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

Introduction: In the Kitchens and on the Verandas

Introduction: In the Kitchens and on the Verandas For some people, the image of the southern plantation might call to mind genteel belles and cavaliers flirting on the veranda of a stately mansion. For others, it might signify a sadistic white slave-master systematically raping his black concubine in one of the cabins out back. Yet these are simply different inflections of the same plantation mythology, and together they reveal the extent to which that mythology operates as a powerful and elaborate discourse about race, sex, and sexuality in American culture. The contemporary artist Kara Walker forces us to confront this sexual dynamic of the plantation myth with her nightmarish silhouettes depicting all kinds of eroticism and sexual violence. In one piece, a white man strangles a small black girl while she rides his knee. In another, a belle and her beau kiss demurely on a riverbank while a black child presents a dead duck or goose (or perhaps a severed head?) to a black woman whose body, remade literally into a vessel, floats on the water like a canoe. And in yet another piece, a black woman straddles a white man wearing a top hat, possibly having intercourse with him as she cuts off his head; a white girl pulls off one of the man’s shoes while a woman in a hoopskirt swoons nearby. A second pair of legs juts out from beneath the white women’s hoopskirts in the latter two pictures, pushing us to imagine what is happening under the crinoline literally and on a more symbolic level. For all the ways that Walker’s work might shock and even horrify, she is merely adding to a long tradition in which sex and sexuality are central to representations of the southern plantation. 2 / cotton's queer relations From as early as the 1820s and 1830s, when John Pendleton Kennedy and others began publishing what are generally considered the first major plantation novels, literary narratives about the plantation have typically revolved around issues of marriage and reproduction, whereby the continuity of the entire plantation system depends on the continuity of the white, slaveholding family. Not surprisingly, slave narratives and abolitionist tracts offered starkly different accounts of sexual and familial relations on southern plantations. And from Reconstruction to the present, countless writers have used the plantation to work through regional and national legacies of, and anxieties about, sexual exploitation and racial mixing. But where are the queer versions of the plantation myth? Where are the narratives of erotic or sexual encounters between men or between women in plantation settings? Given the almost exaggerated emphasis on heterosexual relations in most plantation narratives, it follows that depictions of same-sex relations would be inevitable. Yet any queer representations that do exist are much less visible than their “straight” counterparts. In this book, I try to heighten the visibility of the plantation myth’s queer side by examining a collection of literary texts from the mid-twentieth century that effectively refashion the plantation into an intrinsically queer cultural space—a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South. If it seems surprising that writers of this period would make homo relations integral to their imaginings of the southern plantation, this is probably because the historical scholarship on this topic is severely lacking. We simply do not know how many homoerotic or homosexual relationships might have flourished between men or women living and working on a plantation before or after the Civil War.1 Unfortunately, studies of same-sex relations in southern literature are similarly scarce, with only a few articles devoted to homoeroticism in works of plantation literature.2 Yet a full understanding of the plantation’s legacies and mythologies is not possible without a full understanding of the regional discourses surrounding sexuality in all its forms. And, conversely, we cannot make sense of the shapes and meanings of same-sex desires and queer identities, either in the South or in America, without also considering the cultural and historical influences of the South’s most iconic institution, the plantation. I want to help fill these gaps in our knowledge about same-sex relations in southern literature by examining nine texts published between 1936, the year Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind transformed introduction / 3 the southern plantation into a piece of American mythology that no...