Birthing America’s Kweer: Motherless Children Preach the Gospel of Mercy

The quintessential source of music is the orphan’s ordeal—an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, “social death.” . . . Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music that turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort.

—Nathaniel Mackey

It is no surprise that W. E. B. Du Bois—one of America’s best-known orphans¹—uses refrains from spirituals as epigraphs in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920) to make his enduring metaphors of the color line and double consciousness both plain and timeless. Taking Du Bois’s prescient cue, one that virtually every major African American thinker before and since him has seized, I posit in this essay a meditation on the righteous indictment and radical kindness that these earliest African survivals² simultaneously enact, wherein a third source of insight on the ontological quandaries of blackness may be explored. For the past fifteen years, scholars such as E. Patrick Johnson and Sharon P. Holland have challenged us to mine this source, which inculcates aspects of black folks’ love quotients that Du Bois’s metaphors could not name. It is the quare: multivalent and measured, capable of modulating from aside to polemic as needed; it speaks when commanded to remain silent and quiets when commanded to confess and perform. Its performance captivates as repetition, irony, and a revisionist hermeneutic of mercy defy expectations, moving auditors of the elegiac spirituals to tears even today, an extended m oan or wail harkening the anguish of the motherless children who created them. Thus, these songs have lain the foundation for what I call the great American kweer,³ a too-long-dead word pronounced the same as its fraught allomorph queer that I resurrect here because it encompasses more of “the strange meaning of being black,” the liminal space Du Bois and other orphans know intimately, than its descendant ever could. For inside kweer lies another allomorph, choir, and by invoking the galvanizing power of collective performance in song, kweer allows scholars to ponder the quare as a more expansive path to enter conversations about black art that includes all who bear the diasporic burden of attenuating the legacies of chattel slavery on Americans’ intimate choices across a spectrum of racial, sexual, and gender identities. This meditation on the quare aims to complicate decades-old conversations in Afro-pessimism about whom chattel slavery renders victim and whom it empowers to dominate. In liminal moments of performance, I argue, the quare sets free all orphans—the descendants of African slaves and those who cling to Europe’s feudalism in denial that they, too, are lost Africans—to travel metaphysically and spiritually across time and space and temporize the ache of physical pain and unimaginable grief. Herein lies this kweer’s redefinition of mercy, a sonic dreamscape that exposes the absurdities of the racial hierarchies to which America remains enslaved while prophesying how it might become “one nation [of sundry nationalities] under [a syncretic conception of] God.”

In his 1993 essay “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” Nathaniel Mackey, as cited in this essay’s epigraph, illuminates how the orphaned black child’s strange (read: quare) metaphysical state compels African American verse. Taking a closer look at the lyricism in African American poetics—those that follow traditional forms and those, like the spirituals, that blur generic lines between narrative/prose and high lyric/lineated verse—allows scholars to hear the orphaned child’s singular sound. This gift of the quare has haunted the colonies that would comprise the United States since the advent of the failed chattel slavery project in South Carolina in 1526 and race-based discrimination in the 1660s, especially in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.⁴ Whereas Du Bois’s spiritual-grounded metaphors of the color line and double- consciousness...