Un-“Freak”ing Black Female Selfhood: Grotesque-Erotic Agency and Ecofeminist Unity in Sapphire’s Push

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. . . . I am no freak of nature, nor of history.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1, 15)

If we no longer have recourse to nature or essence to make ethical claims about the body, the continual retelling of tales . . . becomes our only means of working through the past to invest our bodies with the weight of history and memory.

—Rachel Adams, “An American Tail” (288)

In the nineteenth-century United States, in addition to being displayed and prodded on auction blocks, black women were showcased in sideshows, newsprint, broadsides, song, drama, photography, World’s Fairs, and literature as grotesque and exotic “freaks.” One example is the elderly Joice Heth, with whose paralyzed body P. T. Barnum’s famous career originated. In 1835, when Barnum purchased the right to show her, Heth was already on exhibit in Philadelphia as George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. After her death the next year, she was publicly dissected to determine her actual age for “a large crowd of doctors, medical students, clergymen, and editors,” which brought in a hefty sum and much-desired newspaper coverage for the entrepreneurial showman.¹ Blind and otherwise completely disabled, the property of others, black, female, and elderly, a “monster manifest in the ordinary,” Heth embodied what disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson calls “the stigmata of social devaluation” (59). As the “celebrated and reviled,” monstrous, “carnivalesque juxtaposition” to the white, able-bodied, male Washingtonian heroic ideal (Reiss 51, 46), Heth was “America’s composite physical other, the domesticated and trivialized reversal of America’s self-image”—the “quintessential American freak” (Thomson 59). In the urban dime museums such as Barnum’s American Museum, traveling carnival sideshows, Wild West shows, and World’s Fairs, ethnographic and physical “freaks of nature” like Heth were actually “freaks of culture”; they were constructed, in other words, to define more sharply the “normal” white spectator-citizen (Stewart 109) and affirm the march of Manifest Destiny.

Nineteenth-century science utilized categorizations of ethnographic and gender hierarchies for the marginalization of black women as consumable laboring and erotic objects. African American female writer-activists confronted the sexual and physical “enfreakment” (Hevey 53) of black women to a certain extent during this period,² and writers since the 1960s have even more visibly and assertively fought against forces that would (de)form black women as grotesque and erotic “freaks.”³ Recent works have examined incest in black communities, a traditionally taboo subject in African American literature since it undermined black “nationbuilding” (Harris 495–96).⁴ One of the most confrontational of these texts is Sapphire’s Push (1996), in which the teenaged protagonist reveals a painfully fragmented life of familial sexual abuse.⁵ Ultimately supported by a community of survivors and with a life rooted in, rather than denying, her nature, Precious Jones articulates her story to regain a unified/holistic and embodied/located sense of self. Asserting black female agency through her grotesque-erotic counternarrative, Sapphire furthers the literary project begun during slavery of confrontationally un-“freak”ing black female bodies.⁶

As a counternarrative, Sapphire’s grotesque-erotic story is a literary act of resistance to deformation, a voicing of black women’s agency and inherent/natural value. Farah Jasmine Griffin writes that black women’s literature “guides readers towards a consciousness about the manner in which white supremacy and patriarchy have constructed notions of black women’s bodies” as grotesque and hated (522). These writers “have started to explore female bodies as sites of healing, pleasure, and resistance” by replacing “the dominant discourse’s obsession with the visual black body with a perspective that privileges touch and other senses”—in other words, they privilege the black female body as the site of authority about her experience. Writers...