Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

5. Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, and the Uncomfortable Compromise of Black Women's Autonomy

5 / Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, and the Uncomfortable Compromise of Black Women’s Autonomy Lillian Hellman queers the relationship between mistress and servant in order to imagine the possibilities for fighting southern racism. Yet she implicitly perpetuates a white fantasy in which the African American woman remains subordinate to the white woman’s desires and expectations . Katherine Anne Porter’s short-story cycle The Old Order (1944)1 similarly looks at the relationship between mistress and servant to imagine what an egalitarian community between white and black women could look like, in this case focusing on the white grandmother Sophia Jane Gay and her black companion, Nannie. Like Hellman’s Lavinia and Coralee, Sophia Jane and Nannie’s relationship can be read as a queer “southern kitchen romance” because their mutual emphasis on their sexual sameness combines with the contrary force of their racial difference to create the suggestion that there is more to their relationship than meets the eye. There is no direct evidence of a homosexual bond between them, which explains the dominant critical tendency to read their astounding intimacy as nothing more than friendship. But I will show that certain aspects of their partnership still give it an ambiguity that is distinctly queer, including their homo-relational equality as double matriarchs ; their undying affection for each other above all other members of the household, especially their husbands; and the physically satisfying, erotic pleasure they share with each other while nursing their children. When taken together, these things implicate Sophia Jane and Nannie in a nexus of queer relations that stands in opposition to the cultural the compromise of black women’s autonomy / 151 edifice of heterosexuality and to the rigid hierarchies of paternalism and patriarchy that shape the plantation world in which they live. As I will also show in this chapter, Porter is more clearly ambivalent than Hellman about how much this kind of relationship inhibits Nannie’s individuality as a black woman, for the text contains signs of Nannie’s resentment, and in the years following Sophia Jane’s death, Porter imagines Nannie living life on her own terms. In her novel Jubilee (1966), Margaret Walker goes even further than Hellman or Porter to reject the white woman’s fantasy of an easy egalitarianism across the color line, instead embracing the autonomy of a black female identity. Jubilee includes some scenes in which a queer relationship between black and white women becomes, at the very least, a possibility. But Walker resists that kind of relationship by refusing to allow her main character, Vyry, to subordinate her racial identity to a gender identity defined by white women. While Porter’s text begins to explore the consequences of the white woman’s fantasy, Walker’s text shelves that fantasy entirely and denies that any black woman would be likely to embrace the white selfishness implicit in this model of the southern kitchen romance. Double Matriarchs Sophia Jane and Nannie differ most from Lavinia and Coralee in their commitment to the traditions and values associated with the southern plantation. Their conservative viewpoint is especially pronounced in their constant expression of a wish for the return of the ways of the past: “They talked about the past, really—always about the past. Even the future seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not seem an extension of their past, but a repetition of it. They would agree that nothing remained of life as they had known it, the world was changing swiftly, but by the mysterious logic of hope they insisted that each change was probably the last; or if not, a series of changes might bring them, blessedly, back full-circle to the old ways they had known.”2 Within this hope for the “full-circle” return of these “old ways,” neither woman longs for a return to slavery; as William L. Nance reminds us, Porter “makes clear her condemnation of slavery” throughout the text.3 But the “mysterious logic” of their hope is still problematic because it includes an implicit allegiance to the racist inequalities on which those “old ways” rested. To a certain extent, the women’s belief in those racial inequalities appears to fracture and restrict their friendship. Where “The Journey” 152 / the southern kitchen romance outlines the labor and sacrifice that went into making the family stable and prosperous after the death of Sophia...