The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

5. If Lilies are Lily White: From the Stain of Miscegenation in Stein’s “Melanctha” to the “Clean Mixture” of White and Color in Tender Buttons

5 If Lilies are Lily White From the stain of Miscegenation in stein’s “Melanctha” to the “Clean Mixture” of White and Colored in Her Tender Buttons i begin with the idea of color and race as diἀerent yet overlapping preoccupations in the two texts by Gertrude stein with which i, as a black woman and as a poet, have the most intense relationship: “Melanctha” or Tender Buttons. Whether or not stein shows her “true colors,” so to speak, in either “Melanctha” or Tender Buttons is open to argument: “Melanctha,” with its brash forays into a frican a merican vernacular and black female sexuality, has been read by a ldon n ielsen and others as an overtly racist text, while Tender Buttons is more widely celebrated by contemporary poets as a dazzling , cryptic, and insistently colorful work of verbal innovation.1 My reading of Tender Buttons is inextricably bound to my reading of “Melanctha,” its precursor. even though, in many respects, Tender Buttons appears to make a radical stylistic break from the narrative and syntactical structures of “Melanctha,” i am interested in what i perceive to be an underlying thematic continuity that can be traced from one to the other. stein’s explicit interest in sexual and racial stereotypes in “Melanctha” unquestionably influences my response to Tender Buttons. if, as n ielsen argues—an argument with which i agree—“Melanctha” rests on a creaky foundation of racial and sexual fantasy, Tender Buttons, for all its poetic innovation and for all its departure from the overt social concerns of its predecessor, nevertheless continues stein’s concern with the impact of color on perception. it has been said of modern art that “[c]olor was no longer used only to describe or define particular objects, but it could also function as an autonomous element that created a rhythm for the entire composition”; this description applies as well to Tender Buttons.2 Color—as an attribute of physical objects , as a phenomenon of perception, as an aesthetic stimulus, as an artist’s medium, as a set of descriptive adjectives within a literary text, and also as From the stain of Miscegenation in stein's “Melanctha” 21 an indicator of racial and sexual identity—is a preoccupation of stein’s Tender Buttons. if “diἀerence is spreading,” as the text announces right at the beginning, with “a Car a Fe, t Ha t is a BLind GLa ss ,” then color as an indicator of diἀerence is also spreading and pervasive in Tender Buttons.3 While race is overt, visible, and superficial in “Melanctha,” i would argue that it is also present, though more covert, invisible, and subliminal, in Tender Buttons. r eading Tender Buttons through the lens provided by its race-conscious palimpsest “Melanctha,” i am struck by a number of stein’s grammatically and syntactically subversive fragments, sentences, and paragraphs that beg to be read as possible meditations on race as well as sexuality. The first few pages oἀer such suggestive possibilities as “a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system of pointing” (461); “d irty is yellow. a sign of more is not mentioned. a piece of coἀee is not a detainer. The resemblance to yellow is dirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether” (463); and “if lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue” (465). o f course, my favorite fragment, and the key to understanding the relationship of Tender Buttons to “Melanctha” and my own relationship to stein, is the small fragment titled “a pet ti Co a t ,” which reads, in its entirety: “a light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm” (471). Here stein combines a feminine metaphor of writing with images associated with female sexuality and reproduction: ink leaving its stain on white sheets of paper is equated with blood, as the writer is conflated with the menstruating woman, deflowered virgin, or mother giving birth. This brief utterance is remarkable for its compression and for its r orschach-like power to evoke a narrative from the reader. i see in this intriguing description (or series, or sequence, or set of appositives ) a possible allusion to Manet’s painting...