Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

Foreword

xi Contents xi Foreword Joycelyn Moody Segregation usually connotes racialized discrimination in the twentieth-century public sphere—on public conveyances, in public venues ranging from churches to hospitals, even to graveyards. Utter the word segregation, and one might envision Rosa Parks as a young woman, perhaps recall Parks’s coy smile in her now famous mug shot, taken on the December night she was arrested for violating Chapter 6, Section 11 of the 1955 segregation law of Montgomery, Alabama. It bears remembering, however, that the origins of segregation were formed in the institution of slavery as legislated and practiced in colonial America and as persistent in the nascent United States. Before the colonies severed themselves from England, Africans—enslaved and nominally free—were barred from social interactions with Europeans and gravely punished for overstepping the bounds erected to create and maintain a binaristic society of unequal opportunity. One of the earliest legal acts penalizing those who would violate fiercely guarded codes of black separation from whites punished “free-borne English” women for “shameful Matches” with African men. Contemporaneous with Virginia’s notorious 1661 Act that made bastards of all children borne of African mothers, Maryland’s 1664 Act punished with slavery for life “divers English women forgetful of their free Condicon [who] to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro Slaves” (Morgan 48). This act of the white elite against white women of the servant class who loved black men determined the condition of the child according to that of the father, to punish white mothers’ sex acts across the color line with bondage and ignominy. By the time the nation was constituted, then, its prescribed legacy of race separation—and female subjugation—was more than a century old. Thomas Jefferson’s posthumously published, negrophobic Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) cemented many of the early informal practices of discrimination against African Americans. This influential pseudoscientific volume from xii Contents xii Foreword the third president of the United States became among the most prominent in a long line of European and European American “natural histories” to argue for the innate inferiority of persons of African descent. Jefferson’s Notes contributed to the shift in U.S. laws from sanctions against problematic white women and their mixed-race sons and daughters to penalties against blacks who trespassed beyond their appointed sphere. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the disadvantaged but “good women of Wethersfield, Conn. [who] toiled in the blazing sun, year after year, weeding onions, then sold the seed and procured money enough to erect them a house of worship” inspired black orator Maria W. Stewart—ironically, because the “good women” apparently erected a segregated church. In an 1831 essay, Stewart would appeal to other black women to emulate the white women’s spiritual self-determination: “and shall we not imitate their examples, as far as they are worthy of imitation?” (“Religion” 15–16). A year later, Stewart would once more underscore white women’s complicity in race and/or class segregation—specifically barring blacks from education and schooling. Anticipating Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 entreaties, Stewart pleads: “O, ye fairer sisters, whose hands are never soiled, whose nerves and muscles are never strained, go learn by experience! Had we the opportunity that you have had, to improve our moral and mental faculties, what would have hindered our intellects from being as bright, and our manners from being as dignified as yours?” (“Lecture” 54–55). And so it went throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and so it persists in the twenty-first. In the post-black era, the binary is broken, exploded, so that now segregations split Americans by zig-zagging color and gender lines through bizarre swatches of the population. Now, “the hardest things” that render life in the United States divisive and nearly unbearable might well be, as Saidiya Hartman grieves, “the terrible things we [blacks] do to one another” (198). Terrible things we learned from masters of domination and cruelty. Works Cited Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Morgan, Kenneth, ed. “Maryland Establishes Slavery for Life.” Slavery in America: A Reader and a Guide. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005. 48. Stewart, Maria W. “Lecture, Delivered at the Franklin Hall, Boston, Sept. 21, 1832.” Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. 1835. Spiritual Narratives. Ed. Sue Houchins. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 51–56. ———. “Religion and...