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  • Cartography of Curves: Black Women and Eros in Prose and Pictures:A Dialogue between Rachel Eliza Griffiths (photographer) and Alice Randall (novelist), with an Introduction, “Black Magic Women,” by Houston A. Baker
  • Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Alice Randall, and Houston A. Baker

Editor’s Note: Notes from a conversation between Rachel Eliza Griffths and Alice Randall held March 22, 2012, at the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University over lunch with students and faculty attending. The dialogue was part of the “Sex in the 21st Century Symposium” sponsored by the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies. The conversation was a back and forth between Rachel Eliza and Alice, with readings providing counterpoint to photographs and photographs providing counterpoint to readings. Houston A. Baker feted Griffiths and Randall in his introductory remarks, entitled, “Black Magic Women.”

Houston A. Baker: We are blessed this afternoon by Black Magic Women. Such magic is not fake fire or disappearing doves. Black Magic Women are pure historical and artistic imagination. They are luminous intellect and compassion. They harmonize with ancestral spirits and transmute middle passages. They transform Diaspora unknowing into Black Magical intuition, innovation, and Gnosis—a special alchemy of knowledge. They renew the world.

Listen to the song in one measure: “I need you so bad black magic woman, I can’t leave you alone!” (Santana).

Alice Randall righteously entered the “Silver Circle of ASCAP” (The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). Who would have dreamed a black woman from DE-TROIT would become the first black woman [End Page 87] to write a number one country hit song in Nashville, and go on to produce music videos for some of country music’s most outstanding performers? Who could possibly do that but a black magic woman? Alice Randall is a Harvard graduate and novelist who successfully satirized the soul butter and flapdoodle of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Her runaway narrative success, The Wind Done Gone, is a black jubilation song. It boldly assumed premiere place on the New York Times Best-Seller List. There followed, for Randall, awards and nominations for such brilliant and audacious novels as Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. (Who dares create, in Tupac Shakur ambiance, a character named “Pushkin X”?) Next came Rebel Yell, a complex creation that carries readers into a kaleidoscope of psychological, ethnographic, and black decoding of the dilemma of post–civil rights generations.

We are called out of our skin by Black Magic Women.

And when they are in combination—as Alice Randall and Rachel Eliza Griffiths are today—we need to fasten our seatbelts with shoulder straps tightly. It is the only way to prevent our souls from convulsing in un-abandoned JOY.

Hear the song: “I got a black magic woman/Got me so blind I can’t see” (Hendrix).

For, we also have with us Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Rachel is an artist who speaks in her poetry of the bandaged woman, pulled from her bed and deconstructed without anesthesia. Rachel Eliza Griffiths magically suffuses her creative audition and inventiveness into worlds of Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. She strides magnificently into the red zone between civilization and its discontents, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, black rage and ebony masterpieces with grace. She casts Shiva shadows on the arts.

Like Alice Randall, Rachel Griffiths is replete with music, photographic miracles, narrative and cinematic intuitions.

There are standard, “Googleable” biographies of the Black Magic Women with whom we are blessed today. But beware. The standard biographies will lead you to believe they can be captured by ordinary words.

You will hear no ordinary words here today. Only magic.

Alice Randall: Quiet as it is kept, at least in certain circles, there is a “pro-sex” contingent in black feminist scholarship—in fact there are many. I perceive Rachel Eliza Griffiths to be a pro-sex feminist scholar and my work as a novelist places me squarely within one of the pro-sex contingents within black feminist scholarship.

Sex is both a subject and a strategy in my work. One of the reasons I wrote a critique of the novel Gone with the Wind as another...

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