrated in slave laws, which render one to follow the condition of the mother, coupled with the ceaseless trading of human bodies, is to destabilize any sort of humanizing kinship or sustaining connections. For children born into slavery, is to be born displaced. Slave mothers’ desires to liberate their newborn daughters and the fears that shape the mother- daughter relationship during the first few years of the newborn’s life is a distinctive aspect of a culture of girlhood in bondage or within systems in which poverty and racialized violence exists.200 Further, focusing on the relationship between the mother and daughter, as well as others like Jacobs’s grandmother Aunt Marthy, who played key roles in helping slave girls survive, sheds light on slave women’s desire to resist the broken kinship tactics of the slave economy, as they remember the central figures in their early lives. Their speaking to this relationship and connection is telling of the power of their symbolic memories. Jacobs certainly makes it clear to readers the important roles of her mother, father, brother, uncle, and especially grandmother, played in her survival during her girlhood and throughout her early adult life and the young lives of her children.

One can imagine that many slave mothers, similar to Jacobs and Veney, who gave birth to slave girls were haunted by thoughts of liberating their children by way of

200 One might argue that this may have been a distinctive element of white womanhood during this period, particularly among those who may have been experiencing violence and poverty, and also perhaps were not consenting to sex and reproduction. However, understanding death as a source of liberation from human slavery is not a dominant theme in nineteenth-century discourses around the birth of white girls in popular literature. Granted, death, illness, and fainting are common themes in popular nineteenth-century American women’s sentimental literature. Yet, the causes of death and other ailments are not usually centered on saving one’s children from slavery. This discourse does not shape the first few years between the mother and her newborn daughter as frequently as it is remarked upon between slave mothers and their daughters.

109 premature death. 201 It is noteworthy that during this period, white children, too, were exposed to premature death due to childhood illnesses that were thought to be incurable.

But, needless to say, the deaths of children by way of illness shaped the lives of their families, and was a part of their childhood, but their deaths were not predetermined as a means to escape racialized violence because they were born into a culture that deemed them unfit to be human or displaced objects. As illustrated in numerous narratives of mothering in bondage, in both fiction and non-fiction sources, slave women were always plagued and overwhelmed by thoughts of their children being taken away from them, or the possibility of having to witness the particular evils that the institution of slavery would eventually inflict upon their daughters. Some mothers, seeking to, as Paula

Giddings notes in her analysis of medical discourses documenting slave women’s lack of fecundity between nineteenth-century physicians, sought to resist in more covert ways to prevent the unfortunate doom of slavery upon their children by terminating their pregnancy with “medicine.”202

201 I have reservations about whether or not we should refer to the death of a slave, be they one- day old or ninety years old, as “premature,” as the slave was always hovering a liminal space between life and death. There was no perfect time or socially-constructed normal time of death for the slave that was about the preservation of “human” life. Death for the slave was frequently used to punish and intimidate other slaves. Perhaps the slave’s death was accidental, natural causes—illness, sickness, or the slave’s body was no longer usable. But the death of a slave could always be determined by slave owners. I think premature death may be too much of a contemporary analytic that cannot sufficiently be applied to the death of a slave, especially child, but it warrants discussion, at least some aspects, because death of children, especially girls, manifests so frequently in fiction and non-fiction sources imagining or re-counting slave life, respectively. 202 Giddings notes that one of the physicians stated that the women were using “camphor as a contraceptive.” She also goes on to recount a story of slave women requesting “medicine” from “an old slave woman to induce abortions.” See Paula J. Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Perennial, 2001), 45-6.

110 Jacobs and Veney were able to use their narratives to directly inform readers of the sorrows of slave mothers during the nineteenth century. Their appeals also shed light on the very precarious conditions that shape slave girls’ lives from birth. They relate to readers by showing that despite the lack of legal rights to protection, they are desperate to protect their girls in any way possible. This desperation symbolizes their love as mothers to the reader, and more importantly, their daughters as having lives worthy of protecting so much so that they would risk their own lives to protect them. This desire to protect by any means necessary speaks to the relationship between slave girls and their mothers, which from birth is shaped by the mother’s attempts to minimize the effects of the inherited discursive and material conditions, especially racialized sexual violence. It is crucial to point out the significance of slave mothers’ preoccupation with their daughter’s future of violence while she is only a small child or newborn. This is not simply important for the purpose of humanizing, but it was also important because it demonstrates the slave mother’s very sophisticated awareness of the processes of slave capitalism, which I argued in chapter one, negates the humanity and reconfigures age discourses around slave girls. Hence, slave mothers knew that they had very limited time to ascertain measures to protect their daughters.

This liminal period of girlhood in bondage, which illumines the slave mothers’ worries, is telling because they are fixated upon the gendered futures of their daughters even while the young girl is prepubescent. Fear guides them as their awareness of the slave economy’s perniciousness is not simply from their experience, but also through their observation of its processes on the lives of other female slaves. Their fears suggest

111 that they know slavery does not wait for a “proper age” and “proper time” for exploitative labor or the particular violence it inflicts on their daughters or to sell their children. This is certainly the case for former slave girl Elizabeth Keckley who was assigned her first duty at four years old. Keckley, a four-year-old girl, was assigned the duty of caretaker for her mistress’ newborn baby. Keckley recalls, “True, I was but a child myself—only four years old—but then I had been raised in a hardy school—had been taught to rely upon myself, and to prepare myself to render assistance to others.”203

Keckley, reiterates this idea that the processes of slave capitalism do not wait to use slave children, but rather indoctrinates them from their early years with their roles and duties as little laborers. Prior to puberty, slave girls cannot perform the most profitable activity in the slave economy—reproduce other laborers—but as Jacobs suggests in her implication that she has seen slave masters abuse other “little ones,” they are still harmed through various forms of violence, grooming, and will likely be “prematurely knowing in evil things.”204

The battle for the slave girl’s life begins at birth. The haunting thoughts of liberating her from this sure-to-come violence, just like the inherited material and social conditions, shape the worlds of young black girls and the mother-daughter relationship in bondage. Nevertheless, though this narrative of fear and desires to liberate the girl-child are often reiterated in the early lives of slave girls, the desire to protect by these measures, especially to free the child from sexual violence does not necessarily go away

203 Elizabeth Keckley. 1868. Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999, 19, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/keckley/keckley.html. 204 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 28.

112 once the child reaches the age of six. Rather, I want to argue here that the terror lurks around and must be considered a distinctive aspect of enslaved girlhood. An example of how the fear continues to lurk and shape the worlds of slave girls and their mothers even when the girl has reached puberty, is evident in Jacobs recalling “I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of a child nearly white. In her agony she cried out, “O

Lord, come and take me!”205 Jacobs goes on to note that as the young slave girl is suffering, her mother cries out, “The baby is dead, thank God; and I hope my poor child will soon be in heaven, too.” 206 Once the slave girl begins closing her eyes and dies,

Jacobs tells readers the slave girl’s mother “had but the one child, whose eyes she saw closing in death, while she thanked God for taking her away from the greater bitterness of life.”207 Even though her daughter was past the age of six, the slave mother was still thankful that her daughter no longer had to suffer the violence inflicted upon her in bondage. 208

As indicated by these incidents in which slave mothers utilized strange autonomies that emerged within their very limited social locations, liberating slave children, and daughters in particular, by way of death, hovers around the lives of slave girls in bondage. Again, the frequency by which this strange autonomy is recounted beckons one to consider its place in the culture of girlhood in bondage. The importance of this strange autonomy—strange in that it is not necessarily pure social, political,

205 Ibid., 13. 206 Ibid., 13. 207 Ibid., 14. 208 This contemplative period of girlhood can overlap with other stages. Death was never not an option, but from narratives of slavery, it appears that discussions of terminating the child’s life after birth into the slave system frequently occur before they are around the ages of six.

113 intellectual, or economic autonomy—as the slave mother cannot decide to provide a protected life for her child or deliver one’s children from slavery by other means. Further, it is evident in the narratives of Veney and Jacobs that this is not the route that the mothers wish to take, but if given the opportunity, they can liberate their daughters by means of death. Again, this theme is too common in narratives of slave girl experiences—in both fiction and non-fiction sources—to completely disregard. It is important to emphasize that this is not a reading to insinuate that killing girl children is what slave women do, or that they are born with a predisposition to kill female youth.

Rather, it is about recognizing the constitutive elements of an early culture of girlhood in bondage, and the ways in which it was shaped by the conditions of slavery. This enables a more nuanced analysis of a period of slave girls’ lives and transitions between particular stages of youth and growth—physically, mentally, spiritually, and politically.

Female-authored slave narratives suggest that this contemplative period begins at birth and lasts until the child experiences her critical awakening to racial difference as a slave girl around the age of six. 209 Around the age of six, slave girls are on the verge of experiencing one of two awakenings around their social position. These two crucial awakenings that occur in the lives of slave girls include the moment they become privy to their racial difference as human property, and then the more complex cognizance of their

209 I pointed out in chapter one that Historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz contends that “by the age of five or six,” slave children are “initiated into the world of work through education and training intended to enhance a slave’s economic worth.” Extending Jenkins’ analysis, I too suggest that slave children are being indoctrinated with their roles as small laborers, but here I want to center the narratives of black women in which they recall their girlhoods to understand the stages of youth from their perspective. See Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 14.

114 particular racialized sexual difference. The latter is experienced as they reach puberty around the age of twelve.

The moment girls become privy to their racialized difference and slave status occurs when they are assigned their first duty as a child slave, and thus constitutes the second stage of girlhood in bondage. In Elizabeth Keckley’s memories of girlhood, she recalls her ability to remember began at the age of four and during this time she was assigned her first duty as a child slave. As mentioned previously, Keckley knew even at this early age from her conditioning as a little slave, that she was being cultivated according to her racialized difference. Keckley, as she exclaims, a four-year-old child was in charge of taking care of a newborn child. This duty helped to shape her understanding about the processes of racialization for the slave child, in particular, and the slave community, in general.

Born into a racial caste system, Keckley was not deserving of protection or freedom from work at the age of four, but in her duties to protect her mistresses’ child, she was positioned as well as harshly disciplined to understand that her racialized difference removed her from the same spaces of protection deemed birth-right of her white charge. Keckley recalls that shortly after being assigned her first duty as a caretaker, she mistakenly dropped the mistresses’ baby on the floor. Being a child herself,

Keckley had limited knowledge on how to care for a child whom was born deserving of protection, so she proclaims, “not knowing what to do, I seized the fire-shovel in my perplexity, and was trying to shovel up my tender charge…”210 Keckley’s mistress

210 Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 20.

115 ordered her to “be taken out and lashed” for her presumed “carelessness.”211 This incident, in which Keckley tells readers she remembers “so well,” as the “blows were not administered with a light hand,” was her first time being “punished in this cruel way, but was not the last.”212

Likewise, for Jacobs, the age of six was integral to the shaping of her understanding about the processes of racialization for the slave child and her difference.

Following the death of her mother, Jacobs explains that at the age of six, “I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.”213 Unlike Keckley, Jacobs’s earliest assigned duties such as sewing were not, as she recalls, “toilsome or disagreeable” as her “mistress was so kind...”214 Yet, the “blight which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel” began to manifest when her kind mistress died, and she was sent to labor for the Flints around the age of eleven.215

Following their initial realization of racial difference through work assignments and the talk of others, the narratives of former slave girls suggest that there were other defining moments that continued to reinforce dominant ideologies of race throughout their early girlhood, in particular, the harsh treatment they witnessed inflicted on other slaves. Jacobs explains one of the defining moments occur during the New Year holiday.

The turn of a new year was a time that struck fear into the hearts of slave mothers, and I suggest, perhaps their children who were of age, like Jacobs and Keckley, to recognize

211 Ibid., 20-1. 212 Ibid., 20-1. 213 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 6. 214 Ibid., 7. 215 Ibid., 7.

116 their racialized difference, as January 1 was “hiring day [in] the south.”216 On January 2,

Jacobs explains slaves “are expected to go to their new masters.”217 On one of the sale days, Jacobs witnesses a slave mother “lead seven children to the auction-block.” 218 The mother was forced to watch as all seven of her children were traded on hiring day. Jacobs discusses this event in the midst of explaining her new life at the Flints.

In a similar narrative of being exposed to violence towards other slaves during girlhood, Keckley recalls, “When I was about seven years old I witnessed, for the first time, the sale of a human being.”219 A young boy, little Joe—the son of the cook—was used as human currency to cover a purchase for Keckley’s master who purchased more hogs for winter than he could afford. The young boy, as Keckley remembers, “was placed in the scales, and was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound.”220 She remembers the young boy’s mother was tricked, and told that her son would be returned to her the next morning. However, her son never returned. Keckley recalls witnessing the mother grieve and at one point be “whipped for grieving for her lost boy.”221 Though a little later than

Keckley, Jacobs also explains to readers that around the age of eleven, and she had only been with Flints a few weeks, she too, witnessed a traumatic scene of violence involving other slaves in addition to the aforementioned sale of all seven of a slave mother’s children. When Jacobs moved to the Flints, she tells readers that she observed her first slave whipping. Remembering the violence and informing readers that she will “never

216 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 15. 217 Ibid., 15. 218 Ibid., 16. 219 Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 28. 220 Ibid., 28. 221 Ibid., 29.

117 forget that night,” Jacobs states the next morning she noticed the cowhide used to torture the slave was still “wet with blood, and the boards all covered with gore.” 222

Considering both Jacobs and Keckley’s narratives and the overall frequency of formerly enslaved women not only vividly remembering, but also discussing incidents of violence that occurred during their early girlhood years, sheds light on how the brutality of the slave economy impacted slave girls’ views of their early life in bondage and desires for their future as adults. Witnessing violence in the slave system was a common occurrence amongst all slaves, but Jacobs and Keckley’s narratives beckon readers to question what makes black women remembering slavery choose to narrate the violence as part of their coming of age. Granted the slave narrative is a genre, which follows the sentimentalist literary form, but the vivid imagery of their memories of violence and how they choose to narrate the violence as synonymous with their processes of racialization, suggests that this is also a critical moment that occurs in their youth and helps to materialize the reality of their positions as slaves. This is also essential to our understanding of girlhood in bondage, as children’s desires for their future, especially those of girls, have been mute in studies of slave experience. For instance, in studies of slavery, adult slaves, those who had experienced the slave system’s brutality and witnessed it among others for most of their lives, desires for emancipation are frequently engaged. Yet, slave girls, have been given less space to elaborate on their desires for freedom and other aspects that are unique to them as young subjects in bondage, as their known precarious future conditions due to sexual violence in the slave system forecloses

222 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 13.

118 the possibility of exploring other discourses or parts of their formative years that were not simply about their abuse.

This limited engagement with how aspects of slavery impacted girls’ views of their lives or desires for freedom beyond violence is one of the reasons why Jacobs’s narrative is such as critical text for investigating the full range of girlhood in bondage.

Jacobs not only provides a glimpse into the violence and trauma which, as expected, shapes her reality during girlhood, but she also challenges the reader to imagine the possibility of slaves girls’ desires for freedom, love, and marriage similar to those deemed a privilege of girls born outside of bondage. Jacobs does this two-fold task of showing girlhood desires throughout the full range of her youth and also discussing the violence infringed upon girls in her discussion of the third stage of girlhood, which begins around the age of twelve and lasts to approximately fifteen years of age.

After surviving the contemplative period of the first stage of girlhood, the physical violence of the racialization process to inundate slave girls with their duties as slaves through the assignment of jobs, harsh punishment, and the witnessing the torture of others, which constitute the second stage, during the third stage of girlhood, from the age of twelve to fifteen, the slave girl becomes painfully aware of her racialized sexual difference. This period involves the most physical and cognitive transitions that slave girls’ experience, and constitutes what Jacobs notes as a “sad epoch in the of a slave girl.”223 It is the point during which their bodies are reaching puberty and, as I mentioned earlier, the transitions of their corporeality correlate with the particular sexual violence inflicted upon them in the slave system. Interestingly, the narratives of girlhood in

223 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 27.

119 bondage, especially the significant age transitions, in the recalling of incidents of sexual violence that were oftentimes the leading catalysts in their burgeoning awareness of racialized sexual difference, become more nuanced and emphasized to the reader.

However, in line with the respectable politics of sentimental literature, especially amongst women writers, the narratives do not focus on the most private details of sexual abuse, but rather contrasts the vulnerability of young slave girls or their “extreme youth” with the base desires of others in the slave system that deny their girlhood and opportunities to be safe from particular forms of violence.224

Adhering to the respectable politics of sentimental literature, Jacobs, once again relies on rhetorical strategies to reveal the immorality of the slave institution and its harm toward the young slave girl. That is, rather than tell readers the acts of sexual violence, she uses the social construction of youthful innocence and age to demonstrate the cultural protections afforded to white girls during girlhood, and the lack of protections afforded to girls in bondage during the very same period of youth. Though, again, Jacobs has referred to her age throughout the first half of the text, she intensifies this age discourse during the final and most dangerous stage of girlhood in bondage. Jacobs moved to the Flints house when she was around the age of eleven years old. She also explains to readers that the slave girl, prior to the age of twelve, will have learned why she and other female slaves, perhaps her mother, are among the ones whom her mistress hates and will most certainly be “prematurely knowing in evil things.”225 This awareness, as Jacobs notes, will increase to the extent that the slave girl will be “compelled to realize that she is no longer a

224 Ibid., 27. 225 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 28.

120 child.”226 At this time, after the passage of two years, Dr. Flint began to heighten his quest to force Jacobs to surrender to his ill desires. To further emphasize the vulnerability of slave girls during this period, Jacobs consistently speaks of her age, the age of her perpetrator, and periods of youth. Jacobs writes:

But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import…the master’s age, my extreme youth, and the fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother, made him bear his treatment for many months…He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him— where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature.227

Jacobs suggests to readers that upon entering puberty, around the age of fifteen, the violence that haunts slave mothers with daughters begins, and constitutes the “sad epoch in the life of a slave girl.” At this period, Jacobs has no protections from Flint, as she is his property. But, she deploys youthful innocence and age in a manner that suggests to her white audience that even she, a young slave girl, is vulnerable because of Dr. Flint’s immorality and propensity to violate the “most sacred commandments of nature”— engage in sexual acts with a young child. Similar to the narrative of young girl characters in mid-nineteenth century women’s sentimental fiction, Jacobs communicates the vulnerability of the slave girl on the verge of a premature womanhood by using her

“extreme youth” and the lack of protections that she is afforded from the older, benevolent patriarch. That is, Jacobs aligns herself with the story of the vulnerable heroine girl-character “who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly

226 Ibid., 28. 227 Ibid., 27.

121 depended on to sustain her throughout life,” and is left to find “her own way in the world” that Nina Baym contends is recurrent tale in women’s sentimental literature during the nineteenth century.228 Although Jacobs was never completely safe from her master as a slave; still, readers are reminded that she was afforded some form of protection from both her grandmother’s ability to indoctrinate the young girl with “pure principles” and routinely cast a scornful eye towards Dr. Flint in order to publicly shame his immoral acts towards a child. The pure principles and her grandmother’s shaming of

Dr. Flint that offered Jacobs a slight shield of protection prior to puberty were forcibly discarded because of what Jacobs symbolizes as her “natural” inability to protect herself as a “young’ and helpless girl.

Constantly reminding readers of her “youth” and age, despite the lack of legal and social protections for slave girls, Jacobs read slave girls as vulnerable, depicts Flint’s immorality, and again, aligns the girlish desires of white girls with that of slave girls.

Slave girls, as Jacobs notes, despite the unfortunate violence that they experience as property, have similar life goals and desires as white girls such as marriage and children.

Jacobs depicts the moment in which one finally marries and has children as the actual ending of one’s girlhood. Not jettisoning the reality that most slave girls do not have positive endings to their girlhoods, and are usually prematurely knowing or expected to be adult slaves, Jacobs attempts to humanize slave girls and the illustrate the complex

228 Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction : A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820- 1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 11.

122 positions that characterize their final girlhood years by recalling her “love-dream that had been the support through her many trials” of girlhood.229

Jacobs explains to readers that one of the most sustaining sources she had during her enslaved girlhood was a dream of one day marrying her first love, a “young colored carpenter; a free born man,” who was her childhood friend.230 Having “loved him with all the ardor of a young girl’s first love,” Jacobs dreamed of being purchased by the carpenter and later married.231 However, upon revealing her love for the carpenter, Dr.

Flint, as Jacobs notes, delivered his first violent blow to the young girl.232 Realizing that her pursuer would never be able to protect her or his own children since they were slaves,

Jacobs encourages the carpenter to leave for the Free States, and never return. When the carpenter left, Jacobs exclaims, the “dream of my girlhood was over.”233 Jacobs decides that since Dr. Flint will not allow her to marry the man of her girlhood dreams, she, like the archetypical girl-heroine in sentimental literature, must also awaken her “inner possibilities” to develop a plan to protect herself from her slave master’s sexual advances.234 Jacobs creates a plan that both hinders Flint’s sexual schemes and also officially concludes her girlhood—she becomes pregnant with another man’s child.235

Recognizing that her plan, though one in which she briefly experiences what she notes as

229 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 38. 230 Ibid., 38. 231 Ibid., 37. 232 Ibid., 39. 233 Ibid., 42. 234 Baym contends that once the heroine girl-character in sentimental literature realizes that her world offers her no protections or fails to meet her expectations, her “inner possibilities” are awakened. See Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction : A Guide to Novels, 19. 235 Keckley also suggests that girlhood is ended by a violent sexual act. However, since Jacobs uses more time to elaborate upon the stages of girlhood, I focus more upon her reading of the end of youth for this chapter.

123 “akin to freedom” or the experience of “having a lover who has no control over you,” to have children with Mr. Sands is not the way to virtuous womanhood, Jacobs explains to readers what she expected to achieve while beckoning them to suspend their judgement in order to imagine that she, as a young vulnerable girl without any protections, had any other choice.236

Jacobs ends her chapter “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life” by telling her pious grandmother about her plan and the sins she committed in order to escape Dr.

Flint’s torture. Moreover, Jacobs suggests that girlhood ends in the girl becoming a virtuous woman through the institution of marriage. She appeals to readers by centering girlhood, and recounting the unfortunate incidents of her life that denied her as well as other slave girls a proper transition from woman to girl. The formative years are emphasized as critical periods that will determine the slave girl’s future morality. Hence,

Jacobs’s narrative of girlhood makes the case for liberating the slave girl as one of urgent necessity to both the women’s rights and antislavery movement agendas.

Conclusion

Whatever the style and circumstances of these [slave] narratives, they were written to say principally two things. One: “This I is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race.” Two: “I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery.237

Toni Morrison

236 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 55. 237 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth : The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 101–24, 86.

124 Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the narratives that

Morrison asserts was purposefully written to proclaim that African Americans are fully human beings with personal and cultural histories. Reading Incidents in the Life of a

Slave Girl through the lens of girlhood allows us to revise and nuance Morrison’s two essential statements made by the slave narrative author to include an affirmation of the enslaved girl’s history of girlhood in bondage and status as fully human from childhood to womanhood. The slave narrative is a record of not only the slave woman’s history, but it also serves as proof that the “prematurely knowing” slave girl existed and survived the harsh conditions of slavery. My analysis of the stages and representations of enslaved girlhood positions the slave narrative as an accessible archive of black girlhood in the

U.S.

Echoing Robin Bernstein, childhood innocence, and I add youthfulness, was

“raced white” during the nineteenth century, largely due to the antislavery writer Stowe and sentimentalist rhetoric.238 I contend that since racial, sexual, and age ideologies infringed upon black girlhood, Jacobs challenges racialized discourses of childhood, and also presents stages of enslaved girlhood that not only recognize the slave girl’s unique realities within a slave economy, but also the young black female as aged differently than children outside of slavery in the antebellum south. With this said, youthfulness can be used to represent the vulnerability of the slave girl, but since blackness occludes youth and vulnerability, one must be able reconstruct a black girlhood and formative period of life that is recognizable to nineteenth-century readers of the slave narrative, but also

238 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 4.

125 challenging the racialized idea of youthfulness. Jacobs manages to do the work of using a familiar heroine and trope of youthfulness while also upending it to point out its inability to capture the full realities of enslaved girls who are not perceived as vulnerable. Like recent scholars returning to black women’s earlier writings to unearth their narratives of girlhood that we have overlooked due to perpetually reading texts for iterations of black womanhood, I, too, read Jacobs’s text as one of the most important because of its popularity and its cogent, accessible prose about the complexities of black girlhood during slavery that look remarkably familiar to our contemporary moment. Thus, my work is in conversation with scholars who have recently turned to Jacobs to identify stages of girlhood.

After surviving years of harsh critique from scholars proclaiming the slave narrative genre inauthentic or below the rigor of American Letters, pioneering scholars such as Marion Wilson Starling and John W. Blassingame have centered the voices of slaves to illuminate their stories as the quintessential form or template by which black people appealed to dominant society as “human” during slavery. That is, slave-text authors appeal through sentimental testimony of their abuses as well as those of others positioned in slavery while also demonstrating the most privileged skill considered the primary characteristic of a worthy citizen—literacy.239 This early narrative is the

“genesis” from which social change by way of the author as advocate and artist emerged.

240 Hence, it is befitting to extend creative readings of the slave narrative as a similar

239 Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 89. Figure out the page, Morrison said this. 240 Marva J. Furman, “The Slave Narrative: Prototype of the Early Afro-American Novel,” in The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982), 120-1.

126 form of early protest in which black women publicly advocated on behalf of the worthiness and existence of black girls through the recalling of unique racially-gendered experiences while simultaneously refuting claims against their humanity, illegibility, citizenship, and girlhood. Re-imagining the slave narrative as a an accessible archive of early black girlhood nudges readers to dig deeper and perform what Toni Morrison notes as a “literary archeology,” in order to “reconstruct the world” from the “remains [that] were left behind.”241 The female-authored slave narrative is one of the first sites from which one can reconstruct a world of black girlhood in the U.S.

241 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 92.

127 Chapter Three

Yearning for a Place to be a Queer Black Girl in the City: Towards a Theory of “In-betweenness” in the Study of Queer Black Girlhood in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones

To give primary significance to a “brown girl” as the protagonist of a novel was practically unheard of in 1959; to focus on her adolescent years for an entire novel had not been attempted even by Brooks. With its intense focus on Selina’s journey from budding adolescence to questioning womanhood, Brown Girl, Brownstones was unique.242

Barbara Christian

Drawing on Barbara Christian’s insights in the quote, the work of undoing

Topsy’s image in the lives of black girls followed black women writers into the twentieth century. As important as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was to affirming the mere existence, humanity, and rights to citizenship of black girls in the nineteenth century, as I argued in Chapter Two, the formerly enslaved narrator was limited in her attempts to advocate on behalf of black girls within the established architecture of the slave narrative genre. That is, in order to achieve the goal of revealing the ills of slavery, the slave narrative had to be both familiar and accessible to its presumed white audience. Thus, there were aspects of black girls’ lives that simply could not be explored within the space of the slave narrative and other texts that adopted elements of sentimentalist rhetoric during the nineteenth century. However, the African

American novels of the twentieth century disavowed the politics of white comfort, and boldly centered black girls’ experiences. The new black girl characters of the twentieth

242 Barbara Christian, “Paule Marshall (1929- ),” in African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001), 550. http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.its.virginia.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE|9780684316680&v=2.1&u=viva _uva&it=aboutBook&p=G-Scrib&sw=w.

128 century were inevitably weighty, or filled with symbolism capable of illuminating black girls’ lived experiences that had been hidden in the margins since slavery while at the same time theorizing aspects of black girlhood during the contemporary moment. More plainly, twentieth-century fiction allowed black women to add more imaginative layers of their lives and complex personhoods to the historical record, which had long minimized their existence to Topsys, slave girls, and ex-slaves, but never fully human or girls who had become women. Rather, they “jes grew” with no particular life goals since they were not girls and they could never be women.

African American’s women’s fiction in the twentieth century can be reasonably argued as taking up the task of “undoing Topsy” or being the first to work towards making the black girl less of an anomalous figure in American literature and beyond in

U.S. culture. Of the many authors who would take on the task of boldly “undoing Topsy” in the twentieth century in popular texts such as Gwendolyn Brooks’ (1949) Pulitzer-

Prize winning Annie Allen, Maya Angelou’s (1969) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

Toni Morrison’s (1970) The Bluest Eye, Paule Marshall’s (1959) Brown Girl,

Brownstones was one of the first semi-autobiographical novels that centered a black girl—one dealing with the complexities of race, gender, age, sexuality, class, and diasporic identity—as a primary source of insight into the rapidly changing urban landscape of U.S. culture.243 Marshall, like her character, comes of age during the tail-end of the Great Depression, the duration of World War II, second wave of the Great

243 In a published interview with Joyce Pettis, Paule Marshall reveals that some of her protagonist’s experiences in Brown Girl, Brownstones are her own, but perhaps, not exactly the same. I read this as a semi-autobiographical text. See Joyce Pettis and Paule Marshall, “A Melus Interview: Paule Marshall,” Melus 17, no. 4 (1991): 117–29, 118.

129 Migration, and the early beginnings of the Cold War.244 Beginning in 1939 Brooklyn,

New York, Paule Marshall’s West-Indian ten-year old black girl protagonist Selina

Boyce’s girlhood is the lens through which we understand these major historical events.

Using Selina’s girlhood as a site of knowledge, we learn how these events impacted the lives of black girls coming of age in urban cities.

Furthering Geta LeSeur’s claim, Brown Girl, Brownstones is a female bildungsroman “which addresses the problem of dual cultures, American and West

Indian.”245 Like any bildungsroman—a text that explores one’s coming of age or the

“progress from childhood to manhood or womanhood,” Selina must discover her own identity.246 Many scholars have examined Selina’s challenges to become her own person as she faces issues around race, class, and gender during her formative years as a first- generation migrant in the U.S. For example, scholars have looked at Selina’s challenges with her mother, or the mother-daughter relationship.247 Some scholarship has focused on

Selina’s constant battle between accepting the ways of U.S. blacks or West Indians, in terms of shaping her gendered identity, professional future, and sexuality. Rosamond S.

King argues that Selina uses sex to rebel against the respectability politics that governed

244 I am referring to James N. Gregory’s conceptualization of this period as the “second wave” of the Great Migration. See James N. Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview,” in African American Urban History since World War II eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19-20. 245 Geta LeSeur, “One Mother, Two Daughters: The Afro-American and the Afro-Caribbean Female Bildungsroman,” The Black Scholar 17, no. 2 (1986): 26–33, 27. 246 Claudine Raynaud, “Coming of Age in the African American Novel,” in Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel ed. Maryemma Graham (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106. 247 For criticism on mother-daughter relationship in Brown Girl, Brownstone, See Lisa D. McGill, “Thinking Back through the Mother: The Poetics of Place and the Mother/Daughter Dyad in Brown Girl, Brownstones,” The Black Scholar 30, no. 2 (2000): 34–40.

130 Barbadian girlhood.248 Others have examined themes in the text such as Selina’s fight for individualism and pushback against American capitalism as well as Cold War ideologies.249 Each of the aforementioned critiques of Marshall’s text is important, but after reviewing the scholarship on Brown Girl, Brownstones, two facts remain true since its publication in 1959: The text is still grossly understudied, especially in terms of its importance to the history of black girlhood in urban cities. Furthermore, a significant amount of the scholarship critiques the two worlds—West Indian and American—that the black-girl protagonist must negotiate, but scholars rarely address the actual “in-between” space such as queer girl/woman that Selina dwells throughout her girlhood, and ultimately constructs her own queer black-girl identity living in a “different world.”

Specifically, the scholarship on Brown Girl, Brownstones rarely acknowledges that

Selina, like most black girls who are illegible as girls due to racial ideologies of childhood and girlhood, creates something wholly new in the middle. Echoing Paule

Marshall, Selina “envisioned a different world and a different way.”250

Selina is born into a state of perpetual “in-betweenness” because she is a black girl, and therefore illegible due to the intersections of race, class, gender, and age. Her illegibility as a girl and child causes confusion as to whether or not she is a fully-grown woman. She is always in-between black girl and woman. Further, Selina is suspended in a perpetual state of in-betweenness because she lives between people possessing her

248 Rosamond S. King, “Sex as Rebellion: A Close Reading of Lucy and Brown Girl, Brownstones,” Journal of African American Studies 12, no. 4 (2008): 366–77. 249 Kathlene McDonald, “Paule Marshall’s Critique of Capitalism and Cold War Ideology: Brown Girl, Brownstones as a Resistant Working-Class Text,” The Black Scholar 30, no. 2 (2000): 26– 33; Martin Japtok, “Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism,” African American Review 32, no. 2 (1998): 305–15. 250 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 225.

131 mother’s assimilationist desires of living the Barbadian version of the American Dream of owning a home and her father’s unruly dreams of going back “home” to live a carefree life outside of the “man’s country.” 251 Selina moves through girlhood trying to negotiate her own identity amidst the cacophonous worlds of her parents and the rapidly-changing urban landscape. Selina’s mother Silla comes within reach of owning her home when she secretly sells a “piece of ground home,” or land that the girl’s father Deighton inherits from his deceased sister.252 Rather than using the “nine hundred odd dollars” that they received for the land on the house, Deighton goes on a shopping spree for his entire family.253 Silla loses all interest and respect for Deighton, and has him deported.

Deighton eventually is said to have either fallen over board or committed suicide when he was faced with the reality of being back home in the West Indies with no land, no money, and no family. Seeing the toll that both assimilation into the “man’s country” that her family migrated to on her mother as well as the “life-sores” visible on those who carried the rebellious desires of her father, Selina elects to create her own world in the middle.254

In essence, Selina’s coming-of-age story is one which demonstrates how a black girl, literally and figuratively in the middle of two cultures moving toward an ideal world, chooses to search for a way to simply be a queer black girl without having to race for whiteness and a particular representation of blackness.

251 Selina’s mother Silla and the other West Indian women refer to the U.S. as the “man country.” Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: Random House, 1959), 23. 252 Ibid., 24-5. 253 Ibid., 114. 254 One of the characters Miss Thompson has a sore on the bottom of her foot from living a hard life in the south and now trying to make a living in the north. See Ibid., 27-8, 307.

132 Selina introduces us to queer black girlhood in the tumultuous urban landscape at defining moments. The protagonist represents an autonomous expression of queer black girlhood in which black girls wrest power within the precarious spaces they occupy rather than being further victimized by the intersections that have historically caused their illegibility. I employ aspects of M. Nourbese Philip and Hortense Spillers theories of the in-between spaces or liminality of black womanhood alongside Roderick A. Ferguson and Zenzele Isoke’s critiques of “black heteropatriarchy” as a theoretical point of departure in my analysis of queer black girlhood within urban spaces in Brown Girl,

Brownstones. Black Feminist scholars have long used Hortense Spillers’ theory of the liminal spaces in which she argues black women exist as “not-yet” subjects as a result of race removing them from dominant conceptions of white femaleness and gendered identity.255 This theory of liminality or existing as a “not-yet” subject has been critical to investigating aspects of black womanhood and black women’s racialization in the U.S. at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. 256 Likewise, M. Nourbese Philip

255 For “not-yet” subjects, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, 72. 256 Scholars studying black girlhood such as Nazera Sadiq Wright have recently gravitated towards Spillers’ conceptualization of the liminal or in-between space to think about how black girls’ subjectivities are often marginalized due to their placement between black woman and black girl as well as the blurry line between the point one at which one is a black girl and then transitions into a black woman. In particular, my analysis of Paule Marshall’s character Selina Boyce is in conversation with Wright’s observation that the state of “in-betweenness” and “ambiguity” of black girls can be used to “reject their current victimized subjectivity and opt to view themselves as capable and committed to surviving their circumstances.” Other investigations of the liminal are productive for studying complexities of black girlhood in literature and larger culture such as the work of Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, but also limiting because the transitional space in between becomes synonymous with abuse, especially sexual and incestuous desires of black men for the anomalous figure—black daughters—in the black family drama whose positionality sits uncomfortably between girl/woman, at times, mother/daughter, due to social forces of poverty and racism. That is, the black girl, like the black mother, may have ambiguous roles in the heteronormative family of providing and nurturing when poverty and

133 took the liminal a step further by thinking about the geographic aspects of black women’s existence and having to make sense of public space and the land in relation to the “space between the legs.”257 Philip pushes scholars to rethink the liminal as the space “in- between the legs” and source that both makes and unmakes black women. Black women are made into sexualized racial objects because of the space between their legs, thereby simultaneously causing their unmaking as valuable subjects and respectable women.

Ferguson’s Queer of Color Critique helps me expand and rethink the usability of black girls as “not-yet subjects” who are “in-between” girl/woman and black/white heteropatriarchy. Selina is an aberrant, liminal subject—a queer girl who “exceed[s] the racialized boundaries of gender and sexual ideals,” and thereby deviates from both white heteropatriarchy and also black heteropatriarchy—during a period in which migrant black female bodies in urban landscapes were either imagined as belonging in homes increasing the capital of white employers as domestic workers or in factories increasing State capital by manufacturing products for the war.258 Zenzele Isoke’s analysis of queer black women’s efforts to challenge black heteropatriarchy in urban landscapes aids my reading

racism does not allow the girl to simply be a child. Perhaps, the obfuscating roles of black daughters and mothers, and how the liminal is most productive in theorizing this drama in African American women’s literature, is best exemplified in scholars’ close readings of Toni Morrison’s character Pecola in the popular text The Bluest Eye. For more on scholars using Spillers’ theory of “not-yet” subjects to study black girls’ in African American women’s writing, see Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Maria W. Stewart’s ‘The First Stage of Life’: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 40, no. 3 (2015): 150-175, 7-8. Also see Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 114- 150. 257 M. Nourbese Philip, “Dis Place: The Space Between,” Feminist Measures : Soundings in Poetry and Theory, eds. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 287–316, 288. 258 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black : Toward a Queer of Color Critique, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 11, 113, 147-8.

134 of the ways in which Selina, as a queer black girl coming of age in New York, refuses to adhere to the capitalist-driven motivations of the State or her mother who strives toward assimilation and a proper version of Black heteropatriarchy.259 Whereas Spillers and

Philip help me identify the black-girl subject in the liminal spaces and the roles they are made to execute, Ferguson and Isoke aid my reimagining of the possibilities and worlds that black girls are able to create despite their presumed aberrance in the liminal spaces they occupy as “not-yet” subjects. By using Spillers to clarify and extend Isoke,

Ferguson, and Philip, in my reading of Brown Girl, Brownstones, I make a case for expanding the usability of the in-between space for theorizing black female life in urban spaces, especially during girlhood, in African American women’s literature that goes beyond sexual abuse and incest. From a critical race perspective, due to the illegibility of black girls as girls, and the pervasiveness of racism and poverty, they will always have a difficult time being imagined as entities that are entirely separate from black women.

With this in mind, black girls and women have had to figure out how to deal with this reality while re-membering black girlhood in a world that perpetually negates its existence or solely affirms its value as a formative period in black female personhood.

Thus, the in-between positions that black girls are forced to occupy must be taken seriously in order to think about other aspects of black girlhood beyond sexual abuse and incest within literature.

In my analysis, I argue the black-girl character Selina uses her “in-betweenness” as a queer girl/woman to create an entirely different world and resist the social forces of

259 Zenzele Isoke, “Can’t I Be Seen? Can’t I Be Heard? Black Women Queering Politics in Newark,” Gender, Place & Culture 21, no. 3 (March 16, 2014): 353–69.

135 black and white heteropatriarchy which seek to both punish her for not aspiring to the aspects of white girlhood that are unattainable due to her race and a respectable

Barbadian black girlhood that is within reach, but unbearable. Further, using Afro-

Caribbean lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s theory of the “erotic as power,” I show how Selina not only survives between girl and woman and creates an entirely different world, but she also, unlike most black-girl protagonists of the twentieth century, experiences pleasure as an in-between subject.260 Placing my analysis of queer black girlhood in conversation with scholar Adilia E.E. James, I, too, am “in search of sites where young Black female sexuality is joyfully expressed.”261 And, like James, I see Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as being a useful theory when reading black girls’ sexuality and expressions of pleasure cautiously for autonomy at the intersections of race, class, gender, and I add age, rather than through the lens of victimization because of their illegibility.262 Granted, black girls experience sexual violence daily, as much of the literary and filmic representations during the twentieth century so aptly capture, but as Marshall suggests with her character

Selina, they also experience pleasure on their own terms and outside of heteronormativity. In the compromising spaces in-between, Selina found a space to form her own queer black-girl identity. She signifies black girls’ resiliency. Not all black girls

260 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1984), 53. 261 Adilia EE James, “Queer like Me: Black Girlhood Sexuality on the Playground, under the Covers, and in the Halls of Academia,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 15, no. 1 (2011): 41–48, 44. 262 Echoing literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies, it is fitting to place Marshall and Lorde in conversation with each other to study queer black girlhood not simply because they both identify as Afro-Caribbean writers, but also, “Lorde and Marshall challenge the very meaning of specific identity and placement.” Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), 116.

136 die in the liminal spaces they exist, some live to tell their own stories. Selina, then, is a testament of black girls’ narratives of survival.

The Space between Girl and Woman A haze of sunlight seeping down from the skylight through the dust and dimness of the hall caught her wide full mouth, the small but strong nose, the eyes set deep in the darkness of her face. They were not the eyes of a child. Something too old lurked in their centers. They were weighted, it seemed, with scenes of a long life. She might have been old once and now, miraculously, young again—but with the memory of that other life intact. She seemed to know the world down there in the dark hall and beyond for what it was.263

From the time Marshall introduces ten-year old Selina Boyce, it is clear that the young girl stands out like a sore thumb amongst the other West Indian characters who are drowning in their “brown monotony” or the nearly identical brownstones which line

Chauncey Street.264 The brownstones on Chauncey Street serve as material symbols of the West Indian characters who have migrated to New York and fully accept the ideologies of the American Dream and black heteropatriarchy.265 While Selina does not fit within the category of those adhering to the respectable ideals of the West Indian community that she lives among on Chauncey Street, she does not completely fit into the bustling black community on Fulton Street. Unlike Chauncey, Fulton Street is lined night and day with Barbadians who have, similar to her father, disavowed respectability politics and blacks who migrated from the U.S. South and are not invested in being still long enough to dream. Selina exists within the interstices of the dreamers and the good-

263 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones, Ibid., 4. 264 “Brown monotony,” See Ibid., 3. 265 For my analysis of black heteropatriarchy in urban landscapes, I find Zenzele Isoke’s definition to be most useful. Building on the work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Isoke defines black heteropatriarchy as “the local convergence of processes of black racialization, heterosexualization, and patriarchy.” See Isoke, “Can’t I Be Seen?,” 366.

137 timers. She is positioned in the text as having to negotiate the tiny gap between two worlds at all times, with the intention, like any protagonist of a bildungsroman, that she will ultimately find her own way.

At ten years of age Selina does not have the eyes of a child. The girl knows the world in ways that suggests that she is wise beyond her years. Unlike most small children, she can move through dark places without fear. This oddness about the ten-year old girl who seems to bear the knowledge and ways of an older adult, as she is caught between girl and woman, is often noticed among the other characters as well, especially the women. Whereas Selina is odd to her friends who are near her age, and thus they find it difficult to relate or confide in her, the women in her community who remark upon her

“womanishness,” seem to rely on her existence in the middle, as she plays the role of a neutral confidant because of her status as child and familiar female figure who bears characteristics of womanhood since she seems to have lived her old age years before, and has returned young or anew.266 In the middle between girl and woman, Selina challenges the dominant discourse around black girls whose markers of premature womanhood signal that they are “thing[s] ripened too soon,” as Jean Toomer’s character Karintha or

Toni Morrison’s Pecola.267

Selina, as a result of the legacy of slavery on the black family, exists on what

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman describes as a “continuum of black female representation,” “in

266 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 45. 267 Jean Toomer, Cane ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 4; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Reprint Edition (New York: Vintage, 2007).

138 which black motherhood and black girlhood appear to be one in the same.”268 Yet, contrary to Abdur-Rahman’s claim, existing on this continuum of black female representation does not cause Selina to experience “morphing into and out” of her mother.269 Rather, Selina’s premature womanhood is not a curse or a foreshadowing element which symbolizes her pending demise due to sexual abuse, but instead it allows her to venture into places that most young children are forbidden—the dark, secret worlds and feelings of adults—and in turn, her presumed childhood innocence, naiveté, and oddness make her an ideal confidant. Most importantly, as a figure in between girl and woman, Selina acquires power by using what she learns in the secret worlds of adults to protect herself as well as others. In essence, contrary to Abdur-Rahman’s claim about the role of black girls who exist in the space between, Selina does not become her mother; yet, she queers the line of intelligible temporally linear identities—between black girl/black woman and future/present—dwelling within a vestibular female existence defined by her performance of motherhood as a “no longer girl, not yet woman”. Instead, she is her own person—a different, queer black girl—an aberrant subject in becoming of her own invention.

Selina’s role as a confidant in which she performs the emotional and physical labor of mothering as a child are demonstrated in the relationships that she has with those who, like her, refuse to force themselves into neat categories in order to adhere to the respectable politics of the Barbadian community. While many scholars focus on the mother-daughter relationship in Afro-Caribbean texts, given the strong presence of the

268 Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 116. 269 Ibid., 116.

139 women in West Indian communities, I want to center Selina in between the space of girl and woman to emphasize the importance of other relationships that the girl has that significantly impact her ideals about womanhood. Needless to say, that I am not suggesting that the mother-daughter relationship is not essential. Instead, I want to expand the lens to look at other characters and the ways their relationships influence black girls. Two of the most important relationships that Selina has, in which her autonomy within her in-betweenness is most visible, are the ones between her and

Deighton (her father) and Miss Suggie (the summer woman).

Selina’s relationship with Deighton always requires her to protect him from dying under her mother’s unrelenting desire to achieve the American Dream—an accomplishment that Silla is determined to achieve at the cost of Deighton’s life. Unlike

Selina’s mother, Deighton lives for the present moment and does not concern himself with fanciful ideas about the future or eventually owning a home. He is much like the wayward child that Selina has never fully been. Believed to have been spoiled by his mother who thought the “sun rise and set’ on Deighton one, ‘cause he was the last and the only boy,” he lacked ambition and traded working daily in factories like other “good

Barbadian men” during World War II for good times with Fulton Street hustlers and his mistress.270 With no ambition or thought for the future, Deighton starts multiple jobs and hobbies with big plans of making it big to take his “lady-folks”—daughters Selina and

Ina, perhaps their mother Silla—back to the Caribbean.271 But, even with his lack of ambition and unruly lifestyle, Deighton, like Selina, seems to possess a charmed spirit

270 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 32. 271 Throughout the text, Deighton refers to the women in his family as “lady-folks.”

140 that draws people and good fortune to him. When Deighton receives the seemingly undeserved good fortune of inheriting land “back home,” the news incenses the multiple- job working Silla who cannot seem to secure enough money to purchase her home. Silla devises a plan to seek revenge upon Deighton for his unmerited good fortune in order to secure the funds she needs to purchase her brownstone.

In a conversation between Silla and other Barbadian women that Selina overhears, the mother reveals her plan to use obeah (West Indian folk magic) on Deighton in order to sell the land without him knowing. Silla is a stern, determined Barbadian woman whose ambition was said to nearly suffocate anyone within range of hearing her dreams, thus Selina knew that her mother was not simply spewing empty threats. When the women noticed that Selina heard their conversation, and also remembered that she is close to her father, Silla threatens to kill Selina if she mentions a word of her plan to

Deighton.272 As Selina stood staring at her mother with tear-filled eyes, interestingly, one of Silla’s friends, Florrie Trotman intervenes in order to aid Silla’s threats by reminding

Selina of her liminal position between girl and woman. Florrie Trotman tells Selina:

“Come, girl…What you crying for? Tell your mother that you’s no more little girl, but near full woman like us now that you’s filling out—and that you can hold your tongue like a woman…”273 Relying on her unquestioned belief that Selina desires to be a woman like them, Florrie attempts to flaunt the possibility of being a respectable, strong

Barbadian woman as a future within the girl’s reach. However, Selina is determined to show the women that she “won’t be like them” and she “won’t be cut out of the same

272 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 76. 273 Ibid., 77.

141 piece of cloth.”274 Thus, Selina is encouraged to refrain from holding her tongue like the women, as she does not want to become them. Instead, she draws on the autonomy she has in the space between girl and woman to do the duties of protecting her father that she believes are a part of her queer identity.

The girl tells her mother’s plan to whoever will listen in hopes of getting help protecting her father. When she is unable to get help from the adults, she tells her father.

Upon telling her father, she realizes that he becomes filled with fear, and Marshall explains that “a fierce protectiveness welled in her.”275 Selina works to assuage her father’s fears by reassuring him with lies that downplayed her mother’s plans and relentless ambition to acquire whatever she desires. And, “under her soothing voice,” which was layered with lies about the mother, “the fear dropped from his eyes and he rose.”276 Seeing the child reassure him, Deighton wrestles to move back into the place of a protective father and tries to affirm Selina, who has just calmed his fears, that the mother will not sell the land, and in fact, he will purchase a big house back home that will be filled with servants, whom she will manage as “mistress of the house.”277 Deighton promises to buy her fancy clothes and “a big doll like [she] once had,” but again, reclaiming her role in between, Selina dismisses the girlish things and states, “Oh, no dolls. Books.”278

With the same belief that it was her role to protect the adults who were removed from the grace of good Barbadian women and men, Selina’s friendship with the “summer

274 Ibid., 264. 275 Ibid., 86. 276 Ibid., 86-7. 277 Ibid., 87. 278 Ibid., 87.

142 woman” Miss Suggie Skeete requires that she exist between girl and woman.279 Miss

Suggie, one of the good-timers, is a tenant in her mother’s brownstone. Similar to

Deighton, Miss Suggie comes alive in the darkness and does not jettison her current needs and wants for something barely attainable in the future. Miss Suggie openly enjoys having sex with different men and drinking spirits. She holds the entire brownstone, especially Silla whose life is on hold for her future desires of owning a home, hostage with the sounds of love making on Saturday nights. But, when Sunday nears, the

Saturday lovers must return to their own versions of brown monotony, and Miss Suggie is plagued by her loneliness and constant reminders that she is perceived as less than human due to her failure of being a respectable woman like Silla. When Miss Suggie slips into this place of darkness, Selina, again, drawing on her sense of autonomy between girl and woman, unafraid of the unknown and the dark worlds of adults, travels to the dark place to remind Miss Suggie of her value.

While the summer woman Miss Suggie seems as though she “carrie[s] the sun inside her,” thereby never willing to sacrifice her good times for the pressure of conforming to the ways of good Barbadian women, she, like Deighton, finds it difficult to keep the sun from going down on her dreams of living freely under the gaze of the ambitious Barbadian women like Silla.280 To keep from morphing into the Barbadian women, Miss Suggie tries to supplement her long work week as a domestic in the homes of white New Yorkers with a steady stream of Saturday night lovers. Miss Suggie’s carefully planned weekly schedule between domestic work and men is disrupted when

279 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 52. 280 Ibid., 52.

143 her one day of liberation no longer sustains her the entire week as she labors under the beck and call of white employers as well as their children. The passion experienced during one night cannot undo the humiliation of the other six days. Hence, Miss Suggie quits her job, and tells Selina that she was not going to spend her life “cleaning that white woman big house” and remaining obedient and silent while “she snot-nose brats insult” her.281 Miss Suggie’s confidence about her decision to quit her job as a domestic does not last long and she eventually is overcome with despair.

During the moment that Miss Suggie’s confidence begins to waver, Selina is filled with sadness herself and in search of adults to help deter Silla’s plan to steal

Deighton’s land. As Selina is trying to explain her mother’s plan to Miss Suggie, she suspends her feelings of anxiety and sadness in order to comfort her when she notices that the summer woman “seemed more the child than she and more in need of help.”282

As Miss Suggie dwells in doubt, she confides in Selina, whom she later refers to as “the only one I can call friend in this man New York.”283 Like a child seeking affirmation from an adult, Miss Suggie asks Selina if she thinks that she can acquire and keep one of the “good war jobs,” if “I put muh mind to it?”284 During World War II, the good war jobs were filled by ambitious women like Silla who had labored early in the day in the homes of whites as domestics and then used their remaining energy to run machines in the factories at night.

281 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 80. 282 Ibid., 80. 283 Ibid., 209. 284Ibid., 80.

144 Selina reassures Miss Suggie that she can certainly work one of the good war jobs because her “mother’s doing it.”285 Initially, Miss Suggie flies into a rage when Selina juxtaposes her abilities with that of Silla and other Barbadian women. Miss Suggie, like a rebellious child who is jealous of her sisters failed to take the time to fully appreciate the consequences of what she heard. Instead, she brashly acts out of fear and embarrassment and immediately challenges Selina. She angrily explains:

I talking ’bout me! Could I do it? Yuh mother and them so can do anything they put their mind to. Yuh mother! Them so! My people! I’s hiding from them with tears in my eyes. I must put on a piece of black hat pull down over my face and go out here working day in and day out and save every penny. I mustn’t think ’bout spreeing or loving-up or anything so…” But they’s sadly mistaken, I gon spend my money foolish if I choose. And I always gon have some man or the other. When people see me coming they gon know it’s Suggie Skeete, even if it’s only because I’s the biggest whore out.”286

Again, Miss Suggie makes grand platitudes about living an ideal rebellious lifestyle as a free-spending, jobless whore who despises the ways of respectable Barbadian women.

And, once again, her bold claims and confidence are fleeting. After expressing her frustration, perhaps Miss Suggie realizes that Selina—the child who, at only ten years old, had already told her that she does not care what others say about her—would never judge her. Or, perhaps, Miss Suggie remembers that Selina told her that she knows what the summer woman does in the dark, and thus realizes that the young girl would never compare her to Silla and other Barbadian women to chastise her.287 Miss Suggie must realize that Selina, oftentimes her only visitor besides the stream of Saturday lovers, would never look down upon her. Suggesting that she must have remembered the girl’s

285 Ibid., 80. 286 Ibid., 80-1. 287 Ibid., 19.

145 respect for her, Miss Suggie calms down, reneges from her boastful platitude, and seeks further validation from Selina. Miss Suggie asks Selina again if she thinks she’s capable of getting the good wars jobs. The summer woman asks, “Selina, mahn, do you really think I could get one these good war jobs—that I could catch on and learn good like yuh mother and them so…?”288 Like a good friend, familiar with the flailing confidence of adults who have fallen short of the Barbadian American dream, the child answers Suggie by telling her yes, she can get and learn how to do one of the good war jobs well like all of the other Barbadian women.289

Like many African American women writers who try to depict a totalizing representation of black girl’s coming of age by weaving the protagonist’s story into those of older black females, Marshall’s representation of Selina is similar as she places the girl’s relationship with her mother, sister, friends, and other Barbadian women like Miss

Suggie in the backdrop. As important as these relationships are to the girl’s coming of age, it is important to expound upon one relationship in particular, that between girls and the “summer women” who brazenly challenge ideals about respectable black womanhood and black heteropatriarchy. Summer women like Miss Suggie play a key role in the girls’ psychosexual development. They introduce black girls to risqué topics like recreational sex and romantic notions of love. For example, Miss Suggie’s relationship with Selina is very similar to Toni Morrison’s character Pecola Breedlove’s relationship with three women sex workers who lived in her community—China, Poland, and Miss Marie.290

These women, like Miss Suggie, are friends with the young girl Pecola. But, unlike

288 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 81, emphasis mine. 289 Ibid., 81. 290 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2007), 50.

146 Pecola, Selina does not need Miss Suggie to affirm her or mother her in the gap between girl and woman. Rather Miss Suggie needs Selina.

Miss Suggie’s emotional dependency on Selina intensifies as she moves through her adolescence, and their friendship grows. Like Selina’s father, Miss Suggie attempts to move into the space of an adult in order to protect the child throughout their relationship.

In fact, like other friends placed in the black-girl characters coming of age, Miss Suggie, not her mother Silla, talks to her about risqué topics like sex and alcohol as she tells

Selina that she is ‘gon make [her] a summer woman too, just for [her] womanishness.”291

It is Miss Suggie who talks to the girl about her sexual desire and answers Selina’s question about whether or not she will ever “meet anybody—a boy,” with answers like

“Mark my words, soul, a time gon come when the body is willing and the mind is weak and before the cat lick it ear your legs gon be cock high.”292 With little effort, Miss

Suggie also tries to quiet Selina’s fears about her mother’s plan to sell Deighton’s land.

Yet, Miss Suggie is unable to completely engage Selina as a child, as she too frequently needs her to dwell in the space between girl and woman in order to confide in her and feel a sense of familiarity, as the girl reminds her of a woman while giving her the respect, fairness, and adoration of a child who has not yet learned to hate or judge.

This enduring need for her to stay in a state of perpetual in-betweenness is evinced when Silla finally decides she has had enough of rooming with a prostitute and the long-time friendship between Miss Suggie and Selina. Silla evicts the summer woman by starting a petition amongst other roomers that deemed Miss Suggie a prostitute and

291 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 52. 292 Ibid., 207-8.

147 bad influence. Miss Suggie was argued to have given the brownstone “an unsavory reputation and thus lower[ed] its property value.”293 Filled with rage again for being criticized and isolated by the Barbadian women, Miss Suggie relies on Selina to tell her that she is a good person who has not turned the girl into a prostitute. Despite being sad to see her friend leave the brownstone and head to a space Miss Suggie asserts would not

“be much” and “no place for you to come,” seizing power in the space between girl and woman, Selina comforts Miss Suggie when she hits her lowest point.294 As Miss Suggie questions the validity of any of the claims made about her character and influence in the petition that Silla disseminated, resuming her liminal role in the same way as she did as a ten-year old, Selina assures Miss Suggie, “No, I’m not a whore and I’m not a drunkard and neither are you.”295 With no hesitation about going against the desires of her mother,

Selina nurtures Miss Suggie’s free spirit one more time.

Finding Pleasure outside of Black Heteropatriarchy in the Space between Girl and Woman “I bleed sometimes.” “So what. Everybody does.” “Not from a cut or anything but from below. Where the baby pops out. Ina does too. That’s why she gets pains every once in a while…” Selina stared very quietly at her and, for that moment, she was quiet inside, her whole self suspended in disbelief. Then an inexplicable revulsion gripped her and her face screwed with disgust. “It’s never gonna happen to me,” she said proudly. “If it doesn’t happen by the time you’re twenty you die.” “Well then I’ll just die.”296

Selina Boyce and Beryl Challenor

293 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 211. 294 Ibid., 212. 295 Ibid., 211. 296 Ibid., 60-1.

148 As Selina’s young friend Beryl Challenor threatens her with the possibility that she, too, will eventually enter their “cult of blood and breasts,” the girl who has dwelled comfortably in the space between girl and woman suddenly feels betrayed and powerless.297 For years, Selina has assumed power for what the adults around her referred to as “womanishness.” Justifiably, she is frustrated with her mother who had always told her that she was more of a woman than her older sister Ina while failing to mention “the one important condition” that would include breasts and blood.298 To Selina, she was already embodying something similar to womanhood since she understood the worlds of adults, and at many times, served as their only friend. Selina believed she was capable of protecting herself and others like her father and Miss Suggie. But, this new threat of blood and breasts that Beryl asserted was inevitable and would take hold of her body with or without her approval, seemed damning to the place in between woman and girl she had managed to acquire autonomy. Their cult and their kind of Barbadian womanhood was inescapable since it would seize her body.

Like any good bildungsroman protagonist, Selina must face the social forces and personal challenges that constitute one’s transition from girl to woman. Nevertheless,

Marshall still tries to present a coming-of-age character who counters the linear transition from youth to adulthood that the bildungsroman genre depicts, especially for heterosexual men. Marshall’s depiction of Selina as in between girl and woman from the time she is ten years old and the girl’s reluctance to progress in a linear fashion through her adolescence illuminates the author’s ability to create a queer black-girl character who

297 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 62. 298 Ibid., 62.

149 does not desire to “fit” into dominant ideals of girlhood. While the girls around her such as Beryl and her sister Ina who fancy themselves with gendered ideals of becoming respectable Barbadian women with shapely bodies, husbands, children, and brownstones,

Selina simply wants to be free from the pressure of gendered expectations. Selina desires to be different, and thus imagines that she can move into womanhood outside of the boundaries of heteronormativity. She again, looks for a queer space in between the two realities presented for her—being a proper, ambitious Barbadian woman like Silla or unruly summer woman like Miss Suggie. Through Selina’s relationships with her own body as well as with her friend girls and uncouth lover Clive, she finds power again in the space between, and reifies her queer black girl identity.

Faced with the pending tragedy of puberty and possibly developing a body that would make her seem similar to the budding girls and full-grown women around her,

Selina tries to interrupt the process. Yet, Selina is constantly reminded by the girls and women around her that she is becoming a woman and thus, she should act more feminine.

For instance, even Miss Thompson, a black hairstylist whose putrid body odor keeps her tragic past ever present, and further isolates her from the Barbadian women, tries to convince Selina that she should conform to an ideal womanhood that is drastically out of her reach. Miss Thompson’s body odor is the result of a gaping hole that a white man tore in the bottom of her foot in his attempt to rape her when she was a little older than Selina while visiting “down home.”299 Miss Thompson warns Selina that since she is “getting

299 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 216.

150 her developments,” she should not fight “so wild no more” or wear braids.300 Rather, she should be nice and wear curls.301

Acknowledging the warnings about womanhood that women like Miss Thompson explained while at the same time challenging them, Selina continues to try to defy the bodily changes or the “developments” associated with womanhood. As mentioned earlier,

Selina’s body already differs from the girls around her because she has scuffs on her legs, a “boy’s shape,” and wears scraggly clothing.302 But, for a brief moment, Selina imagines what it might be like to be even closer to her friend Beryl and sister Ina if she welcomed the changes around her body. In fact, briefly enamored with the idea of breasts and blood,

Selina begins checking her chest each morning to determine if she has grown breasts. At the emergence of a “barely perceptible swelling under the washcloth” one night as she is bathing, Marshall writes that Selina became hopeful.303 However, this hope and momentary eagerness for joining the ranks of womanhood via the body does not persist when she learns that by acquiring breasts and experiencing menarche, she will not only be more like her friend Beryl and sister Ina, but will also eventually grow into the

Barbadian women like her mother.

During the conversation mentioned earlier between Selina’s mother and other

Barbadian women—Florrie Trotman and Iris Hurley—after the women notice Selina listening, they try to reason and threaten the child not to speak a word of Silla’s plan to steal Deighton’s land. Florrie Trotman intervenes to speak directly to Selina and remind

300 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 92, 95. 301 Ibid., 92, 95. 302 Ibid., 7. 303 Ibid., 67.

151 her of how proper Barbadian women are capable of keeping secrets, and she too should be able to “hold [her] tongue like a woman” because she is “filling out” or her body is changing to publicize her growing womanhood.304 As Florrie Trotman laughs and speaks to Selina, one of the woman’s hands brushes her developing breasts. Florrie’s hand on

Selina’s breasts causes her to become outraged. Marshall writes:

That slight but intimate pressure of Florrie Trotman’s hand remained like an intaglio on Selina’s barely formed breast. She knew, in a remote corner of her mind, that she would carry its damp warmth and roughness, the feel of it, all her life. It was the rite which made her one with Florrie’s weighty bosom…It meant that she would always have vestiges of Iris Hurley’s malice and the mother’s gorgeous rage. Although she did not understand this, she was often seized by a frenzy of rejection and would rush to the bathroom and there, behind the locked door, rub her breasts until pain coursed through her body. But no matter how hard she rubbed, the imprint remained, for it was indelible.305

Selina’s inability to move away quick enough before Florrie’s hand brushed her newly- forming breast causes her to realize that she is no longer “trapped within a hard flat body.”306 Like Florrie and her “weighty bosom,” she now has protrusions and markings which publicize that she is somewhat cut from the same cloth, if only in body, as the

Barbadian women she so desperately seeks to never become.307 Her body now bares the engravings of femininity that required her to adhere to the warnings and changes that

Miss Thompson made about girls with their developments. Still determined to rebel against the biological forces that were stacked against her, Selina tries to remove the intaglio of Barbadian womanhood that were laden in Florrie’s touch. She did not want to look upon her body as one that had accepted the rite of passage into Barbadian

304 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 77. 305 Ibid., 78. 306 Ibid., 62. 307 Ibid., 78.

152 womanhood. Thus, Selina tries, to no avail, to rub her breasts off. In pain from a combination of the rubbing and the fact that the breasts of Barbadian women like Silla and Florrie will remain, Selina seeks to rebel the black heteropatriarchy and find power in the spaces between within her relationships.

Selina defies the gendered expectations of her pending Barbadian womanhood by refusing to seek all of her intimacy and pleasure in heterosexual relationships with proper ideals of good Barbadian men. Borrowing from Rosamond S. King, Selina choses to use her sexuality with her first lover Clive—an older, unruly man who moves through the world aimlessly like Miss Suggie and her father— as a way to rebel and define her own sexuality.308 Yet, extending King’s analysis, I argue that Selina seeks queer pleasure long before she engages in heterosexual sex with Clive, in her relationships with other girls.

The other Barbadian girls in Selina’s community are depicted as virgins, never knowing pleasure or intimacy primarily because their ideas of desire are tangled in capital and heteropatriarchy similar to Silla. Meaning, while Silla’s life is on hold until she acquires her own home, the Barbadian girls and their growing sexualities are on hold for their future good Barbadian husbands and brownstones. To Selina, the proper Barbadian girls were all the same. Marshall explains how the girls appear to Selina:

Prim, pious, pretentious pack! She noted the girls’ tightly closed legs, the skirts dropping well over their knees, the hands folded decorously in their laps. No boy’s hand had ever gained access to those breasts or succeeded in prying apart those clenched knees.309

308 Rosamond S. King, “Sex as Rebellion: A Close Reading of Lucy and Brown Girl, Brownstones,” Journal of African American Studies 12, no. 4 (2008): 366–77, 372-3. 309 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 226.

153 Therefore, the Barbadian girls wait on proper men, but Selina desires to experience pleasure on her own terms without heteropatriarchy and materialism dictating who she can experience pleasure with or the time that is appropriate for her to be intimate.

Because of Selina’s desire to experience pleasure on her own terms, she is inspired by the

Fulton-Street teenage girl who boasts of her first time having sex to the Barbadian girls who oftentimes look down on her because she did not live on Chauncey Street and she

“played hookey, smoked and talked of boys.”310 Hanging on to each word she delivered about having sex while the other “[p]rim, pious, and pretentious” girls snickered and taunted her, “Selina gazed wonderingly at the girl.”311 She could not see the girl’s desire for sex as sin, and was “envious” because the Fulton-Street girl “seemed suddenly awakened into life.”312After listening to the girl, Marshall writes that Selina dreams of having a boy for the first time, not for sex, but to have someone to read books with in the library.313 But, long before she could be bold enough to imagine receiving pleasure in reading with boys, Selina’s desire for an unrestricted, queer pleasure is evinced in her relationship with Beryl. Within her relationship with Beryl she receives intimacy and pleasure in ways that are strikingly similar to the pleasure she receives from having sex or “becoming one” with Clive.

Before Beryl Challenor becomes completely enthralled in her future life as a proper Barbadian woman, she and Selina were close childhood friends. Though Selina’s positon in between girl and woman usually made her an outlier among the Barbadian

310 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 152. 311 Ibid., 153. 312 Ibid., 153-4. 313 Ibid., 154.

154 girls, Beryl was one of the few girls her age that considered Selina and all her differences worthy of good friendship. Beryl, seeing herself as more mature than most girls, believed she could be friends with Selina, but it did not keep her from trying to persuade the girl as they grew older to put away her rebellious ways and simply try to fit in with the other

Barbadian girls. However, before Beryl’s desires for Selina to simply be more like her and the other girls became unbearable, Selina found pleasure in her friendship with Beryl.

In fact, Marshall notes that “[s]omething in Beryl always soothed [Selina] and destroyed her anger.”314 Selina is unsure of exactly what it is about Beryl that soothes her, but

Marshall suggests that it is perhaps Beryl’s body, or specifically, “the way Beryl’s thick braids rested quietly on her shoulders or the way her tiny breasts nudged her middy blouse.”315 Beryl’s warmth causes Selina to wonder what lie beneath the girls skin, and she thinks about questions such as “What would Beryl be like inside?”316At times,

Beryl’s body, her breasts in particular, made Selina uneasy, and “ashamed of her own shapelessness,” but it is with her friend Beryl when they take the trolley to journey outside of Chauncey Street, that Selina states, “I’m free.”317

Experiencing the pleasure of freedom from the constraints of Barbadian girlhood and black heteropatriarchy in her friendship with Beryl illustrates Selina’s ability to create a queer space of power in the middle. As Beryl espouses her heteropatriarchal and capitalist desires of having children and becoming what her father wants her to be—a lawyer—because she “can always make money at that among [her] people”—Selina talks

314 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 15. 315 Ibid., 15. 316 Ibid., 15. 317 Ibid., 56.

155 of not being restricted to what a man wants her to be.318 Selina reveals all of her queer desires to be something different than what is expected of Barbadian girls. She tells Beryl that she hates boys and never wants children.319 Further, Selina admits to Beryl her desire to be a poetess rather than grow up and become one of the professionals that respectable

Barbadian girls should be, even though her ambitious mother will later dream of her becoming a doctor, so she, like Beryl, can help her people.

Before Selina is depicted as experiencing the pleasure of intimacy from having sex with Clive, she encounters similar feelings when she moves rhythmically with Beryl and embraces her body. As Selina and Beryl walk to the park together, Marshall suggests that Selina and Beryl become one and move together happily in unison. Marshall writes:

Their hands met and Selina separated Beryl’s fingers and meshed them with hers. Together, their hands closed into one fist, their bodies joined in a single rhythm, they skipped the three blocks to the Tompkins Avenue Trolley.320 Once the girls skip to the park as one, following Beryl and Selina’s heated discussion about blood and breasts, Selina becomes angry. And, again, something about Beryl calms her. Marshall describes the exchange between the girls in the park:

After a time Beryl came and lay close to her. She placed her arm comfortingly around her. “What was that poem you wrote about the sky?” she asked. And always her voice calmed Selina. Her disappointment, her anguish tapered slowly until finally her tears were gone and she turned to Beryl and held her so that they were like the lovers on the slope. “It wasn’t about this kind of sky,” she said and began to recite...When she finished and opened her eyes Beryl’s were closed, her face serene in sleep...Beryl stirred in her sleep and pressed Selina closer. Just then the sun rose above the rock. The strong light seemed to smooth the grass, to set the earth steaming richly. They were all joined it seemed: Beryl with the blood bursting each month inside her, the sun, the seared grass and earth—even she,

318 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 59. 319 Ibid., 57. 320 Ibid., 56.

156 though barren of breasts, was part of the mosaic. With a cry she buried her face between Beryl’s small breasts, and suddenly her happiness was like pain and a long leap into space.321

Using Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to interpret this passage, the liberation and power that Selina experiences in her relationship with Beryl can be read as erotic.

Lorde notes that the erotic “is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling…The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person …Our erotic knowledge empowers us…”322Beryl’s body and voice are pleasurable and they incite power within Selina. Like Miss Suggie and Deighton’s needs for Selina to dwell in the space between girl and woman, Beryl is calming and empowers her to feel as though she can exist in the in-between space or outside of black heteropatriarchy, recite her poetry, and simply be herself in the park. Lorde contends, “[T]here is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”323 As Selina lies in the park with Beryl while reciting her poetry, the erotic source of power “lessens the threat of their difference,” and they become one.324 Selina is joined with Beryl despite the girl’s overarching desires to bear the blood and breasts of proper

Barbadian women and become a lawyer like her father expects. Neither of the girls need good Barbadian men or brownstones on Chauncey Street as they lie together in the park like lovers. They have each other and the power of the erotic. Selina acquires

321 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 62, emphasis mine. 322 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 53, 56, 57. 323 Ibid., 58. 324 Ibid., 56.

157 satisfaction—love, pleasure, freedom, and acceptance—from Beryl. Like a first love,

Beryl is the first to read with her and hear her deepest thoughts. Although Selina eventually has sex with Clive, she becomes one with him in the park—the place she first experienced pleasure with Beryl. And, while having sex with Clive in the park, Selina thinks of all of the important moments in her life leading up to that moment, one of which is “Beryl’s secret and her despair.”325

As Selina and Beryl progress from twelve and eleven year-old girls loving each other in the park to teenagers, their friendship begins to unravel when Beryl makes the huge step of proving her allegiance to black heteropatriarchy by joining the Barbadian

Association. The association, which boasts of mottos such as “It is not the depths from which we come but the heights to which we ascend” and “We ain white yet,” was a symbol of Barbadian commitment and efforts to assimilate and obtain everything, especially property, that would indicate their position as proper citizens in the “man country.”326 Selina despises the Association and the other Barbadian teenagers who serve as junior members. She eventually elects to join the Association in order to use their scholarship money to run away with her lover Clive. However, she returns the money as she could not bear the lie and being affiliated with the Association.

After her relationship with Beryl dissolves because of Selina’s failure to commit to the Barbadian Association, she experiences the erotic and pleasure in her relationship with another female friend Rachel Fine. Selina meets Rachel in her modern dance

325 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 239. 326 Ibid., 219-221.

158 class.327 Like Selina, Rachel desires to exist outside of heteropatriarchy. Rachel explains to Selina that she, too, has a mother who wants her to adhere to proper ideals of womanhood. Yet, Rachel tells Selina that she “felt like puking” when her boyfriend put a diamond ring on her finger and she abandoned her blond hair that went well with her blue eyes by chopping and drowning it in black dye.328Similar to Beryl, Rachel comforts

Selina and facilitates her ability to experience intimacy and the pleasure of freedom within the space in-between the two worlds she must navigate. Selina imagines herself becoming one with Rachel in the same way she became one with Rachel and Clive in the park.

The comfort, power, intimacy, and pleasure Selina experiences with Rachel and

Clive are strikingly similar. The resemblances are visible when Selina is trying to shake off her stage fright prior to performing the life cycle in the dance recital. Marshall explains that Selina became filled with anxiety before the recital when she realized “how utterly dependent she would be upon her body. It must speak for her and, crouched there, she feared that it would not prove eloquent enough.”329Selina carries her fears on stage as she, “expressing with deft movements the life cycle,” and imagines the bodies of her lover Clive and the comfort of Rachel concurrently.330 She thinks about the rhythm of their bodies during the moments that she was joined with each of them. Selina reflects:

But as the light cascaded down and formed a protective ring around her, as the piano sounded and her body instinctively responded, she thought of Clive first, and then of Rachel—how she and Rachel had danced the night before as if guided by a single will, as if, indeed, they were simply reflections of each other. At this,

327 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 250. 328 Ibid., 278. 329 Ibid., 281. 330 Ibid., 281.

159 her nervousness subsided, and she rose—sure, lithe, controlled; her head with its coarse hair lifting gracefully; the huge eyes in her dark face absorbed yet passionate.331

Selina releases her fear when she meditates on how both Clive and Rachel’s bodies move beside her. Clive and Rachel seem to have no difference—not even sex—in the ways in which they provide pleasure and comfort to Selina. They are interchangeable. Though

Marshall notes that the first time Clive touched Selina, he released “something exquisitely pleasurable inside her,” it is not him alone that she imagines as she dances the life cycle.332 The thought of Clive, alone, was not sufficient enough to make her body, which she was solely dependent upon in her recital, move outside of her paralyzing fears and become one with the music. Selina imagines him and Rachel, together, to assuage her fears and experience pleasure in her dance.

In addition to Selina’s dependence on the images of Clive and Rachel together for pleasure in dance, she ends up relying on them both again to finally escape the social forces of black heteropatriarchy and the brown monotony of Chauncey Street. Partially smitten with Clive after she has sex with him in the park at the age of eighteen, as mentioned previously, Selina devises a plan to use the Barbadian Association’s scholarship money to run away with her new lover. But again, when Selina realizes that a heterosexual union with Clive alone will not fulfill her, she chooses to abandon her plan to run away with him. Clive, though not thrown overboard like her father, was certainly drowning in a shallow pool of hatred and despair, as he lived in the shadow of his own

Barbadian mother’s ambition. Staying with Clive, who constantly runs to meet his

331 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 281. 332 Ibid., 231.

160 mother’s every beck and call, would have been too suffocating for Selina since she made it clear since the age of ten that she would never be like the Barbadians on Chauncey

Street.

Therefore, the decision to leave Clive was inevitable. However, meeting him helped to facilitate her plans of escaping Chauncey Street. Clive, a self-proclaimed, rebel, was considered strange by the other teenagers like Beryl at the Association, including

Selina’s own sister Ina. Clive aids Selina’s forthcoming escape because he accompanies her to the forbidden world of pleasure, not just in terms of premarital sex with no brownstone and wealth, but the vibrant night life of Fulton Street. Entering the White

Drake night club on Fulton Street, Selina and Clive are together when she discovers a world where people indulged in their present living rather than remaining trapped in the stillness of their perpetual yearnings for going “back home” or owning brownstones in their new home—“the man’s land.” With Clive, a man far from respectable black heteropatriarchy, Selina is able to open “something inside her which had always been closed.”333 That something, as Marshall writes, “was slowly opening like a fan, shimmering with color.”334 But, with all that Clive incited in Selina, again, he, alone, was not enough.

However, before Selina realizes that Clive is not enough, when she initially reveals her relationship to Rachel, she explains that she has to take the Association’s money in order to run away with her lover. Selina states, “Fine, I’m going to feel like hell taking their money. But what can I do? If we don’t get away, he’ll go to waste in that

333 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 232. 334 Ibid., 232.

161 room and I’ll rot down in Howard’s med school.”335 When Rachel learns of Selina’s plans to run away, she offers her help finding jobs for her and Clive. Rachel’s aunt is a wheel for a Caribbean cruise agency.336 Rachel suggests that Selina will feel a sense of belonging in the Caribbean and will learn a lot about dance since her “family is from there.”337But, Selina is still depressed as she listens to Fine’s offer to help “both she and

Clive” escape, and eventually declines the offer because, as she insists, “Clive wouldn’t go for it.”338

Realizing the impossibility of staying with Clive, as it would only enable her to escape the weight of Chauncey Street momentarily, Selina makes the decision to save herself rather than both she and Clive—her lover and the man who told her he was “much less of a man then [when he was twenty-four and in the war] than you are a woman at eighteen.”339 She, was, in fact “too much woman” for him in the same ways she had been noted as “too much woman” for the ambitious Barbadian women throughout her girlhood. She could not live according to the norms of black heteropatriarchy, or its ideals of proper manhood or womanhood. Knowing her desire for liberation, she turns to Rachel

Fine again for help escaping, but this time for herself alone. Selina asks Rachel to “fix it for me,” or help her get to the islands.340 Shocked by Selina’s request since she declined her offer initially, Rachel agrees to help her and asks whether or not it will be “just

335 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 279. 336 Ibid., 279. 337 Ibid., 279. 338 Ibid., 279. 339 Ibid., 244. 340 Ibid., 308.

162 you?”341 With no hesitation, Selina tells her yes, and takes her last stroll through Fulton

Street, and realizes that “she was again, the sole survivor amid the wreckage.”342She used the erotic power that lie within her to save herself.

Conclusion

Selina Boyce: A Different Literary Representation of Black Girls

“It was her own small truth that dimly envisioned a different world and a different way; a small belief—illusory and undefined still—which was slowly forming out of all she had lived.”343

The author presents a ten-year old girl character who is teased for her eclectic dreams of becoming a “poetess” and because of her “boy’s shape” and “scuffed legs.”344

From the beginning, we learn that Selina is different and creative. Her difference and creativity suggests that she is more than capable of pushing outside of the realm of the usual either-or expectations of the bildungsroman, and thus cannot only find her own way, but she is also equipped with the qualities needed to create the “different world” in which she wants to be her own person. Selina Boyce, like the Sulas and Ursa’s that would come after her, is a black girl who aspires to be something different. How, then, is this creativity and desire for a queer world not mirrored in the criticism or studied more often as a key text in the emerging field of Black Girlhood Studies? Scholars have to meet

Selina within the worlds she creates in the middle. Within this world in the middle, she acquires power by reshaping her role as a girl becoming a woman.

341 Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, 308. 342 Ibid., 310. 343 Ibid., 225. 344 Ibid., ,195, 7, 4.

163 Furthermore, Selina determines what pleasure is for her and from whom and when she can receive it. Unlike many narratives of black girl’s sexual awakening,

Selina’s sexual encounters are not marred by incest, violence, or “being ripened too soon.” Contrary to the larger narrative around black women who live without spaces to represent their sexuality autonomously, Selina is one of the rare black-girl protagonists who gets to both have sex on her own terms and enjoy it. Additionally, Selina acknowledges the queer desires of black girls. Not all black girls are heterosexual.

Granted, Marshall’s character “chooses” to have sex with a man, but she also illuminates the pleasures in the form of liberation and comfort that are derived in her same-sex relationships with other girls.

Selina represents something bigger for black girlhood and the ways black women imagine, remember, and write about black girlhood and sexuality. Considering all of the representations—fiction and nonfiction—of black girls who dwell in the “in-between” space and are harmed because of existing within an unrelenting state of ambiguity as girl and/or woman, Selina is different. She does not die in the middle, nor does she suffocate.

Rather she survives the journey to womanhood that she travels in the middle, in-between space. And, like many of her ancestors, she survived and told her own story. Unlike

Topsy, she understood and defined her journey from girl to woman. And, as Selina became a woman, she lived freely and found her own way back home.

164 Chapter Four

Black Girls were Never Meant to Survive the Jim Crow South: Black Girlhood in the Narratives of Young Civil Rights Movement Leaders Anne Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland

Please, God, try to forgive those people. Because even if they say those bad things, They don’t know what they’re doing. So You could forgive them, Just like You did those folks a long time ago When they said terrible things about You.345

Six-year old Ruby Bridges’ daily prayer on her way to school

Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me. You know, I used to go to Sunday school when I was a little girl…We were taught how merciful and forgiving you are. Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us seventy-seven times a day, and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. It [sic] that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers?346

Anne Moody’s prayer following the murder of the four little girls in the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing

Black girls coming of age in the South are rarely recalled as key figures in the civil rights movement following the 1954 United States Supreme Court Brown v. Board of education decision. Yet, few could disagree that one black girl, Ruby Bridges, stands apart as having substantial significance or recognition during the fight to integrate

345 Robert Coles states that Ruby Bridges recited a prayer each day before she went to school. This is the prayer that Coles imagines that Bridges recited in front of the angry mob who disapproved of the little girl’s attempt to desegregate an all-white elementary school. See Robert Coles, The Story Of Ruby Bridges (New York: Scholastic Press, 1995), np. During an interview, Bridges explains that she remembers praying whenever she was afraid, and is certain that she may have prayed on the day that Coles discusses in his book; however she cannot remember the exact prayer that she recited on her way to school. See Ruby Bridges, interview by Charlayne Hunter- Gault, NewsHour, PBS, February 18, 1997. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues-jan- june97-bridges_2-18/. 346 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1968), 317-8.

165 schools. In 1960, six-year old Ruby Bridges was escorted to her new school by Federal

Marshalls. A small Bridges walked to begin the first grade amongst an angry mob of whites who opposed the integration of the school. The mob made their staunch support of segregation visible by launching verbal attacks at the small girl. Bridges recalls walking past individuals screaming at her and others holding tiny caskets with black dolls inside of them.347 In the midst of the racial tension and violent verbal attacks against Bridges, the six-year old, was the perfect image of innocence, vulnerability, and most importantly

Christian black girlhood that could be aligned with a respectable, non-violent civil rights movement philosophy. This non-violent political philosophy that six-year old Bridges embodied as she walked to school constituted one of the most powerful political approaches to blatantly demonstrate the resilience and peacefulness of blacks in the face of racist regimes that governed the Deep South.

Similar to the children who peacefully marched in Birmingham, Alabama’s

Children’s Crusade of 1963, Bridges’ ability to walk past the white mob in silence, and even stop to recite prayers for them, symbolizes how black girls, though not considered a part of the dominant ideology of white childhood and girlhood, could strategically make themselves legible as vulnerable and innocent, small child-like figures in the civil rights movement. Specifically, the stark contrast between the small black girl walking alone beside the large, armored Federal Marshalls interrupted the racialized visual field that oftentimes depicted blackness as always-already criminalized and outside of the image of childhood. Bridges presented a model non-violent politicized black girlhood in which the black female child is only seen and not heard or functions as a silent representation of

347 Ruby Bridges, Through My Eyes, ed. Margo Lundell (New York: Scholastic Press, 1999), np.

166 black southern Christian ethics. In a sense, Bridges was the perfect black-girl-child martyr for the movement.

This image of black girlhood is etched into the fabric of American social movement history through Bridges’s children’s literature, filmic representations, and

Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting of the small girl integrating her school in his “The

Problem We All Live With” for Look magazine in 1964.348 In addition to Bridges, the only other iconic representation of black girls as vulnerable and innocent figures who are recognized as having significant impact in social movement history were also aligned with the characteristics of silence and Christianity—the four little girls, Addie Mae

Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—murdered in the bombing of the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September

15, 1963. All four little girls articulated vulnerability and innocence posthumously through their silence as a result of their untimely and tragic death as well as piety through the space in which their death occurred, an institution associated with peaceful gathering, resilience, and non-violence—the black southern Baptist church. Like Bridges, the four little girls, though black and female, and thereby constructed outside of the normal ages and times of childhood, inadvertently forced spectators to imagine and see them as something akin to white children due to social movement propaganda which reified their

“smallness” and innocence. Hence, Bridges is suspended in time as a small, silent girl walking to school in Rockwell’s painting and the four girls are suspended in time as little girls in Sunday school in childhood photos and grainy images of the bombed church.

Because of their impact on social movement and dominant culture, Bridges and the four

348 Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With,” Look Magazine, January 14, 1964.

167 little girls were rarely imagined outside of the images that were captured on the days they interrupted the racialized visual field. In other words, in cultural memory, the girls never grew up. They were a part of the movement, but they were seen and unheard. They did not shape their own political identity, their identities were shaped publicly on behalf of the movement.

But for other black girls coming of age in the Deep South during the civil rights movement who were not the image of a model politicized black girlhood such as Anne

“Essie Mae” Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae “Cat” Holland, their narratives tell a different story of black girlhood at the intersections of race, class, gender, age, and space. Each of these girls played instrumental roles in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and were determined to be seen and heard as leaders. Most importantly,

Moody, Travis, and Holland’s narratives of girlhood illuminate how older black girls used political organizing to express some form of autonomy during their youth within the dangerous racial and sexual climate of the Jim Crow south, which caused black female late adolescence to be a period laden with fear and caution rather the a pivotal moment in which black girls shaped their political identity.349 As Moody’s conversation with God following the death of the four little girls murdered in the bombing of the Sixteenth-Street

349 In this chapter, I am extending aspects of the claim that I made in chapter one about black girls being constructed outside of normal time, age, and childhood, and thereby causing them to be ambiguously-aged. Thus, when I use the term girl and girlhood in this chapter, I am referring to the ways in which black women and girls imagine and redefine the ages and times of girlhood. If black girls are constructed outside of time and dominant age as I argued in chapter one, then the periods of black girlhood that I am discussing in this chapter are not restricted to the dominant ages of childhood that are reserved for white children. Dominant age and time provide black girls with no privileges. And, in this chapter, black women remembering their girlhoods show that they found ways to express girlhood outside of the restrictions of dominant age and time by using political organizing to shape aspects of their young identities and perform girlhood despite their illegibility.

168 Baptist Church suggests in the opening quote, politicization during girlhood in

Mississippi was abrupt and filled with dissonance, especially around their racial, gendered, political, and spiritual identities. Thus, poor southern black girls such as Anne

Moody who came of age in Mississippi stood in stark contrast to the posthumous innocence afforded to the four little girls murdered at the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church as well as the girlhood that Ruby Bridges represented on her way to school in 1960. It is

Moody’s as well as Travis and Holland’s representation of black girlhood that I investigate in this chapter to add a different perspective of the civil rights movement that emerges in the narratives of southern black girls.

Anne Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland, though not examples of respectable black girlhood or familiar images of non-violent youth activism, came of age in Mississippi—an area considered a bastion of racial and sexual violence. As girls, they were instrumental to the civil rights movement efforts in the Deep South because of their political savvy, and most importantly, their familiarity with the southern sociopolitical landscape that they learned to navigate from a very young age in order to survive. Examining a collection of published and unpublished personal narratives (oral and written), newspapers, children’s literature, and images, I argue that Moody, Holland, and Travis tell a different story of black girlhood that is entangled with the civil rights movement and the racialized geography of the Jim Crow south. I place my analysis of black girlhood as it intersects with racialized space in conversation with the work of

Black Feminist Geographer Katherine McKittrick. In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick notes that “we produce space, we produce

169 its meanings, and we work very hard to make geography what it is.”350 “The production of space” is political and arranged “according to a seemingly stable white, heterosexual, classed vantage point.”351 Blacks are “placed” into spaces that they are deemed to belong.352 In rural Mississippi, social practices including Jim Crow laws, lynching, and threats of physical and sexual violence forcefully determined where blacks and whites belonged. It also determined that white femininity was deserving of protection in all southern spaces, and as Katherine McKittrick asserts, placed black femininity “within the broader system of servitude—as an inhuman racial-sexual worker, as an objectified body, as a site through which sex, violence, and reproduction can be imagined and enacted, and as a captive human.”353

However, since “black matters are spatial matters,” black women, McKittrick notes, have been in an “ongoing geographic struggle” to dismantle hierarchies of power that have displaced and oppressed them in order to locate more “humanly workable geographies.”354 I use McKittrick to read the racialized geography of Mississippi as one in which black girls are literally and figuratively placed outside of childhood and girlhood. Girlhood was not a luxury of black girls, who, like their mothers were objectified and rendered subhuman. Yet, again, like black women, black girls Anne

Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland challenged the racialized spatial hierarchy in Mississippi by joining the civil rights movement and articulating black

350 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi. 351 Ibid., xv. 352 Ibid., xv. 353 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xvii. 354 Ibid., xiv, xxiv.

170 girlhood as a period of political power and autonomy. As young activists, they imagined a new place for the black girl coming of age in the south—at the front of the civil rights movement. In the movement, Moody, Travis, and Holland, literally and figuratively found themselves in spaces that were considered off limits to blacks—all-white lunch counters, all-white bus stations, college, and standing beside prominent civil rights leaders in the front of the movement for social justice.

Further, their coming-of-age stories are not grounded in gendered expectations or familiar iterations of dominant performances of white girlhood. Rather, their articulations of the transition from girl to woman challenge dominant gender and age ideologies by aligning their stages of youth and development with their political growth and youth activism in the Jim Crow south. Their narratives show how race, class, gender, and age intersect with space and impact the way black girls and women perform, remember, and write about girlhood. Collectively, their unique narratives of girlhood suggest that they, as black girls, move through the south disempowered, not fully human, or in a state of naiveté that only dissipates when they commit to the civil rights movement. That is, their politics are at the center of their youth development, not their racially-gendered bodies or chronological age. Their narratives of black girlhood serve as sites of knowledge to investigate the formation of young black female political identities at the intersections of race, class, gender, age, and space. Instead of their narratives of girlhood tracing black female development from girl to woman, they present the pivotal moments in their youth as transitions from girl to self-actualized freedom fighter. Borrowing from Hortense

Spillers and Roderick A. Ferguson, the southern black girls that I focus on in this chapter

171 found power in their placement outside of Western ideologies of gender, and I add age, as they employed political organizing as a medium to both perform their unique versions of a politicized black girlhood and discover “something else to be,” other than heteronormative ideals of “Woman,” wife, and mother upon reaching adulthood.355

My analysis of southern black girlhood is organized around three key moments in the formation of black girls’ political identities. First, I show how Moody, Travis, and

Holland’s narratives indicate how the initial stage in their political development is centered on their education in terms of knowledge acquired inside and outside of school in subjects related to class, sexual, racial, and spatial politics. This knowledge of race relations in the south is usually learned abruptly through the violence the girls experience or witness inflicted upon others. Second, I focus on black girls’ critical moment of politicization and the key figures in the civil rights movement that had the most impact in the formation of their unique political identity. I contend that their initial politicization is the pinnacle of their narratives, and represents their moment of awakening as well as

355 I am referring to Hortense Spillers oft-cited argument that the black female is outside of the “traditional symbolics of female gender,” and thus it is “our task to make a place for this different social subject.” In this chapter, I use personal narratives to argue that black girls coming of age in the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow south take up this task of creating a different social and political subject that is not restricted by “gendered femaleness.” See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65– 81, 80. “Something else to be,” is derived from Roderick A. Ferguson’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Sula alongside the intellectual and political practices of black lesbian feminists. Specifically, Ferguson reads Sula as an exemplar of the heterogeneous social formations that black lesbian feminists incited in their negation of the practices of revolutionary nationalist movements that utilized identity politics to facilitate their investments in heteropatriarchy. I draw upon Ferguson’s reading of black lesbian intellectualism and politics to show how black girls at the intersections of race, class, gender, age, and most importantly space, evinced a similar sort of political practice in their girlhoods in order to exercise more autonomy within a racialized geography and oftentimes sexist, ageist movement that negates alternative political and social formations, especially in the Jim Crow era. See Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black : Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 111-13, 132-7.

172 constitutes the period during which one nears the end of adolescence. After being politicized, the girls see the racialized world that they live in through the eyes of adults.

Finally, I end this chapter by focusing on what the girls suggest as the consequence of growing up and then becoming politicized in the Deep South—exile. I show how each of the girls experience myriad forms of exile, be it physically or psychologically, as a result of not being able to return to a positon of ignorance or naiveté after being politicized.

When the girls reach the point of no return or exile, they are then fully grown and have to depend solely on themselves for survival.

Using personal narratives to examine the formation of black girls’ political identities adds a new lens through which to study the civil rights movement, activism as mode of expressing black girlhood, and the impact of the spatial politics of the Deep

South on young black female life during the Jim Crow era. Similar to the methodological intervention made in the previous chapters, in this chapter I bring together an array of diverse accounts of black girlhood, and my analysis encourages an epistemological shift in our critical reading practices of black women’s personal narratives in order to center the discourses of girlhood that they suggest are formative periods in the development of their political identity as adults. In order to truly understand black female personhood, there must be a space within scholarly conversations that takes black women’s discussions of their girlhood seriously, especially during moments such as the civil rights movement when so many black girls, as I will illustrate through the narratives of Anne

Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland, found a way to use their voices in order to fight back against the racial terror they experienced in the south. Without shifting

173 the paradigms around the way we read these narratives, this important period in black girls and women’s histories will continue to be overlooked in studies of the civil rights movement. My critical reading of personal narratives to uncover black girlhood makes the study of black girls’ histories more accessible. Similar to chapter two, I am reading the personal narrative as a critical source which documents the life histories of black girls during moments and within spaces that have been understudied. Approaching the personal narrative as a life history of black girls’ lives expands the usability of personal narratives on behalf of marginalized subjects with limited representation in the archive.

Using the personal narrative allows us to creatively pull black girls out of the blind spots of U.S. cultural history, and engage the unique worlds they created to survive.

Learning about Race, Class, Sex, and Space as a Black Girl in the Jim Crow South

If South is a perspective as well as a direction, then the Mississippi Delta may well be the most southern place on earth…Mississippi Delta remained a world apart—another country, another time, she refused to rejoin the Union that had “saved” us.356

Endesha Ida Mae Holland The racialized geography of the Jim Crow south is as important to black girls coming of age during the 1940s through 1960s in Mississippi as the actual events that they explain to readers throughout their narratives. Similar to the nineteenth-century slave narrative author writing in the antebellum south, the writers of twentieth-century female coming-of-age narratives expect for the readers to question the veracity of their stories.

Yet unlike slave narratives, the authors of twentieth-century coming-of-age texts rarely enlist a white editor to establish the authenticity of their stories or use prefaces to gently

356 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 9-10.

174 request readers’ sympathy and suspension of judgment about their grammar or particular unsavory incidents that they recall. Rather, as Holland shows in the epigraph, black women remembering their girlhoods in the Jim Crow south, emphasize the impact that the racialized geography that they must navigate have on the ways they shape their unique identities throughout their youth. The social hierarchy of whites as superior to blacks that was established during slavery lingered on in the lives of southern blacks after the Civil War. While the rest of the states, at least agreed to recognize that slavery had ended (in theory), Mississippi was a “world apart” that sustained it’s hierarchies of power.

Holland, Travis, and Moody explain to readers that the south, particularly

Mississippi, is unlike any other place in the world. Although slavery was abolished,

Holland tells readers that the south has never quite changed, joined the Union, or actually liberated any individuals from the chains of slavery. In fact, Holland contends that instead of being called slaves, “Now we were called “sharecroppers,” cropping for shares to pay back loans at prices set by the plantation masters (only now they were called

“plantation owners” or “planters”). We had swapped the chains of slavery for the bonds of debt.”357 Similarly, Moody invokes the afterlife of slavery that is ever-present in the lives of girls in the south as she begins her narrative by telling readers about constantly having dreams about the time that her family lived on a plantation.358 Travis introduces readers to her parents as sharecroppers on a plantation. While Travis’s mother was pregnant, she had to flee the plantation because the white owner threatened to kill her

357 Ibid, 10. 358 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 11.

175 husband if he did not send the pregnant woman into the field to pick cotton.359 Imbedding their narratives on or near southern plantations not only symbolizes their early lives in poverty, but also the chains of slavery that they continually sought to break throughout their girlhoods in the south. Thus, beginning their narratives so close to slavery helps to materialize the difference of their location and the racial minefield in which they experienced girlhood. This early emphasis on the landscape is important because more than likely the readers may have some idea about the racial tensions which came to represent the south, however, they may not know what that meant for youth in the south, especially girls. Their emphasis on geography requires that readers, from the very beginning of the narrative, consider the past and present alongside race, gender, class, age, and space. The racialized geography of the south is woven throughout every aspect of Holland, Travis, and Moody’s narratives. Everything from their education and development of their political identities are all recalled in relationship to the south.

Two spaces within the racialized geography of the Jim Crow south in which this ubiquitous presence of slavery is most apparent is in the early education of southern girls in both black schools and in the homes or spaces owned by whites in which they served as young domestic laborers. In school, black girls learned that their labor was more important in the southern economy than their education. Unlike white children in the south who were permitted to go to school uninterrupted Monday through Friday, black girls such and Holland, Travis, and Moody attending black schools were not allotted similar privileges. Rather than stay in school, they were required to leave school early or

359 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Origins,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm.

176 arrive at school late in order to meet the needs of planters by picking cotton or the needs of white families who required them to work as domestics in their homes.360 While in school, they learned the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as what poverty looked like among other black children, but it was in the homes and spaces owned by whites where they learned about the dangerous racial, sexual, class, and spatial politics of the south. In a constant battle between the state and local planters who believed that poor black children should be in the fields, the segregated school was one of the most important places for black girls to be legible as black girls and children, even if just for a few hours a day.

Although their communities were situated in poverty and frequently terrorized by whites, within their segregated schools and churches, or black social life, their girlhoods were celebrated through southern rituals and programming in ways that affirmed their value as girls despite state institutions that were invested in their labor. School programming that involved teams such as basketball and tumbling squads were important initiatives in articulating the value of black youth in the Jim Crow south. However, two of the most important celebrations in which black girls stood front and center, and often recalled as pivotal moments in their formative years prior to politicization, include the homecoming celebration and the first public speaking opportunity.

During the last year of Junior High School when thirteen-year old Anne Moody was crowned the eighth-grade’s homecoming queen for her small town school in

Centreville, she sheds light on the important role that segregated school programming

360 Holland notes that “black schools usually opened a couple of months after the white schools to ensure that enough hands were available in the fields” to pick cotton. See Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 38.

177 played in the lives of girls during their formative years in the Jim Crow south. In a racialized geography in which the southern poor black girl and woman are constructed outside of the realm of pulchritude, the school homecoming celebration, which involved both a crowing of a black girl as “queen” and placing her on display throughout the school town in a parade, was a public demonstration of her beauty, blackness, and most importantly, innocence as a young girl. This moment was filled with public displays of the black girl as young and beautiful to other blacks as well as whites for Anne Moody.

Following a hard three weeks of fundraising with her teacher Mrs. Willis for the homecoming event and receiving a beautiful gown from her estranged father, Anne

Moody took her place as queen. After the teenage girls helped her put on makeup for the first time, Moody saw herself in the mirror as pretty or a “queen” for the first time.

Moody explains:

When they had carefully pinned the crown to my hair, Mrs. Willis said, smiling, “Turn around, Queen, look at yourself.” I pulled the stool out a bit. I was scared to look in the mirror now that they were all finished. But from the way Mrs. Willis was looking at me, I could tell that I must look pretty. When I turned I had to touch my face to see if it was me. I sat there in front of the mirror for a good five minutes; I kept staring at myself, at my piled-up hair, my full breasts and wide hips—I realized that I was no longer a little girl.361

In this passage, the homecoming celebration provides Moody, a poor, dark- skinned thirteen-year old girl, an opportunity to see herself as well as be seen by others as beautiful and feminine. As she is gazing at herself as homecoming queen, Moody also suggests that this is the first time she has seen her full self as moving outside of the space of a little girl. Moody had been employed since the age of seven as a domestic for whites, yet, it was during homecoming when she saw herself and body edging towards

361 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 107.

178 adulthood. Unlike other black girls such as Holland whose first time seeing themselves outside of the lens of early girlhood was usually abrupt and due to violence inflicted upon them by others, Moody recalls the homecoming celebration as a moment in which the black girl is provided with a space to be beautiful, feminine, and also direct her gaze upon her own body. Looking at her body as “homecoming queen” in a fitted gown, Moody was permitted to articulate her own close of one stage of youth as she moves to another stage of girlhood. Positioning the reader to focus upon her own examination of the body—full breasts and wide hips—for signs of pending womanhood also speaks to the level of unusual autonomy that was a characteristic of Moody’s youth, and challenges the dominant racialized discourse of childhood and girlhood that are embedded into the culture of the Jim Crow South. The southern child, especially black girl, could not be careless as normal children in a racialized and dangerous southern geography in which it was commonplace for blacks to be wrongfully accused of violating hegemonic codes of cultural conduct that reinforced the supremacy of whiteness. Black girls did not have the luxury to be carefree and curious, racial and sexual violence meant that, as illegible children, they had to be cautious.

Unbothered by these often unspoken racial ideologies and rules which deny the curiosity and autonomy of black girls, Moody blatantly disregarded this doctrine during homecoming with the black female body being at the center of her discovery. Moreover, as a small child, Moody was curious about racial difference, and the reasons why whiteness was presumed to be better than blackness. Again, imagining that the body was the foremost authority on presenting answers to one’s difference or uncovering the

179 “secret” of whiteness, Moody decides to make up a game called “The Doctor” in order to examine the bodies of her white playmates. Moody believed that the secret to their whiteness and the reasons why white children were treated better was hidden in the areas of their bodies that her mother said should only be seen by “The Doctor.”362 With childish wonder and determination to find the secret, Moody examined the children.

Moody writes:

One day when we were all playing in our playhouse in the ditch under the pecan tree, I got a crazy idea. I thought the secret was their “privates.” I had seen everything they had but their privates and it wasn’t any different than mine. So I made up a game called “The Doctor.”...I had all of them, Katie, Bill, Sandra, and Paul plus Adline and Junior take off their clothes and stand in line as I sat on one of the apple crates and examined them. I looked in their mouths and ears, put my ear to their hearts to listen for their heartbeats. Then I had them lie down on the leaves and I looked at t heir privates. I examined each of them about three times, but I didn’t see any differences. I still hadn’t found that secret.363

Keeping the ever presence of slavery within southern geography in mind, this passage in which Moody describes her curiosity as a child and desire to learn the secret of whiteness, is strangely familiar to slave traders who assessed the bodies of slaves on the auction block to determine their value. The slave trader’s job was to make the “secrets” or differences of the black body “knowable” in spaces reserved for the trading of black bodies in order to ensure the gazing spectator would be able to secure a sizable profit.364

On a racial geography haunted by the afterlife of slavery, Moody, as a child, was also searching the bodies of her black brother and sister along with her poor white playmates.

Though Moody was searching for what she understood as the secret of whiteness rather

362 Ibid., 39. 363 Ibid., 39. 364 Furthering the work of M. Nourbese Philip, Katherine McKittrick writes that the auction block’s “material purpose is to measure and render knowable hair, skin, muscles, blood, eyes, and the space between the legs.” See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 69.

180 than making the value of bodies knowable, she too was centering the body as the space in which the hegemony of racial hierarchies could be materialized in the south. That is, she saw the body as bearing the truth behind why race relations were apparently static and blackness made one inferior to whiteness. The body, as Moody indicates in the Doctor game, was the source of one’s racial difference.

The body that Moody relied on to uncover the differences between whites and blacks during her childhood games, as I mentioned previously, was just as important to her own conceptualizing of herself as beautiful and a girl transitioning to womanhood.

Granted, being homecoming queen and then placed on display in front of her peers in a beautiful gown was important to do among the black community. It was equally important, as Moody explains, for black girls to be represented as beautiful homecoming queens in front of white people in their community during the parade. Put differently, this moment during which Moody reigns as homecoming queen is not only crucial for her in terms of seeing herself in a new light, it is also crucial for whites that employ her and the other black girls within the small town of Centreville.

The white people who stood along the streets to watch the homecoming parade oftentimes consisted of the harsh employers of black girls who refuted their status as children. Yet, riding atop cars decorated with signs referring to one as the “queen” momentarily challenged whites’ perception of girls like Moody. It also forced them to acknowledge that the girls whom they saw as simply domestics could be something else beside their laborers. Seeing one of her employers, Linda Jean, standing in the crowd at the parade, Moody suggests that the woman was in the middle of one of these moments

181 of contestation around black girls. Moody contends that Linda Jean looked at her as if she

“was surprised that a Negro could look that beautiful.”365 With an air of confidence and excitement about challenging Linda Jean’s assumptions about black girls, Moody explains that she wanted to boldly shout to her employer that, “Yes, Linda Jean, it’s me.

Negroes can be beautiful too.”366

Similar to Moody, Brenda Travis was a strong student in school, and thus she had several experiences during her early education in which her value as a black girl was affirmed. However, as I will explain later in the chapter, Travis’s relationship with her school would be strained due to her political organizing. But, prior to Travis’s politicization, she was placed front and center among other students and her community several times. In an autobiography that Travis wrote at the age of sixteen, she explains her active role in school:

The subjects I liked best were history, English and mathematics. I was also engaged in many extra-curricula activities. I was a member of the dramatic club and the school chorus. In 8th grade, for one of my 4-H club projects, I raised 50 chicks and won 2nd prize for my exhibit. I also was a model for the Home Economics fashion show and queen of the N.H.A. ball.367

The space of the segregated school that facilitates Moody and Travis’s opportunities to affirm the value of southern black girlhood at school and in their communities also provides Endesha Ida Mae Holland with a similar experience to prove her value publicly in front of white spectators. Holland, grew up in an impoverished community of Greenwood in the Mississippi Delta, and frequently skipped school.

365 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 108. 366 Ibid., 108. 367 Signed Autobiography, “Brenda Lavern Travis,” n.d., 1, Aurelia Norris Young Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

182 However, Holland decided to attend one of the most important events in the segregated school’s history—the visit from the white school board to determine whether or not black children at segregated schools could perform well enough to remain in their own schools or be bussed to white schools. Holland’s entire community was preparing for the special day of impressing the white school board. One student, Queen Oliphant, was appointed to speak before the white visitors. Only the school’s brightest and most well-behaved was chosen to speak. Though Holland had been known around town as a great orator due to her highly-requested performance of the “Casey and the Bat” poem she was also known to be a part of the bad girls, or those expressing the “allure of womanhood” too soon.368

Therefore, if she showed up for school on the special day, Holland was expected to sit quietly in the audience and watch as Queen Oliphant performed for the white visitors.

When the brightest student Queen Oliphant got cold feet and failed to deliver her speech in front of the white visitors, Holland proceeded to save the school by marching to the front and delivering her highly requested poem. After delivering the poem effortlessly and with the grace of the best southern orators, Holland was celebrated by the Stone

Street School principal, her peers, and the white visitors alike. Briefly, Holland was referred to around her community as the girl who saved the colored school.369 Holland’s moment at the center of the stage reciting her monologue within her school program provided her with a public space within the tense southern racial geography to affirm her status as girl and valuable among whites and blacks.

368 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 59. 369 Ibid., 74.

183 Despite the important affirmations that their segregated schools provided around their status as children and most importantly black girls, this positive reinforcement or momentary protection of their girlhood during school hours was often challenged once they left school and entered the homes or other spaces of their white employers as domestics. The segregated geographies of their schools tried to affirm their worth as girls; yet, it was in the spaces of whites where they learned that the idea of black children and girls, in particular, offered them no protections in the south. Southern black girls consistently navigated opposing geographic territories—one working to make them see themselves as unique and proud of their black identity, while the latter carefully worked to refute any affirmations of their worth as black girls and children in order to sustain the girls as a source of labor in white-owned spaces.

Many scholars have interrogated the role of the southern domestic in the homes of whites in the Jim Crow south following slavery. Black women working as domestics, though they oftentimes found clever ways to survive in the homes of southern whites, underwent myriad forms of sexual, physical, and emotional exploitation.370

Unfortunately, poor black women working as domestics were frequently forced to introduce their daughters to this form of exploitation at very young ages in order to provide for their families. Though rarely examined, black girls, like black women, also have an extensive history in the homes of whites as domestics. This history, as the illuminating stories of Holland and Moody reveal, is fraught with contradictions that

370 For more on black women domestic laborers history of opposition to white employers in the south, See Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books), 1985.

184 provide a more nuanced investigation of the southern racialized geography that young black girls navigated in the Jim Crow south.

From the stories of Holland and Moody, the black girl domestic entered white homes at a young age and usually unaware of the complex sexual, racial, and emotional exploitation woven into the fabric of the white-black employer-employee relationship that took place within the white domestic sphere. Prior to becoming a domestic, the girls, simply watched their mothers’ daily routine of leaving their homes to enter the homes of whites. The girls watched as their mothers fiery spirits were instantly diminished as they became “[m]eek as lambs,” once they climbed into the backseats of cars owned by their white women employers who came in and out of their neighborhoods to take them to and from their homes.371 But, then the day came when they, too, climbed into the backseat of the white employer’s car and prepared for their service as domestics.

When the girls entered the homes of whites, the racialized violence that the adults in their segregated schools and communities sought to shield them from was quickly exposed. The girls quickly learned their first real lessons in racial, class, sexual, and spatial differences. Again, though the black girls’ engagement with whites as domestics is less examined, it is in this space—the home of whites—that black girls experience many of the challenges during their formative years that will shape significant aspects of their political identity. The lessons that Holland learned as an eleven-year old domestic in the

Lawrence’s home altered her entire life and also implicated another figure in the sexual exploitation of black girls and women domestics—white women employers. Heretofore, white men have been associated with the abuse of black girls and women domestics in

371 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 80.

185 the Jim Crow South, but Holland’s narrative of girlhood challenges readers to explore the role of white women in the sexual exploitation of black female laborers.

On Holland’s eleventh birthday, she began working for her mother’s employer

Ms. Lawrence. Holland, under the naïve belief that she was employed to simply entertain and babysit Ms. Lawrence’s granddaughter Becky Ann, entered the home with the usual excitement of a child in a new setting and was amazed by the living conditions of whites.

Holland was happy about her opportunity to finally “go upstairs” and peep into what was deemed the most sacred part of white employers’ homes on her birthday. Having heard stories about all of the grand furniture and secrets that were upstairs in the homes of whites, Holland was excited to finally see for herself all of the things that she heard other domestics, especially young girls, discuss in their gossiping. Upon going upstairs,

Holland learned that the secrets that lie in the sacred worlds of whites was not grand at all, but rather a secret world between other black-girl domestics who had gone “upstairs” and experienced similar violence. Ms. Lawrence made Holland privy to this secret when she told the eleven-year old to go upstairs into her bedroom and then forced the girl on top of her husband. Mrs. Lawrence stood by as her husband raped the young girl.372After raping Holland, Mr. Lawrence gave her a five-dollar bill. Holland returned to her duty of babysitting Becky Ann and realized that she had just learned the secret shared between the girls who had “gone upstairs.” After being raped by her employer, Holland notes that she had become a woman, though not in a manner she expected or wanted. 373 But, the incident upstairs in a white home affirmed to her that she was not understood to be a

372 Ibid., 82-3. 373 Ibid., 86.

186 normal eleven-year old child. Going upstairs in the homes of whites was synonymous with ending one’s innocence, and the girls such as Holland’s classmate Percy Mae who bragged about their time upstairs were also women because as they walked back down the stairs their childhoods disappeared.374

This critical moment in Holland’s girlhood during which she articulates a loss of childhood and innocence upstairs in the homes of whites is one that she suggests was a common experience among most poor southern black girls who did not have “daddies who knew the score about white men and kept their daughters safe by refusing to let them work in white households.”375 Holland estimates that most of the girls in Greenwood did not have daddies and worked in the homes of whites. Hence, they must certainly have known the secret of being upstairs and, like Holland, had been forcibly exposed to the harsh realities of racial, sexual, and class differences in the violent geography of the Jim

Crow south. This geography, Holland notes is one in which the bodies of black girls and women were always accessible to white men. In fact, Holland contends that it was simply

“a part of life” for white men to sexually assault black women. Holland writes:

Folks used to tell how, in the South, no white man wanted to die without having sex with a black woman. It was just seen as a part of life, and if you were white, there was so much on this earth between the birthing and the dying. Only God had the power over your life. But if you were black, you were always at the mercy of white people, and all you had in life was the hope of heaven…If you were white, dream and desire were possibilities, not madness or fantasy like they were for black people. And what was the white man’s great dream, his burning desire? To have sex with a colored woman.376

374 Percy Mae was one of Holland’s classmates who frequently bragged about going upstairs in the houses of whites during her work as a domestic. Holland notes that she and Percy Mae grew closer because they both shared the secret of “going upstairs” even though they were both too embarrassed to admit it. See Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 91. 375 Ibid., 90. 376 Ibid., 85.

187

This relentless desire of white men to someday have sex with black girls and women that

Holland discusses has been frequently mentioned by scholars studying black women’s lives and the institutionalized sexual abuse that they have experienced since slavery.

Moody also explains this reality of black girls’ bodies as always accessible to the desires of white men in her narrative, as they were believed to be sexually deviant at any age. For example, Moody explains that just about every white man in Centreville had a black woman in their kitchen or nursing their babies, but many preferred to have young black girls if the employers had more than one child. The employers wanted younger girls to tend to their growing families. However, Moody notes that white women were reluctant to hire young black girls because they believed that they would seduce their husbands if they were left alone with them in the house.377

The racial geography of the Jim Crow south and its landscapes such as that of the white household made both black girls and women’s bodies “knowable” as sexually perverse and accessible to white-male desire.378 This knowing and owning of black female bodies shaped the girlhood experiences of black girls in the south. Granted, the household or domestic sphere was one of the most dangerous landscapes for black girls due to the privacy of being behind closed doors, but it was not the only space in which whites took advantage of the presumed accessibility and perversity of black female bodies and sexualities in the south. As Holland explains, “And we didn’t have to be

377 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 130. 378 I am drawing on the concept of black female bodies being “knowable” and seemingly out of place in “geographies of domination” such as those in the Jim Crow south from the work of Katherine McKittrick. See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), xv.

188 sitting babies or cleaning houses to fall victim to the white man’s lust. We could just as easily be picking cotton or walking to the store or spending money in the white man’s store when the mood would take him and he’d take us—just like that, like lightning striking. No longer any one man’s property, now we belonged to everyone.”379

Moody makes this reality of growing up a black girl in the Jim Crow south as always accessible property to white men, be it inside or outside of their homes, that

Holland discusses more concrete as she recounts an instance during which a black girl high school student was raped by a white farmer when she was picking cotton after school.380 Under the depressing economic conditions that many rural black southerners faced coupled with the afterlife of slavery which still organized white-black relationships, although many blacks were angry about the violence inflicted upon the young girl, they were forced to send their children back into the cotton fields following the incident. Both

Holland and Moody’s recounting of the sexual violence against black girls by white men and women demonstrate how black girlhood in the Jim Crow south was plagued by sexual violence. Being a young black girl in the Jim Crow south meant that while navigating your home, school, and work life, each day you expected that your body, and those of other girls like you, were never protected.

At the age of twelve Brenda Travis underwent her life-changing lesson about race, class, and space while working in the south when she experienced verbal abuse from a white female customer. The customer was not pleased with the way Travis ironed her shirt, and proceeded to threaten to harm the young girl. After hearing the woman’s

379 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 90. 380 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 324.

189 threats, Travis recalls that she “put the iron down,” grabbed her lunch and ran straight to join the NAACP.381 Though Travis was only twelve, her decision to immediately run to the NAACP suggests that she knew that the woman’s threats to “have her ass out of here so fast,” were not to be taken lightly, as the racial status quo in Mississippi provided her with no protections should the customer have decided to act on her threats.382 As I will explain later in this section, this event led to Travis’s politicization.

In Moody’s narrative of girlhood, she also centers the period during which she was a domestic in the homes of whites as an important educational experience that significantly alters her ideas about herself, racial, sexual, and economic politics of the south. Yet, it is important to mention that Moody’s narrative of her time as a domestic expands the realm through which scholars have heretofore viewed black girls’ engagement with whites within their homes. Granted, black girls’ work lives were often plagued by violence within whites’ homes, but Moody’s story presents black-girl domestics, similar to black-women domestics, as finding clever ways to navigate the homes and relationships with whites to ensure their survival and cultivate a sense of autonomy that could be used to benefit themselves and their families. While scholars have written extensively about black women “outsmarting” white employers by finding ways to do tasks such as take food to feed their families in order to supplement the wages that they were often cheated, black girls also found ways to benefit from their time in white homes. For example, frequently unimpressed by the lackluster teaching and the

381 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Standing Up,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 382 Ibid., “Standing Up.”

190 minimal competition that other students in her class presented, Moody found the white employers’ homes to be a place that supplemented the little she learned in the classroom with other challenging subjects and life outside of Mississippi. With unusually kind white employers, Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Ola, Moody around the age of seven years old, began working as a domestic. Mrs. Ola read to Moody and taught her words. Moody makes it clear throughout her narrative that this early education from Mrs. Ola was instrumental to her academic success.

Unfortunately, Moody’s luck of being with a nice employer would end. Similar to

Holland, the affirmations around Moody’s identity as a child and valuable black girl in the Jim Crow south that she obtained in her segregated school and community were also challenged during her domestic labor for whites. Whereas Holland’s employer refuted her innocence and girlhood by teaching her that black girls’ bodies were always accessible to white sexual desire, Moody’s employer worked to negate her innocence and status as a normal child by forcing her to understand that the lives of black children were not equal to that of white children, and thus to harm or murder young black children was, in fact, no crime at all since they were not human. Using the murder of fourteen-year old Emmett

Till who was around the same age as Anne Moody when he died about a month before her birthday, Moody’s employer Mrs. Burke insinuated that murdering black children was justified if white women were disrespected. Moody recounts the exchange between her and Mrs. Burke:

“Essie [Anne Moody], did you hear about that fourteen-year old boy who was killed in Greenwood? she asked me, sitting down in one of the chairs opposite me. “No, I didn’t hear that,” I answered, almost choking on the food.

191 “Do you know why he was killed?” she asked and I didn’t answer. “He was killed because he got out of his place with a white woman. A boy from Mississippi would have known better than that. This boy was from Chicago. Negroes up North have no respect for people. They think they can get away with anything. He just came to Mississippi and put a whole lot of notions in the boys’ heads here and stirred up a lot of trouble,” she said passionately. “How old are you, Essie?” she asked me after a pause. “Fourteen. I will soon be fifteen though,” I said. “See, that boy was just fourteen too. It’s a shame he had to die so soon.”383 As Mrs. Burke teased and questioned the girl about Till’s murder, Moody reflected on her mother’s warnings that she should not act as though she knew anything about the young boy’s murder in front of her employer.384 But, despite how loudly her mother’s warning lingered in the back of her mind, Moody’s conversation with Mrs.

Burke was a critical moment for her and other black youth in the south. And as Mrs.

Burke’s remarks evince, Emmett Till’s murder on August 28, 1955 was also a powerful symbol of race-based violence that white employers could use as a scare tactic or way of sustaining the racial status quo in the south, especially among black youth who may have been tempted to participate in civil rights organizations. For Moody and other black youth, this exchange between her and Mrs. Burke reifies the supremacy of whiteness at any cost. The employer teaches Moody, who prior to this incident was still naïve about particular aspects of southern race relations because of the not-so-forthcoming education that she received in school and in her community that tried to do the dual task of substantiating her value as a child and human despite race while at the same time

383 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 125. 384 Ibid., 123.

192 providing her with just enough information to navigate the racialized geography of

Mississippi as a young black girl. Until the conversation with Mrs. Burke, Anne Moody was mostly afraid of the factors that she believed could be fixed or were escapable such as “hunger, hell, and the Devil.”385 Yet, as Mrs. Burke aligned Moody’s young age and fate with that of Emmett Till, and asserted that the killing of a black child in order to protect white women’s honor was justifiable, Moody acquired a new fear. Moody’s new fear, as she explains, was being killed simply because of her race.386 This fear, Moody notes, was the one that she, as a fourteen-year old black girl coming of age in the south, found to be the most unbearable.

The girls learned that their race was a justifiable means for them to be killed from

Emmett Till’s murder. The young teen’s murder was a defining period in the lives of black girls and the development of their political identities. Till’s murder was also a pivotal moment for black girls because the racial climate in the south grew more intense.

Moody recounts several incidents following Till’s murder during which white mobs terrorized black people in her community. In addition to negotiating the dangerous southern geography as a black girl carrying her new deep-seated fears of being killed simply because she was black, Moody also had to deal with the material realities of her fears which were visible everywhere in her community—from hearing her friend Jerry recount being brutally attacked by whites who accused him of making inappropriate calls to a white telephone operator to walking past the ruins of the Taplin family house that

385 Ibid., 125. 386 Ibid., 125.

193 was burned down killing all eight or nine of the people that lived there.387 The symbols of her disposable life, or that she was, as she exclaims Mrs. Burke made her feel, “like rotten garbage” were embedded into every aspect of her life—community, school, and work.388

Similar to Moody, Emmett Till’s murder was a defining moment in Travis’s girlhood. When Travis was around the age of ten years old, white police officers barged into her home and arrested her older brother. Her brother was around the age of thirteen.

Travis recalls older family members asking the police about their reasons for arresting her brother. But, the police ignored their requests and insisted that they had to take him to jail. Travis states that the unlawful arrest of her brother caused her to have “visions” about the photos of Emmett Till.389 Travis feared that her brother would be killed as well.

Travis remembers, “I thought he would die. When I saw him again I held him with everything I had. I never wanted to let him go.”390

The effects and symbolism of Till’s murder also significantly impacted Holland’s girlhood and political development. Whereas Moody hears of Till’s death from talk among adults and Travis saw pictures of the slain teenager, Holland and her friends witnessed the effects of the racialized violence inflicted upon the young boy’s body. Till was murdered in the Mississippi Delta community where Holland lived. While playing a game of Post Office with her friends, Holland saw Till’s body being carried into the local

387 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 132-8. 388 Ibid., 125. 389 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Standing Up,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 390 Steve Marion, “The Greatest Act of Bravery I’ve Ever Seen,” Carson-Newman University News, n.d., http://www.cn.edu/news?view=225

194 funeral home. When the adults were not paying attention, Holland and her friends clandestinely looked at Till’s body. Holland recalls the moment she saw Till’s body:

We sneaked a peek at his body…We were horrified at the swollen, lumpy face with the eyes gouged out. Alix Sanders pointed to something stuck between the lips. “Dat’s his thang,” I said. We stood for the longest time staring down at the body, which seemed to have served as food for the fish. Finally, some white men shooed us away with the warning, “Y’all see what kin happen when you sass-out white women.”391

This passage in which Holland shares the moment she and her friends saw the mutilated body of a black child who was killed in honor of white femininity offers important insights about what it meant to be a girl-child growing up in the Jim Crow south. While Till’s body was witnessed around the world through photographs taken at his open-casket funeral, Holland recounts an experience in which she and her friends saw the body prior to staging that occurred during the embalming process in order to make the corpse presentable for spectators at the funeral. Granted, Till’s mother arranged for his body, in its mutilated state, to be seen by a large audience in order to make the violence of racism in the south visible. Holland’s story, however, in which she saw Till’s body as he was carried into the funeral home suggests that there is still another perspective through which to view racial violence in the south. And this perspective is one that is derived from those who were not viewing or feeling the effects of racial violence from afar, through images, or as adults, but who were born, raised, and educated in the bastion of racial violence and were still children. Holland presents a perspective of black children witnessing the murder of other black children at the hands of whites.

391 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 36.

195 After Till’s death, Holland, similar to Moody and Travis, recalls that she “began to see, even if I did not understand it all, that we black folks had to be careful around whites, and mind never to get out of our “place” around them.”392 In essence, drawing on the narratives of Holland, Moody, and Travis, Till’s murder shattered the thin layer of protection that they as naïve children expected to have had from adults. Till’s murder proved that as long as they were black and living in the Jim Crow south, irrespective of age or size, they were unprotectable. Whites such as Mrs. Burke and the white men who chastised Holland while she was viewing Till’s body and insisted that murder is the fate for one who chooses to “sass-out white women,” helped to make their lack of protection more tangible by using the young boy’s murder as a scare tactic. Like Moody, Holland explains how the racial climate changed in her community and whites began to increase the amount of attacks they launched against blacks in Greenwood. After Till’s death,

Holland recalls watching a white mob pour acid on a black man who refused to allow a white man to have sex with his wife. Holland remembers watching the man’s skin melt.393 Holland, Travis, and Moody’s time in white-owned spaces as domestics and the witnessing of Till’s death exposed them to one of the hardest lessons that black girls learned within the racialized geography of the Jim Crow south—they were never meant to survive as children nor as girls. Their experiences taught them, especially the murder of Till, that they could be killed simply from being young and black.

392 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 36-7. 393 Ibid., 37.

196 The Political Journey from Unprotectable Girl-Child to Freedom Fighter

Don’t need no overhalls to be a freedom fighter—weren’t born wit’ no pances on.394 Endesha Ida Mae Holland Before she interrupted my listening, I had picked up the words “NAACP” and “that organization.” Because they were talking about niggers, I knew NAACP had something to do with Negroes. All that night I kept wondering what could that NAACP mean?... I even got up to look up NAACP in my little concise dictionary. But I didn’t find it.395

Anne Moody

One of the most important lessons that Anne Moody and other black children like her learned while growing up in the Jim Crow south was to be oblivious about race issues in the presence of whites, and never “mention that word (NAACP) around Mrs. Burke or no other white person…”396 In essence, through a performed ignorance in front of whites, black children were to appear unaware of racial politics. In the presence of whites, black children were responsible for letting them know through their mannerisms and performance that they, even as small children, were adhering to the racialized codes of conduct or what Jennifer Ritterhouse notes as “racial etiquette.”397 Whereas activists who migrated down south and shaped their political identities based on what they experienced as transplants to the southern civil rights movement, girls like Moody, Holland, and

Travis cultivated their political identities with their parents’ homegrown fears and lifetime of shunning social justice movements in the back of their minds. Having known

394 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 257. 395 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 126-7. 396 Moody’s mother told her to never mention the word NAACP around her employer or any other white person. See Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 127. 397 Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 4.

197 these racialized ways of living and being in order to sustain the racial status quo, the girls knew that going against these codes could result in violence inflicted upon their entire family or their own personal exile from their communities, and possibly the larger State of Mississippi. I discuss the forms of exile black girls experienced later in the chapter.

Although jettisoning the lessons they learned about how one is to perform racial codes of conduct in the presence of whites was dangerous, as I illustrated in the previous sections, the murder of a fellow teen Emmett Till and the violence they experienced in white-owned spaces were critical turning points in the budding political identities of black girls. Their outrage about the violence they and other black youth endured in the south without any justification other than the color of their skin coupled with their class, gender, and geographic location could not be contained by their parents and community members’ fears for their lives. Rather these incidents of violence and their outrage encouraged them to search for answers and end their victimhood. This quest constituted the early stages of their political journey as well as the initial period during which the girls began to pull away from family and friends in order to discover their political selves during their girlhoods.

Moody, Holland, and Travis each have similar political journeys. Though Moody and Holland briefly discuss other moments around their bodies that are aligned with their development from girl to woman, all three narratives primarily situate their growing knowledge of racial politics and increasing involvement in the civil rights movement as foundational to their progression from girl to woman. This shift is also evidenced by the change in the way they articulate their autonomy and identity. When they discuss the

198 changes around their bodies as constituting the journey from girl to woman, they are still speaking as if they are the “other” or vulnerable and lacking power due to their race, gender, class, geographic location, and young age. However, when they discuss their political journey from girl to woman, the discourse of helplessness at the aforementioned intersections are eschewed for a more bold discourse that is undergirded with a sense of militancy around finding one’s voice and getting justice for the crimes inflicted upon them as children and their communities through political organizing.

Moody’s growing militancy in her development as a freedom fighter is revealed when she discusses having dreams as a young girl about carrying guns and waging race wars against white mobs following the murder of a community member Samuel O’

Quinn who was rumored to have been involved with the NAACP. Moody recalls her desire for wanting to take action into her own hands:

I lay in bed for two days after his death recalling the Taplin burning, Jerry’s beating, Emmett Till’s murder, and working for Mrs. Burke. I hated myself and every Negro in Centreville for not putting a stop to the killings or at least putting up a fight in an attempt to stop them. I thought of waging a war in protest against the killings all by myself, if no one else would help. I wanted to take my savings, buy a machine gun, and walk down the main street in Centreville cutting down every white person I saw.398

As a young girl growing up in the south among adults who staunchly disapproved of her involvement in anything related to race, Moody illuminates here that one of the earliest moments in her political journey, as a child, was that of dealing with her feelings of anger, frustration, and desire for revenge. As intense and vital as each of these feelings are for a child whose naiveté around race is abruptly discarded due to senseless racialized violence, Moody lacked spaces to actually express the rage she felt, or an ability as a

398 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 187.

199 young girl to seek revenge for the violence inflicted upon her and other black youth. Left with limited places to express herself after her teacher Mrs. Rice, the only adult who talked with Moody about the NAACP, was fired, she used the space of her dreams to execute acts of revenge. She also used the dreams to boldly express her hatred for white people and the conditions of the south.

Moody’s discourse of revenge and hatred as a young girl opens up a space to examine the emergence of southern black female political identity as one that was undergirded with a sense of rebellion and militancy. That is, Moody’s emergent political identity is not one that adheres to nonviolence. Rather, her idea of activism grows out of a spirit of rebellion. This is noteworthy because it allows Moody to challenge spatial, gendered, and age-biased discourses which suggest that most southern black girls represented the image of Ruby Bridges, Christianity, or other principals of nonviolent leaders. Unlike the widespread images of silent, disciplined children marching to advance the non-violent freedom movement amidst the vitriol and hate speech spewed by white mobs, Moody articulates her earliest engagement with race as a black girl who grew up in one of the deepest bastions of racial and sexual violence as one in which she aligns herself, though a girl in Mississippi, with the most militant efforts to eradicate racism.

Moody imagined that she had the power to protect herself and others using guns. She challenges readers to discard their beliefs that all blacks, especially southern blacks— were docile and cowardly.399 Moody chooses to narrate her story of becoming politicized

399 Moody’s early desires to use guns to resist racism in Mississippi help to challenge claims that southerners were docile, and echo Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s revised definition of “armed resistance” in Mississippi. See Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 7-8

200 as one in which she wrested some form of autonomy and power over her life, if only in her dreams, it was the onset of her goal of organizing to fight back against injustice and survive during her girlhood. It was also the foundation from which she would develop guiding principles behind her future activist pursuits.

Initially, the dreams provided a platform for Moody to be honest, but they did not suffice for long, and she found herself experiencing feelings of entrapment and suffocation. At the age of fifteen, Moody began to feel like she was “choking to death in

Centreville,” as a result of having to keep her feelings about race hidden.400 She notes that she was “sick of selling my feelings for a dollar a day,” in order to work for Mrs.

Burke, and decided to leave home for the summer and spend time with her relatives in

New Orleans.401 Although Moody could momentarily deal with having to perform naiveté and continue being exploited as a domestic in the home of Mrs. Burke by going to New Orleans for the summer, Holland’s feelings of anger and entrapment were not as easy to remedy, even temporarily, as the Delta seemed impossible to escape.

Holland, espousing similar militant and rebellious sentiments as Moody, took a different approach to deal with the anger, entrapment, and feelings of revenge upon whites during the beginning of her political journey as a young black girl. Long before

Holland joined the civil rights movement, and would blatantly consider herself an activist during her girlhood, she waged her own war and movement in which she tried to reclaim her body. Vowing to never be victimized by white men again or poverty, which was the cause of her having to be in the home of her rapist Mr. Lawrence, Holland narrates the

400 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 138. 401 Ibid., 138.

201 early beginnings of her political journey through her body. Having been taunted by her peers about her appearance as well as surviving a brutal sexual assault at the age of eleven, in addition to racism and classism, Holland’s body became one of her primary sources of oppression as young girl.

When Holland was still a young teenager, Dossie Ree, a family friend, who was fond of rumors, decided to make her the subject of one her stories, and told the girl’s mother that she was making a name for herself as a prostitute or “walking de streets.”402

As Holland explains, like most girls her age in the Delta, she would often prance around her neighborhood, walking her walk or streetwalking. But, streetwalking for young black girls in the Delta, as Holland notes, was not about prostitution, it was “strolling, trolling, and strutting your stuff, showing off from table to table, counter to jukebox, joint to joint.”403 To young girls, streetwalking was the time to show off in front of spectators.

And, one’s stride, Holland explains “was your signature.”404 Hence, poor girls in the

Delta may have lacked the luxuries that were believed to enhance one’s beauty such as fine clothing, makeup, and perfumes, but they found other ways, like perfecting their stride and “strutting their stuff” to show off their budding self-confidence as they were making the transition from girl to woman. And, Holland shows that this form of streetwalking, though not understood by older blacks in their community, was empowering for the girls in the Delta because it was one of the rare times that one could choose to display their bodies as well as have sex, if they desired, but were not obligated.

402 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 94. 403 Ibid., 95. 404 Ibid., 95.

202 Holland notes, “Street-walkin’ girls might have sex, or they might not, and everyone knew it was their choice.”405

Once Holland realized that this power of choice had been challenged due to

Dossie Ree’s lies to her mother and other members of the community, it was hard for her to sustain the line between strutting one’s stuff to show off as purely fun among young girls and soliciting money for sex. Holland’s male suitors were convinced that the rumors were true, and her reputation in the community was tarnished. But, even at the darkest point in which most of her community believed she was damaged, Holland still refused to be a victim to their rumors, and instead decided to obtain some form of power. To

Holland, this power came from deciding to engage in prostitution with the goals of earning money to provide for herself and her family as well as possibly leave the Delta one day, since most of the community believed she, even as a young girl, was involved in selling sex. Holland tried to expand her power over her body more by deciding to charge white men higher prices. When Holland became a prostitute, she notes that she was not afraid of white men, but “didn’t want them to get a free feel.”406 Thus, the white men,

Holland explains, would pay the debt of Mr. Lawrence or the money that her white male rapist “still owed.”407 In a sense, Holland did not want to be further victimized by the rumors, and found a way to seize some form of control over the discourse around her body.

Ironically, Holland narrates her early politicization through her choice to engage in prostitution as, in fact, facilitating her involvement in the civil rights movement.

405 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 95. 406 Ibid., 146. 407 Ibid., 101.

203 Again, growing up in a community that shunned any talk of race relations or civil rights organizations, Holland rarely came in contact with black people involved in politics. She learned a little information about the Freedom Riders from one of her cousins who read

Northern newspapers; nevertheless, Holland was still largely unaware of the efforts of civil rights organizations and the young people who were involved.408 But, during one of the times in which she was “walking her walk,” she had a chance encounter with prominent civil rights leader Bob Moses that catapulted her into the movement. Holland had heard that Moses was one of the “Riders,” but did not care when she saw him on the street because she knew he was not from the Delta, and a stranger; therefore, she believed that he had money or could, at least, help her leave Mississippi. Holland decided that she would approach Moses for sex. But, instead of accepting Holland’s offer, Moses led her to the local SNCC office. Holland explains her first encounter with Moses. Holland writes:

I was [walking] behind him. He didn’t look back, so I wiggled and undulated behind him all the way down McLauren Street. I didn’t know if he had any money, but he did look like he was from the North, and I still had my sights set on leaving the Delta. People on the sidewalk began clapping their hands and shouting, “Go on, Cat [Holland]—walk dat walk—git his ’tention!” Finally he turned, looked me up and down, smiled like an amused daddy at his little girl, then kept walking. Now that he knew I was there, I tried a little advertising. “I got it—come an’ git it—” I sang, just loud enough for him to hear. “Come an’ git you some—” He kept walking…Our long walk ended at a modest brick building surrounded by shacks. The front door, shaded by a brick arch, bore a sign showing clasped hands, one white, one black, and the words “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”409

Moses led Holland to the SNCC office, provided her with a desk and typewriter, and requested that she help the organization type up the names and addresses of individuals in

408 Ibid., 189. 409 Ibid., 201-2.

204 her community who were interested in registering to vote. Holland strutted her way right into the center of the civil rights movement. Her encounter with Moses and invitation to help register voters was the moment in which Holland was politicized. She notes the one day at the SNCC office filled her with a sense of pride, and she began to see herself in a new light. Holland experienced respect from people in the SNCC office, and explains that it was a new experience for her. An experience that would, in fact, change her entire life.

As mentioned previously, Travis’s political organizing began when she was only twelve years old and ran to join the NAACP after being threatened by a white customer in the summer of 1961. Yet, Travis recalls that her politicization did not really manifest until she was a teenager and had witnessed a significant amount of racialized violence including the incident when her brother was arrested, and she thought he would be murdered in the same way as Emmett Till.410 It was at that point when Travis knew that something had to be done. But, it is important to think about her moment of politicization, as similar to Holland, Bob Moses played a significant role in her involvement in the movement. When Travis first joined the movement, local NAACP chapter president introduced Travis to Moses. Travis worked with Moses on the voter registration drive in McComb, and was inspired by his commitment to the movement.

After Moses had been severely beaten, Travis recalls, “I knew that I could not sit still and be silent.”411 Travis joined the group of boys, who had already agreed to participate in a sit-in as well as go to jail. Together, Travis and the boys, became known as the

410 Steve Marion, “The Greatest Act of Bravery I’ve Ever Seen,” Carson-Newman University News, n.d., http://www.cn.edu/news?view=225 411 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Sit-In Arrest,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm.

205 “McComb Five.”412 As a seventeen-year old teenager, Travis recalls, “I had no idea I’d ever get involved in sit-ins.” But ever since it happened, the changes in my life have been so vast.” And, implying that she understood that being a freedom fighter in Mississippi had consequences, Travis goes on to say, “I always used to wonder what it would be like to go to jail—you know, silly things the way kids think…”413

Once Holland, Moody, and Travis narrate the moment they become politicized as teenagers, each of their stories begin to align the remaining years of their girlhood and emerging young womanhood with the civil rights movement. That is, upon politicization, any event that they consider pivotal during their formative years is narrated through organizing. The movement becomes the lens through which they discuss how they shape their identities, their engagement with their families, and their ideas about the future as women. As girls growing up in the rural south they, again, know that the dangers of participating in civil rights organizations can have particular damaging effects that will not only affect their lives, but also the lives of their families. But, pushing the unique danger they faced as Mississippians aside, they each committed every aspect of their lives to the movement.

Like their girlhoods prior to politicization, growing up in the civil rights movement, the girls went through stages in which they were like naïve children learning the ropes and then became fully aware of who they were or their specific roles (or the sort of activist—violent or nonviolent) in what they believed would be their life goal— working for liberation. In fact, the narratives are arranged in a matter that suggests that

412 Ibid. “Sit-In Arrest,” 3. 413 Joseph Wershba, “A Civil Rights Award Winner Vows She’ll Fight Even Harder,” New York Post Tuesday, June 5 1962.

206 they are stagnated or incapable of growing fully from naïve child to self-actualized adult without their involvement in the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, similar to the lessons they learned about race prior to joining the movement that were abrupt and usually life changing, so too were the lessons they learned as young freedom fighters.

Their transition from girlhood to womanhood had now become their transition from inexperienced girl-activist to a more self-actualized freedom fighter, and notably their discourse around their gender and age begins to change. That is, growing up as a black girl in the south and fully committed to the civil rights movement becomes more about political maturity, and thus one’s development in terms of age and gender move outside of the bounds of heteronormativity. I will discuss their engagement with gender and age later in this section, but here, I want to focus on the moments that they suggest are the primary shifts in their transition from girl-activist to freedom fighter.

One of the most pivotal moments in their transition from girl-activist to freedom fighter occurs when they participate in major political events such as a sit-in, march, or other public encounter that situates them in front of their communities as activists.

Granted, they may have participated in several political events, but their narratives tend to center one event in particular that represented a significant change in their identities.

Making one’s support of the civil rights movement public by participating in a major race-related event, irrespective of whether they were actually shaking with fear, boldly proclaimed to blacks and whites in their community that they were not afraid and no longer naïve children. It was much like coming out or the moment when one announces their unique existence in a debutante ball. Meaning, after years of toiling under white

207 supremacist ideologies that rendered them insignificant and powerless girls, they announced to their communities as well as white individuals alike that they mattered and were fighting for their own futures.

Holland experienced several major political events such as helping to organize well-known comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory’s infamous flight to

Greenwood, Mississippi during which he donated fourteen thousand pounds of food to the community after whites ended the welfare program to dissuade locals from working with civil rights organizations. Holland narrates her experience with Gregory from the periphery, and does not suggest that she, as a young activist, had undergone significant changes around her identity on the verge of adulthood. However, she articulates this shift or significant transition from girl to woman when she describes her meeting with Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. during his visit to Greenwood in 1964 to support the Mississippi

Freedom Democratic Party. When King arrived in Greenwood and began to march through the town with the community, Holland made her way to the front of the line to march beside him. Holland had become known for “being at the front of every other parade and demonstration in Greenwood for the last year and half,” and thus she states that, “I didn’t feel shy about elbowing my way to the head” of the line in order to walk beside Dr. King.414 At the front of the line with Dr. King, Holland told him about her community, and explained to him who each person was that eagerly ran up to him and shook his hand as he moved throughout Greenwood. In addition to walking through the town with King, when they passed by her mother’s house, Holland stopped the line and introduced King to her and everyone else in the neighborhood.

414 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 270.

208 Holland’s entire community witnessed her as a “freedom fighter” walking with

Dr. King. She was no longer “little Cat,” known for her strut and misbehaving throughout

Greenwood. As essential as her new found image was to her public identity, it was the moment that she rode in the car with King when he was escorted back to the airport that she acknowledges her transition from girl to woman. Holland writes:

I thought he was sleep until his big voice boomed inside the car. “What grade are you in, young lady?” Before I could say anything, Reverend Red began to answer for me. “You see, Reverend, Little Cat here—uh, that is, Ida Mae, was on the wrong road in life.” He went on to catalogue every crime and misdemeanor I had ever committed— plus a few that I hadn’t. I didn’t think I could speak with his authority or grace, so I just lowered my head in shame. “Well,” Dr. King said finally, glancing wearily out the window, “she’s going to do better, Reverend Red. You keep up with her and let me know what she’s doing.” “I’m goin’ to be Somebody, Reverend King,” I said in the fullest, firmest, most pear-shaped tones I could manage.415

Interestingly, Holland was around the age of nineteen or twenty when she rode with Reverend Red to escort Dr. King to the airport. However, Reverend Red catapulted

Holland back into the earlier years of her troubled girlhood at what one could reasonably argue was a defining moment in her life as a political activist. Considering the level of influence that Dr. King had in the U.S. during this time, it was important to Holland to show him along with her community that she had become an important figure and was reaching a new level in her political development. Even though, Holland herself, no

415 Ibid., 273-4.

209 longer narrates her story by talking about key moments that would signify heteronormative girlhood and development such as relationships or bodily changes that project one’s femininity, she makes space for Dr. King to ask her about what grade she is as well as Revered Red to speak of her girlhood experiences in the recalling of her personal narrative. I contend that Holland makes space for them to invoke her girlhood at this point in the narrative in order to illuminate that she is no longer a child or girl, and her age and gender are not central to her personhood in so much as her emerging political identity. Furthermore, she articulated this to two of the most revered black people in black communities at the time—black male reverends.

Though oftentimes shamed by other civil rights workers about her earlier life as a prostitute from the ages of thirteen to eighteen before the movement in the same ways that Reverend Red did in front of Dr. King, Holland took the moment in the car with Red and King to move beyond her young girlhood and declare herself valuable with a bright future ahead. Her sense of self-actualization is evinced as she refused to be silenced by

Revered Red. While escorting King to the airport, Holland demonstrated her bravery, end to vulnerable girlhood, and declared that she was going to be “Somebody.” And, this

“Somebody” that Holland was striving to be was not qualified with the word woman or lady, despite Reverend Red’s suggestion that her past had removed her from respectable womanhood. Holland did not seek to grow into a proper representation of a woman, but rather a politicized “Somebody,”—powerful, self-actualized force committed to accomplishing her goals. For Holland, that goal was liberation for black people in the south.

210 Holland’s major shift occurred when she is in the backseat of the car with King and Red, but I want to point out that in another brief scene between her mother, whom again, was trying to make her emerging womanhood about gender and femininity rather than liberation and Holland’s political agenda in the movement. After spending time working in the SNCC office among other girls who were also committed to the movement, Holland began to dress and style her hair like them. Holland’s mother, determined to make her a symbol of proper womanhood on her journey to become

“Somebody,” scolded the young girl about her look and demanded that she change her clothes. Holland narrates the exchange:

“What de devil you done wit’ yo’ hair, gal?” Mama said. “Why you be runnin’ ‘round here wit’ yo’ head all nappy?” “It called a natural, Mama,” I said. I’d seen pictures of African queens wearing their hair all bushy and regal-looking, and some of the black women at the Freedom Office had started wearing their hair that way, too. I’d started dressing like the other women workers, too. ‘Den ‘fore you leave dis house, Ida Mae,” Mama snapped, sensing she’d already lost the fight about my hair, “you pull dem overhalls off an’ put you on a dress!” “Can’t, Mama. I may hafta go limp in the march and people could look underneath my dress.”416 In this exchange with her mother and shortly before the meeting with Dr. King,

Holland begun showing signs that she was undergoing a shift in identity that was centered on her political agenda rather than her gender. Holland no longer styled her hair or wore clothing that followed gender or sexual expectations. Rather the girl whose strut in front of men and boys with wandering eyes had defined her for years ditched her

416 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 236.

211 signature walk for overalls, or what Tanisha C. Ford, calls “SNCC skin,” in order to move freely in case she had to play dead or “go limp” if attacked during a demonstration.417 In addition, she began wearing hairstyles that yielded to her growing militant political identity rather than her mother’s ideals of black, southern female beauty standards. Perhaps, one may consider Holland’s decision to style her hair natural as a point at which she reified gendered norms among African American women during the civil rights movement. But, echoing, Robin D.G. Kelley, I would argue that Holland’s hair style along with the decision to wear overhalls were, in fact, not about her gender as both men and women wore afros and overhalls as political statements. Kelley contends that “[f]or black women, more so than black men, going “natural” [wearing an afro] was not just a valorization of blackness or Africanness, but a direct rejection of a conception of female beauty that many black men themselves had upheld.”418 Even Holland’s comments about the “regal-looking” beauty that she observed among the African women with afros speak to the larger nationalist political statements among black men and women during the civil rights movement who were defining their identities by imagining themselves as part of a larger diasporic community beyond the U.S. Holland, as someone who struggled throughout her life with perceptions about her appearance, emerges at this point as someone who is confident, and not burdened by black or white expectations of femininity, neither of which she could live up to due to class, geographic location, and race.

417 Tanisha C. Ford, “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress,” The Journal of Southern History 79, no. 3 (2013): 625-658, 626. 418 Robin DG. Kelley, "Nap time: Historicizing the Afro," Fashion Theory 1, no. 4 (1997): 339- 351, 348.

212 A few years younger than Holland and Moody, Travis’s peak moment in her political development from girl-activist to freedom fighter occurred when she and the

McComb Five participated in a sit-in at the Greyhound bus station in McComb,

Mississippi. Travis and the other demonstrators were arrested and taken to jail. After

Travis was released from jail, she tried to enroll in high school, but was not allowed to register due to her involvement in the sit-in. Unbeknownst to the high school principal or

Travis at the time, the pivotal moment in her political development not only changed her life, but the lives of one-hundred and sixteen students who walked out of the high school in support of her when they learned she was not permitted to register.419 After picking up signs of protest, Travis notes that she led the students downtown McComb to City Hall to hold a prayer meeting.420 When Travis prepared to kneel and pray, she was arrested again, and then taken to a reformatory school.421

Travis’s bravery and commitment to the movement that she demonstrated publicly in her community cost her and the students who marched out of the school in protest greatly. I will expound on the consequences that Travis faced in the next section, but here, I want to emphasize how her bravery as a freedom fighter inspired other students and community members in McComb. Travis’s sit-in at the bus station and leadership among the students in the walk-out became a symbol of the highest level of dedication to the movement in McComb. From a advertisement that was circulated in order to publicize a mass meeting about a protest, among the important issues noted that

419 Signed Autobiography, “Brenda Lavern Travis,” n.d., 2, Aurelia Norris Young Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 420 Ibid., 2. 421 Ibid., 2.

213 would be discussed at the meeting was Travis’s transfer to the reformatory school.

Alongside the meeting announcement is a comic strip in which Travis and another freedom fighter who walked out in support of her, both young high school students at the time, are depicted as more committed to the movement than college students.

214

Handbill or advertisement for NAACP mass meeting published in the Voice of the Jackson Movement, in Aurelia Norris Young Papers, MDAH.

215

For Anne Moody, the transition from girl-activist to freedom fighter occurs in one of the most well-known sit-ins in the south at the Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson,

Mississippi. Like Holland and Travis, Moody had experienced several events leading up to the moment in which she transitions from girl to freedom fighter, but she centers the event in which she demonstrates her full commitment to the movement in public as the pinnacle of her political development. Prior to the sit-in, the activism that Moody narrates such as that of stumbling into a worker’s strike during her summer visit in New Orleans or the hunger strike that she organized at her junior college were all suggested to be immature or without a clear purpose. But, Moody sheds this layer of political immaturity when she goes to Tougaloo College and resumes her lesson on the NAACP that she started in high school with her teacher Mrs. Rice.

After Moody’s roommate Trotter, secretary of Tougaloo’s NAACP chapter, talks to her about the organization, she joined and was anxious to learn everything about their efforts towards ending racial violence in the south.422 While Holland positions Dr. King as a central force in her political development, Moody centers Medgar Evers as an instrumental figure in the period leading up to the pivotal moment in her political development. But much Like Holland and Travis, during the early stages of her work as an activist, Moody was also heavily influenced by Bob Moses. During one of her first trips to the Delta to help SNCC with the voter registration drive, Moody speaks of her initial encounter with Moses: “I thought Bob Moses, the director of SNCC in Mississippi, was Jesus Christ in the flesh. A lot of other people thought of him as J.C., too.” During

422 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 247-8.

216 her work with Moses and SNCC in the Delta, Moody was on the verge of transitioning and notes that she was going to be a part of the movement. Moody writes:

That summer I could feel myself beginning to change. For the first time I began to think something would be done about whites killing, beating, and misusing Negroes. I knew I was going to be a part of whatever happened.423

Perhaps, it was the work in the Delta alongside Moses and other SNCC workers that moved Moody to make the bold decision to participate in the most publicized sit-in effort in Mississippi. Despite receiving letters from her mother “with dried-up tears on it,” in which she informed Moody that news of her early activism and canvassing with SNCC had incensed Klansman in Centerville, the young activist was still determined to risk everything in the fight for freedom. On the brink of losing family support and communication, Moody committed everything to the movement as she contends it “gave meaning to life.”424

Showing her full commitment to the freedom movement, Moody became the spokesman for a team of her classmates and professors who would integrate the

Woolworth lunch counter on May 28, 1963.425 The Woolworth lunch counter sit-in was among one of the most violent in Jackson. Moody and the other demonstrators endured three hours of brutal attacks. Moody describes the incident:

The mob started smearing us with ketchup, mustard, sugar, pies, and everything on the counter. Soon Joan and I were joined by John Salter, but the moment he sat down he was hit on the jaw with what appeared to be brass knuckles. Blood gushed from his face and someone threw salt into the open wound…We sat there for three hours taking a beating when the manager decided to close the store because the mob had begun to go wild with stuff from the counters.426

423 Ibid., 254. 424 Ibid., 263. 425 Ibid., 263. 426 Ibid., 266-7.

217

Newspaper clipping in Aurelia Norris Young’s Papers of Anne Moody and two demonstrators at Woolworth’s lunch counter. Anne Moody is the third demonstrator from the left. Daily News May 29, 1963427

427 Image was printed in a newspaper that was part of Aurelia Norris Young’s scrapbook. Young followed youth activism meticulously in Mississippi. Her husband Jack Harvey Young, Sr. was a prominent civil rights attorney. Publication information is handwritten on newspaper clipping, but has not been confirmed as the actual source of the image. “Demonstrators Doused,” Daily News May 29, 1963. Aurelia Norris Young Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

218 The now iconic images of Moody and other demonstrators sitting at the

Woolworth lunch counter soiled with condiments amongst an angry mob captures a significant growth spurt in the young activist’s political development. This moment not only radically changed Moody’s life, but the lives of other blacks in Jackson as well as her family members back in Centreville. Because of the national publication of the sit-in,

Moody explains that she had become “known to every white in Jackson.”428 Following the Woolworth lunch counter sit-in, Moody narrates these pivotal moments in which she suggests to readers that she has grown up in the movement so much so that she can, similar to Holland, evince a sort of militant politics that is not restrained by gendered norms as well as critique leadership. Following the Woolworth sit-in Moody decided to leave Jackson and go to what was deemed an area “too rough for girls,”—Canton,

Mississippi.429 Moody notes that “Negroes frequently turned up dead” in Canton, thereby causing her friends to plead with her not go into the area to organize. But, as Moody, explains, she “just had to go. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.”430 Still narrating the sit-in as a turning point in development of a more militant political identity, a couple of months after Evers death when Moody attends the March on Washington on

August 28, 1963, she illustrates this period of growth and change more through her bold critique of the leaders who spoke at the event. Moody writes:

By the time we got to the Lincoln Memorial, there were already thousands of people there. I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had “dreamers” instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up

428 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 279. 429 Ibid., 286. 430 Ibid., 286.

219 there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream.431

Critiquing leadership at this point for Moody implies that she, again, had matured politically, and could use her own voice and creative strategies in the fight towards freedom rather than solely depending upon those centered as the leaders of the movement. Her critique of their leadership is also informed by the dangerous racialized geography that she worked in as an activist and grew up in as a black girl coming of age in the south. Moody’s disapproval of the “dreaming” among leaders also coincides with the self-reflection that she was doing in terms of whether or not she wanted to continue supporting the non-violent approach that her organization employed in the movement.

This becomes a significant point of contention for Moody as she shaped her political identity following the three-hour beating during the sit-in coupled with the racial terror that she and other blacks in her hometown and Canton experienced. Moreover, the highly publicized Woolworth sit-in is believed to have been one of the events that sparked the most dangerous periods of racial terror in Jackson. A short period after the sit-in, on June

12, 1963, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in front of his home. And, Moody’s family in

Centreville began receiving threats. Moody’s sister Adline wrote to her shortly after the

Woolworth lunch counter sit-in to explain one of the incidents:

She [Adline] told me…that Junior [Moody’s brother] had been cornered by a group of white boys and was about to be lynched, when one of his friends came along in a car and rescued him. Besides that, a group of white men had gone out and beaten up my old Uncle Buck. Adline said Mama told her they couldn’t sleep, for fear of night riders. They were all scared to death. My sister ended the letter by cursing me out. She said I was trying to get every Negro in Centreville murdered.432

431 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 307. 432 Ibid., 275.

220

Moody realized the danger that her involvement in the Woolworth lunch counter sit-in had caused in the lives of her family back in Centerville, but was convinced that there was nothing that she could do besides deal with the consequences because she had reached a critical point in her political identity in which there was no turning back from the movement.433 And the consequences of her commitment to the movement included more incidents of violence like Junior experienced. Further, Moody recognized that her commitment to freedom could also cause the one consequence that loomed over her from the beginning of her political journey to materialize—being exiled, or unable to ever return home to her family in Centreville.

The exile that loomed in the backdrop of Moody’s consciousness was one that was familiar to many black girls who grew up in Mississippi and made the choice to disregard the racial status quo and codes of conduct in the south. Experiencing myriad forms of exile became an important point in their girlhoods and political development of girls like Moody, Holland, and Travis, who were fully committed to the civil rights movement and their roles as freedom fighters. Their exile was synonymous with the final stage of their youth, as they were taken out of their communities and eventually forced to leave home—the state of Mississippi. In the next section, I discuss the common forms of exile that black girls experienced, which I contend add a new lens to study the catalysts behind migratory patterns of young black southerners during the civil rights era that are rarely explored.

433 Ibid., 275.

221 The Price of Freedom for Black Girls in Mississippi is Exile

Governor Ross Barnett had stipulated that he would release me into his [Professor Herman Einsman] custody, if and only if, he got me out of Mississippi within 24 hours, because he could not “guarantee my life.” So, I don’t know what anybody else called it, but I called it exiled from the State of Mississippi.434

Brenda Travis

The short time I spent in Parchman seemed like an eternity. It confined the mind and spirit completely as it confined the body.435

Endesha Ida Mae Holland

“If you can’t go home, then don’t go feeling like the Lone Ranger,” I said. “I haven’t been home since Thanksgiving of ’61. I know a lot of other people that can’t go home either.436

Anne Moody

The last period that signified black girls had reached their zenith in the movement and political maturity occurred when they experienced some form of exile, and had to depend solely on themselves for survival. This exile usually occurred when the girls were imprisoned, forcibly driven outside of the State of Mississippi, or displaced from their own communities for their involvement in the movement. The opening quotes from

Travis, Moody, and Holland speak to each form of exile that girls experienced as young freedom fighters. It is noteworthy to explain the significance of using the word exile to describe the close of black girlhood that is entangled with the civil rights movement and racialized geography of the Jim Crow South. Scholars have studied the migratory patterns

434 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Exiled from Mississippi,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 435 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 259. 436 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 320.

222 of black southerners who left the south at pivotal moments in U.S. culture such as the

American Civil War, Black Exodus, and the different waves of the Great Migration during the early twentieth century extensively. Yet, the concept of exile and the migratory patterns of young black girls have rarely been considered at the intersections of age, race, gender, class, and space. The concept of exile and the focus upon which subjects were experiencing expulsion from their homes due to their politics must be expanded in order to capture the unique experiences of black girls, especially those involved in the civil rights movement.

Despite the sizable number of young black girls who were committed to the civil rights movement in the south, and thus spent a significant amount of time in county jails or the infamous Parchman facility in Mississippi during their formative years, there are very few studies that investigate the impact of this form of exile from their communities within the historical record or as a constitutive aspect of the coming-of-age narratives of black girls in the south. Travis, Holland, and Moody each spent time in jail. Following the crucial moment in her political development when she participated in the sit-in at the

Greyhound bus station in her hometown, Travis was arrested and spent one month in Pike

County jail.437 Like Holland and Moody, even though she had been working outside of the home since the age of twelve in order to help support her poor family, it is when

Travis goes to jail that she describes having to learn how to survive on her own.438 Being

437 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Sit-In Arrest,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 438 Ibid., “County Jail.”

223 sent to jail was the ultimate step in their political identity and transition into adulthood as young freedom fighters.

Though black girls learned at an early age from race relations that they were not deemed vulnerable children, the conditions of the jail violently affirmed their status outside of childhood, humanity, and made it very clear that they were never meant to survive as black girls in the south. For example, they were oftentimes jailed with older adults. Being jailed with older adults was particularly dangerous for the younger girls.

Travis recalls being told by an older female inmate in her cell that the officers stated they would release her early if she agreed to beat the girl. Luckily, the inmate refused to beat

Travis because she was afraid of the retaliation she might encounter from the girl’s uncle upon her release.439 Furthermore, the officers as well as other staff routinely subjected the girls to violent conditions. If the police officers had no room for the children they arrested during political demonstrations, they would send them to the state fairgrounds for days at a time as though they were cattle. The fairgrounds in Jackson, Mississippi, or what was referred to as the “Fairgrounds Motel” by the Times-Picayune newspaper was particularly dangerous as hundreds of children were cramped in the small areas in the sweltering

Mississippi heat without proper food or water.440 Moody was jailed at the state fairgrounds briefly, and describes her experience:

The fairgrounds were everything I had heard they were. The compounds they put us in were two large buildings used to auction off cattle during the annual state fair. They were about a block long, with large openings about twenty feet wide on both ends where the cattle were driven in. the openings had been closed up with wire. It reminded me of a concentration camp. It was hot and sticky…We were guarded by four policemen. They had rifles and kept an eye on us through the

439 Ibid., 5. 440 Dudly Lehew, “Marchers Held at Fair Grounds,” Times-Picayune Newspaper, June 3, 1963.

224 wired sides of the building…About five-thirty we were told that dinner was ready. We were lined up single file and marched out of the compound. They had the cook from the city jail there. He was standing over a large garbage can stirring something in it with a stick. The sight of it nauseated me. No one was eating, girls or boys. In the next few days, many were taken from the fairgrounds sick from hunger.441

Based on the conditions the children were subject to at the fairgrounds, it is reasonable to conclude that the officials in Mississippi had no regard for the ages or the well-being of the children who participated in demonstrations. The officials sought to teach the children a lesson and dissuade them from being involved in the movement.

Although, as Moody mentions, the children were cramped in the fairgrounds and showed signs of malnutrition, their ailing bodies were on display as newspaper journalists such as those writing for Times-Picayune were allowed to view the children.442 Yet, much to the surprise of the journalists who frequented the fairgrounds, the children, using the survival techniques of “singing and praying” that Brenda Travis explains were oftentimes taught by the movement leaders in order to keep from “thinking or concentrating on our surroundings,” the young imprisoned freedom fighters refused to show any weakness.443

Seemingly oblivious to the survival techniques of the young people at the state fairgrounds, on June 3, 1963, Times-Picayune writer Dudly Lehew writes that the children are simply “performing” when the cameras arrive. Lehew writes:

The performance seems to begin each time a newsman or camera approaches. The girls sing “We Shall Overcome” and the boys assume a defiant look—for a brief

441 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 280-1. 442 Dudly Lehew, “Marchers Held at Fair Grounds.” 443 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “County Jail,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm.

225 time. Between performances, they seem to wonder just what they’re doing there.444

Contrary to Lehew’s observation, the girls like Moody, who may have been among the youth imprisoned during his visit in 1963, knew exactly what they were doing at the state fairgrounds and how to survive their stay. In addition to the survival techniques of singing and praying that were taught by the movement leaders, the girls also developed their own strategies to deal with the different forms of exile they experienced. While in jail, Moody explains that the girls “made cards out of toilet tissue and played Gin Rummy,” or taught each other dance steps to survive.445 When Holland was sent to the workhouse with girls like Joyce and Dorie Ladner who were college students, following a demonstration, they all worked together to convert the jail cell into a dorm room, or a more livable space.446 Believing that they would surely be sent to jail again soon because, as Holland notes, they were willing to “fight, even die for” the movement, the girls “cleaned the toilets, laundered [the] rough blankets, and painted everything that didn’t move.”447 This more livable space helped to sustain the girls throughout the duration of their stay, and the next time that Holland and another group of girls were arrested and sent back to the workhouse after another demonstration.

However, the ability to create a more livable space within a space of exile as young black girls proved to be challenging when they were abruptly removed from the workhouse and sent to what I mentioned earlier as one of the most brutal facilities in

444 Dudly Lehew, “Marchers Held at Fair Grounds.” 445Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 272-3. 446 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 240-1. 447 Ibid., 241, 253.

226 Mississippi—Parchman, or the “Devil’s Island of the Delta.”448 Like the children at the fairgrounds, Holland and the other girls relied on singing as a survival technique, but found it harder do because the guards strictly forbid them from making noise.449 But, in the spirit of rebellion and the desire to live, they sang anyway. Considering the conditions that Holland describes that they experienced for thirty-three days in Parchman, it was essential that they did. The guards harassed them by shaving their heads and keeping hot lights on all night to prevent the girls from sleeping.450 Holland explains the conditions further:

We slept one to a cell, on iron slabs that, although they had no mattress and no covers, did have thirty-three…airholes that served mostly to pinch your skin when you turned over…A typical meal was molasses and biscuits with weak coffee…Those sticky biscuits, plus lack of exercise, plugged us up like wet concrete. This made the six squares of toilet paper we got issued once a week more understandable..[O]ur gums puffed up, too, swelling outside of our mouths…I didn’t realize how much my mind and body had degenerated until a group of white women toured the prison…I wanted to shout, “What you lookin’ at, white gal?” until I realized her only answer could have been a “pathetic black girl with feces running down her legs, a raw mouth, bleeding gums, and a belly swollen with malnutrition.” I felt like an inhabitant of some other world.451

Again, reflecting upon their experience in jail, the will to live and continue their work as freedom fighters outweighed the conditions of confinement. To be jailed in Mississippi, one knows, like Holland claims, that she is outside of the dominant social body or “an inhabitant of some other world,” from your treatment and the isolated geography of terror that is meant to dehumanize inmates on the “Devil’s Island of the Delta.”

448 Holland notes that the local people usually referred to Parchman as the “Devil’s’ Island of the Delta.” See Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 256. 449 Ibid., 257. 450 Ibid., 258, 260. 451 Ibid., 258.

227 Though jailers could interfere with the girls’ survival techniques by prohibiting singing, praying, or subjecting them to even harsher conditions, the one strategy that each of the girls employed that could not be as easily imposed upon was that of reimagining their confinement and the ways they could contribute to the movement from a distance.

This reimagining also indicates their political maturity as freedom fighters. Rather than succumb to the tactics of officers who made sustaining oneself in confinement nearly impossible, Holland, arrested a total of thirteen times for what she notes as “classy crimes”—parading without a permit or inciting a riot—reimagined her role as a freedom fighter as one in which she was not only mature enough politically to be responsible for herself, but for the well-being and political development of other girls trying to survive their imprisonment.452 Holland states that her “unofficial official job in the Movement was to be arrested, go to jail, and stay there as long as other workers needed me.”453 This

“unofficial official job” of going to jail to help others, for Holland, may have been quite significant because she was strongly influenced by other southern black freedom fighters, especially Fannie Lou Hamer who had been subjected to violence and exile. During

Hamer’s well-known arrest when officers instructed other prisoners to brutally beat her, an experience she later testified about at the Democratic National Convention in 1964,

Holland was the young movement worker assigned with the duty of bringing fresh clothes to Hamer and writing a report on what she witnessed during her visit. Holland notes in her report:

As I walked into the hall down by the cells, My [sic] Hamer caught me [sic] arm, she was crying and she told me to tell the people if she died in jail that those two

452 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 254. 453 Ibid., 253.

228 men, (referring to the jailer and the shief [sic]) had two white prisoners beat her. She placed my hand on her body and I fetl [sic] the places, they were hard and swollen.454

In addition to seeing Hamer in jail, Holland further implies that she was influenced by the movement worker and her imprisonment as she mentions Hamer again upon her release from Parchman. On the ride home from Parchman, Holland states that the bus was stopped in Ruleville, Mississippi, and Hamer got on to sing and hug each of the girls who were released from Parchman. Holland recalls Hamer telling her that she had “the light of freedom!”455Moody, on the other hand, does not suggest renowned figures such as Hamer impacted the ways she survived confinement, but she does note that she, like Holland, reimagined the space of incarceration. When the weight of the movement became too much, Moody reimagined the space of confinement as the only place that she could go to think without being interrupted.456Doing shorter stints in jail than both Holland and Travis, Moody would use her brief periods in jail to reflect upon her next political moves.457

Travis used the other survival strategies, but her ability to reimagine her role in the movement and space of confinement were challenged a bit more than Holland and

Moody because she was not only jailed, but also forced to go to a training school and then eventually required to leave the State of Mississippi at the age of sixteen. After what she figured was a routine period in a city jail following a political demonstration with her classmates, Travis expected to be transported back to her family. Instead, she was

454 “Ida Holland,” Sally Belfrage papers, 1962-1966; Historical Society Library Microforms Room, Micro 599, Reel 2, Segment 21; WIHV91-A140. 455 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 262. 456 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 278. 457 Ibid., 278.

229 removed from the city jail cell with her classmates and then sent to Pike County jail.

Travis was never allowed to go before a judge or a right to trial.458 While in county jail, movement leaders tried to bail her out. In fact, Travis recalls Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. putting up five thousand dollars for her release from jail.459 But, rather than release her to the custody of her family, the state placed her in Oakley Training School in Raymond,

Mississippi, over fifty miles from her hometown, without telling movement leaders,

Travis’s attorney, or her parents.460 After three or four weeks, Travis’s family learned of her placement in Oakley Training School; however, police officers still tried to keep her isolated by frequently denying her visits from friends and family members.461

Travis, who had been a strong student in school in a variety of subjects, was only allowed to take one course, Home Economics, during her six months in reformatory school.462 In a short autobiography, sixteen-year old Travis explains how she manages to cope with being in Oakley:

Of course, I have happy moments and sad moments like anyone else. I’m studying by a schedule which includes prayer three times a day. I attend Sunday School every Sunday and often participate in discussions. I hope to obtain more knowledge through books which are being sent to me so that I may be able to compete with other students attending high school daily. I’m praying to be released soon so that I may return to my mother and be able to attend a school of my choice.463

458 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Students March in McComb,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 459 Ibid., “Reform School.” 460 Ibid., “Reform School.” 461 Ibid., “Reform School.” 462 Signed Autobiography, “Brenda Lavern Travis,” n.d., 2, Aurelia Norris Young Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 463 Ibid., 3.

230 Praying and envisioning her future in which she could “attend a school of her choice,” helped Travis endure her placement in the reformatory school. Travis’s emphasis on being able to both choose her school as well as be prepared to simply rejoin the students her age in high school is noteworthy because even though she had been expelled, she evinces a relentless commitment to completing her education, returning to her family, and a life in McComb. Hence, at the time she wrote her autobiography, Travis was still hopeful that she could survive in the State of Mississippi as a freedom fighter.

Despite Travis’s commitment to education and continuing her life in McComb, the conditions of exile as a sixteen-year old black girl were exacerbated further when she was abruptly released to a white professor who taught at a Black College in Alabama.

The professor and his students began following the coverage of Travis’s unlawful arrest in the newspapers. After a while, the professor arranged a meeting with Mississippi

Governor Ross Barnett to discuss the conditions of Travis’s release from the training school. The Governor allowed the professor to take Travis from the training school with the condition that she leave Mississippi within twenty-four hours. Travis notes that the professor allowed her to visit with her family for about three hours before she had to leave Mississippi.464

Shortly after Travis left the State of Mississippi with the professor, she realized that he, too, had plans to confine and exploit her when he began leaving inappropriate notes in the young girl’s room.465 Fearful about the professor’s plans now that he had her

464 Brenda Travis, interviewed by Wazir Peacock, Jean Wiley, and Bruce Hartford, February 2007, transcript, Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, “Exiled from Mississippi,” http://www.crmvet.org/nars/travisb.htm. 465 Ibid. “Escape to SNCC.”

231 alone in a completely new state, Travis escaped from the professor with the help of

SNCC members, and went to Georgia. After arriving in Georgia, the same professor who organized her release from the custody of the State of Mississippi sent police officers to her new home, and pleaded with them to send her back to reformatory school since she was a “fugitive from justice!”466 Luckily, Travis had recently turned seventeen years old, thereby making her an adult in the State of Georgia, and the professor could not have her arrested.467

The conditions of exile that the girls experienced were also felt among their families. Travis’ mother could no longer find work in their hometown to support her other six children.468 Holland’s mother was inside of her home when it was burned down. Due to the severity of the burns, Holland’s mother died. Holland insinuates that whites in Greenwood may have been responsible for her mother’s death. And, initially,

Holland’s sister Jean blamed her for their mother’s home being burned down. Jean told

Holland that she knew that her activism was going to “git [sic] somebody kilt.”469

Moody’s activism also created divisions between her family. When her stepmother’s brother was killed, Moody believed that her activism may have caused his death.470

Further, after receiving threats from angry white mobs in Centreville, several of Moody’s family members urged her to never return to their homes or send letters directly to them.

If Moody wanted to write home to inquire about her family, she had to send letters to other community members who would then deliver them to her family because the local

466 Ibid., 12. 467 Ibid., 12. 468 Ibid., 10. 469 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 296. 470 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 359.

232 post office screened the letters that she mailed to Centreville. Moody was also placed on the local Ku Klux Klan’s black list alongside others, some of whom had “X’s” over their faces to indicate that they had been killed.471

Travis was the only girl who was ordered and “documented” by the Governor to leave Mississippi, but the violence inflicted upon their families and the division they experienced from their communities as a result of their activism made it nearly impossible to continue living in Mississippi. The difficulty of living in their native state as displaced persons is demonstrated in both their narratives as well as Moody and

Holland’s decision to end their coming-of-age stories with them leaving the State of

Mississippi. Holland notes that after her mother died, she decided to leave “Greenwood for good.”472 Likewise, Moody ends her narrative with heavy feelings of displacement as she is now a recent college graduate with no place to go. Moody concludes her coming- of-age narrative as she boards a bus with Bob Moses and other civil rights activists headed to Washington, D.C. to testify about the racism they witnessed in Mississippi.473

Collectively, each girl’s departure from Mississippi as they come of age shows that in order to study black girlhood during the civil rights era, exile must be a part of the story.

Travis, Holland, and Moody faced several forms of exile as young activists. They grew up in Mississippi, and thus knew the price of freedom was exile. Yet, they chose to fight anyway.

471 Ibid., 339. 472 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 305. 473 Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 383-4.

233 Conclusion

As soon as I finish high school, I’m going to fight much harder. You don’t give up fighting just because you’re punished.474

Brenda Travis

If you’re young, make a promise right now that you will never, ever give up your dreams. If you’ve been a ho’, be a doctor, too.475

Endesha Ida Mae Holland

In spite of the hardships they faced, Anne Moody, Brenda Travis, and Endesha

Ida Mae Holland were still determined to accomplish their goals as freedom fighters.

Travis, when awarded the annual NAACP award for her activism at the age of seventeen, told the New York Post in 1962, “As soon as I finish high school, I’m going to fight much harder. You don’t give up fighting just because you’re punished.”476 And, she continued that fight by finishing her education outside of the state of Mississippi and sharing her story of activism with other young people around the world. Holland left Mississippi shortly after her mother died and continued her fight in social justice movements in

Minneapolis, Minnesota. Vowing to never be ashamed of her past life of “streetwalking,”

Holland continued to share all of her life story with movement workers and the world alike by making a stage play based on her life in the Delta. Holland fought her way to her ultimate accomplishment when she graduated with a doctorate degree from the

University of Minnesota in 1985. At her graduation ceremony, Holland states, “I eased into my streetwalker’s walk and crossed the stage to uproarious cheers, whistles, and

474 Joseph Wershba, “A Civil Rights Award Winner.” 475 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 313. 476 Joseph Wershba, “A Civil Rights Award Winner.”

234 applause.”477 Moody went on to graduate from Tougaloo College and continued her work in the civil rights movement as well.

I opened this chapter with Ruby Bridges and the four little girls who were murdered in the Sixteenth-Street Baptist church to show that a very visible, though oftentimes overlooked, representation of black girls and their girlhoods exist in U.S. culture. Contrary to popular claims, we are familiar with these representations of black girls; and their stories of girlhood are accessible. Whether or not we see Bridges and the four little girls as constituting a history of black girlhood in the U.S., they exist and have played integral roles in the civil rights movement as children. Thus, their stories are a part of the larger history of childhood, and can be used as sites of knowledge to investigate other aspects of the civil rights movement. I chose to use the stories of black girlhood that differ greatly from the few representations of black girls during the civil rights movement that we know, but offer a fresh perspective on how black girls survived outside of the conceptualizations of normal, respectable childhood, girlhood, and youth activism. I chose to look at the girls who were born into the deepest bastion of racial and sexual violence.

Using the stories of Moody, Travis, and Holland, I examined how their girlhoods were shaped by the civil rights movement and the racialized geography of Mississippi. As sites of knowledge, their girlhoods created spaces to study the civil rights movement through the lenses of black girls. From their perspectives, I showed the events and influential figures who were most significant to the emerging political maturity of black girls coming of age in the civil rights movement. Travis, Holland, and Moody

477 Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 309.

235 demonstrate how black girls in the south acquired autonomy in their transition from girl to woman by aligning their coming of age with that of developing one’s political identity rather than gendered expectations of pending womanhood.

Lastly, examining memoires and discussions of adults’ development of their political selves, some scholars argue that the voice in which the author remembers moments of enlightenment may differ slightly in tone and impact than what actually took place during one’s childhood. Further, scholars contend that the adult cannot possibly capture the child’s voice and feelings in their reflections in a manner that purely display the raw and unedited emotions of one’s childhood experience. If we take this to be true, then, Moody, Travis, and Holland’s early militancy and the spirt of rebellion that cultivated their burgeoning political identities may, in fact, be hard to determine or substantiate. Yet, if we are going to allow black women the privilege of speaking about multiple aspects of their realties, and if we take their girlhood experiences seriously, why should we refute the possibility of a black woman who grew up in the south—outside of the normal time, space, and childhood—having reflections of her political journey as one that was tinged with anger, hate, and militancy? Nevertheless, memories of anyone’s childhood or life story are not without possible deviations from the truth, but to provide a space for black girlhood—a period of life that is largely illegible to dominant culture—is to be open to myriad expressions being drawn from innovative sources that may not look remotely similar to normal depictions of childhood, as there was nothing normal about growing up poor, black, and female in the south during the Jim Crow era except the likelihood of one not surviving racialized violence.

236 Conclusion

Loving Black Girls Unconditionally as a form of Militant Political Resistance478

In my Master’s program in 2010, I had the rare privilege of taking an independent study course on black girls. At the time, there were only a few books that solely focused on black girls. And, there were no books available that looked at black girls, in particular, as historical actors.479 There were no book-length manuscripts that situated black women and girls’ stories of girlhood as actual sites of knowledge that could be used to investigate defining moments in U.S. and black history. It was if black girls did not exist, historically, or at least in the historical record and repositories as “children.” On the other hand, there were so many stories littered throughout the archive, published texts, and cultural work that clearly challenged the scholarship which examined aspects of white childhood and then used the preface to say that the study would like to be more intersectional, yet the sources for investigating children of color were limited or unreliable. However, the fact that black women and girls have been documenting and performing aspects of their girlhood since the nineteenth century could not convey that black girls and their girlhoods have always been real and legible to them because the idea of a black girl and the period she experiences girlhood were illegible at the troubling intersections of race, class, gender, and age within the dominant, racialized visual field.

478 Title and argument is inspired by bell hooks's essay "Loving Blackness as Political Resistance." bell hooks, Black Looks : Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the lines, 1992), 9-20. 479 As I mentioned in the introduction to the dissertation, during the time period that I was completing my dissertation, history scholars Marcia Chatelain and LaKisha Simmons have published books that focus on black girls as historical actors.

237 In Making Black Girls Real, I intentionally blurred the disciplinary lines of

History and African American Literature in order to make the lived experiences of black girls real as well as firmly situate black girls as real historical actors whose intellectual and political contributions to U.S. culture can be traced, and most importantly, are accessible. When we acknowledge the troubling intersections and racialized discourses that negate black girls’ existence as girls while also expanding our ideas of what constitutes a legible source of black girlhood, it is clear that black girls are real and they have real histories. And, their histories reveal answers to past and present questions that we are still trying to answer about the systemic violence that black girls face daily. Like

Harriet Jacobs in 1861, we are still trying to figure out why age does not seem to afford black girls privileges, or why they are still “prematurely knowing in evil things.”480 In fact, as social movements such as #IAMTRAYVON and #BLACKLIVESMATTER have been largely associated with seeking justice on behalf of black boys and men, black girls are still waiting for the hashtag that will move the masses on their behalf.481 Who will die, go to jail, wear the hoodie, burn down CVS, interrupt the presidential candidate, or stop traffic for black girls?

From the death of Emmett Till (1955) throughout our contemporary moment with the death of Michael Brown (2014), we can trace a very public discourse emerging in black culture around the extent to which black children are legible as innocent and as

480 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 28. 481 I recognize that the Black Lives Matter movement and hashtag was started by three black women. And, each have made incredible strides towards justice for queer people of color and black girls. However, what I am saying here is, despite who initiated the movement, the lives of heterosexual black boys and men that were taken due to police violence have garnered the most attention in the national movement.

238 children to dominant culture. Thus, in addition to the intense grieving of the deaths of black children, black culture must also grapple with these same questions about innocence and legibility of black children as children. You see many people in scholarly conversations as well as in popular culture trying to answer these questions, but when it comes to black children, people rarely move beyond the sort of casual speculation such as

“blackness causes one to not be deemed worthy of living” or “police hate black people” in order to understand how black children are constructed in dominant culture. For example, it’s as if we say, of course black children do not matter to the masses because they are black, and then we abandon analyzing any further for answers. And, rather than interrogate black children’s social location further, if the child is murdered, we move into the talk of martyrdom and begin campaigning or movements to solidify the innocence and position of black children as innocent children posthumously.

Granted, all of the political movements that result from the deaths of black children are substantial and important. But, in Making Black Girls Real, I wanted to dig deeper to think about how to understand the construction of the black child historically, especially the black girl, and the manner in which this image impacts the lives of children who manage to survive and live in our contemporary moment. In particular, I wanted to know how black girls, who are oftentimes not only illegible as innocent children or girls in dominant culture, but also silenced in their own communities, are constructed because, like black boys, black girls also have a history of experiencing racialized violence that results in murder in U.S. culture. One of the most pivotal moments in this history of violence inflicted upon black girls can be traced to the 1963 murders of the four little

239 girls at the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Like Till, their deaths generated questions about their status as children, but then these questions as

Martin Luther King, Jr’s eulogy for three of the girls points out, quickly became a discourse about posthumous innocence and martyrdom. Unlike the black boys, the deaths of black girls then and now are still largely overlooked. And, for the girls who experience racialized violence, but are not murdered or manage to live beyond the incident, based on the attack of several black girls that we witness daily via videos across the web, it is harder to sustain a campaign on behalf of their innocence as they are carrying similar stereotypes of black women—hypersexual, loud, and rude. Thus again, I wanted to examine the history and impact of these racial and gender stereotypes that black girls embodied and have caused them to be illegible in white culture and sometimes in black culture. I wanted an intersectional framework within black feminist thought that was capable of identifying the unique social locations of black girls at the intersections of race, gender, class, and age.

Since I have established an intersectional framework to explore black girls’ lived experiences historically within Making Black Girls Real, I want to conclude by ending on a political note because as an activist for black girls in scholarship and beyond the walls of the academy, I do not wish to simply reveal the problems that exist without placing theory with practice—or praxis—in hopes of addressing the injustice that black girls experience. Returning to black feminist politics, I want to advocate for an oppositional culture of loving black girls unconditionally as a militant form of political resistance.

Inspired by bell hooks’ essay, “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” I, too, see the

240 need for movements that seek to change culture, in terms of language, ideas, and attitudes, about the ways we see, think about, and address black girls.482 The changes in culture must occur on the national, state, and local levels.

To love black girls unconditional as a militant form of political resistance, I believe we would have to understand that much like the sort of oppositional culture that communities of color have had to create in order to counter dominant discourses and ideologies that have constructed them as inferior to whiteness, we have to commit to creating a culture that celebrates black girls and their differences. One of the ways that I suggest that we do this consists of changing our language around black girls, they can no longer be called “fast”—slang usually used in communities of color to suggest that a black girl is promiscuous or acts in the ways of adults. If we really take the historical roots of this language seriously, if we desire to help black girls survive in conditions and structures that are actively working against their survival, we have to understand that that this sort of language is dangerous.

However, we cannot simply overlook the fact that acting like grown-ups is also a mode of survival for black girls who understand that they must take care of themselves because dominant culture does not realize they are children. This is similar to the ways that having to be a “strong black woman,” have functioned as apparatuses for black women to maneuver the world at the intersections of racism, classism, and sexism that sought to refute their personhood and political agency.483 For example, the black woman who has to be “strong” and save face in order to stay sane as she works for a few dollars a

482 bell hooks, Black Looks. 483 Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 184-7.

241 day to feed her children may actually need to “be strong” because if she isn’t she may not be able to provide for her children. Likewise, the black girl high school student in Spring

Valley or perhaps any other state institution who must protect herself from being bullied by adults and others who do not see her as a girl may feel as though she has to “be strong” or have what others understand as the “the black-girl-attitude” in order to survive the walk/bus ride to school, sitting in the classroom, going to the bathroom, and the commute back home.484

An oppositional culture that is committed to loving black girls unconditionally as a militant form of political resistance will be able to celebrate the black girl who acts grown to survive without further negating the fact that she is a child. In addition, we have to be committed to challenging teachers, officials, and others who are not recognizing that black girls are children. I believe we have to do this in the classroom where black girls are, but also in the academy in the emerging field of Black Girlhood Studies. Black girlhood must be understood as valuable and worthy of scholarly attention. And, most importantly, we have to consistently fight for the validity, safety, and existence of black girlhood. This period of girlhood in black girls’ lives, irrespective of their class status, ability, or appearance, has to be respected as important and necessary.

There are tons of questions that are still unanswered about black girls’ lived experiences. I did not seek to fill every gap in the historical literature around black girls. I also did not simply just seek to fill a gap by covering a hundred years of black women and girls writing about being black, female, and young. I did it because, as unfortunate as

484 I mention Spring Valley here in reference to the black female high school student who was violently attacked by a police officer in 2015. Video of her attack went viral.

242 it is, we needed tangible proof, evidence, that black girls were and are real. We needed proof that the books that we have read for years and the black women scholars and activists we know well, have actually been writing about black girls for years, and we have mistakenly only looked for womanhood in their stories. How did we not see black girls when they have been here all the time? They were hidden in plain sight. They were always in the visual field and illegible, but their stories were always accessible. Perhaps we never saw the need to read for black girls since black women must have been born women? If their stories had been snakes, we would all have been bitten.485

485 “If it was a snake, it would have bitten you” is a southern idiom you hear most often when you are a child and you fail to find what you were told to look for because you were not paying close attention during your search.

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