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1 / The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora A letter full of curses, again in Bessie’s handwriting to the manager of the 91 Club in Atlanta. An original record of “Downhearted Blues.” A reject selection of the songs that were never released. A giant pot of chicken stew still steaming, its lid tilted to the side. A photograph of Ethel Waters; underneath the sophisticated image Bessie has written: “Northern bitch. Long goody. Sweet Mama String Bean. 1922.” . . . A jar of Harlem night air. —jackie kay, Bessie Smith Bessie Smith’s first hit, 1923’s “Downhearted Blues,” tells a familiar blues story of love and loss using the strange and fantastic metaphor of “the world,” “a jug,” and “the stopper”: “Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Going to hold it, baby, till you come under my command.” These objects form a complex relationship to one another: on the surface, the lyrics are another performance of a popular heterosexual romance imperative; of course, as has been well documented, blues songs’ engagement with “love” often exposes decidedly unpopular narratives of power and loss. In “Downhearted Blues,” the world is both trouble and possibility, the jug is limited from inside and outside, and the stopper represents control as well as the inability to act. As an image of cultural and self-containment , the verse haunts with its suggestion of the capacity and agency of black subjectivity, the ordinariness of a jug holding the extraordinary body of the world. Ralph Ellison uses a similar conceit in his 1964 essay analyzing the legacy of Richard Wright and of mainstream critical reception of black literature, “The World and the Jug”: “But if we are in a jug it is transparent , not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read what is going on out there” (1995, 116). For him, the jug of public intellectual and artistic discourse limits how black writing (and black subjects) are held by the outside world to reflections of a particular form of tragic the world and the “jar” / 19 realism. But Ellison is also concerned with how the black imaginary contained inside of this jug is similarly shaped by the devaluing of a variety of black aesthetic practices and influences by “sociology-oriented critics” (108). Ellison’s use of the popular lyric as the metaphor he borrows for his title connects the articulation of romantic desire in a classic blueswoman ’s song to the stifling insistence on social realism as the model for reading black expression and discourse. In this chapter, I take Ellison’s titular gesture seriously in order to ask what the metaphorical work of gender, desire, and cultural form might have to offer in reframing the location of Black Atlantic discourse through the reordered spaces and temporalities of Jackie Kay’s work on Bessie Smith. This chapter engages Bessie Smith, poet and novelist Jackie Kay’s 1997 book-length profile of the blues singer, to begin to address this question, first and foremost by performing a literal gloss of the “world”; I examine how Smith’s and Ellison’s articulation of the paradoxes of power and black subjectivity relate to Kay’s decidedly broad geographical and historical spread—nineteen-sixties Scotland, early twentieth-century American South, nineteen-twenties Harlem, contemporary England. This immense and surprising “world” of the black diaspora interacts with the portability of the “jar”—Kay’s version of Smith and Ellison’s jug—as a reference to the quotidian, yet no less fantastic, spheres of gender and sexual desire that also thread through black aesthetic practice and cultural expression. Like Kay’s critically acclaimed novel Trumpet, Bessie Smith trades in the intersections of popular performance, Black British identity away from the metropole, and queer desire. Kay links the popular circulation of black subjectivity to the sphere of high formal literacy through her experimental form in the biography (made up of anecdotal evidence, fictional scenarios, and autobiographical reflection rendered in various typefaces within each chapter). Kay’s revaluation of Bessie Smith’s and her own relationship to “the world” of the black diaspora through her text exposes the overlaps and incommensurabilities found in various circulating models of black women’s identity in Ellison ’s sense of the juglike lens of critical discourse. Reading Kay’s text as a model of the necessarily uneven transmissions that...

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