Erotic Illegibility and Desire in Representations of Black Sexuality

This essay engages our shared interest in the capriciousness of sexual expression and desire.¹ By analyzing the discontinued WGN television series Underground (2016–17) as an ephemeral site for imagining black women's erotic interiority and theorizing black sexual desire as a scattered effect of the archive in Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman (1996), we assert that rather than stifle desire, black sexuality enacts an elasticity as it negotiates white male power and respectability politics. Although black gendered and sexual difference appears illegible, it nonetheless reveals the sociosexual power relations of slavery, and even as it surfaces as erased, it articulates history making as a practice of desire.

Erotic Representation in Underground

Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived "pleasure" from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask. Whether or not "pleasure" is possible at all under the conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled.

—Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book"

There had to be orgasms during slavery. If there weren't, we simply would not have been able to survive … Why is talking about that seen to be threatening or destabilizing?

—Joan Morgan, "The Sweetest Taboo: Theorizing Black Female Pleasure, Agency, and Desire within Black Feminism"

With nearly three decades of black feminist intellectual labor separating them, these statements frame the impolite, unresolved, and disruptive nature of theorizing black women's sexuality, eroticism, and pleasure. Freda and I share an investment in representation: in the ways that fiction and critical speculation can accomplish what seems comparably inaccessible, unattainable, or insurmountable to stark empiricism's naked eye. To consider the question of ephemeral intimacy and erotic encounters among enslaved subjects, speculation rather ironically emerges as the most practical means of analysis.

For a two-season run, Misha Green and Joe Polaski's series Underground (2016–17) courageously waded into uncharted territory, destabilizing conventions that have come to characterize depictions and dramatizations of enslavement in film and television with multidimensional enslaved characters, allusions to the psychological toll of enslavement on enslaved people, slave owners, and abolitionists through depictions of substance abuse and, most significantly, representations of enslaved women's erotic interiority. When conducting research for the series, Green, a black woman in her thirties, said she found that "the truth was stronger than fiction."² Green's belief that the knowable past—what glimpses incomplete archives and short paragraphs throughout history can offer—is stronger than fiction signals to me that she saw and perhaps still sees Underground as something more than pure fiction. She gestures toward the series occupying an "imaginative space," one created for typically overlooked spectators: black women.³

The series is set in 1857 in Macon, Georgia. Described as "shocking, uncomfortable, and … sexy," a scene in the second episode between the plantation master Tom Macon and the enslaved Ernestine blurs the lines of consent, exchange, and pleasure.⁴ Ernestine meets Tom in the wine cellar of the plantation, and he drizzles alcohol onto her naked body. Tom grunts in appreciation as rivulets of wine cascade down the small of her back and the crack of her behind. When he tries to kiss her, Ernestine snatches her head back, refuses his kiss, and slaps him hard across the face. Pointing a finger at his mild confusion, Ernestine taunts him, exclaiming, "I didn't say you could touch me yet!"⁵

Although Tom is forbidden from touching Ernestine, as the frame focuses on her facial expressions, it becomes clear that she is touching him. Her tongue dances across her lips as she stares Tom into submission. Mouth agape, Tom's head lolls back on his shoulders as he moans in ecstasy. Ernestine caresses the nape of Tom's neck and, pulling him close, plainly demands that their son, James, not work in the plantation fields. She feeds Tom lines to repeat to his wife and plantation mistress, Suzanna, whose children he has also fathered: "You tell her he been showin' some skills with woodwork. He can go work with Sam." Although Tom drowsily concedes, mumbling, "He'll be wherever you want him," this is not the sort of reassurance that will satisfy Ernestine—not when the fate of her child is at stake. Her tender caress of Tom's profile hastily becomes a stiff and twisted grip on his bottom lip. She says again, with heavy delivery punctuating each word, "He ain't … going … out … in the fields," and then commands Tom to "say it" and repeat after her. Slightly taken aback at her seriousness, Tom repeats that their son will not work out in the fields, his delivery muffled by Ernestine's still-tight grasp on his bottom lip. Without another word, Ernestine smiles for the first time during the scene, pulls Tom's face close to hers, and finally graces him with a deep and passionate kiss, allowing him to touch her. The scene ends with various shots of Ernestine and Tom's exhales, gropes, and contortions of pleasure. Ernestine's eyebrows raise in a final tent—whether knitted in orgasmic surprise, concern over her son's fate, or both, the audience is left to decide.

This brief scene of release is juxtaposed in Underground with enduring pain and the brutality of enslavement. Just before entering the wine cellar, Ernestine had created a diversion by offering to bring Tom's guests more alcohol. This allowed another one of her and Tom's children, Rosalee, to narrowly escape the predation of a fellow plantation owner that Tom had invited over for dinner. Ernestine's character calls us to "visualize black female sex as flesh and sensation in bodies betrayed and violated, participating and initiating," and, thinking back to Green's assertion that "the truth is stronger than fiction," the presentation of familiar violence with less familiar scenes of unsettling (and transactional) intimacy challenges viewers to broaden their conceptualization of enslaved black women's interior lives and consider their potentially contradictory motivations.⁶

While the character is groundbreaking in her embrace of conflicting desires and often contradictory decisions, Ernestine is portrayed by Amirah Vann, a light-skinned and conventionally attractive Puerto Rican actress. Imagine the impact of substituting the wine cellar scene with a darker-skinned black actress sporting kinky coiled hair and a body not molded into the typically palatable form of an hourglass. It would refuse to cede eroticism as available for consideration only under conditions of structural freedom, just as the original scene does, while continuing to challenge who and what bodies are represented as desiring and desirable. This is the serious work of speculative theory and representation that challenges limited conceptualizations of black women's sexuality, and instead embraces taboo, messiness, and contradiction.

If we regard black female sexuality with deserved gravity as a realm of theoretical inquiry and imaginative practice, Treva Lindsey and Jessica Johnson contend that "we end up at two substantive conclusions": that "present-day constructions of black female sexuality are inextricably tied to slavery"; and that "black women had sex, and not just with the heads of their households, whether white or black men—not just, even, with men."⁷ When read with the opening pair of quotes from Spillers and Morgan, these conclusions re-energize black feminism's incumbent investment in imagination, and they situate Ernestine's erotic representation in the short-lived series Underground as simultaneously farfetched and feasible, defiant and obedient: as occupying a space between fact and fiction.

Scattered Desire in The Watermelon Woman

Similar to how Ernestine's sexual interiority directs us to the expansive possibility of illegible desire, Dunye's independent film The Watermelon Woman attests to black sexual desire as indistinct. Rather than focus on a sexually oriented desire, the film articulates desire as a yearning for a foreclosed history. The Watermelon Woman documents the life and labor of the fictional black actress "Fae Richards," who is also known by her stage name "Faith Richardson" and credited as "The Watermelon Woman" in the films in which she plays mammy roles.⁸ I argue that Dunye's film mobilizes the Watermelon Woman as an effect of the occlusion of black women's labor from classic Hollywood cinema, thereby suturing desirability to the figure of the mammy.

As the film desires mammy, it deploys scattering to make possible black queer history-making. To scatter, according to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, is to "throw in various random directions." Stuart Hall has asserted that black diaspora is the "result of a long and discontinuous series of transformations."⁹ Insofar as scattering invites discontinuity, keeping present Hall's assessment of Blackness, I (Freda) assert that it also serves as a tool for examining The Watermelon Woman's portrayal of black women's devalued labor vis-à-vis mammy roles.¹⁰ The labor of the black actresses that Richards is modeled after exceeds exclusion. Dunye, playing the lead character Cheryl, reminds us that the labor of black actresses was often not "even listed in the credits" of Hollywood films.

In the first minutes of The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl pushes the play button on a VCR, starting a scene from a fictional film called Plantation Memories, which evokes American antebellum sentimentality epitomized by the novel and later the film Gone with the Wind (1939).¹¹ In the scene, the Watermelon Woman, playing the mammy role of Elsie, runs with a look of concern toward the white woman of the house, Missy Barbara, who stands under a large tree. Elsie places one hand on Missy Barbara's back and with the other takes Missy Barbara's handkerchief and comfortingly pats dry her tears. Elsie, strategically ingratiating in her optimism, reassures Missy Barbara: "Oh, don't cry missy, Master Charles is coming back for sure, I know he is … Oh, yes, Missy Barbara, I know he is. I pray to God all night long. This morning, this little angel told me that he was coming back, back to you." This scene presents the mammy as stereotypically faithful and excessively concerned with the happiness of the white employers who exercise power over her.

Cheryl describes the Watermelon Woman as "the most beautiful black mammy" and connects her to a tradition of black actresses who played mammy roles, such as Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. Cheryl yearns for a history in film of black sexual difference that Fae Richards as the Watermelon Woman signifies. Cheryl's work to piece together a scattered history comes to bear on her identity as a black lesbian when later in the film it is confirmed that Fae also had relationships with women. Cheryl declares: "Can you believe it? Fae was a Sapphic sister, a bulldagger, a lesbian … I knew something was up when I saw Plantation Memories." Cheryl sits, faces the camera, and shares her interest and enthusiasm:

Her Name. The Watermelon Woman. That's right, Watermelon Woman. Is Watermelon Woman her first name, her last name, or is it her whole name? I don't know, but girlfriend has it going on … there's something in her face, something in the way she looks and moves that is serious, and interesting, and I'm just going to tell you all about it.

From the outset, the Watermelon Woman is delineated as obtuse yet visible: "Is Watermelon Woman her first name, her last name, or is it her whole name?" The Watermelon Woman is scattered—she is not a singular construction that in turn suggests the unlikelihood of finding her story in one self-evident place. The potential presented by and through the indistinct multiple possibilities of "Is Watermelon Woman her first name, her last name, or is it her whole name?" compels Cheryl to exclaim "girlfriend has it going on," thereby affirming the scattered constitution of the Watermelon Woman as desirable—so much so that Cheryl wants to tell "all about it."

The Watermelon Woman's scattered discontinuity is rooted in a longer history of the mammy as a representational figure generated out of black women's domestic labor. Domestic work was seen as respectable work within the black community, and black middle-class women in particular displayed a formative cross-class affiliation with black working-class domestic workers.¹² Evelyn Higginbotham asserts that black middle-class respectability unseated American cultural norms that constructed black women as the "embodiment of deviance."¹³

The mammy is constituted as labor and representation intersect, further manifesting the relationship between the devalued domestic work of black women and the politics of respectability. Respectability regulated individual behaviors and manners even as it endeavored to generate "alternate images of black women" in order to unseat "the plethora of negative stereotypes."¹⁴ The mammy and the Watermelon Woman together serve as a depoliticized representation of black women's domestic labor as well as one of the "negative images" that respectability politics sought to combat.

Even as respectability operates largely as a conservative black middle-class discourse, it nonetheless maintains a "shifting and fluid position along a continuum of African American resistance."¹⁵ Fluidity, like scattering, guides oppositional formations toward change, and respectability's potential to be both resistant and conforming serves as one example. The fluidity of respectability politics, following Higginbotham, de-essentializes race relations by presenting them instead as social constructions. The Watermelon Woman, accounted for through scattering, serves as a conjunctural site for the varied operations of discontinuity, multiplicity, and fluidity in black queer history-making. In a scene in which Cheryl, joined by her friend Tamera, visits the public library to research the Watermelon Woman, Cheryl finds no information, only evidence of her multi-sited absence. As Cheryl asks for research assistance at the circulation desk, the camera alternates between the disaffected face of the white librarian to those of exasperated Cheryl and Tamera to visually convey discontinuity. In response to Cheryl's inquiry, "I'm looking for information on the Watermelon Woman. She was a black actress in the 1930s," the librarian checks the database, and he responds:

Nothing comes up … Ah, check the black section in the reference library … All this information is referenced in the reference section, have you checked the reference section of the library, Miss? … Well, have you tried the film section, PN 1993 to 1995? … The names again … Watermelon Woman … No, no Watermelon Woman … Check the reserve desk on the third floor.¹⁶

The librarian directs Cheryl to inquire further about information she already knows as she is told to check sections of the library that she has already checked and where no information was found. The library scene serves as an example of scattering as a process of dispersal as much as erasure in the archive of the Watermelon Woman, the uncredited labor of the mammy, and of black sexual difference and desire more extensively. Cheryl's scattered route to the story of the Watermelon Woman materializes in and through personal and community-based archives and interviews as well as through absences from institutionalized sites such as the public library or Hollywood cinema. It is by emerging across a scattering of difference that the Watermelon Woman emerges as desired and desirable.

Conclusion

Illegibility and scattering as analytics delineate black sexuality and desire as versatile with reference to Ernestine and Fae Richards, the Watermelon Woman. Ernestine's eroticism becomes a space through which she enacts autonomy amid immense white patriarchal power, and The Watermelon Woman desires a scattered archive that demonstrates the unruly potential of black sexual difference. In her now-foundational text in black feminist cultural analysis, "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," bell hooks theorizes black female spectators' refusal to garner pleasure in the context of negation.¹⁷ While "pleasure from negation" is situated as external to the black female spectator, hooks unlocks the dialectic of spectatorship by pointing out that "the oppositional gaze" does not merely "resist" nor does it only "react"; rather, the oppositional gaze is guided by the production of "alternative texts."¹⁸ These alternative texts generate modes of identification and identity that transform rather than transfer dominant ideology.¹⁹ To be guided by critical black oppositionality is to acknowledge it as unresolved. It is from the place of the unresolved that illegibility and scattering portend possibility. Underground has been discontinued, and Dunye's Watermelon Woman refuses to ever be truly found. In place of foreclosing pleasure altogether from within oppositionality, hooks accounts for "pleasure from interrogation."²⁰ The representations we consider above explore some of the possibilities of black interrogative pleasure—namely, the potential of the disruptive, ephemeral, illegible, and the scattered.