Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For example, in Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Douglass recounts the story of a root given to him by a fellow slave to keep on his body as a talisman that would protect him from the master’s whip. Charles Chestnutt’s folktales and short stories also show ample evidence of African belief systems. 2. Note, for example, that the first published African-American poet, Jupiter Hammon , wrote the poem “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley” to the second published African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley, in 1778, decrying Africa as a “heathen” land from which Wheatley was fortunate to have escaped “thro’ the mercy of the Lord” (see Hammon, America’s First Negro Poet). 3. I am thinking, for instance, of texts such as Iola Leroy (Francis Harper); Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs); and the Spiritual Narratives (Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, et al.); and even Our Nig (Harriet Wilson). 4. Critics argue that New World black subjectivity is necessarily fragmented. But as Keizer rightly points out, given the “intolerable conditions” via which such fragmentation was fomented, “there is no reason why they would have celebrated a shattered body or a shattered consciousness” (Black Subjects, 44). 5. See Lamothe, “Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which makes comparisons between Janie and the Haitian Voudoun goddess Erzulie. 6. See Judylyn Ryan, Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature, for a definition of spirituality “as a combination of consciousness, ethos, lifestyle, and discourse that privileges spirit . . . that is, life-force—as a primary aspect of self and that defines and determines health and well-being” (2). 7. Lamothe identifies Janie as the Voudoun goddess herself, who manifests through Hurston’s heroine in multiple emanations, as she does in the Haitian imagination and ritual. She is variously a coquettish mulatta with many lovers, a cold French beauty, or an old black woman from the Haitian working class. 8. See Dayan, “Erzulie: A Woman’s History of Haiti.” 9. See Shea, “The Hunger to Tell,” for an interview with Danticat in which she names Erzulie as both “absence and presence.” I coin the term “absent presence” from her usage . 10. See Murphy, Working the Spirit, for a definition of konesans (connaissance) (17). Chapter 1. The Cult of Nineteenth-Century Black Womanhood 1. See the early nineteenth-century French print entitled La Belle Hottentot at www. southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/history/saartjie.htm. 2. Deborah Gray White argues that the very conditions under which black women had to work—bending over in rice fields with their dresses hiked up to their waist to keep them from getting wet or scrubbing floors with their dresses around their thighs to allow free movement and keep the dresses clean—served to convince white men of black women’s lack of modesty. She observes that often slave women were forced to wear tattered clothes that exposed their bodies, and this was also held against them as a sign of their sexual impropriety. Black women were also whipped publicly in the nude. These exposures that were a condition of their enslavement—running so contrary to the demand placed on white women to have their bodies fully covered so that no flesh was ever exposed—gave credibility to the myth that black women were more sexual and less moral. 3. In “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Gilman reproduces this popular engraving titled The Hottentot Venus, ca. 1850. 4. See Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood for an examination of the impact that stereotypical depictions of black female sexuality had on black women’s writings in the nineteenth century. 5. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Douglass also describes several situations where slaves were murdered by their masters and mistresses for petty offenses: The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, living but a short distance from where I used to live, murdered my wife’s cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor girl expired in a few hours afterwards. She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks’s baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She, having lost her rest for...