Body Politics and the Fictional Double

[4] Writing in Red Ink

Debra Walker King 56 [4] writing in red inkDEBRA WALKER KING Karla Holloway opens the first chapter of Codes of Conduct (1995) with a confession: “My grandmother warned me away from red.”1 I too was warned against red; and, during most of my adolescent years, I refused to wear it. For me, and others like me, red suggested an audaciousness, rebelliousness , and promiscuity condemned by the ethically and morally correct as vulgar and unclean. It suggested a face-to-face encounter with the reality of our bodies’ interior spaces—sexual spaces with longings and desires , and the spaces where the rich, free, and sometimes dangerous flow of blood nudges budding flesh into maturity, awareness, and self-expression . Nice girls did not wear red, and I certainly wanted to be a “nice girl.” Yet I wondered: why did the older girls—the ones with afros, dashikis, and bangles—wear it, especially the ones I considered “nice”? Why, I asked myself , would they chance their reputations on a color that informed against them? What I did not realize was that I had little control over the interpretive gaze my body received regardless of how I dressed it. I did not realize that it was not the color of my clothes but the color of my body that informed against me. According to America’s culturally constructed standards of morality and purity, not only did “nice girls” not wear red, their skin did writing in red ink 57 not bear the racial indicator black, or brown, or yellow either. They were not called “Red Hot Mamas,” “Brown Sugars,” or “Exotics” simply because melanin colored their skin. Their bodies’ public value was not predetermined and maintained by a system of name-calling that interpolated and disfigured its subject—labeling her whore, slut, or loose—even if that subject was costumed (as Anita Hill was during the Thomas confirmation hearings) in teal blue with “a modest row of military-like double buttons down the front” (Holloway, 15). Today I look back with understanding at the older girls I once watched in wonder—the ones who wore afros, bangles, and that awesome color, red. Instead of accepting the value coding of a gendered and racialized fiction, they revised the code by appropriating it. As I see them now, they were young women living and writing the liberation of their “flesh”—that willfulness, courage, and subversive understanding of self that frees the mind and spirit from the assaults of conceptual violence that often accompany derogatory constructions of gender, race, and ethnicity. This chapter is about that liberation as it appears in the fiction of black women writers. By reading a few images of captivity and liberation presented in selected works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and others, this essay traces the difficulties of writing the body in laughing rhythms and “white ink” (as French feminist critic and writer Hélène Cixous proposes) for those who discover that the public and private liberation of their flesh requires RED. 2 The preponderance of stories about captivity, mutilation, and death in black women’s literature is haunting. Who, for instance, having encountered Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Octavia Butler ’s Kindred (1979), or Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976), can forget the murdered Mem Copeland lying in “a pool of blood,” Dana Franklin’s violently severed left arm, or the imprisoned Eva Media Canada’s oral castration of her lover? Images such as these sadden and even horrify us, but for black women writers and their readers, these events symbolize a struggle against socialized codes and values that denigrate subjective realities, hopes, and dreams. In each case, red emerges and spreads as blood flows freely from bodies experiencing physical and psychological wounding. This spilling of blood, a literal loosening of the flesh, intensifies moments of liberation and is often its prerequisite. Images of bodily destruction occur so frequently in black women’s literature that one begins to wonder what all this spilling of blood implies. Why is it necessary? The answer is simple: it brings into sharp focus that which our postmodern ideologies have taught us to disassociate from any Debra Walker King 58 possibility of sociocultural meaningfulness—our pain. We are taught to deny our suffering and feel so ashamed of our scars that we hide them beneath makeup or remove them with plastic surgery. In fact...