"Everything 'Cept Eat Us": The Antebellum Black Body Portrayed as Edible Body

The Venus [speaks]:

Petits Coeurs
Rhum Caramel
Pharaon
Bouchon Fraise
Escargot Lait
Enfant de Bruxelles
(Rest)
Do you think that I look like
one of these little chocolate brussels infants?

Venus: A Play by Suzan-Lori Parks

Toward the end of Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, the embattled Saartje Bartman, also known as the Venus Hottentot, is offered a box of chocolates by her lover and captor the Baron Docteur. Parks's 1997 play dramatizes the life of Bartman, a nineteenth-century woman who was brought to England from Africa as a freak-show performer because of her allegedly large buttocks and hips. Following Bartman's death, her body was dissected by her lover, and her genitals preserved—pickled even—in a jar in Paris, until her remains were returned to her tribe in 2002 (Swarns 3). Over the last two decades, historians, theorists and artists have rediscovered Bartman's life; it has become a central example of the confluence of scientific racism and commercial entertainment in the nineteenth century¹

The violence and intimacy of the racist desires that the western white imaginary demonstrates toward black bodies is one of the central themes of Venus. The seemingly benevolent cultural connections between black bodies and food objects—here frankly embedded in eroticism—bring to the forefront the violence and ambivalence of American racial politics in which desire and disgust for black bodies commingle intimately and produce representations of market, parlor, and kitchen cannibalism. At its most extreme, the connection between food and black bodies emerges in the representation of the black body as food itself, and thus in the desire to consume those bodies. This desire is shockingly represented in the scene quoted in the epigraph, in which the Venus eats chocolate bonbons as her lover watches her and covertly masturbates. An "exotic" food item introduced to Europeans through the colonial conquest of Mexico, chocolate is today associated with sexuality, female desire, and romantic love. In these passages, chocolate's color, history, and cultural valences easily bear the weight of a metaphoric association with the black female body.

Written in the late twentieth century but set in the nineteenth, Parks's play makes clear that the history of this representation stretches across at least two centuries, finding its origins in the intimacies of the slave economy and expressed in multiple visual and literary representations of black bodies.² Most famously crystallized in modern representations of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, these images are, as Doris Witt has written, "products of the dialectic(s) between commodity capitalism and popular culture [. . .] created to suture contradictions of racial, ethnic, gender, and class difference"(39).

How did this close association between black bodies and food come to be? What are the origins of this image and why does it continue to resonate today? The earliest iteration of the black-body-as-food trope that I have found is in the kitchen-bound black bodies of the nineteenth-century novel. This article is thus concerned with the edible politics of race in that period. Specifically, this paper examines the figure of the black body as food in three antebellum novels: Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig. While each of these novels figures this trope differently, given their political projects, in all of these texts the edible black body is linked to white, often female, embodiment. These images were not restricted to the nineteenth century; such was the power of these pictures—often of black children being eaten by alligators, the famous "gator bait" image—that they continued to appear in late nineteenth-century advertising,³ early twentieth-century silent film,⁴ and, as Parks's play demonstrates, in late twentieth-century art.

Parks's play reworks the connection between blackness and food in the twentieth century, giving the Venus character considerable agency in the chocolate monologue scene: far more than just a passive object of the Baron Docteur's gaze, she both holds and interrogates his desire, consuming the chocolates that...