Cotton Babies, Mama’s Maybe: Invention, Matter, and Mythology in Kara Walker’s 8 Possible Beginnings

In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.

—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987)

When Kara Walker shifted from working primarily in acrylic paint to the medium of silhouette in the mid-1990s she became a lightning rod for debate. Her silhouette tableaux, depicting violent, quaint, panoramic, pornographic, scatological scenes of Southern plantation slavery, are hand cut and scaled two-thirds life size such that her figures populate a landscape extending just beyond our own immediate ground, exposing racial mythology not as a curiosity of the past but as a structuring principle of the present.¹ Since Walker’s figures are monochromatic (she fashions “black” and “white” figures out of black paper pasted against white gallery walls), one must read the scenes of racialized violence and desire through the grammar of racial stereotype, identifying stock images from Southern mythology, such as “the mammy,” “the pickaninny,” “the soldier,” and “the lady,” with the narrative priority given to “the Negress,” who often functions as a cipher for Walker herself. Walker’s intervention into debates over race and representation is heavily dependent on the viewer’s process of identification and recognition of a visual lexicon mined from the past—nineteenth-century postcards, romance novels, and minstrel fliers. Consequently, her invention of a purely mythological creature that resists a metonymic relationship to the raced and gendered body in her 2005 film 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker marks a significant departure from her paradigm of racial representation.

As the title suggests, 8 Possible Beginnings operates as both the presentation of eight discrete origin stories that could stand alone, and as a loosely chronological national allegory that begins with the Middle Passage, takes us through the invention of the cotton gin, and ends at the conclusion of the nineteenth century with a chapter channeling the Uncle Remus stories. The narrative core of the film is a sexual encounter between a male slave and his master that produces the gleefully sinister cotton baby—an animated cotton boll that smiles and dances—which is planted in a field, watered by the slave, and eventually grows into a tall tree that becomes a lynching site for multiple black men. Pitched at the intersection between the material history of slavery and the ideological production of the mythical black body, Walker’s invention of the cotton baby prefigures her mammy-as-sphinx, the massive sugar-coated centerpiece of her most recent work, A Subtlety, or “The Marvelous Sugar Baby,” an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.² Emerging at precisely the juncture between the material and the fantastic, Walker’s mammy-sphinx and cotton babies elucidate the intimate relationship between hot-house economies of desire and the stark ledgers of commodity culture.

While both figures frustrate the association between racial glyphs and the physical body, the mammy-sphinx created a public sensation, while the cotton baby received relatively little notice.³ If we understand A Subtlety as New World eschatology—a melting, ephemeral production on the occasion of a defunct factory’s demolition—8 Possible Beginnings is the corollary origin story, both works meditating on the inextricability of individual and national identity from the physically, sexually, and economically exploitative dynamics of racial slavery. Pure invention, Walker’s “wispy elves of the American South, with cotton blossoms for heads and leafy black limbs” highlight the enduring, exploitative jouissance constitutive of the New World.⁴ Presented as both commodification and waste—a compound of racial subjection, sexual exploitation, and commodity fetishism—Walker’s cotton babies constitute the contemporary residue of the psychosexual economy of slavery. As animated figures Walker gives life to, her...