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Race-ing the Goddess: Gloria Naylor'sMama Day and Sue Monk Kidd's The SecretLife of BeesJoni J. Mayfield

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

RACE-ING THE GODDESS:

GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY AND

SUE MONK KIDD’S THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

By

JONI J. MAYFIELD

A Thesis submitted to the

Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Degree Awarded:

Summer Semester, 2005

Copyright © 2005

Joni J. Mayfield

All Rights Reserved

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Joni Jean Mayfield on the seventh day of

July 2005.

Maxine L. Montgomery

Professor Directing Thesis

Tomeiko Ashford

Committee Member

Robin Truth Goodman

Committee Member

Approved:

Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English

Joseph Travis, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii

To Hana and Karl, without whom life holds little meaning; and to the voices of women of

color, whose sharp criticism enabled me to see my position within the ideology of whiteness.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the guidance and availability of my committee’s director and

members—Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Dr. Tomeiko Ashford, and Dr. Robin Truth Goodman.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract......................................................................................................................................... vi

INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1

WITNESSING NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA IN GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY....... 9

THE POLITICS OF INTEGRATED HETEROSEXUALITY ...................................................................................24

THE IRIGARAYAN GODDESS AND THE INVISIBILITY OF BLACKNESS.........................................................33

POSTMODERN IDENTITY TROUBLE AND GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY ......... 38

READING WHITE DESIRE IN SUE MONK KIDD’S THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES .... 58

CONCLUSION: ANALYSES AND AFTERTHOUGHTS..................................................... 76

NOTES......................................................................................................................................... 81

REFERENCES............................................................................................................................ 85

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..................................................................................................... 90

v

ABSTRACT

This thesis focuses on two primary texts: Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Sue Monk

Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Rather than positing those texts within the growing body of

goddess literature written by women, this analysis contextualizes the goddess by noting how

African-American and white identities limned in both novels position their relative protagonists

vis-à-vis a racialized context. While Naylor’s text works to strengthen the African-American

identity of its protagonist Cocoa, Sue Monk Kidd allows her protagonist Lily to integrate rather

effortlessly into an African-American spiritual community by glossing over difficult issues of

whiteness. The analysis further examines African-American female identity, noting how race is

performed through cultural and somatic gestures that allow it to be read at the level of the body.

While identity construction possesses benefits for subordinated groups, some individuals note the

disadvantages that inevitably occur through identity ossification. The analysis presents both sides

of the current identity problematic voiced within the African-American community.

vi

INTRODUCTION

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”1

Thus opens the biblical passage commonly attributed to John, the son of Zebedee. It requires a

total of seventeen English words to establish the following equation: God equals the Word, or in

Greek, the logos. Phrased another way, language equals power. Or put differently, those in

whom authority is vested possess the power to articulate the word. From Virginia Woolf’s

lectures at the colleges of Newnham and Girton,2 to J. L. Austin’s oft-referenced How to Do

Things With Words,3 to the recognition by Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist that it is “only

those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep

their power by,”4 to Suzan-Lori Parks’ re-visionary casting of “thuh” word,

5 the legitimacy of

possessing the word and the right to utter it has been challenged by authors, scholars, and

playwrights. Yet, these instances are comparatively recent historical articulations regarding the

proprietorship of parole. If Zebedee had been the father of a daughter, history has not left her

record. But assuming for the moment that Zebedee did, indeed, have a daughter and that his

daughter uttered words whose currency was deemed legitimate, it might be possible to imagine

the equation differently. Perhaps the received wisdom of Christianity would have it that “the

word was Goddess.” Perhaps, in a re-imaged world, the feminine is the undifferentiated standard

by which all gender is evaluated. In this world, femininity is unmarked by difference.

It is no small coincidence that within the past thirty years or so, since the beginning of the

feminist spirituality movement evidenced by Western publications, goddess texts written by

women have proliferated. Not only is religion an enclave for empowerment, but the spiritual

imaginary possesses the ability either to cripple or to enable notions of female selfhood. In a

myriad of ways, women have taken into their own hands the task of refashioning themselves

positively by creating archetypal images I term mythographic. But not all mythographic images

possess the same signification. From woman to woman and culture to culture, the goddess’

meaning contains singularities that impose a contingent element relative to particular histories

1

and experiences. Ntozake Shange’s choreo-poem, for example, professes that “i found god in

myself/ and i loved her/ i loved her fiercely,” yet the work’s title reveals Shange’s intended

audience: For colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf.6

Specifically, Shange addresses her writing to African-American women and women of

color who strive to establish identities recognized in their own right. Shange’s god possesses a

racialized signification whose intelligibility did not initially concretize within my consciousness.

While Shange’s lyrics bolster the conceptualization of the female self, that self is not identical to

the self of white women who benefit, often unknowingly, from the privilege that being

interpellated as white within the United States confers. The ideology of whiteness often renders

racial specificity invisible to white readers. In my particular experience, several months elapsed

after reading two other goddess texts—Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day and, at the insistence of

several of my academic peers, Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees—before I was

able to recognize my narrative equivalent within Kidd’s character of Lily. Perhaps it was a fated

occurrence, or perhaps reading Naylor’s and Kidd’s texts concomitantly was merely the

incidental result of an avid reading of goddess texts, but the subsequent question formulated by

the two novels’ juxtaposition refused to be silenced: why does Kidd’s novel integrate African-

American and white characters within a spiritual context while Naylor’s novel refuses to admit

white characters in ways that are positive? That question derailed the research I had previously

begun. Its answer would fill tomes.

The original trajectory of the following analysis intended to focus on the aspect of the

divine female which Naylor figures in her novel as Sapphira—conjure woman par excellence

and the ancient goddess enabling the positive and formative identity of Cocoa, a young African-

American woman whose maturity is one of the novel’s central themes. I had also and

concomitantly decided to locate those yearnings for the goddess, a thematic element contained

within, not only Kidd’s text, but also within a plethora of texts by feminist women, under the

theoretical framework of Luce Irigaray’s lecture entitled “Divine Women” in which Irigaray

calls for the creation of a female goddess to enable women’s “becoming.” That project proved

untenable, however, due to my slow but eventual awakening to the historical and racialized ways

in which Cocoa’s “becoming” lacked articulation within a white and European representation of

the goddess. While texts of many white women certainly concurred with the need for a

2

transcendental and transcending archetypal mythography, they tended to focus on issues which

posited gender as the primary vehicle for subordination, a movement that left the issue of race

and at times, class, unaddressed. Rethinking these issues resulted in the conclusion that the

divine mythologies being formulated by women in an effort to transcend subordinate roles within

society will not be the cause for women’s collaboration, which was undeniably one of the initial

goals of such an undertaking.

I have since moderated the hope for a coalitional politics between women racialized as

either white or of color with a more fundamental attempt to acquire “a more than superficial

comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture,” as the composers of The

Combahee River Collective Statement demanded of white feminists in 1977. This moderation

does not bespeak despair; indeed, it may be that between the exigencies of feminist politicization

and, more significantly, the invisibility of an ideology of whiteness, white women have hurried

over the crucial and necessary step of hearing what women of color have to say. The voices of

the two groups speak from distinct points of view: those of women of color speak from an anger

and pain that reveals nearly ineffable experiences of injustice and inequity, but also a determined

strength that defies such experience; those voices belonging to white women seem to believe that

what is necessary is a mere expression of the desire for integration for that integration to occur,

somehow effortlessly. If the latter indicts the pathology of entitlement, it is an intentional charge,

and one which I address in the last chapter of this thesis.

Taking Mama Day as a starting point, Chapter One explores the identity formation of

Naylor’s protagonist Cocoa. This exploration arose from a reformulated desire to understand the

issues and cultural milieu affecting an, admittedly, hypothetical black female identity, but an

identity with which many African-American female readers might nevertheless identify. Rather

than examining Cocoa’s process of identity formation through theoretical paradigms developed

by white feminists, I chose to examine the novel utilizing voices that discuss how oppression

works in the lives of women of color; therefore, I have relied on texts of African-American

womanists, particularly because womanist critical writing centers spirituality, and also texts of

African-American feminists that help elucidate Cocoa’s experience.

3

It is necessary to approach Naylor’s text by focusing on, not “the African-American

female experience,” for no such monologue exists, but at a particular African-American

experience of female spirituality informed by African-American women. Of course, it would be

informative to compare and contrast other goddess texts with Mama Day in order to demonstrate

the peculiar differences or similarities which necessitate the construction of a goddess in the first

place, but without understanding the synchronic and historical context of a dominant African-

American female spirituality or positing race as a criteria formatively crucial to African-

American female identity, such an analysis would be superficial.

Considerably influenced by exhortations such as Paula Gunn Allen’s “Kochinnenako in

Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale”7 which stress the importance

of analyzing kindred texts from within the context of the culture that gives rise to them, Chapter

One endeavors to position the analysis within the parameters of both an historically and

culturally specific context. Allen’s essay, concerned with Native American texts and folklore,

focuses on the story of Kochinnenako, translated by her maternal uncle John M. Gunn. Allen

insists that readings of Kochinnenako by feminists who view the folktale through an Anglo-

European lens tend to be myopic, and in some instances, miss the point entirely. Allen writes that

“When Western assumptions are applied to tribal narratives, they become mildly confusing and

moderately annoying from any perspective. Western assumptions about the nature of human

society (and thus of literature) when contextualizing a tribal story or ritual must necessarily leave

certain elements unclear” (2121). Therefore, I thought it crucial to listen to explanations by

African-American women that seemed to parallel closely the narrative perspective of Mama

Day, and that parallel revealed itself most often in the texts of African-American womanists and

feminists.

Additionally, Allen writes that Native American worldviews differ from the linear

trajectory of Anglo-European thought: “Traditional peoples perceive their world in a unified-

field fashion that is very different from the single-focus perception that generally characterizes

western masculinist, monotheistic modes of perception. Because of this, tribal cultures are

consistently misperceived and misrepresented by nontribal folklorists, ethnographers, artists,

writers, and social workers” (2126). This is also the case with African-American literature that

4

hearkens back to a powerful African presence, causing narrative sequence to unfold along a

recursive trajectory.

Particularly relevant to Naylor’s text are the foundational elements of womanist theology

that encourage complementariness between African-American women and men, the importance

of community to the individual and vice-versa, the hearkening to ancestral voices, and the

inextricability of the sacred and the secular. Especially helpful is Kelly Douglass Brown’s

explanation of how what might be perceived to be heterodoxy by practitioners of “mainstream”

Christianity functions to make African-American religious practice pliable without eroding its

basic core.

Because Cocoa’s story re-turns to the nexus of race and sexuality frequently, it is

necessary to attend to the politics of sexuality within Naylor’s text in a more than cursory

manner. I hope I have not drifted too far afield by examining the economy of integrated

heterosexual relationships through a Chicana lens. I do not insist that the Chicana perspective

perfectly mirrors the African-American female perspective, but that Sandra Cisneros’ forthright

exploration opens up the multidimensionality of integrated heterosexual relationships more

explicitly than most literature I have encountered. Texts of Chicana theorists, such as Cherie

Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and Aida Hurtado, are equally plainspoken regarding antagonism

endemic to communities composed of individuals of color and the seduction that works

differently from racial oppression to maintain the status quo of white masculinist hegemony.

Believing that even a failed attempt is still an attempt that might possess some benefit, I

discuss Irigaray’s theory of the feminine divine within the last section of Chapter One in order to

demonstrate how the parameters of Irigaray’s argument did not apply to Cocoa’s situation.

Chapter Two plunges into the often charged discussion that frequently proceeds when

considerations of identity politics arise, and that is the topic of racial performativity and

essentialist ideologies that solidify identities. Judith Butler’s discussion of reiterative

performativity with regard to gender contains many statements questioning the applicability of

her theory to race. Therefore, I engage the process of Cocoa’s identity formation by focusing on

key passages within Mama Day and watching how Cocoa’s process of identity formation

5

becomes discursively and somatically produced through references, not to an essential

femininity, but to an essential blackness. The concept of an essential blackness, while positive

for Cocoa and African-American women who might identify with Naylor’s character, is at times

contested by individuals of color who consider it restrictive, and I present some of those

opposing voices in an effort to broaden the discourse concerning essentialism. This discussion

has, by far, been the most difficult consideration of the current thesis, one which does not

culminate in any definitive conclusion, but is undertaken in an effort to engage various sides of

the current academic debate. I did not realize to what extent the discussion of racial

performativity had permeated academic discourse until attending The Society for Women’s

Advancement in Philosophy (S.W.A.P.) Conference hosted by the Florida State University

Department of Philosophy on April 9, 2005. During that conference, white philosopher and

linguist Sally Haslanger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (also adoptive parent to

her two African-American children—a situation that informs much of Haslanger’s writing)

delivered a keynote presentation that also questioned how gender and race might be somatically

produced, and whether or not the two categories contain similarities. Haslanger’s recent work

entitled “You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology”8 in Adoption Matters:

Philosophical and Feminist Essays (2005) contains a condensed version of such questions:

On one materialist account of gender (in particular, one I support [writes

Haslanger]), men and women are defined as those hierarchical classes of

individuals whose membership is determined by culturally variable readings of

the reproductive capacities of the human body. In contexts in which the

reproductive body is not a site of subordination and privilege (presumably no

contexts we know of, but ones we may hope for) there are no men or women,

though there still may be other (new) genders.

Is this strategy useful for thinking about race? Perhaps, though off-hand this idea

is not easy to develop. It is one thing to acknowledge that race is socially real,

even if a biological fiction; but it is another thing to capture in racial terms the

“social meaning” of the body. There seem to be too many different forms that

race takes. Note, however, that the same problem arises for gender: is it possible

to provide a unified (cross-cultural, transhistorical) analysis of “the social

6

meaning of sex”? The materialist feminist approach offered a helpful strategy:

don’t look for an analysis that assumes that the meaning is always and

everywhere the same; rather, consider how members of the group are socially

positioned, and what physical markers serve in a supposed basis for such

treatment. Let this provide the common framework within which we explore the

contextually variable meanings. (269-70; original italics)

Therefore, in my discussion of reiterative performativity and the construction of

identities, I present various viewpoints: those of Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, and

Kiini Ibura Salaam, both women of color, both children of racially integrated parents, and both

individuals whose subject positions and lighter skin tone allow them to regard racial meanings in

alternative ways; as well as the views of African-American women in the academy such as Carla

L. Peterson, Yvette Louis, and Deborah E. McDowell who show that pernicious historical

narratives must be re-written in positive scripts on the black female body in the process of

obtaining wholeness. In Chapter Two, I argue that essentialist narratives are indispensable to

African-American identity formation, but that they nevertheless risk exclusion. Additionally,

individual or group history need not devolve into historical determinism. One way of avoiding

the immanence of historical determinism is to consider alternative voices that challenge

prevailing constructions of identity—racial, gendered, or classed. It also provides space for those

individuals who possess transient identities. I believe that the “Thirdspace”9 opened up by these

alternative voices resists the tendency to ensconce identities within a binary framework they are

much too complicated to fit.

Chapter Three examines The Secret Life of Bees, written by white female author Sue

Monk Kidd. In Kidd’s novel, the young white protagonist Lily finds spiritual and maternal

fulfillment by integrating within a household composed of three African-American sisters. Lily’s

integration, I argue, is relatively effortless and might be considered as a manifestation of the

presumptuousness of whiteness. While Kidd’s novel touches on the antagonism toward white

women often articulated within the texts of African-American women, Kidd’s novel explores

this antagonism inadequately and allows it to quiesce into an ineffectual silence. Analysis of

Kidd’s text was relatively effortless due to the similar “colorblind” conclusions drawn in my

initial readings of goddess texts. Indeed, it was my own immersion within an ideology of

7

whiteness that initially obscured how Cocoa’s desire for the goddess was forged by historical and

cultural experiences that do not parallel my own. My realization of being white and, therefore, an

outsider to Naylor’s text recalled for me the way in which Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie in Their

Eyes Were Watching God came to perceive that she was black. Playing amongst the Washburn

grandchildren as a young girl, Janie does not differentiate between herself and her white

playmates until a photographer passes by and takes a picture, a picture in which Janie is unable

to identify herself until Miss Nellie indicates to Janie her image. Janie exclaims with surprise, “

‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’ (9), and says that “before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just

like de rest.” Of course, Janie’s experience revealed that society subordinated her on account of

skin color, while my recognition revealed how society’s interpellation of my whiteness confers

privilege.

Theoretically, all individuals are the same—we are all human. Praxis, however, is not so

obliging. Until praxis and theory interact to implement the dignified treatment of all individuals,

it will be necessary to discuss race in terms of the way racialized identities work to subordinate

individuals of color and privilege those constructed as white. Chapter Three, therefore, also

examines the ideology of whiteness, exposing whiteness as a social construction enabling the

oppression of individuals of color.

It is an understatement to claim that my understanding of the historical and daily struggle

experienced by women of color is rudimentary. It is naive to assume that, because I have at last

realized my position within the ideology of whiteness, my vision is now unobstructed by its

detritus. It will take a lifetime of effort to unlearn “white” ways of seeing, performing, and

colluding. The following pages will undoubtedly evidence fledgling attempts to unlearn such an

ideology. Yet, race is not spoken of often enough by white women. Commonly relegated to the

silent spaces between fear and the indolence of preservation, white silence merely serves to

perpetuate the status quo of its privilege. Ultimately, the goal of this thesis is no loftier than to

breech that silence.

8

CHAPTER 1

WITNESSING NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA IN GLORIA

NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY

One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly

address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black feminists we are

made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made

to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that

they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history

and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition

work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak and demand

accountability on this issue.

The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day weaves several different narrative threads together in a

manner that prevents the novel from privileging any one of those narratives, providing literary

studies a wealth of issues to explore. Among the threads is the island of Willow Springs, whose

African-American inhabitants are isolated from the United States’ mainland; Mama Day, the

conjure woman who uses her powers, she hopes, in ways that are beneficial; Dr. Buzzard, the

conjurer that uses his pseudo-ability to trick; and Ruby, the malevolent conjurer that uses her

abilities both to possess and to kill. This chapter, however, focuses on another of those stories—

that of Cocoa and the issues of a young African-American woman’s process of identity

formation within both a white masculinist society (across the bridge) and the African-American

woman-centered community of Willow Springs. This process requires assistance from the

African female divine figure of Sapphira, a goddess figure linked specifically to Cocoa’s past

9

and matrilineal genealogy. Sapphira is at once an African goddess and a positive recasting of

Sapphire, who African-American womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglass describes as “a

powerful matriarch” negatively stereotyped in the 1965 Moynihan Report as “the major source

of weakness for the Black community.” Any analysis of Cocoa’s story must also include both

references to her great aunt, Mama Day, and the story of George, an African-American male

whose story began in a preceding novel of Naylor’s, Bailey’s Cafe, for George’s story is

inextricably linked to Cocoa’s and provides half of a dichotomous and symbiotic dynamic within

which Cocoa’s wholeness is realized.

In addition to focusing on Cocoa’s specific identity formation contextualized with regard

to race, it is critically important to note the way in which “white” and “female” readers of

Naylor’s text, especially those who view the goddess figure as potentially transcending, might

identify with Cocoa while failing to comprehend the unique set of circumstances that Cocoa’s

process of identity formation entails as an African-American woman coming into her own. As

Patricia Sharpe, F. E. Mascia-Lees, and C. B. Cohen note in “White Women and Black Men:

Differential Responses to Reading Black Women’s Texts,” all women share a “connected

knowing” that is “predominantly female based”; further, “Women’s greater ability to identify

across gender, and therefore, we might expect, across racial and cultural boundaries, is borne out

by reader response” (147; emphasis added). I argue that “connected knowing” requires a

determined and sustained process in which individuals must, in addition to listening intuitively,

actively seek to acquire hard knowledge of the circumstantial conditions that affect the lives of

other individuals, or acquire a “more than superficial comprehension” as Barbara Smith, Beverly

Smith, and Demita Frazier insist in The Combahee River Collective Statement.

In Cocoa’s case those circumstantial conditions differ from white women’s primarily

because of race, historical milieu, and the woman-centered economy of Willow Springs that

provide the foundational elements of Cocoa’s identity. The failure of white women readers to

apprehend these circumstantial differences is directly related to the invisibility and pervasive

lack of focus on an ideology of whiteness, and that invisibility often leads white readers to

examine black texts in ways that center gendered issues without noticing the inextricability of

racial determinants. Moreover, since the proliferation of goddess texts, which occurred

concomitantly with the rise of “the feminist spirituality movement” in the 1970s, adherents to the

10

movement, predominantly white, have noted with frustration the absence of “black, Asian,

Hispanic, and Native American spiritual feminists” (Eller 18). Desiring to ally themselves with

women of color without interrogating ways in which their whiteness has served to dominate the

feminist movement, women involved in feminist spirituality mime the hegemonic gesture that

prompted their break with mainstream Christianity initially. Cynthia Eller, whose research

provides detailed profiles of the movement’s members, notes that “Because they are mainly

white, spiritual feminists’ racial identity is not problematic for them: it is the norm in American

society, and is easily regarded as peripheral to their central identity as women” (19). Therefore, it

is not only necessary to acquire knowledge of textual ways in which African-American female

spirituality differs, but to problematize whiteness in a way that exposes its ideological blindness,

a blindness which I will explore more fully in Chapter Three.

French theorist Luce Irigaray provides an obvious theoretical approach for examining the

way in which “white feminism” fails to address issues of race, especially Irigaray’s lecture

“Divine Women,” because in that lecture, Irigaray promotes the need for a female god.

Therefore, the latter part of this analysis will examine the inapplicability of Irigaray’s theory to

African-American goddess literature. Because it is spiritually centered, a womanist approach

provides a more relevant theoretical lens through which to understand Naylor’s text, and by

implication the spiritually-centered texts of other African-American authors, though it would be

restrictive to insist that this lens holds an exclusive monopoly on understanding the intersection

of a multiplicity of factors including race, gender, class, spirituality, and sexuality within those

texts, as the voices of other women of color provide elucidation of this complex nexus. Black

feminist thought1 which is not separate from, but also not identical to, the womanist paradigm,

allows for the critique of African-American female authors’ texts along recognizably similar

experiential considerations. Therefore, this analysis borrows assistance from both black

feminism and, within the second section of this analysis, the writing of Sandra Cisneros and

other Chicana theorists in an effort to elucidate the politics of integrated heterosexuality.

After the prolusion of Mama Day, in which an omniscient narrator limns the island of

Willow Springs and its founding mother, Sapphira, Cocoa’s voice reminisces about meeting

George, her future husband, while job-hunting in the city of New York. During the “cattle call”

(15) in which Cocoa applies for the position of office manager at Andrews & Stein Engineering

11

Company, she describes the other applicants: “three other women . . . and one very very gay

Oriental” (20). The receptionist distributing applications is also female. But Cocoa hardly notices

the subordinated gender of the applicants competing for these low-level jobs; for Cocoa, the

salient marker of individual identity outside Willow Springs falls predominantly along a

racialized division, which Cocoa labels into food groups. The receptionist is white—a “cherry

vanilla”; of the applicants, two are described as dull “milkshakes” and the third “licorice.” Cocoa

refers to the gay and ostensibly Jewish male (his surname is “Weisman”) as a “kumquat” (21).

Although Cocoa possesses solid credentials (“two years in business school in Atlanta”

where she “ended up graduating at the top of [her] class” [29] and “One job [as office manager]

in seven years” [21]), she considers the “licorice” and the “kumquat” her main competitors.

Though she does not describe what competitive characteristics the latter possesses (conceivably

his maleness or surname with which the partner Stein might identify), the former “had the body

and courage to wear a Danskin top as tight as it was red” (20). Cocoa implicitly understands that

an “ideal” female physiology and the willingness to “properly” exhibit that physiology within a

masculinist environment works to distinguish and privilege certain females in the job market,

causing Cocoa to “want to push out [her] pathetic chest.” She quickly forgoes the idea, because

“that meant bringing in my nonexistent hips. Forget it, I thought, you’re standing here with no

tits, no ass, and no color.” While aware of the sexism practiced by employers toward female

applicants desperate for work, Cocoa’s hostility is most acutely connected to racial issues. For

Cocoa, subordination based on a sexualized identity is connected to, but less fundamental than,

subordination linked to her racialized identity, even while both have prohibited Cocoa’s access to

opportunities that have privileged George. This is partly due to the strength of Cocoa’s

grounding, both within her specific family and the larger community of Willow Springs, in

which a masculinist ideology is not allowed to undermine the “becoming” of women.

While Cocoa’s predominant concern centers on race, this is not to suggest that Naylor

disregards gendered concerns within Mama Day and the additional novels that round out her

oeuvre. Cocoa’s identity problematic, however, is unique to Naylor’s oeuvre in that it

foregrounds a nuclear family supported by a male breadwinner and maintains a strict

heterosexual economy throughout. Although both Kelly Brown Douglass and Joy James discuss

the past hesitancy of African-American women to broach feminist topics because, as Douglas

12

explains, they “were fearful that an advocacy of feminist concerns might alienate them from

Black males and from the joint struggle of Black men and women against White racism” (128), it

is important that the present analysis de-generalize claims that African-American women are not

interested in gendered oppression. Regarding such claims, Joy James writes:

Generalizing accusations maintain that black females are less inclined toward

feminism than their white counterparts, attributing that aversion to an alleged

emotive nostalgia for “the black community” and strong racial identification with

black males. Although there is some validity in this charge, it cannot be

generalized. If it is, then it must be assumed that black women, and by extension a

feminism that emphasizes antiracism and gender-inclusive community, is not

“feminist.” Such assumptions crassly simplify black women’s lives and struggles

in a racist and racialized state. The liberation of the women of an oppressed

people—as a group rather than as atomized individuals—is inseparable from, but

not reducible to, the liberation of their people or communities of origin and

identification. (183-4)

Within the parameters of Mama Day, however, issues of race, class, and gender have not

deterred George Andrews from success. Brought up as an orphan in a state home for boys,

George worked his way through Columbia, earning his engineering degree and acquiring a

partnership in the successful company which bears his name, Andrews & Stein. As he interviews

Cocoa, his future wife, George attempts to personalize the interview by asking Cocoa how she

acquired her nickname. Cocoa provides shrewd responses that answer George’s questions while

simultaneously displaying her credentials. George is aware of his position and the power inherent

in it, later thinking that he “hated [himself]” for putting Cocoa in the “position where [she] had to

answer questions that bordered on an invasion of [her privacy] mak[ing] what [he] did all the

more unfair” (31). “If it’s any consolation” thinks George, “I didn’t enjoy the sour aftertaste of

abused power.” While George recognizes his privilege, this recognition does not actuate a

genuine understanding of Cocoa’s “type” (32) which George describes as “too bright, too jaded

colored girls” that “made no bones about their plans to hook into a man who . . . was going

somewhere.” Because during college George worked hard “as a room-service waiter” rather than

accept more esteemed employment and was unable, both because of schedule and finances, to

13

spend his weekends and money with these girls, George believes he knows what lies beneath

“the polished iron webbing around their hearts.”

While George may understand the economy that forces racialized individuals to work

harder in a racist society, he never insinuates that this economy simultaneously commodifies and

devalues his body in the same way as it does Cocoa’s. This lack of understanding induces

George to perceive himself as one of the “good black men” these girls desire, claiming that “All

[he] wanted was for [Cocoa] to be [herself]” (33). Yet, for George, that image is a subordinated

gendered self that allows him to perceive Cocoa in a way that “conjured up images of jasmine-

scented nights, warm biscuits and honey being brought to me on flowered china plates as you sat

at my feet and rubbed your cheek against my knee.”

George’s assessment contains some truth, however; Cocoa is looking for a man who will

treat her as she wants to be treated, and Cocoa assesses that treatment by financial ability and

willingness to purchase her company at the price she deems equitable. All items, including

people and their labor, assume the signification of commodity in the city, and this signification

carries over into the process of forming romantic attachments. During the seven years Cocoa has

resided in New York, Cocoa believes she has figured out the heterosexual economy and the

process of dating and has constructed a mathematics allowing her to assess and avoid those men

who desire to purchase her for a night (i.e., believe that a gift economy ought apply to romantic

situations and an profit-making economy kept reserved for business ones) and which men are

willing to invest in a long-term relationship by providing “quality” outings at “quality”

restaurants and post-dinner locales. Had Cocoa applied the gift economy of Mama Day to the

profit-making economy existing in the city, Cocoa realizes that her value would have been

diminished long ago. In a system where labor and the bodies providing that labor are constructed

as items of exchange, Cocoa resists the devaluation of her “self” by examining the criteria that

permeates all interaction between individuals valuated and constructed differently, especially

outside the familiarity of the Willow Springs community. As a black woman, Cocoa is both a

racialized and gendered commodity outside that community (in a sexualized way that George is

not) and assigned the lowest value in the hierarchy necessitated by that system, a valuation she

resists by carefully choosing the male that will accept and buy into her reevaluated economy.

14

The odds against Cocoa becoming an “owner” in this system are steep, for that would

require overcoming virtually insurmountable social obstacles that George, as a male, has never

encountered. George owns the tools of his labor, and as such he possesses a proprietary

advantage over Cocoa. Therefore, Cocoa believes that she is being herself—a female commodity

that must sell her marketable and sexualized labor to the highest bidder: “At least I was being

real: I didn’t have a job, and I wanted one—badly” (15), Cocoa thinks as she surveys other job

seekers attempting to mask their desperation. Cocoa is “real” in that she has adapted to the

circumstances of the economy “beyond the bridge” (making her “too bright” and “too jaded” in

an effort to survive) whose urban dynamic structures her environment, while refusing the in-

authenticity of its masquerade. Perhaps Cocoa sees into the belly of the beast more clearly than

George due to her position at the bottom of its hierarchy; that view, however, does not preclude

Cocoa’s participation in the only economy available for sustaining herself—Cocoa has merely

learned to work the system to her advantage in ways that do not apply to George. Rather than

perceiving how gender works to privilege George and subordinate her self, Cocoa’s frustration

fixes on racial issues as evidenced by her desire for a time in which “Help Wanted” ads

unequivocally printed “colored or white” instead of “Equal Opportunity Employer, or nothing”

(19).

Trudier Harris explains that Naylor’s “inspiration for Mama Day grew in part out of the

dichotomy her parents represented. . . . Her father . . . was always quick to assert in discussions

about extranatural ways of knowing, healing, or spell-casting, that is conjuration, that such

matters were pretty much nonsense. . . . By contrast, Naylor’s mother was generally receptive to

other ways of knowing, other ways of healing” (56). Yet Naylor is ever vigilant not to let Mama

Day collapse into this simple dichotomy of male versus female. That care is taken, at least within

novelistic bounds, to ensure George’s and Cocoa’s pairing, a process which requires compromise

on both sides, but especially from Cocoa. Theoretically, Naylor’s resistance to this dichotomy

may issue from the desire to work toward a politics of gendered complementarity that African-

American womanist spirituality encourages. Explaining the womanist theology that provides the

basis for her work, Linda E. Thomas explains that “often white feminist theology creates a

paradigm over against men; it is an oppositional theological discourse between females and

males. In contrast, womanist theology recognizes patriarchal systems as problematic for the

15

entire black community—women, men, and children.”2 Thus, the problematic of gender between

Cocoa and George is able to resolve, albeit restlessly, through compromise and the deflection of

tension between Cocoa and George outward. That deflection often implicates Shawn, a white

woman with whom George experienced a five-year relationship prior to and during the nascent

period of his involvement with Cocoa.

While Mama Day avoids collapsing into a male versus female dispute, Cocoa’s world

remains a highly gendered world, and the masculine half of that world poses little concern for

Cocoa due to her solid grounding in the strength of her femaleness and the woman-centered

community Willow Springs provides her. After their “worst fight ever,” it comes, then, as no

surprise when Mama Day encourages Cocoa to be the first one to apologize. “Yeah, always the

woman” Cocoa replies, to which Mama Day provides the definitive answer: “’Cause we got

more going for us than them. A good woman is worth two good men any day when she puts her

mind to it. So the little bit we gotta give up, we don’t miss half as much” (240). On the contrary,

Cocoa’s task is to learn how to subdue the forcefulness of her will. It is primarily beyond the

bridge where gender imposes difficulty for Cocoa and during her present connubial forging with

George, for George’s culture is derived from external influences including the sport of football

within which George finds a sort of spiritual fulfillment: it “produces a high that’s possible only

when a man has glimpsed the substance of immorality” (124), whose crowd “create[s] miracles”

with its will. George’s relationships derive from an economy of profit exemplified by successful

businessmen such as “Hopewell,” whose name signifies the difference between the male-

centered and racially integrated economy of production and the complex woman-centered

economy of reproduction Naylor symbolizes with the well where Peace died. Gender will

become problematic if in the future Cocoa re-members the historical sex/gender dynamic

between the couples in her family and listens to the legacy of voices describe how the destruction

of women often hinged on the inability of men to “let [them] go” (285). But for now, Cocoa’s

conflict centers on race.

Kelly Brown Douglas questions why “open dialogue concerning gender relations . . . has

been slow in coming” within the African-American community. Douglas writes:

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To confront the issue of strained male/female relationships in the Black

community would mean acknowledging the presence of sexism within that

community. Black men and some Black women refuse to confront this issue and

thus relinquish privileges that accrue from gender-biased systems and structures.

But even more daunting for many in the Black community is the fact that a

serious confrontation with sexism implies the even more difficult discussion of

Black sexuality. (81).

The pairing of Cocoa and George exemplifies such a strained relationship, and Cocoa’s

inability to confront the trauma of Sapphira and Bascombe is inextricably linked to sexuality in a

way that is agonizing and disruptive to her psyche. Douglas appeals to the black community and

especially the black church for “a sexual discourse of resistance” that will begin to face the

“scars of a White cultural humiliation that debases [Black women’s] womanhood” (73). Douglas

testifies that “[Black women] bear within their psyches the open wounds of the violence

perpetrated against their bodies.” Certainly, Cocoa has inherited such wounds and must hearken

to the “whispers” that speak to Cocoa as she walks with George “through [her] family plot”

(Naylor 223).

Though George and Shawn’s relationship is unresolved when George first meets Cocoa,

he does not discuss the issue with Cocoa until he realizes the seriousness of his feelings, a

realization that Cocoa has also experienced. When George brings up the issue while he and

Cocoa walk near Riverside Park, Cocoa knows it will be a day indelibly inscribed in her

memory. On the inside, Cocoa’s emotions capsize, but she knows exposing her infuriation will

merely push George into the arms of an already losing competitor, so Cocoa maintains a “cool”

(102) composure. Initially, Cocoa’s anger is directed merely toward another woman, but when

George tells her “‘she’d stopped being a redhead with freckles and had just become Shawn,’”

Cocoa understands that her competition is white. This recognition causes Cocoa angst so

disconcerting that she can only express it by imagining her friend Selma’s reaction, a reaction

that repeats the white masculinist stereotype of the hypersexual black male that ostensibly drives

white female desire:

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I bet you had to go sniveling around two dozen before you “chanced into” this

special one. Did she meet you in her anthropology course? I hear y’all are a lot

easier for them to housebreak than chimpanzees. Or did her shrink tell her that the

only way to get you out of her nightmares was to screw you? Maybe she’s one of

those affirmative action nymphomaniacs—running through you like water,

looking for that ever elusive nine-inch thrill? She musta been awful disappointed,

huh? But don’t despair, baby, she’ll go on trying, thinking that you and the last

two hundred were only the small exception to the rule. No doubt about it, Selma

would have lost her cool. (103)

Attributing the possession of this white masculinist stereotype to Shawn displays Cocoa’s

misunderstanding of how the myth of black male potency works in the white community. Ruth

Frankenberg’s study of white women’s attitudes toward black men’s sexuality reveals that the

hypersexed image most frequently incites white female fear rather than desire. The racist images

that Frankenberg elicited from the white women she studied show that this stereotype often

causes white females to envision black males as violent, dominating, and aggressive—prejudices

that police integrated sexuality rather than encourage it. By “protecting” white women from

black men, this mythology reasserts white masculinist potency and strives to maintain the myth

of white female purity. As Frankenberg insists, “white women and nonwhite men are to be kept

apart, by white men” (81). Cocoa’s hostility toward George’s involvement with Shawn mirrors

this white masculinist stereotype.3

Cocoa longs to be back in Willow Springs where, she romanticizes, “you knew when you

saw a catfish, you called it a catfish” (22), apparently alluding to the difficulty of categorizing

her job-search competitor Mr. Weisman. Cocoa will rearticulate that same sentiment while on

her first date with George when he finds her habit of categorizing individuals as food offensive.

Cocoa explains that “I was scared when I came to this city . . . A whole kaleidoscope of people—

nothing’s just black and white here like in Willow Springs. . . . I’m not a bigot, but if I sound like

one, I guess it’s because deep down I’m as frightened of change and difference as they are” (63).

But Cocoa was presented with her own set of identity ambiguities growing up on the island,

difficulties based on the lightness of her skin and the children’s cruel remarks questioning her

blackness. Certainly, these formative experiences collude to make the adult Cocoa highly

18

sensitive to issues of racialized identity. When Cocoa returns to Willow Springs that summer,

Mama Day refers to such incidences by remembering “the little girl running home crying and

almost taking off her middle finger with a butcher knife, fearing she really had the white blood

she was teased about at school—she wanted red blood like everybody else” (47). Cocoa’s

anxiety revolves around several issues simultaneously. First, the children’s teasing evidences that

Willow Springs’ inhabitants possess a code of inclusivity and exclusivity based on shades of

blackness that resonate ontologically, a code similar to that which insinuated itself in the town of

Ruby, Oklahoma and described by Toni Morrison’s character of Patricia in Paradise:4

This time the clarity was clear: for ten generations they had believed the division

they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually but not

always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned

against black. Oh, they knew there was a difference in the minds of whites, but it

had not struck them before that it was of consequence, serious consequence, to

Negroes themselves. (194)

Difference has similarly insinuated itself within the racialized ideology of Willow

Springs, but Cocoa’s filiation with her revered great-aunt Mama Day provides her protection

from the exclusionary taunts of the children. More importantly, Sapphira provides protection to

Cocoa in the form of what might be termed a mythographic image, or an archetypal imaginary

whose construction provides mental and spiritual fortitude for those individuals affined with that

image, for Sapphira was “A true conjure woman: satin black, biscuit cream, red as Georgia clay:

depending upon which of us takes a mind to her” (3), states the omniscient narrator of the

novel’s prolusion. While Sapphira provides all shades of blackness with which Cocoa might

identify, it is clear that the lightness of her skin color remains a visible reminder both that she is

descended from the slave-owning, putatively Norwegian Bascombe Wade and the resultant

miscegenation that occurred between Sapphira—Cocoa’s forbear and Bascombe’s purchase.

Naylor presents Cocoa’s inability to face the pain of confronting the stigma of whiteness

within her past during a later scene in which Cocoa guides George, now her now husband,

through the western side of the island where tombstones tangibly display the Day’s history.

George remembers that “Bascombe Wade’s stone had been marked 1788-1823” (218). Wade’s

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tombstone is the only dated stone, the others bearing “no dates and only one name.” The surname

Wade is effaced by the matrilineal genealogy that the mythology of Sapphira has re-claimed and

renamed “Day,” which a note appended to the genealogical chart Naylor presents at the novel’s

beginning explains: “‘God rested on the seventh day and so would she.’” Curious about the

tombstones, George questions Cocoa about her history until her irritation becomes noticeable.

George then muses about the way in which Cocoa’s skin color signifies the problematic nature of

her identity, noting that Cocoa always “stressed[ed] that [she was] a black woman if someone

was about to mistake [her] for a Spaniard or Creole” (219). Cocoa’s reluctance to discuss the

excruciatingly undesirable events of her heritage leads George to name for Cocoa what she

cannot articulate herself: “But you hated to think about the fact that you might also be carrying a

bit of him.” The novel remains opaque throughout its entirety regarding the nature of the initial

exchange between Bascombe and Sapphira, thereby leaving open to question whether their

connection continued to be based on ownership or eventually became dementedly symbiotic. As

George reflects about the house at “the other place,” he thinks, “No, there was something more,

and something deeper than the old historical line about slave women and their white masters. A

slave hadn’t lived in this house. And without a slave, there could be no master. What had [Mama

Day] said—he had claim to her body, but not her mind?” (225). Naylor does not explicate what

Mama Day represses when she “talks what she knows, not what she’s afraid to remember” (207)

and when she claims that “[Sapphira had] never been a slave. And what she gave of her own

will, she took away”(308). Perhaps this unopened “door for the child of Grace to walk through”

refers to that inapproachable giving and taking which occurred between Bascombe and Sapphira

during the “thousand days” that founded Willow Springs, but because Cocoa cannot yet

formulate the question it remains elusive to the reader. Hortense Spillers attempts to write the

inarticulate question:

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 conditions that I would aver as

nonfreedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we could

go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that “sexuality,” as a term of

implied relationship and desire, is dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate

20

to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the

master’s family to the captive enclave. Under these arrangements, the customary

lexis of sexuality, including “reproduction,” “motherhood,” pleasure,” and desire

are thrown into unrelieved crisis. (667)

This state of “unrelieved crisis,” I believe, best illustrates Naylor’s leaving unresolved the

question of Sapphira and Bascombe.

Cocoa must find herself within the family of women that surround her. Some of these

women are physically present and others are spiritually present. It is in this specific genealogical

and geographical location where the fragmentation of her “self” will pull together into a cohesive

whole, but this is not to say that the site of wholeness may be reached passively. Cocoa must

look for and listen to the assemblage of voices that, much like the pieces of the quilt Mama Day

and Abigail create for Cocoa by the active engagement of repeating familiarized stitches and

drawing on familial materials, will create a harmonious whole forming the heritage of strength

from which Cocoa and her descendants may draw. As Mama Day thinks when she visits “the

other place,” “All that Baby Girl is was made by the people who walked these oak floors, sat and

dreamed out on that balcony” (278). Cocoa’s identity formation, therefore, centers around

actively engaging the problematic of this wholeness, of wrestling with the familial and the past

until she decides on the pieces that will fit her own idiosyncrasies and, especially, never

abandoning these historical or familial sites in the belief that she may find this wholeness in a

place external to her community. It does not exist there. As Linda E. Thomas explains:

This method of womanist theology validates the past lives of enslaved African

women by remembering, affirming, and glorifying their contributions. After

excavating analytically and reflecting critically on the life stories of our

foremothers, the methodology entails a construction and creation of a novel

paradigm. We who are womanists concoct something new that makes sense for

how we are living in complex gender, racial, and class social configurations. We

use our foremothers’ rituals and survival tools to live in hostile environments.

Moreover, we gather data from a reservoir of bold ideas and actions from past

centuries to reconstruct knowledge for an enhanced and liberating quality of life

21

for black women today. The weaving of the past into present knowledge

construction produces a polyvalent self-constituting folk-culture of African

American women. In other words, the past, present, and future fuse to create a

dynamic multi-vocal tapestry of black women’s experience inter-generationally.

Though Cocoa’s identity formation is unique and applicable only to her, the popularity of

Naylor’s novel indicates that its issues are recognizable within the African-American

community; clearly there are many African-American female readers who might experience

similar points of reference. It certainly is not the definitive African-American female experience,

for no such definitive experience exists. Each and every identity bears the individuality of its

own formation, but the trope or formula of linking this interactive process of identity formation

to the African-American community recurs within much literature by African American women

in a way that maintains the inseparability of the process and the community. Joy James says it

best when she writes:

Perhaps one of the most debated issues in American politics is the value of an

independent African American political-cultural community. Not unique to, but

nevertheless a strong characteristic of, black feminisms are expressions of

responsibility and accountability that place community as a cornerstone in the

lives and work of black females. Community in fact is understood as requiring

and sustaining intergenerational responsibilities that foster the well-being of

family, individuals, and a people, male and female. Even if the idea is discredited

by the dominant culture, the knowledge that individual hope, sanity, and

development come through relationship in community resonates in black politics.

Recognizing the political place of African American cultural views that manifest

and mutate through time and space does not construct these views as

quintessential or universal to everyone of African descent. Some reject while

others pursue transcendent community in order to affirm African beliefs

resonating throughout American culture as a form of political resistance to culture

annihilation or assimilation. (30, 37-8)

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The process of identity formation for Cocoa is a difficult one, for not only is Cocoa’s

family a demanding one, but she must simultaneously learn strategies for living on the outside of

it, interdependent as Cocoa is with communities external to Willow Springs. At times, those

strategies conflict with the traditional ones she must assume parts of to become whole. This is

not to argue that Cocoa must become identical to either Mama Day or her grandmother Abigail,

for not only is the diversity of personalities Cocoa must draw on multiple, but neither does the

narrative’s message insist that she discard elements of her particular identity as long as those

elements coexist along an established continuum. Temper them, definitely, but not discard them.

The fragmented patchwork from which Cocoa must form the whole of her identity

manifests itself in her conceptual image of “mother” formed from the two distinct personalities

who raised her: Mama Day and Abigail, one indulgent and the other stern, but both loving.

“[T]ogether they were the perfect mother” thinks Cocoa. Yet a third image of mother is the

physical mother whose milk dried up from hatred when Cocoa’s father abandoned the family and

Cocoa confronts the issue, albeit briefly. Cocoa possesses a blank space where the concept of

father would reside. Her own father abandoned the family; the significance of her maternal

grandfathers is eclipsed by her identification with Sapphira; Bascombe Wade, the white

Norwegian that owned Sapphira (in body only) presents intuitions so assaulting that Cocoa

works to erase him from her consciousness and bury his existence beneath it. Cocoa’s

fragmented identity is further illustrated by the names which serve to identify her within various

contexts: Cocoa, Baby Girl, and Ophelia. It is from the shards of her past and plurality of her

present that Cocoa must create an identity, and it is in this process that Cocoa will require the

transcendence bequeathed to her by Sapphira, the forbear who possesses “the attributes of a

goddess” (218) and “got away from [Bascombe] and headed . . . toward the east bluff on her way

back to Africa” (206).

By the time of their “worst fight ever” (232), George still misconceives the nature of

Cocoa’s identity formation, leading him to repeat his desire for Cocoa to simply be herself (234).

As Cocoa prepares to introduce George to the Willow Springs’ community, she seeks assurance

from George about her appearance. The conversation begins with Cocoa’s seemingly innocuous

question, “Is my make-up all right?” (231) and ends several pages later with a vase in her hand

(235). Yet, Cocoa’s angst over the signification of her skin color reemerges. George makes the

23

mistake of telling Cocoa about his “ideal” woman—“someone who was deep, deep brown”

(234). Cocoa cannot resist reminding George of his previous relationship with Shawn, whom

Cocoa calls “Howdy Doody in drag” (234). Again, the politics of skin color and shades of

blackness, inextricably literal and metaphysical, reassert their dynamic into Cocoa’s behavior,

demonstrating their complexity and Cocoa’s difficulty in resolving this issue for herself. It is as

though the emptiness of whiteness—its definition refers to nothing more than what is not

black—is here duplicated and reversed. Blackness must signify all that is not white. Cocoa must

exorcise her perception of the ontological whiteness she carries through a psychological and

spiritual repudiation of its signifier, Shawn. Though the scene plays out rather humorously, the

racial and economic implications are quite serious and well-worth taking the time to explore.

Because the writing of Chicana poet and author Sandra Cisneros delves into the economy of

integrated sexuality and displays obvious similarities to Cocoa’s situation, the next section of this

analysis will develop the politics of integrated sexuality by focusing on Cisneros’ texts.

T h e P o l i t i c s o f I n t e g r a t e d H e t e r o s e x u a l i t y

The racialized angst Naylor reveals through her character of Cocoa is reflected within

the literature of other authors of color including Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, whose poem

“Perras” and short story “Never Marry a Mexican” exhibit both the desire for cohesion and

against cleavage within the Chicana/o community. In her poem “Perras,” Cisneros articulates the

frustration of this desire:

I can’t imagine that goofy white woman

With you. Her pink skin on your dark.

Your tongue on hers. I can’t

Imagine without laughing.

Who would’ve thought.

[ . . . ]

I can’t imagine this woman.

Nor your white ex-wife. Nor any

Of those you’ve hugged and held,

So foreign from the country we shared.

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Damn. Where’s your respect?

You could’ve used a little imagination.

Picked someone I didn’t know. Or at least,

A bitch more to my liking. (LW 58)

In “Never Marry a Mexican” Cisneros presents a story about Clemencia, a young

Chicana who is the daughter of a mixed-class marriage in which Clemencia’s mother is the

daughter of Mexican emigrants, raised in the United States, a country to which Clemencia’s

father emigrated as an adult. “[A]nd,” as Clemencia tells us, “it’s not the same, you know”

(author’s italics 68). Cisneros illustrates this disparity by revealing that Clemencia’s mother

lacks the racialized (exemplified linguistically)5 and class purity her husband possesses, and

these distinctions place Clemencia’s mother in a subordinate position. Clemencia explains her

mother’s devaluation as articulated by her father’s family: “Having had to put up with all the

grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and

my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro

lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was

poor” (69; author’s italics ). The disparity that exists between Clemencia’s parents is due to the

impurity perceived to inhere within both class and racial/linguistic markers of identity. For

example, Clemencia’s mother cannot “even speak Spanish, [she] didn’t know enough to set a

separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the

silverware.” She fails to speak, not only the correct language, but also the proper signs of

etiquette that would identify her in the Chicana/o community a class-worthy Chicana wife.

Cisneros presents Clemencia’s maternal grandfather as a hardworking man that made

certain his family never went without food or the generosity to share it. Yet, her mother’s

upbringing lacked many of the formalities that Clemencia’s father enjoyed growing up in

Mexico, formalities that mark his identity through class privilege. Clemencia’s father does not

understand that the currency of his former privilege is unrecognized in his new country. He

believes that the middle-class pride he feels for his birth family in Mexico continues to elevate

him as he begins a new phase of life in the United States. This elevation also applies to one of his

most intimate relationships—that between him and his wife. It is no wonder, then, that later on in

the story Clemencia declares her “amphibious[ness]. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any

25

class” (71). Of course, she is categorized within the boundaries of class whether she perceives

that categorization or feels no affinity toward it. But Clemencia’s cynical repudiation of class

(“The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity”) appears to stem from both

her mother’s class- and race-based devaluation and white women’s elevation.

Had Clemencia’s father married “a white woman from el otro lado . . . [he would have]

been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor.” Here, Cisneros shows how whiteness is

perceived to elevate the hypothetical woman’s status, though she may be poor. Though this

hypothetical white female may be doubly stigmatized as female and poor within a white

community, her whiteness would further elevate the status of any Chicano she might marry.

However, it must be pointed out that this action would further devalue her within the economy of

whiteness and the community that upholds its ideology. The white female’s whiteness makes her

a desirable marriage partner for the Chicano, Cisneros’ story suggests, and while a poor Chicana

will have little trouble in engaging in illicit sexual relations with men of any group, Cisneros

indicates that legalizing those relations will be considerably more difficult for her than for the

white woman. Aida Hurtado sheds light on the politics of integrated sexuality and the subsequent

rift that this politics causes between women:

In essence, women of Color, as a group, have been used primarily as laborers as

well as exploited for their sexuality. Women of Color are not needed by white

men to reproduce biologically pure offspring and therefore have been

subordinated through rejection, whereas white women have been seduced into

compliance because they are needed to reproduce biologically the next generation

for the power structure. Rejection as potential biological childbearers (not

necessarily as child caretakers) creates distance for women of Color from the

intimate and familial centers of structural power. For white women, who are

essential for survival of the status quo, have to be seduced through material and

psychological rewards to accept the role of biological bearers. White women as

biological carriers are squarely placed in the intimate circles of power and

therefore are familially connected (through biological ties) to those who

subordinate them—white men. Their allegiance to white men through familial ties

means that they cannot be subordinated in the same way as women of Color. The

26

difference in access to structural power between white men and white women has

to be made palatable, attractive, and rewarding; otherwise, rebellion would ensue.

In fact, white families are organized and united around the notion of the male

breadwinner’s access to socioeconomic power and success; his success is the

entire family’s success. Therefore, gender subordination, as imposed by white

men, is experienced differently by white women and by women of Color. It is in

this experiential difference that many of the conflicts around political

mobilization occur. It is this difference that has produced much of the disunity in

the women’s movement from its inception in the nineteenth century to the

present. (vii-viii; author’s italics)

As African-American historian Nell Irvin Painter shows, during the South’s ante- and

post-bellum periods the seductive carrot white men offered white women in order to seduce them

often took the forms of material comfort (Painter shows how the journals Georgia slave mistress

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, “indicate that slave mistresses preferred the enjoyment of

unlimited class privilege to the limitation of their husbands’ opportunities for adultery [92]) and

a coveted, constructed space on the proverbial pedestal of white womanhood that ostensibly

maintained white biological “purity.” The historical dynamic between the South’s black and

white women is so fraught with repressed ambivalence and complication that it still defies

characterization. Painter explains that

Historians have wanted to teach a single conclusion that would characterize the

relationship between slaveowning and slave women in the antebellum South:

Either slave women were at the bottom of a hierarchical society, as the exslave

narrators testify, or all southern women were, finally, at the mercy of rich white

men. The relationship between black and white women through white men

deserves to be named, for slavery often made women of different races and

classes into co-mothers and co-wives as well as owners and suppliers of labor.

(108)

After Clemencia’s father dies, her mother marries a white man. Clemencia explains that

“it was as if she stopped being my mother. Like I never even had one” (73). Cisneros exposes the

27

complexities of marriage as a social alliance that potentially permits class mobility. She also

exposes the resentment that racially integrated marriages potentially arouse, especially among

members of subordinated and racialized groups that strive to cohere within the borders of the

United States. An articulation of resentment emerges when members of racially constructed or

strategically allied groups form alliances with outsiders. While both dominant and subordinated

groups express fear of exogamic sexual alliances, the way in which the resultant fear becomes

displaced is not identical. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” this resentment, applied to the women

most severely in both cases,—Clemencia’s mother and the white wife of Drew—indicates that

Clemencia judges these two women by masculinist criteria denying women the quest for

pleasure and fulfillment (she “stop[s] listening” when her mother attempts to explain that “I

never had a chance to be young” [73]) and assigns women the task of maintaining racialized

boundaries rather than the freedom of venturing beyond them.

Analysis pays more attention, for the obvious reason of its provocativeness, to the next

sequence within Cisneros’ story—that of a grown Clemencia and her relationship with Drew.

Drew, a married Latino man, keeps Clemencia, his mistress. He has no intention of leaving his

legitimate white wife for Clemencia, and he demonstrates impunity at keeping both women for

his sexual exploits.

Drew’s racial identity is important to this story. Though his name is anglicized, there are

two reasons for interpreting Drew as a Latino character. The narrative is written in epistolary

form (along the lines of a simple note), and this form allows Clemencia to juxtapose memories of

the failed relationship and the pain and anger it causes her in the present. The letter opens with

Clemencia asking Drew, “remember when you used to call me your Malinalli?” (74). Soon

Clemencia reveals another of Drew’s names for her—“Malinche.” Both “Malinalli” and

“Malinche” are variant names historically attributed to the young Aztec girl who translated the

Aztec language for the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez. Cherie Moraga tells the story:

The sexual legacy passed down to the Mexicana/Chicana is the legacy of betrayal,

pivoting around the historical/mythical female figure of Malintzin Tenepal. As

translator and strategic advisor and mistress to the Spanish conqueror of Mexico,

Hernan Cortez, Malintzin is considered the mother of the mestizo people. But

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unlike La Virgen de Guadalupe, she is not revered as the Virgin Mother, but

rather slandered as La Chingada, meaning the “fucked one,” or La Vendida, sell-

out to the white race. (99)

Moraga explains that the archetype of Malintzin pervasively inhabits both the historical

and contemporary imagination of the Mexican collective consciousness. The story of Malintzin

negatively affects the perception and potential of Chicanas, the way in which Chicano society

interpellates females, and the politics of sexuality between Chicanas and Chicanos. As the story

is related, Malintzin betrayed her people and by extension, Chicanas are inheritors of that same

tendentious capability. As Moraga points out, Malintzin’s historical construction is not unlike

that of the Eve of western mythology, although there is one twist. The story of Malintzin is also

the story of betrayal between women, for it is commonly believed that Malintzin’s mother sold

her daughter into slavery.6 Though the truth of this account is arguable

7 it nevertheless impacts

relationships among Chicanas, explains Moraga, resulting in mistrust and competitiveness for

male approval. Moraga believes that the myth of Malintzin provides an explanation for male

children’s higher valuation in comparison to their sisters, for “through her son [a mother] can get

a small taste of male privilege, since without race or class privilege that’s all there is to be had”

(102). The existence of this phenomenon is ubiquitous, inhabiting levels of all masculinist

societies, though it varies in potency from culture to culture and from family to family. That

potency is relative to the degree to which the mythology is either accepted or questioned. The

potency of the Malintzin myth, therefore, ought to decrease as it comes under scrutiny from

feminist Chicanas that re-vision and rewrite pernicious mythologies in ways that do not

undermine positive and transcending images of women. This process contains obvious

similarities to the re-visioning process exemplified within the goddess texts written by African-

American women.

The second suggestion of Drew’s Latino identity revolves around his physical

appearance. Clemencia describes his “skin pale, but . . . hair blacker than a pirate’s” and the way

he “looked like a Cortez with that beard of [his]” (WH 74). Clemencia conflates Drew’s identity

with that of Hernan Cortez, and Clemencia regresses into her mythic Malintzin identity—her

“skin dark against [his]” suggests the Mexican earth of her foremother; the way Drew “yanked

[her] head back by the braid” reenacts the violation of the conquistador. Clemencia imagines that

29

her presence haunts Drew, even when his is not with her. Clemencia is seared with Drew’s

identity. They are inseparable. Clemencia imagines a relationship with Drew’s son, the son to

which Drew’s white wife has given birth; speaking to Drew’s son, Clemencia tells him that his

father does not belong either to son or mother. It is Clemencia’s way of getting her revenge, of

telling her pain, because she is unable to avenge her violent conqueror directly—he is also

genitor of the Chicana and Chicano people and, consequently, of Clemencia herself . Clemencia

has internalized the conqueror; she is now as much a part of him as he is of her. Clemencia

explains to Drew’s son her oneness with his (and her) father/conqueror—it is a physiological

oneness that collapses into pathology:

All I know is I was sleeping with your father the night you were born. In the same

bed where you were conceived. I was sleeping with your father and didn’t give a

damn about that woman, your mother. If she was a brown woman like me, I

might’ve had a harder time living with myself, but since she’s not, I don’t care. I

was there first, always. I’ve always been there, in the mirror, under his skin, in the

blood, before you were born. And he’s been here in my heart before I even knew

him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always. Dissolving like a hibiscus

flower, exploding like a rope into dust. I don’t care what’s right anymore. I don’t

care about his wife. She’s not my sister. (author’s italics 76)

Clemencia is obsessively unbalanced by various shades of skin. She agonizes over the

fetishization of the white female that lures Drew. Placing stroke after stroke on the palimpsest

that is her story, Clemencia attempts to write the desirability of her darkness over the whiteness

of Drew’s wife: “he said I was his doradita, all golden and sun-baked, and that’s the kind of

woman he likes best, the ones brown as river sand, yes,” but when describing Drew’s white wife,

Clemencia’s pain appears in between the lines. She is unable to understand why Megan’s value

supersedes her own, why the superficiality of skin color legitimates Megan’s access to power,

and why her sensuality is unable to have the same effect. Drew’s son has “the same kind of skin,

the boy. All the blue veins pale and clear just like his mama. Skin like roses in December. Pretty

boy. Little clone. Little cells split into you and you and you. Tell me, baby, which part of you is

your mother. I try to imagine her lips, her jaw, her long long legs that wrapped themselves

around this father who took me to his bed” (77). Clemencia attempts to understand the painful

30

politics of integrated sexuality, procreation, and conquest that exist in this Chicana/Latino/White

triangle. Emma Perez explains:

The Oedipal-conquest triangle dictates the sexual politics of miscegenation in the

twentieth century. Although Chicanos are usually incensed when Chicanas marry

the “enemy,” white men, they exercise male prerogative by marrying white

women to both defy and collaborate with the white father. In having half-white

children, they move their sons a step closer to the nexus of power—the white

colonizer-father. The Chicana who marries a white male, by contrast, embraces

the white Oedipal-colonizer ambivalently, because—although theoretically she

gains access to power—realistically she is still perceived as la india by a white

dominant culture that disapproves of miscegenation. (62)

Perez’s politics of sexual triangularity contains obvious similarities with Cisneros’ story.

Drew’s personal access to power increases. Megan’s whiteness is a sign-conduit that extends her

personal, professional, and familial ties to Drew; her body is a literal site for Drew’s

reproduction of power. Both ideological characteristics allow Drew access to social sites of

empowerment, and Drew’s son moves yet closer toward those sectors of power through the

potential whitening of his skin. Were Clemencia to marry a white male, however, both her

gender and her race would occlude her from access to that power. Thus, a disparate standard

applies to biracial couplings, a standard less condemning and more beneficial to males.

During their last encounter, Clemencia receives her rejection notice. Drew informs

Clemencia that their parting is “All for the best. Surely I could see that, couldn’t I? My own

good. A good sport. A young girl like me. Hadn’t I understood . . . responsibilities. Besides, he

could never marry me. You didn’t think . . . ? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican . .

. No, of course not. I see. I see” (80). These words, which create the title of Cisneros’ story,

present an ironic reversal. Originally a warning issued to Clemencia by her mother, Drew now

uses the line to take advantage of his mistress, pointing out the foolishness of her assumption that

their arrangement held any possibility of permanence. Cisneros limns the scene painfully,

exposing Clemencia’s attempt to exit with grace by assuring Drew that she understands.

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Instead of directing her anger at the lover that exploits her, Clemencia displaces her anger

onto the object of Drew’s “legitimate” desire, his white wife. bell hooks describes a component

of women’s hostility toward women: “Women find it easier to rage against one another. Anger

directed at males feels more threatening, their power to retaliate more dangerous” (126). Yet

when that power resides within a dynamic of heterosexual love dictated by racist and masculinist

desire, often women find it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the source of their pain

explicitly. The competitive dynamic drives Clemencia’s reaction toward Megan; it is the

competition of commodities in which one is expendable within the white masculinist economy

that affects all characters differentially. The pernicious Malintzin archetype is here revealed,

providing Clemencia with a deep distrust of other women, perhaps also a deep distrust of herself.

In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the late Gloria Anzaldua expressed one

of her missions in life. Particularly her lesbian identity, Anzaldua believed, enabled her role as

bridge between groups whose antagonism is fueled by hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

Chicana lesbians, like other lesbians of Color, are relegated to the margins of the margins of

society, and it is in this space on the borders of the white heterosexual masculinist economy from

which Anzaldua speaks. In this most desolate of locations, many find a poetics of strength and a

desire to bridge painful pasts at costs others are not willing to pay. Anzaldua described a ritual

she practiced and termed “el dia de la Chicana y el Chicano”:

On that day I say, “Yes, all you people wound us when you reject us. Rejection

strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability exposes us to shame. It is our innate

identity you find wanting. We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that

we need your acceptance. We can no longer camouflage our needs, can no longer

let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no longer withdraw. To rage and

look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We

can no longer blame you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the

pathological parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts. Here we are weaponless

with open arms, with only our magic. Let’s try it our way, the mestiza way, the

Chicana way, the woman way. (88)

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T h e I r i g a r a y a n G o d d e s s a n d t h e I n v i s i b i l i t y o f

B l a c k n e s s

In her lecture “Divine Women” (1984), French theorist Luce Irigaray argues that

“Divinity is what [women] need to become free, autonomous, sovereign. No human subjectivity,

no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine. There comes a time

for destruction. But before destruction is possible, God or the gods must exist” (62). While

Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day represents this need through the creation of Sapphira, Naylor’s

goddess, and indeed the goddess representations depicted by many women who are not “white”

or European, cannot be theoretically analyzed through an indiscriminate application of Irigaray’s

assertion. There are several textual and subtextual implications within Irigaray’s argument that

point to the difference in the strategic uses of the female divine and the different needs arising

from different cultural and historical situations. Primary among those uses, for Irigaray, is

establishing a differentiating female politics of divinity that opposes white masculinist

domination and traditional Christianity which, Irigaray asserts, facilitates that domination:

To avoid that finiteness, man has sought out a unique male God. God has been

created out of man’s gender. He scarcely sets limits within Himself and between

Himself: He is father, son, spirit. Man has not allowed himself to be defined by

another gender: the female. His unique God is assumed to correspond to the

human race (genre humain), which we know is not neuter or neutral from the

point of view of the difference of the sexes. (62)

At first glance, Irigaray’s assertion appears relevant to Naylor’s text within the dynamic

represented between Cocoa and George. Indeed, George’s death occurs because he refuses to

accommodate the woman-centered way of knowing within his rationalist paradigm. The critical

test for George, so critical in fact that his life depends on it, is to embrace the knowing of Mama

Day and return to her; it is a belief in a power other than his own that will save him. But at no

time does Naylor suggest that this rationalist paradigm must be supplanted by the irrational.

Rather, Naylor’s narrative suggests that these two must form a complementary system

symbolized by the necessity of George’s hands in order to facilitate Cocoa’s healing:

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[Mama Day] looks down at her hands again. In all her years she could count on

half of her fingers folks she’d met with a will like his. He believes in himself—

deep within himself—‘cause he ain’t never had a choice. And he keeps it

protected down in his center, but she needs that belief buried in George. Of his

own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his hand in hers—his very

hand—so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before. A

single moment was all she asked, even a fingertip to touch hers here at the other

place. So together they could be the bridge for [Cocoa] to walk over. Yes, in his

very hands he already held the missing piece she’d come looking for. (285)

Clearly, Mama Day realizes the necessity for George’s belief in himself, and she does not

attempt to extinguish that belief, only find within it a space, a niche, in which George can avow

the woman-centered economy of knowing that will not only accommodate Cocoa’s spirituality

(linked to both her race and gender), but expand George’s own sense of self that is inextricably

bound up with Cocoa’s. As Mama Day tells Abigail her sister, “He’s a part of her, Abigail. And

that’s the part that Ruby done fixed to take it out of our hands” (267).

Irigaray’s motivation for claiming that women need a divine is rearticulated several times

within her lecture. “According to this world, these worlds” states Irigaray, “female identity

always comes down to empirical parameters that prevent a woman, and the world of women,

from getting themselves together as a unit” (Author’s italics 72). Irigaray’s motivation, therefore,

explicitly names the unity of women as the driving force of her argument. But to whom does

Irigaray refer when she claims that “Our theological tradition presents some difficulty as far as

God in the feminine gender is concerned”? When Irigaray claims that “The most influential

representation of God in our culture over the last two thousand years has been a male trinitary

God and a Virgin mother,” it is necessary to question to whose culture Irigaray refers. Clearly,

Irigaray’s culture and theological tradition is one within which predominantly white or European

women have moved for centuries, and to apply this theoretical approach to instances of the

divine within African-American texts would be to neglect their differing historical development

which manifests itself not only in the re-creation of African elements within women-centered

spiritualities, but also in those traumatic moments of slavery.

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Although it would be a simplistic reduction to assume a monolithic version of African-

American spirituality, much current discourse by African-American female and male authors

discusses the significance of a unifying historical link to a Christian spirituality concomitant with

the traumatic moment of chattel slavery perpetuated upon the shores of the “New World.” That

spirituality frequently combines African and Christian elements to create an African-American

Christianity adapted to the experience of historical trauma specifically forged within an enslaved

community. In arguing against homophobic attitudes within the black church and community at

large, Kelly Brown Douglas emphasizes that “the authority of scripture is in large measure

determined by whether or not a text supports the life and freedom of the Black community”

(107). Noting the ways in which white culture used and perverted biblical scripture to “justify

slavery” (96), Douglas issues a passionate plea to the black community to resist repeating

oppressive white tactics. In addition to pointing out the “oral/aural” nature of what Douglas

terms “selective” biblical transmission (92-4), Douglas also informs that “There is no radical

break in most African traditions between the spiritual and fleshly realms: all that is of the earthly

realm is God’s and is sacred” (84). Clearly, African-American spirituality differs from Irigaray’s

“theological tradition.” Rather than advocating severance with Christian theology, Douglas

explains that African-American Christianity attempts to challenge from within orthodox

convictions that are either inapplicable or hostile to the black community. Brown’s explication of

African-American Christianity’s uniqueness likewise appears within Naylor’s Mama Day.

The tradition of “Candle Walk” supersedes traditional Christmas festivities. Although the

Candle Walk celebration morphs to accommodate the distinctiveness of each generational

community, Mama Day remembers the legacy of stories that have punctuated the background of

Candle Walk night, stories that allude to “a slave woman who came to Willow Springs, and

when she left, she left in a ball of fire to journey back home east over the ocean” (111). While

the omniscient narrator gives no credence to the legends, Mama Day knows that “Candle Walk

was a way of getting help without feeling obliged” (110).

Mama Day’s other ways of knowing and the traditional practice of conjuring is figured

into a spiritual biblical paradigm compatibly. When a carping Pearl points her finger at Dr.

Buzzard’s opportunistic pseudo-conjuring practices Mama Day refuses to join in the gossip, even

though she has a bone to pick with Buzzard herself. Instead Mama Day signifies on Pearl, telling

35

her that “the devil—like the Lord—works in mysterious ways. And maybe he’s using Buzzard to

let folks see the big difference between the way he’s living his life and the way you’re living

yours” (93). In other words, Buzzard’s fun-loving deceit causes little harm compared to the

derision of a gossipy and hypocritical Christian like Pearl. Mama Day attends “prayer meeting”

(111) but not compulsorily, and she augments the natural course of events with her genuine and

benevolent conjuring. After Mama Day ritually assists Bernice, a young married woman

desperate to have a child, to become pregnant, Mama Day questions whether “God [would]

forgive her” (139) and realizes that “she wasn’t changing the natural course of nothing, she

couldn’t if she tried. Just using what’s there.” Within the narrative, “what’s there” is what the

mind believes. Belief is axiomatic to Willow Springs’ cosmology; Mama Day remarks time and

again that “the mind is everything” (90).

Irigaray posits a male versus female dynamic within the world, and though this dynamic

appears within both Naylor’s text and the theoretical approach of womanist theology, within the

Irigarayan text it appears as a hostile and oppositional force that enunciates a binary in which a

gendered “not-A” supplants “A.” Irigaray questions this tendency within the parameters of her

theory by asserting that “If we resist hierarchies (the man/woman hierarchy, or state/woman, or a

certain form of God/woman, or machine/woman), only to fall back into the power (pouvoir) of

nature/woman, animal/woman, even matriarchs/women, women/women, we have not made

much progress” (60). The solution Irigaray provides for this dilemma is merely to “enter further

into womanhood” which, if the possibility of defining “womanhood” were attainable, appears to

only further entrench the binaries her theory inscribes.

One further issue in Irigaray’s theoretical assertion which is inapplicable to the study of

African-American goddess texts is the prefiguring of the goddess’s destruction. “There comes a

time for destruction,” to repeat Irigaray’s assertion, “But, before destruction is possible, God or

the gods must exist.” Clearly, creation of the goddess in Irigaray’s model is a strategic maneuver

rather than a genuinely received historical or cultural legacy. This is not to condemn either the

construction or destruction of a goddess mythography within the contextual framework of a

white or European feminist paradigm, but rather to stress the incongruity of this type of strategic

prognostication as compared to African-American womanist theology and texts such as Mama

Day that are more appropriately assessed within the womanist ideology. The Christian church

36

and teachings are part of the historical legacy of African-American womanists. Thomas explains

that “certain feminist theological trends regard the institutional church as a patriarchal space

anathema to women, thus advising women to abandon the ecclesiastical mainstream. For African

American women, however, the black church has been the central historical institution which has

helped their families survive.” Thomas notes that critique of the black church is a necessary task

incumbent upon African-American women because, in Thomas’s words, “we comprise two-

thirds of the black church in America. We are the black church. The church would be bankrupt

without us and the church would shut down without us.” Thus, an African-American womanist

theological paradigm works within, rather than seeking to demolish or abandon, current church

doctrine whose legacy is imbibed within a context of genuine historical meaningfulness.

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CHAPTER 2

POSTMODERN IDENTITY TROUBLE AND GLORIA

NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect.

. . . It causes dreams, it intoxicates whole peoples, gives them false memories,

quickens their reflexes, keeps their old wounds open, torments them in their

repose, leads them into delusions of grandeur or persecution, and makes nations

bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vain.

--Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: History and Politics

Revisiting one’s collective history has consistently been the first step in the

overturning of a society’s regime; having a history of one’s own is a vital step

toward resistance and the regrouping . . . of any community that has been

dominated by another more powerful group.

--Erika R. Apfelbaum, “And Now What, After Such Tribulations?”

The following analysis will attempt to synthesize the paradox illustrated in the preceding

dialectic of the two epigraphs by examining key passages within Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.

Interspersed throughout those passages are voices of African-American theorists and authors that

contest or concur with either of the two points of view, in whole or in part. Underlying the

theoretical trajectory of this analysis is Judith Butler’s notion of the reiterative performativity of

gender applied to race. Prior to analyzing the concept of African-American identity in Naylor’s

Mama Day, I will briefly explain the reasons for applying such a philosophical critique,

enunciated from the white, lesbian subject position of Judith Butler and filtered through the lens

38

of a white female heterosexual critical analyst. It is imperative to do so here, primarily since I

have argued in Chapter One that the Irigarayan argument calling for the creation of a feminine

divine is theoretically inapplicable to much criteria presented by African-American goddess

texts, specifically because Irigaray’s formulation reinscribes the male/female binary rather than

figuring males and females as interdependent and prefigures the strategic destruction of the

goddess1 when she is no longer necessary to feminism. Those antagonistic and prefigurative

movements establish the goddess as a disposable tool for identity formation, reverse the current

male/female dichotomy that African-American womanist theology attempts to integrate, and take

as disingenuous the historical, social, and individual importance of African-American female

spirituality. First, Butler’s assertion that both sex and gender are reiteratively performed is a

consistent and provocative notion within academic theoretical discourse. Especially significant to

Queer Theory, Butler’s assertions are becoming central to more “mainstream” academic

theoretical considerations. In my experience, those considerations have inevitably led to the

question of its applicability to race and racial performance. Second, Butler’s arguments take the

de-construction of identity to a radical limit. Though many other scholars argue that identity is

performed Butler sustains that argument more exhaustively, using a philosophical methodology

that destabilizes the current limit of performativity by foraying into its biological roots.

When discussing postmodern concepts of identity within a black context, bell hooks cites

a response she often hears: “Yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one.”2 Current

theoretical discourse proposes a de-construction of identity while many narratives such as Mama

Day strive to construct and re-construct identities through recourse to a historical past “written

on the body.”3 Therefore, in this chapter, I will question how the theoretical formulations noted

by Judith Butler in her critique of the genealogy of gender in Gender Trouble can be extended to

the concept of race and the notion of an essential African-American identity, whether Naylor’s

Mama Day promotes or complicates the nature of that identity, and draw attention to ways in

which identity construction can be simultaneously advantageous and disadvantageous, liberating

and limiting, to individuals who identify (or who feel compelled to identify) with collective

identities.

If the following analysis seems to present no definitive conclusion, I admit that I have not

adopted one. Instead, I find myself in a state of constant vacillation, repeating “But on the other

39

hand . . .” much like Tevia in Fiddler on the Roof. Essentialist notions of identity are potentially

empowering and liberating. They provide historically subordinated groups recourse to positive

identifications that assist individuals to transcend the pernicious stereotypes reified and exploited

by white ideology. On the other hand, they can be restrictive for those who assume them and

exclusionary for individuals that do not pass the often stringent tests that allow communities to

place them easily.

Because I am generally interpellated by the society in which I reside as white, my desire

to enter the controversial arena of racialized identity politics might seem unnecessary. Indeed,

more than a few of my peers in academia have expressed astonishment over my decision,

frequently posing the following: “Why are you researching race? You’re white!” If I were to

possess no ideological resistance to whiteness, that might be a reasonable question for me to

consider. Certainly, no one would express any qualms had I decided to pursue my intended study

of eighteenth-century British literature—a traditionally suitable field for white academics, which

is not at all to suggest that it is somehow a “cop-out,” although it could have been in my

particular situation.

During my graduate study, I have been mesmerized by voices, such as Renee R. Curry’s,

that insist “Although white women have argued against their exclusion from the white male

world’s glories, they have hardly argued for inclusion in white male nightmares. In the case of

claiming whiteness, invisibility has served as a beneficial mask that enables and furthers white

women’s irresponsibility” (6), and I have genuinely sought to understand the offenses for which

I have been charged. I listened to the sharp criticism contained in the statements of women of

color and gradually came to understand, not only that it was warranted, but that my behavior had

to change and my response was long overdue.

While whiteness has become and continues to be an ideological battle I now engage on a

daily basis, I also witness the identity conflicts that exist within my own family. As the product

of a mother that possesses (and resists) a white identity and a father who is Jordanian, my

children often consider where they belong in the world: are they Arab? Jordanian? white? all of

the above? none of the above? Although they are generally treated as white in the United States

(unless they reveal their Jordanian heritage) and are directed to check the box marked “white” on

40

institutional forms, they do not feel at all white. In family get-togethers involving my white

family, my children are treated differently than their white cousins—they are not seen as quite

white. They identify more easily with their Jordanian relatives (although their slightly lighter

skin color is valued and, hence, still a cause for differentiation), savoring the traditional elements

of Arab culture which combat the alienation they experience living in the United States. And

when the tradition and conformity threatens to become suffocating, they know that a plane can

return them fairly quickly to the more unobtrusive relationships and culture that characterize

their lives in the US. And while my sons view Arab culture rather unproblematically due to the

prestige it assigns to their maleness, my daughter contests the lesser agency allowed her paternal

aunts. Ultimately, my children possess transient identities that don’t fit snugly inside any

particular group. Do they belong to a racialized “Thirdspace?” Certainly, this category might

enable them to feel as if they belong somewhere, anywhere. Edward Soja explains his notion of

“Thirdspace” as

rooted in . . . a recombinatorial and radically open perspective . . . a critical

strategy of ‘thirding-as Othering,’ [that] open[s] up our spatial imaginaries to

ways of thinking and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any

attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives, by

interjecting an-Other set of choices. In this critical thirding, the original binary

choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of

restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing

categories to open new alternatives (6).

If race can be considered a location for “thirding,” I would stipulate that “the original

binary choice” must not be dismissed at all, but problematized. The construction of race is unlike

the construction of gender. While hermaphroditic and transgendered identities are able to

destabilize the binary of male/female, it does not follow that a black/white or white/black binary

must undergo an identical process. Here is how the scenario plays out: Judith Butler’s critique of

the genealogy of gender dismantles normative heterosexuality inhabiting both sides of the

male/female binary; but with the white/black binary, what needs to take place is a dismantling of

whiteness (which an opposing ideological blackness effectively assists) and a concomitant

“Thirdspace” must be recognized as a viable location for the creation of identities that do not

41

exclusively or comfortably reside within either location. It is crucial to understand the different

ways that gender and race inform deconstructionist theoretical paradigms—they do not play out

in the same way. Black communities, Arab communities, Jewish communities, and many more

communities maintain unification through a shared sense of commitment to racialized identities.

Feminist identities have proven to be tenuously maintained. And as Aida Hurtado notes,

oppression by rejection or seduction works differently. But perhaps the location Soja describes is

one that might afford my children a sense of belonging to an “imagined community,” to borrow

Benedict Anderson’s term. Their dilemmas mean that identity politics has become a profound

consideration in my home and as the voices of many authors presented in this analysis show,

identity politics presents an increasingly complex challenge to academic discourse. In Gloria

Naylor’s novel, it is a challenge from which it is impossible for Cocoa to withdraw.

In the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, Butler discusses attempts to apply her

genealogical critique to the subject of race and notions of its constructed nature, raising the

following proviso:

. . . racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways

that need to be made explicit, but . . . race and gender ought not to be treated as

simply analogies. I would therefore suggest that the question to ask is not whether

the theory of performativity is transposable onto race, but what happens to the

theory when it tries to come to grips with race. Many of these debates have

centered on the status of “construction,” whether race is constructed in the same

way as gender. My view is that no single account of construction will do, and that

these categories always work as background for one another, and they often find

their most powerful articulation through one another.

Indeed, “no single account of construction will do.” Perhaps Cocoa’s very last thought in

Naylor’s novel sums it up best: “there are just too many sides to the whole story” (311).

However, bearing Judith Butler’s proviso in mind, it is possible to set out on a multilateral

examination of Cocoa’s identity formation through alternative lenses, primarily those historical

and phenotypical lenses that resist a reductive analogical critique with gender.

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Written by Naylor in 1989, Mama Day opens ten years into the future, in August of 1999.

The story proper then shifts to a time eighteen years into the past and begins with the story of

Cocoa, the granddaughter of Abigail and great niece of Abigail’s sister Mama Day. Naylor limns

Cocoa as a stubbornly independent twenty seven year-old African-American woman who has

relocated “beyond the bridge” in New York City, who serendipitously meets and then resists

loving George, the African-American male she is fated to marry, and as a woman who must

realize and embrace the legacy symbolized by Sapphira, passed down to Cocoa through her

matrilineal genealogy. The novel thus revolves around the concept of Cocoa’s identity formation,

a formation culturally specific to an (hypothetical) African-American female.

Although Cocoa has returned home every year for the past seven years during August,

the first visit Naylor presents to her readers occurs when Cocoa is twenty seven years-old. Mama

Day watches as her great niece disembarks from Dr. Buzzard’s truck and approaches her

grandmother Abigail’s house. “When did it happen” Mama Day wonders, “this kind of blooming

from pale to gold?” (47). Cocoa’s skin is paler than her grandmother’s and Mama Day’s. All the

Days, it should be remembered, are descended from the putatively Norwegian Bascombe Wade,

whose origin is highlighted in the novel in order to demonstrate the separateness of the African-

American community residing on the island of Willow Springs from those communities existing

in the United States (Willow Springs is located within no state). Cocoa’s skin is quite light; at

one point she describes herself as having “no color” (20). Her lighter pigment has been a source

of distress for her from childhood, causing her to question the motivation of men who might

believe that she is beautiful. “It was awful growing up” Cocoa laments, “looking the way I did,

on an island of soft brown girls, or burnished ebony girls with their flashing teeth against that

deep satin skin. Girls who could summon all the beauty of midnight by standing, arms akimbo,

in the full sun” (232-33).

When Mama Day sees Cocoa return to Willow Springs after another year and describes

the blackness of her grand niece, it is clear that she refers, not to a physical color, but to an

essential and ideological blackness, one based on the historical and matrilineal legacy of

Sapphira. Optimally, Cocoa should grow into and acquire this metaphysical blackness as she

matures: “The lean thighs, tight hips, the long strides flashing light between the blur of strong

legs—pure black. . . . the Baby Girl brings back the great, grand Mother. We ain’t seen 18 & 23

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black from that time till now. The black that can soak up all the light in the universe, can even

swallow the sun” (48). Cocoa’s existence, it is hoped, will bring back a kind of redemption to the

Days, to blackness, and specifically, to black females. Cocoa must acquire this blackness for the

purposes of contesting the negative connotations that stem from social stereotypes and the

negative self-perception produced by those stereotypes.

Though this blackness is historical, its historicity is specific to Cocoa; it is a blackness

that must be acquired intuitively and, as will be discussed, somatically rather than learned from

textbooks or the academic study of history. Although Cocoa does return to school later in the

novel in order to study history, Mama Day signals the inadequacy of Cocoa’s endeavor to “‘find

herself’” (Mama Day’s perception is always intuitively sound): “Baby Girl did have something

lost to her, but she weren’t gonna find it in no school” (150). Cocoa’s process of identity

formation will be completed (within the confines of the novel), however, as she gradually

acquires the blackness of her “great, grand Mother” and surrenders the ambivalence, antagonism,

and self-doubt acquired as a result of her surroundings: the cruelness of the children that accused

her of having “white blood” (47), the Cosmo magazine (which overvalues whiteness) Cocoa

turns to for guidance in her relationships, the fact that the man she loves was involved in a

serious relationship with a white woman named Shawn—the markers of race are everywhere

haunting Cocoa with mixed-message refrains. Cocoa cannot escape from the specter of race. To

cast aside her blackness would mean severance from her familial roots; to assume an ideological

whiteness would always be to fake, to pass, for something she is not entirely. Naylor does not

present Cocoa with a synthesis of choice. She must, if she is to survive, re-turn to her black

heritage.

African-American author and daughter of Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker expresses a

similar ambivalence regarding the paleness of her skin and the privilege that it carries: “. . . when

I stand next to one of my favorite women friends, an absolute goddess who is as brown as

mahogany, I feel like the chunky, awkward poor cousin just visiting from Siberia. When she

turns to look at me, I feel a kind of shame alongside my deep affection. I am conscious that the

color of my skin carries privilege that may wound, a lightness that can betray.”4 For Walker, the

stigma of whiteness within the African-American community stems from the shame of the

historical brutality of forced miscegenation and a repugnance of the privilege that comes from

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being lighter than the community to which she belongs, but the guilt it generates also originates

within the African-American community itself, resulting in a misperceived alliance with the

oppressive race. Walker engages the dilemma of her racialized identity quite differently from

Cocoa, however. Her writing displays the complexity of her search for belonging. Walker writes:

This way of ordering the world is especially difficult for a generation that has

grown up transgender, bisexual, interracial, and knowing and loving people who

are racist, sexist, and otherwise afflicted. We have trouble formulating and

perpetuating theories that compartmentalize and divide according to race and

gender and all of the other signifiers. For us the lines between Us and Them are

often blurred, and as a result we find ourselves seeking to create identities that

accommodate ambiguity and our multiple positionalities: including more than

excluding, exploring more than defining, searching more than arriving. (xxxiii)

But while Walker finds a certain comfort and, perhaps, a certain challenge in the multiple

shift and flux of identity, Cocoa values the stability she finds on the island of Willow Springs. As

Naylor shows Cocoa returning home that August, Cocoa thinks, “Knowing that as long as the old

survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a

total stranger” (49). Both the physical geography of the island, inextricably tied to her heritage,

and the African-American woman-centered community of Willow Springs feed Cocoa’s spirit.

This sustenance plays out on the discursive body, and when Cocoa’s visit comes to an end, her

grandmother notices its impact: “Abigail holds a young woman on her front porch who moves

different now. It only took a little while for her body to remember how to flow in time with the

warm air and the swaying limbs of the oaks. She is deeper in color and rounder in her face and

hips” (50). Cocoa’s flesh imbibes blackness and communal warmth from Willow Springs’

women and topography which Naylor punctuates with easy currents and arboreal motions; these

anchors put meat on Cocoa’s bones.

Both idiomatic language and gesture play significant roles in cohering George and

Cocoa’s coupling. After Cocoa receives an acceptance letter from NYU to pursue her history

degree, George arrives home after a day at the office and finds that Cocoa has mismanaged

cooking dinner. As George playfully turns up his nose at Cocoa’s “goulash” (144), Cocoa

45

responds with “Nigger—please” (145). George describes the comfort of understanding Cocoa’s

racialized gesture and the way in which Cocoa puts him rhetorically at ease. George thinks:

Only you could have put your hands on your hips, narrowed your eyes, and come

out with that. It was effortless and real. And above all—no, I should say, beneath

it all, we both understood. A small moment, long forgotten in the drama of our

lives. And so much of why I was with you, instead of [Shawn], hinged on it. No, I

didn’t marry you because only you could call me a nigger. It’s just that you’d

never feel the need to explain.

For African-American females such as Walker and the fictional Cocoa who struggle with

difference endemic to a community already marked as different, females who are never

genuinely accepted within white culture, essentialist notions of race might provide alternative

ways of being accepted within the black community and working toward its solidarity. Yet,

because these notions are so closely linked to the tangible physical and biological body, they risk

collapsing into notions of difference that also exclude individuals who fail to meet intra-group

criteria. However, the link between the ideology of blackness and the tangible body arises, as

African American Professor of English Carla L. Peterson notes, from the distinctiveness of

“African cosmology’s refusal to distinguish clearly between the realms of life and death, which

are demarcated only by a boundary of water” (x). Kelly Brown Douglas concurs, stressing that

“It cannot be said often enough that African worldviews tend not to make a distinction between

sacred and secular realities” (132). Analyzing Suzan-Lori Parks’ play, The Death of the Last

Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Yvette Louis notes how “The play’s context is the history

of racial violence and of the discursive and conceptual associations of the black body with the

fragmentation that made ‘flesh’ its primary narrative” (142). This narrative plays out acutely for

many African American women, in whose name “Parks appropriates the speech act to transform

the narrative of ‘flesh’ to the subject positionality of a more integrated black female self,

emphasizing the signifier as a contested space in which resistance and recuperation of identity

can take place” (144), though Louis also notes that Parks’ character of Black Woman “runs the

risk of reifying a stereotype of black womanhood” (146). Thus, the creation of positive identities

within contexts that refigure and aim to construct black identities runs the risk of policing black

female identity formation even while it must stress wholeness at the level of the body.

46

Recollect, if you will, that the preceding chapter refers to an incident in which Cocoa

realizes that George is divulging information related to his relationship with a white woman

named Shawn. During that incident, as discussed, Cocoa’s anger coalesces around the black male

stereotype perpetrated by white men fearful of black male sexuality and the loss of a mythical

white masculinist purity, and projects that anger onto the white woman moralized in white

masculinist ideology as the sustainer of sexual purity. Yet, there exists another facet of that

incident which revolves around the issue of Cocoa’s identity formation, and that is Cocoa’s re-

collection of a specifically African heritage connected to Cocoa somatically. Cocoa’s train of

thought demonstrates the corporeality of that connectedness and Cocoa’s attribution of this

connectedness to the African American community, a community whose existence Cocoa re-

members beginning with experiences of chattel slavery:

Now, I’m gonna tell you about cool. It comes with the cultural territory: the

beating of the bush drum, the rocking of the slave ship, the rhythm of the hand

going from cotton sack to cotton row and back again. It went on to settle into the

belly of the blues, the arms of Jackie Robinson, and the head of every ghetto kid

who lives to a ripe old age. You can keep it, you can hide it, you can blow it—but

even when your ass is in the tightest crack, you must never, ever, LOSE it.

And I didn’t, did I? I dug back to wherever in our history I had to get it,

and let it put my body on remote control. I never missed a beat—my steps didn’t

falter, my voice stayed even, I nodded where I should have, stuck in a question

now and then, my hands didn’t even sweat—cool.

Explaining how Cocoa’s past on the ostensibly free island of Willow Springs (with the

exception of Sapphira, “who took her freedom in 1823” [111; original italics]) includes the

history of slavery is not the primary aim here. It may be simply a lapse contained within the

novel’s diegesis, or Naylor may be insinuating that plantation slaves transmigrated onto the

island of Willow Springs’ from the mainland—after all, Sapphira’s seven sons must have

obtained female partners from some place. Or, most probably, Naylor illustrates that Cocoa’s

historical memory is collective. Yet, The significance of the passage lies in its African imagery,

its references to the transatlantic slave trade including the rhythmic motion of the ship, and its

47

somatic gestures reiteratively produced mnemonically. Naylor’s words repeatedly reference the

body: “belly,” “arms,” “head,” and “ass”; they repeatedly gesture toward physical manifestations

of such memories: “steps,” “voice,” and “nods.” It is here that Cocoa, reeling from the anger of

George’s revelation, relinquishes control of the literal flesh, allowing the force of the past—a

force greater than herself—to automatically drive the reaction that is beyond her ability to

control.

In Mama Day, re-membering the body does not signify within the masculinist economy

of Cocoa’s husband George. As with Parks’ character of Black Man, George must find

wholeness within “the subjectivity and will to power of Black Woman [Cocoa and her

matrilineal kin], in keeping with the womanist agenda that there cannot be liberation for self

without liberation for the other” (Louis 153). George’s wholeness must also be realized within a

specific geographical and womanist space divorced from the white mainland where he was

orphaned at birth and raised in a state home for boys. His philosophy of life is statistical,

mechanistic, and disavows the intuitive phenomena of the mind. Willow Springs’ women,

however, know that there is often more to phenomena than meets the eye. The mind is a

powerful device for these women; it possesses the ability to shape, metaphysically, the

circumstances of life. George’s creed is to live only in the present—a philosophical legacy

acquired growing up in the state orphanage. Naylor does not denounce this philosophy as she

limns the character of George, but concedes that it is, at times, a necessary approach to life under

certain circumstances. George’s first encounter with Willow Springs allows us to view the

island’s physical terrain and tangible attributes alongside its perceiver:

My suspicions were confirmed when we drove over that shaky wooden bridge:

you had not prepared me for paradise. And to be fair, I realized that there was

nothing you could have said that would have made any sense to me. I had to be

there and see—no, feel—that I was entering another world. Where even the word

paradise failed once I crossed over The Sound. Sure, I can describe what I saw: a

sleepy little section of wooden storefronts, then sporadic houses of stucco, brick

and clapboard all framed by palmettos, live oaks, and flowering bushes; every

now and then a span of marshland, a patch of woods, but how do I describe air

that thickens so that it seems as solid as the water, causing colors and sounds and

48

textures to actually float in it? So as that old blue truck crept along, there was no

choice but to breath in lungfuls of oaks dripping with silvery gray moss, the high

leaning pines. My nose and mouth were coated with the various shades of greens,

browns, and golds in the muddy flatlands. And if someone had asked me about

the fragrance from the whisperings of the palmettos, or the distant rush of the surf,

I would have said that it all smelled like forever. (175)

The rhetorical space opens up to the perceiver (both fictive and readerly) as one

simultaneously canny and uncanny (heimlich and unheimlich)5 in the metaphysical sense of

longing it produces. It is an ancient home residing in memory, therefore canny; it is an ancient

home of which George has been unfamiliar all his life, therefore uncanny. In his exposition of

these two inextricably related phenomenon, Freud notes that “. . . we can understand why the

usage of speech has extended das Heimliche into its opposite das Unheimliche; for this uncanny

is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that

has been estranged only by the process of repression” (944). George’s analytical tendencies

encourage the reader to believe and to privilege the metaphysical over things rationally

perceived, for if a character whose iron-clad determination to believe solely in the present can be

challenged, then Willow Springs must be undoubtedly beyond the ability to rationally

comprehend.

Unarguably formulated within a language of Eurocentric and masculinist ideology, Freud

nevertheless attributes an ability to sense the uncanny to all people: “. . . each one of us has been

through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive

men, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces of it which now strikes us

as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us

and bringing them to expression.” It is this common ability which allows readers of every gender

or race to understand the, at once, uncanny and canny associations of Willow Springs. However,

if we concede as to the repressive nature of the ability, then we also must allow that certain

individuals experience a greater or lesser repression of what is “familiar and old established,”

and that this repression is often inflicted by dominant groups harboring hostile and exploitative

intentions toward those they seek to dominate and devalue. In this way, the mythography of

49

Willow Springs benefits George, allowing him to confront and reclaim a collectively repressed

experience that most of Cocoa’s female relatives have refused to forget and desire to pass on.

A conversation between Cocoa and George demonstrates the pain involved in the process

of re-membering, or in Cocoa’s case, the selective mnemonics and hedging she employs that

reveal the threshold of that pain. George recollects:

I stopped asking you questions you couldn’t answer, because it was irritating you.

I didn’t know why, but I could guess. You were always sensitive about your

complexion, going out of your way to stress that you were a black woman if

someone was about to mistake you for a Spaniard or Creole. It was certainly one I

could never make. We only had to get into an argument for me to be reminded—

your fists balled up on your hips, you drawing blood with your never-ending

mouth—you were, in spirit at least, as black as they come. (218-19)

George’s thoughts provide understanding of the importance of possessing recourse to an

ideological blackness that bolsters Cocoa and allows her to express herself through a culture of

gesture recognizable within the black community, even by individuals such as George that grew

up apart from that community. Again, the body (“fists,” “hips,” “blood,” and “mouth”) signify

the positive image of strength for the African American female whose heritage is inscribed with

the story of slavery. George continues:

No, you could have easily descended from that slave woman who talked a man

out of a whole island. But you hated to think about the fact that you might also be

carrying a bit of him. What difference did it make? All of us carried strains of

God-knows-what from God-knows-where except the American Indian. And if

they were traced back far enough, there were strains of Asian blood in them. I

thought it was unique that you had a heritage intact and solid enough to be able to

walk over the same ground that your grandfather did, to be leading me toward the

very house where your great-grandfather was born. Even your shame was a

privilege few of us had. We could only look at our skins and guess. At least you

knew. (219)

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George’s comments reveal his ultimate lack of understanding. Perhaps for George,

blackness does not function at the level of the body in the same way that it does for Cocoa. Is it

because George is male, or is it because George does not realize his present and historical

inextricability from the black female body? Naylor’s text implies the latter. Yet, George’s lack of

realization is also bound up with his masculinist ideology, and perhaps that ideology is also

white.

The central African-American female characters of Willow Springs: Cocoa, Mama Day,

and Abigail, all resist the persistent question of Bascombe Wade. The aporia in these characters’

ability to articulate the whiteness in their lineage issues from the painful recesses of historical

memory. While many African American women express being deeply troubled by the inscription

of white ancestry upon their family tree, others experience less trauma. Kiini Ibura Salaam

admits to experiencing this discomfiture, if briefly, herself: “Acknowledging my lack of racial

purity was momentarily painful. In the United States, we behave as if we were shot from African

Genes with no European interference. But the truth is black Americans are of mixed race (and it

isn’t only Native American blood in the mix)” (259). Yet others, such as Deborah McDowell,

seek answers to haunting questions such as

What might contemporary black women’s bodies “remember” about the

possession of and assault on their bodies, on their reproductive systems? Can we

speak of such things as deep “memory” of a system that claimed their bodies and

the issue of their bodies in order to reproduce itself? Does that memory speak

today in tumors on the uterine wall in numbers disproportionate to black women’s

representation in the general female population? Could these tumors constitute an

unvoiced, unconscious response to the dangerous realities of supplying more

bodies for a differently exploitative system to destroy? (314)

Butler argues that “The feminist recourse to an imaginary past needs to be cautious not to

promote a politically problematic reification of women’s experience in the course of debunking

the self-reifying claims of masculinist power” (46). Contemporary mainstream feminism falls

into this problematic trap, even as it attempts to assert the equality of women, by employing the

romantic and mythological notion of motherhood, for example, to argue for ways in which

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women might be adept in positions of political leadership and problem solving. In effect,

contemporary mainstream feminism argues that mothering skills innately possessed by female

politicians will allow for peaceful solutions between aggressive political actors. But, not every

female feels herself to be a “mother-woman”;6 indeed Butler’s entire thesis deconstructs the

entire stability of female sex as well as female gender. But can Butler’s argument hold true for

the notion of race?

Is it possible for the notion of an essential African-American spirituality to stereotype,

limit, and exclude? Can African-American “goddess” literature that promotes an essentialist

notion of African-American spirituality perform an exclusionary function for writers such as

Rebecca Walker who claims that “the Goddess didn’t work for me”? In fact, Walker encourages,

rather, the acceptance of Buddhist practices. “The most profound injury that Buddhism can

address in African-Americans,” Walker writes, “is the fracture in our identity we continue to

hold as a result of slavery. The nature of the injury is disconnection from our ancestral lineage

and indigenous Divine. When we ask the question, ‘Who are we?’ Buddhism offers us great

clarity in realizing that being a human being is enough, and the rest is a footnote.”

Born in the United Kingdom, raised in Ghana, and presently a United States citizen and

openly homosexual African-American, the identity of Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony

Appiah crosses numerous borders. Appiah’s book The Ethics of Identity (2005) struggles fluently

with the politics of identity. Appiah discusses the attempt to formulate positive black and gay

identities. Appiah writes:

. . . I see how the story goes. It may even be historically, strategically necessary

for the story to go this way. But I think we need to go on to the next step, which is

to ask whether the identities constructed in this way are ones we can be happy

with in the longer run. Demanding respect for people as blacks and as gays can go

along with the notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American

or a person with same–sex desires. In a particularly fraught and emphatic way,

there will be proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are

made; expectations to be met; battles [sic] lines to be drawn. It is at this point that

someone who takes autonomy seriously may worry whether we have replaced one

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kind of tyranny with another. We know that acts of recognition, and the civil

apparatus of such recognition, can sometimes ossify the identities that are their

object. Because here a gaze can turn to stone, we can call this the Medusa

Syndrome. The politics of recognition, if pursued with excessive zeal, can seem to

require that one’s skin color, one’s sexual body, should be politically

acknowledged in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and

their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self. And personal, here, does not

mean secret or (per impossible) wholly unscripted or innocent of social meanings;

it means, rather, something that is not too tightly scripted, not too resistant to our

individual vagaries. Even though my race and my sexuality may be elements of

my individuality, someone who demands that I organize my life around these

things is not an ally of individuality. Because identities are constituted in part by

social conceptions and by treatment-as, in the realm of identity there is no bright

line between recognition and imposition. (110)

The African-American debate over the efficacy of unification tactics forged within the

collective construction of an African-centered nativist identity dates at least as far back as the

Harlem Renaissance. Toward the end of that Renaissance, Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the

Spring (1932) addresses various of those unifying appeals in circulation among Harlem’s artistic

community at the time, appeals which included militancy, communism, individualism, and

humanism. Toward the end of Thurman’s novel a party occurs that allows intellectuals and

artists to articulate these various and varying strategies. The character of Raymond, also a writer

and believed to be Thurman’s pseudonym within the novel, assesses each of these appeals and

eventually leans toward the anti-purist argument of individualism he finds most agreeable. “Is

there really any reason why all Negro artists should consciously and deliberately dig into African

soil for inspiration and material unless they actually wish to do so?” Raymond asks (237).

Thurman has Paul the artist discuss his heritage of “German, English, and Indian ancestors,”

asking “How can I go back to African ancestors when their blood is so diluted and their country

and times so far away? I have no conscious affinity for them at all.” Clearly, the argument of

whether or not to “amalgamate,” a term Thurman’s character Raymond employs, or to

dissimilate is not a new consideration. What is fairly recent, however, is the way in which

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identities are discussed by poststructuralists as constructed and performed, and the inability of

more than a few individuals to find a comfortable niche within the politics of identity.

“Race is bullshit” insists Kiini Ibura Salaam, “A meaningless line drawn in sand by men

bent on world domination and oppression” (253). Salaam describes her experiences growing up

“African identified and black centered” in the creolized spatiality of New Orleans and the dis-

ruption of that black identity when visiting the Dominican Republic and Salvador, Brazil. In

New Orleans, Salaam notes the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of interpellating individuals

based on skin color. In her hometown, an individual must articulate the specific race to which he

or she belongs, but even that articulation is problematic, not only because it is unable to

transcend the specificity of a certain geographic locale, but also because within the very spaces

where one’s race is ostensibly established by articulation, the community with which one claims

to identify questions its legitimacy when the utterance conflicts with phenotypical characteristics.

During her childhood, Salaam mentions overhearing her mother, a light-skinned Creole,

express the desire that her children had been born with darker skin, leading Salaam to imagine

her mother’s difficulties within her own community. It also shocked Salaam, since she and her

siblings had always been the darkest members of her family. This “Thirdspace” to which Salaam,

as well as her mother, belongs, disrupts the established binary of white and black and the once

facile articulation of race, just as Butler’s articulation of the hermaphroditic individual and the

pre- and postoperative transsexual disrupts the binary of male/female. Within this space where

signified and signifier lose coherence, it is necessary to either reformulate notions of race or, as

Salaam attempts to do, repudiate the ideology that race dictates identity. Salaam claims that “The

biggest truth that race keeps at bay is that all of us are human” (259).

In “Rethinking the National Model,” Linda Hutcheon delivers a nuanced argument

regarding the creation of national narratives which have centered around notions of identity.

While Hutcheon acknowledges the dangers inherent in the attempt to create “culturally pure”

identities, she also acknowledges the positive and progressive value inherent in the act of

building up and constructing those identities. Seeking assurance that history will not repeat itself

and that marginalized groups will not duplicate the oppressive exclusionary practices initiated by

hegemonic groups, Hutcheon argues that “. . . these same groups have generally been alert to the

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exclusions and entrapments as well as to the emancipatory potential of those principles,

especially in their literary historical manifestations. Therefore, the longevity and continuing

appeal of the developmental model (and its ideological underpinnings) have to be understood in

context and not condemned outright as signs of backsliding” (13). While hopeful, Hutcheon’s

statement must be read with cautious optimism. The late Andrea Dworkin, scrutinizing her

Jewish upbringing and indoctrination, felt compelled to address the potential for repeating the

violence of history in the name of group cohesion and progressivism. “We took a country from

the people who lived there: we the dispossessed finally did it to someone else; we said They’re

Arabs, let them go somewhere Arab. . . . It may be a first for Jews, but everyone else has been

doing it throughout recorded history. It is recorded history” (6). Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, whose

trial is still in process, is the first woman to be charged with rape before ordering the killing of

Tutsi women in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 2002, former Bosnian Serb leader Biljana

Plavsic became the first female leader to have confessed to charges of persecution. Within the

fictional world of Mama Day, Naylor constructs the character of Ruby, Willow Springs’

malevolent conjure woman who uses her powers by attempting to kill Cocoa, an attempt that

stems from Ruby’s hysterical and delusional jealousy. Clearly the past and present (both literary

and historical) refute the notion that formerly subordinated groups’ and individuals’ “alertness”

prevents the recursivity of domination and oppression. While not oblivious to the atrocities

committed in the name of ethnic purity (indeed Hutcheon opens her chapter by noting its

historical context within “the final moments of the twentieth century, when various nations

around the world re-erupted into their pattern of sectarian violence in the name of ethnic or

religious identity” [3]), she also maintains that constructions of identity hold positive value.

Hutcheon presents a maze of responses to the identity politics of postcolonial narratives

(Hutcheon seems to prefer the use of ‘propter-colonial’ or ‘because of’ colonization), offering

her own analysis in what she refers to as “the witnessing of trauma” (19), noting that this act

“can only occur with the help of a listener” (22). This approach, even while it “may be yet

another constructed, even illusory, ‘fiction of power’ is both the danger and the entire point of

the exercise.” What Hutcheon seems to recognize is the absolute necessity for the articulation of

this trauma and its witnessing to occur, and it is, without question, a necessity for both groups

historically subordinated as well as dominant groups in that it “reclaim[s] the repressed, the

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blocked out, the marginalized [by] openly addressing the forces that caused the repressing, the

blocking, and the marginalizing in the first place.” But an equally important realization of this

reclamation is the way in which its articulation renders fluid the identity politics of hegemony,

allowing for the recognition that all social participants are also partakers in what Michael

Awkward refers to as “a multicultural synchronicity” (14). Awkward asserts that an “untainted

locational purity” can only be claimed “by erasing facts from [one’s] autobiographical account,”

and urges that “we must abandon fictions of natural affinity or unbridgeable perspectival

separateness.”

Hutcheon also presents Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridization in one of her most cogent

arguments concerning identity politics. “One of the ways [hybridization] does this,” writes

Hutcheon, “is by making hybridity replace purity, syncretism replace essentialism, the plural

replace the singular” (17). Judith Butler argues similarly regarding gender politics: “The critical

task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to

affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of

repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting

them” (188). In other words, the task of the academician and critical analyst ought to include an

offering up of narratives which seek to create and affirm the construction of identity, but to

perpetually and simultaneously offer up voices that “third” those identities such as those of

Salaam and Walker, whose transient identities resist the process of solidification into monolithic

unities. The task of the critical analyst is to resist historical determinism even while it respects

the integrity of the present, or as Butler explains

. . . not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to

redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural

domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible. If identities were

no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer

understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a

set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge

from the ruins of the old. (189-90)

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Thus, the conscientious and recursive task of opening up venues that allow articulation of

continually marginalized individuals and groups is at once hopeful and dynamic—a decolonizing

tool that resists “master” narratives. It cannot, however, be uncoupled from actively engaging or

attempting to witness the construction of identities designed to contest the pathology of

whiteness. The task at hand, however, addresses and ensures that only one-half of the traditional

dichotomy resists discursive solidification. In the following chapter, I address the problem of

whiteness by looking at another goddess text, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, and the

necessity for the de-construction of white ideology. De-stabilizing whiteness as ideology is an

equally urgent and fundamental task, for the tools of domination have historically and

horrifically been utilized by white individuals adhering to such an unproblematized and

unscrutinized identity.

Currently, the jury contemplating African-American identity politics is still out. It will be

for a long time to come. Analyses are as disparate as J. Martin Favor’s, which claims that “In

combating an oppression based on the category ‘race,’ we may re-create the notion of ‘race’

itself and, in doing so, hazard laying the framework for a new type of essentialism that

potentially reproduces many facets of the old one,” to that of James Cone’s urgent call for Black

Power: “What is needed, then, is not ‘integration’ but a sense of worth in being black, and only

black people can teach that. Black consciousness is the key to the black man’s emancipation

from his distorted self-image” (19). But I would suggest that the current and quotidian struggle

over racialized identities not neglect the question, “What happens to those who feel that they to

belong to no space exclusively?”

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CHAPTER 3

READING WHITE DESIRE IN SUE MONK KIDD’S THE

SECRET LIFE OF BEES

No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his

innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from

their vines.

--Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

Sue Monk Kidd, the white female author of The Secret Life of Bees, grew up in the small

town of Sylvester, Georgia. The novel reveals Kidd’s southern heritage and revolves around

many of the same themes explored by Gloria Naylor in Mama Day: identity, spirituality, other

ways of knowing, and a young woman’s need for a female “divine.” Initially set in Sylvan, South

Carolina, the novel features a young white girl named Lily. At an early age, Lily loses her

mother to a probable mishap in which Lily picks up a gun that has fallen to the floor and

accidentally shoots her. Afterward, Lily is raised by her abusive father T. Ray, with the help of

an African-American woman named Rosaleen. Set during the height of the Civil Rights

Movement in 1964, a dramatic turn of events unfolds when President Johnson signs the Civil

Rights Act and Rosaleen, accompanied by Lily, heads for town with the intention of registering

to vote. Rosaleen is taunted by a group of white men as she reaches the outskirts of town,

however, and she indignantly pours the juice of her snuff-bottle onto the men’s shoes. The

outraged group restrains Rosaleen while the local sheriff arrives and takes her to jail. Once there,

an especially belligerent and racist member of the white male group beats Rosaleen so severely

that she requires hospitalization. Lily, of course, is released, but her father is nevertheless

angered by her involvement in the situation. T. Ray threatens Lily with punishment and tells her

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what he knows will hurt his daughter more than anything else. “The truth is” T. Ray gloats,

“your sorry mother ran off and left you. The day she died, she’d come back to get her things,

that’s all” (39). As expected, the force of T. Ray’s statement unhinges Lily and she decides to

run away from home, but not alone. Lily sneaks Rosaleen past the guard at the hospital, and the

pair escapes to the South Carolina town of Tiburon where they obtain refuge in the home of three

African American sisters: August, June, and May.

Rosaleen and Lily do not wind up in Tiburon by chance; Lily chooses the town because

its name is written on the back of a picture of a black Madonna which Lily’s mother possessed

while she was alive (later on, August is revealed to be a beekeeper whose marketed Black

Madonna honey jars display just such a picture). The novel’s beginning complicates Lily’s

reasons for running away. T. Ray has told Lily that the white man who beat Rosaleen will

definitely kill the woman Lily cares for and needs. Yet for Lily, running away appears to be

more about following clues that might lead to the truth about her mother and, Lily hopes, refute

T. Ray’s terrible assertion that she was abandoned. Indeed, when Rosaleen questions Lily about

their destination, she finally realizes that Lily’s heist was merely incidental to her primary

motivation. “Oh,” [Rosaleen] said. “I get it. You ran off ‘cause of what your daddy said about

your mother. It didn’t have nothing to do with me in jail. And here you got me worrying myself

sick about you running away and getting in trouble over me, and you would’ve run off anyway.

Well, ain’t it nice of you to fill me in” (53). Although Rosaleen’s words offend Lily, she does not

refute them. The conversation between Rosaleen and Lily escalates; Lily seems unable to

understand how the secondary nature of her concern for Rosaleen insults and offends the woman

whose identity has genuinely acquired the status of surrogate mother, but whose identity is also

inextricably bound up with racialized significance—a fact that has relegated Rosaleen to

secondary, if not tertiary, status her entire life. Even the most incriminating of Rosaleen’s

accusations escapes Lily’s reflection: “Well, you sure had one [plan] back at the hospital, coming

in there saying we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that, and I’m supposed to follow you like

a pet dog. You act like you’re my keeper. Like I’m some dumb nigger you gonna save.” These

words incite Lily to act defensively, and the situation deescalates as Lily and Rosaleen part, sleep

for the night, and apologize to each other the following morning, bathing penitent and unclothed

in the cold waters of a secluded creek. It is Lily’s inability to recognize the circumstantial,

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historical, and cultural difference that exists between her and Rosaleen as well as Kidd’s tactic of

facile rapprochement between racialized characters without thorough exploration of deep-seated

racial issues that betray the novel’s well-meaning intent. Of course, Lily is still quite young, and

the temptation to excuse Lily’s naivete because of her youth and inexperience is constantly

present (her fourteenth birthday coincides with the fateful day), but because the novel is a

bildungsroman, one would expect Lily to address this tension and attempt to engage it, even if

problematically. Each time, however, the novel’s progression approaches the point of dialogical

confrontation it fails to engage the issue of race in any effectual or meaningful way, faltering

under a naive illusion of virtually effortless racial integration between black and white women.

This fantasy, I argue, might be considered analogous to casual interpretation by white readers of

texts written by black authors.

In Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Positionality, Michael

Awkward discusses the potentiality of misreadings of black texts by white readers: “But if

gender and race as we have traditionally perceived them are both by and large socially

constructed, then whiteness as a dominant position in the Western racial hierarchy is potentially

as formidable an obstacle to interpretive competence vis-à-vis black texts and contexts as

maleness is to persuasive feminist exegesis” (59). Awkward does not insist that informed white

readings are impossible, but questions how critics’ whiteness results in a misinformed and

misinterpreted discourse. One of the beneficial ways in which white critics approach black texts,

Awkard argues, is “rather than attempting to adopt either a black, racially neutral, or objective

reading position, use the occasion of an analysis of Afro-American texts to discuss their own

racial positionality’s effects upon the process of interpretation” (60). In other words, white critics

benefit from questioning the whiteness they possess and which frequently infects interpretive

analyses in ways that reinscribe gestures of entitlement. Kidd’s character of Lily performs these

gestures by refusing to recognize and question the cultural and historical differences that exist

between the African-American sisters who become her “mothers” (the last sentence of Kidd’s

novel reads “They are the moons shining over me.”) and herself. While the intent of this analysis

is not to prove that the premise of Kidd’s novel is a malicious one, its naivete is certainly

malignant, for the novel instantiates its protagonist’s wish-fulfillment for integration without

performing what Awkward refers to as “an energetic investigation of the cultural situation” (61).

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The novel presents another motivation for Lily’s flight from Sylvan, one that Kidd

constructs to underwrite the novel’s spiritual quest: she is harkening to a deeper and supernatural

call. Kidd begins to lay out this spiritual quest by presenting the eponymous bees early in the

novel. These bees have infiltrated the walls of Lily’s room as beneficent companions that reveal

themselves only to her, foreshadowing the sisters’ beekeeping home that will provide Lily

refuge, spiritual satisfaction, and maternal love. As the novel opens and Lily is shown looking

back on the formation of events contained within the narrative, she muses, “I want to say the

bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin

Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed” (2).

Lily and Rosaleen finally locate the pink house of the woman that produces Black

Madonna honey. As they enter the parlor, still unsure of the story they will fabricate to conceal

their bizarre experience, Lily viscerally grasps that she and Rosaleen have arrived at their

destination:

Some people have a sixth sense, and some are duds at it. I believe I must have it,

because the moment I stepped into the house I felt a trembling along my skin, a

traveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my

fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before

the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn’t.

(69)1

As she surveys the contents of the sisters’ parlor, Lily’s eyes catch on an object of

particular significance. It is an old ship’s masthead carved into the figure of a woman that Lily

thinks

was black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather,

her face a map of all the storms and journeys she’d been through. Her right arm

was raised, as if she was pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist.

It gave her a serious look, like she could straighten you out if necessary.

Even though she wasn’t dressed up like Mary and didn’t resemble the picture on

the honey jar, I knew that’s who she was. She had a faded red heart painted on her

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breast and a yellow crescent moon, worn down and crooked, painted where her

body would have blended into the ship’s wood.

. . . She was a mix of mighty and humble all in one. I didn’t know what to think,

but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my

chest and filled it up. (70)

August, May, and June house the figure Lily calls “the black Mary”; the black female

figure is integral to the spiritual practices of the Daughters of Mary—a group of African-

American women and one man that compose the sisters’ spiritual community who gather in the

sisters’ pink house in order to commemorate their patron, whose significance exceeds the black

Mary’s gender. Lily feels an immediate affinity with the black Mary, who empathetically

transmits to Lily the message: “Lily Owens, I know you down to the core” (71). The black Mary

assuages Lily’s spiritual yearnings, symbolizing for the maturing girl a divinity in female form,

providing her with an unfaltering and maternal assurance that she possesses value, worth, and

lovability despite her hatred for T. Ray and despite the possibility that she effected her mother’s

death. “Standing there” Lily thinks, “I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black

Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.” The black Mary,

therefore, opens up to Lily the possibility of her potential and the realness of her deficiencies.

She is the spiritual guidepost that Lily so desperately needs and desires. The black Mary’s

blackness never poses a dilemma for Lily; she never sees alternative significations of the raised

fist, never asks if this fist carries a meaning for the sisters that are not applicable to her in the

same way, and does not notice the broader signification of social and racial, rather than

individual, defiance in the black Mary’s gesture.

Lily finally comes up with a plausible story for August, the oldest of the sisters and the

sister whose wisdom most frequently presides. Lily tells August that she and Rosaleen are

runaways and in need of a place to stay, a half-truth which prompts August to offer shelter to the

ragged pair of women standing in her parlor. June, however, is resistant, and Lily notices this

resistance when “[t]he intake of June’s breath nearly sucked the air from the room” (72). June

objects, but August’s offer holds sway. After August leads Rosaleen and Lily to their

accommodations in the honey-house, a fatigued Lily lies down on her cot and contemplates the

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racial difference that exists between her and the sisters: “I felt that somehow I belonged here, I

really did, but I could have been in the Congo for how unfamiliar it felt. Staying in a colored

house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets—it was not something I

was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me” (78). Perhaps

prodded by June’s reaction, Lily momentarily experiences an inchoate racial consciousness that

forces her to confess, “Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I

thought [colored women] could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white.” As she

reflects on August’s keen and refined bearing, Lily finds herself surprised because they do not

correspond with her mental image of black women. “That’s what let me know I had some

prejudice buried inside me” she thinks. Yet, Lily is part of a larger ideology which she never

recognizes: whiteness and the entitlement society affords those who appear to reside within its

ideational limits.

Lily’s recognition that she possesses racist thoughts provides a minimal resolution, a

resolution that, at some level, might appear to absolve her. But in fact, recognition of one’s

acculturation into an ideology of whiteness and the prejudice it effects addresses but a fraction of

the assiduous process required for white individuals that must daily battle such acculturation.

Janet E. Helms’s psychological research proposes a model that includes six “statuses”2

individuals experience upon recognizing their whiteness: Contact, Disintegration, Reintegration,

Pseudoindependence, Immersion/Emersion, and Autonomy.3 Beverly Daniel Tatum describes

“[t]he first status, Contact, . . . as obliviousness” (57). In this stage, Tatum explains, “Being

White is viewed as a ‘normal’ state of being that is rarely reflected upon, and the privileges

associated with being White are simply taken for granted.” Assessing Lily’s place within this

status, it is clear that being white is a reflection she engages in more than “rarely,” but it is not

apparent that she subsequently recognizes the privilege being white grants her in society.

“Disintegration is often precipitated by increased interactions with people of color and/or

exposure to new information about the reality of racism, heightening awareness of White racial

privilege and the systematic disadvantages experienced by people of color.” Once again, it is

possible to see that Lily has engaged this experience partially; rather than attempting to

understand how racism deleteriously affects the lives of August, May, and June, Lily sees her

own hardships as comparable. Reintegration moves backward and is characterized by “Feelings

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of guilt and denial [that] may be transformed into fear and anger toward people of color” (58).

Lily does experience anger toward June, which will be discussed shortly, and the resolution that

Kidd provides depicts June overcoming this anger through time and the policing of her elder

sister, but not through the effort of dialogue or confrontation.

“The fourth status, Pseudoindependence, is marked by an intellectual understanding of

the unfairness of racism as a system of advantage and a recognition of the need to assume

personal responsibility for dismantling it.” Though Lily is certainly exposed to the horrors of

racism, she does not see its effect within a larger “system,” and, therefore, the novel provides no

constructive acts of dismantling. To Lily, battling whiteness seems to require little more than a

change of heart, and while this is certainly a necessary stage in antiracist thought, Lily’s shame at

being white remains static and unconstructive.4

Tatum notes a second component of Pseudoindependence: “The individual may seek to

distance him or herself from other Whites and actively seek relationships with people of color as

a way of reducing the social isolation experienced earlier.” Though Lily disengages from the

white community, her distance is a result of her fugitive status, abusive situation, and longing for

maternal fulfillment rather than a racially motivated ideological struggle. The fifth and sixth

statuses are entirely absent from the novel. Immersion/Emersion requires “[a]ctively seeking

answers to such question as ‘Who am I racially? What does it really mean to be White in this

society?’” and “Gaining access to information about White allies, those Whites who have

worked against racism, as role models and guides for a new way of thinking about White

identity. . . .” Lily’s identification with being white is never problematized throughout the novel

as it often is for individuals who battle it ideologically—a process in which the validity of

“white” as a racial designation is questioned. This questioning refers to the way in which

whiteness, as a social construct, historically, economically, and discursively came into being.

Questioning whiteness reveals its fallaciousness as an ontological identity that, however,

signifies in a very real way in praxis. In “Unthinking Whiteness, Rethinking Democracy,” Peter

McLaren exposes whiteness in such a way:

Whiteness has no formal content. It works rhetorically by articulating itself out of

the semiotic detritus of myths of European superiority. These are myths that are

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ontologically empty, epistemologically misleading, and morally pernicious in the

way that they privilege descendants of Europeans as the truly civilized in contrast

to the quaint, exotic, or barbaric character of non-European cultures. Whiteness is

a sociohistorical form of consciousness, given birth at the nexus of capitalism,

colonial rule, and the emergent relationships among dominant and subordinate

groups. Whiteness operates by means of its constitution as a universalizing

authority by which the hegemonic White bourgeois subject appropriates the right

to speak on behalf of everyone who is non-White while denying voice and agency

to these Others in the name of civilized humankind. Whiteness constitutes and

demarcates ideas, feelings, knowledge, social practices, cultural formations, and

systems of intelligibility that are identified with or attributed to White people and

that are invested in by White people as “White.” Whiteness is also a refusal to

acknowledge how White people are implicated in certain social relations of

privilege and relations of domination and subordination. Whiteness, then, can be

considered as a form of social amnesia associated with modes of subjectivity

within particular social sites considered to be normative. (35)

In part, this is what Black Power advocate and theologian James H. Cone refers to when

he states that “The problem of values is not that white people need to instill values in the ghetto;

but white society itself needs values so that it will no longer need a ghetto . . . God’s Word of

reconciliation means that we can only be justified by becoming black. Reconciliation makes us

all black” (151). Whiteness must be thought through as an ideology of values rather than a race,

for no real biological “white” race exists. White historian David R. Roediger explains that

The term white arose as a designation for European explorers, traders and settlers

who came into contact with Africans and the indigenous people of the Americas. .

. . Its early usages in America served as much to distinguish European settlers

from Native Americans as to distinguish Africans from Europeans. . . . Thus, the

prehistory of the white worker begins with the settlers’ images of Native

Americans (21).

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In 1931, African-American writer George Schuyler wrote a brilliant satire on race

entitled Black No More. In his novel, Schuyler created the character of Dr. Junius Crookman

who develops a procedure able to turn black people white. When Crookman succeeds in

whitening nearly the entire nation, panic ensues. The South has no workers left to occupy low-

paying jobs and the economy suffers. Schuyler describes the South’s resulting panic:

When one-third of the population of the erstwhile Confederacy had consisted of

the much-maligned Sons of Ham, the blacks had really been of economic, social

and psychological value to the section. Not only had they done the dirty work and

laid the foundation of its wealth, but they had served as a convenient red herring

for the upper classes when the white proletariat brew restive under exploitation.

[ . . . ]

The deep concern of the Southern Caucasians with chivalry, the protection

of white womanhood, the exaggerated development of race pride and the studied

arrogance of even the poorest half-starved white peon, were all due to the

presence of the black man. Booted and starved by their industrial and agricultural

feudal lords, the white masses derived their only consolation and happiness from

the fact that they were the same color as their oppressors and consequently better

than the mudsill blacks. (102)

Schuyler’s novel, hilariously written, accurately describes the way in which post-bellum

white freemen sought to distinguish themselves from “free blacks” in order to obtain labor

conditions that were not like those of slaves. During the nineteenth-century, for example, wage

laborers sought to decrease their working-day to ten hours. Railing against conditions these

laborers claimed enslaved them helped their cause, but it also categorized them with free blacks.

To distance themselves from the connotations of chattel slavery, the term “white slavery” came

to signify whiteness. As Roediger explains,

White slavery was particularly favored by radical Democratic politicians for a

time because it could unite various elements of their coalition—wage workers,

debtors, small employers and even slaveholders—without necessarily raising the

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issue of whether the spread of wage labor was always and everywhere anti-

republican. Abolitionists, free Blacks, bankers, factory owners and prison labor

could, in sundry combinations, be cast as villains in a loose plot to enslave white

workers. (17)

In “Beneath the underdog: Race, religion, and the trail of tears,” Patrick Menges

discusses the dissemination of the ideology of racial differences by white colonists among Native

American and African-American slaves.5 This dissemination of an ideology of whiteness

allowed for control of slave populations by pitting against one another groups that did not

formerly recognize such difference, let alone mine such an ideology for its exploitative potential.

“In Cherokee cosmology” writes Menges, “there is no mention of race; the myth of Selu and

Kana’ti—the first humans—is the story of a common human origin. . . . Only years later,

following the introduction of Christian traditions and the ideology of race as a component within

human interactions, would a Cherokee myth of multiple origins and racial hierarchy be

developed” (456). Thus, examination of the historical evidence demystifies “white” as a racial

categorization consisting of biologically related human beings and reveals it as a construction

encouraged to prevent white freemen from allying with free blacks and to strategically incite

internecine conflict within groups that threatened the hegemony of powerful white males.

How the exposition of whiteness as an ideology will translate into actual praxis is an

issue that must eventually arise. For example, how should “whites” accept or reject institutional

interpellation—i.e., what “box” do socially interpellated whites check on forms that ask the

question of race? Should the category “white” be deconstructed and reformulated into non-

monolithic categories? If so, on what basis/bases of identity does the law interpellate the

individual, and does the individual posses the right to self-definition when contemplating the

law’s pronouncements?

Tatum describes the final status, Autonomy, as one which “represents the internalization

of a positive White racial identity and is evidenced by a lived commitment to antiracist activity,

ongoing self-examination, and increased interpersonal effectiveness in multiracial settings . . .”

(59). Though Lily does not internalize “a positive White racial identity,” she does acquire

feminine strength. For Lily, the goddess provides a positive image of womanhood, an image

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whose identity is not racialized only gendered, and thereby duplicates the obliviousness to race

frequently exhibited by white authors and expressed by the majority of white women engaged in

the feminist spirituality movement.

Though Lily’s recognition of her own prejudice increases the conscientiousness of her

character, the novel does not continue to explore the crucial unease that exists between Lily and

June, thereby exposing the social injustice that is meted out to the sisters on account of their skin

color and perpetrated by the white society to which Lily never fully realizes she belongs. After

Lily engages in this act of confession, the novel immediately shifts to a time when Rosaleen and

Lily wake from their much-needed slumber. By this rapid transitioning, Kidd allows the novel to

broach a subject struggling for dialogue, provides ample fora for exploration of such issues, but

relinquishes performing an in-depth examination at those crucial and sensitive moments. Kidd

provides many such instances, for example, in scenarios involving May, the youngest of the

sisters.

May is acutely attuned to the world’s suffering in a way that socially debilitates her; her

lack of immunity to suffering inspires her to take drastic measures such as saving roaches by

dropping trails of sweet crumbs that lead them out of the kitchen unharmed. May deals with the

pain of social trauma with the construction of a “wailing wall.” Should May have difficulty

bearing any particular event, she writes down that event on a scrap of paper and commits it to the

crevices formed by the wall’s rocks. In this way, the rocks bear the weight of grief that would

otherwise destabilize May. The morning following Lily’s recognition of her prejudice, Lily

discovers the wall and an inserted scrap of paper which reads “Birmingham, Sept 15, four little

angels dead” (80), referring to the killing of four young girls, three Lily’s age: Addie Mae

Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and eleven-year old Denise McNair, killed by

explosives in Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Rather than question the

incident that lowers May to such a state of despondency, Lily leaves the issue unaddressed. In

fact, Lily uses the wall for her own purposes, as she does the sisters’ rituals and spirituality,

mining them as resources to ameliorate the doubt and pain of her motherless situation—in short,

appropriating the sisters’ spirituality with her newfound maternal surrogate and docent August

facilitating Lily’s appropriation uncomplicatedly.

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As June’s resignation to Lily’s presence dwindles, Lily overhears a conversation between

August and June in which the latter attempts to actuate Lily’s departure. August advocates

patience, to which June replies “But she’s white, August” (87). Hearing June’s words, Lily thinks

“This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want

me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being

white.” Lily slinks back to her honey-house abode, indignant toward June and grateful for

August’s intervention. Along the way Lily stops to relieve herself and in the process concludes

that “There was no difference between my piss and June’s. . . . Piss was piss” (88). This

conclusion, however, does not stop Lily from feeling “white and self-conscious . . . especially

with June in the room. Self conscious and ashamed” (89), while watching yet another event of

racial intolerance perpetrated in the South unfold on the evening news. Though Lily describes

these news stories, noting their chaotic effect on American social life, she does not examine the

correlation between these events and the shame it rouses within her, the space of identity which

white society affords her. Lily can reenter that society without resistance and can reclaim the

identity she casts off temporarily, although it will be subordinated to white masculinist identity.

The sisters, however, are not afforded that alternative. Therefore, while Lily learns that she is

white, she does not recognize the larger implications of her position within the privilege of

whiteness.

Lily’s naivete becomes even clearer when August tells her the story of May and her twin

April. April took her own life when she was fifteen after a depression instigated by a white ice

cream parlor owner who sold April and May ice cream, but ejected them from his store while

allowing white children to eat and browse through the store’s books. The sisters’ father

counseled, “‘Nothing’s fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now” (96), and

Lily thinks “how I myself had gotten that straight long before I was eleven” (96-7). While T.

Ray’s abuse and her mother’s death produce hardships for Lily that most children do not suffer,

they are nevertheless incomparable in many ways to the racism that May and April experienced.

This incomparableness should not denote a hierarchization of oppressions, but ought to instigate

a realization of the cultural differences that work to form oppressions unique to diverse groups

and individuals.

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May’s ability to cope with racist incidents is, in fact, so severe that she ends her life in the

river behind the sisters’ home. After May’s casket is brought into the parlor where the sisters will

sit vigil, the Daughters arrive to participate. As they discuss and laugh about the town’s bank

converted into a white people’s drive through funeral home, Lily is elated due to the Daughters’

lack of reserve when discussing “white people” in front of her, believing that “They didn’t even

think of me being different. Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people

getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless was a better

plan” (209). In White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and

Whiteness, Renee R. Curry excavates tendencies present in select passages of the three white

women writers her title names. Curry describes two of those tendencies as “elusive mastery

signifiers” and “power and color evasion” (13-14). In the former, Curry argues that writers’

whiteness reveals itself within “the power to proclaim equality.” With regard to the latter, Curry

claims that whiteness insinuates itself into the text by a “selective perception, this color

blindness, this politeness, [which] although it feigns to benefit the person of color by not

rekindling issues of racism, also serves to keep the white person from claiming association with

the masterful, dominating race and from dismantling ongoing racist institutions.” Engaging in the

vigil along with August, June, and the Daughters instigates within Lily a desire to rid her world

of the color line insisting that individuals remain on either side of its divide. While this desire is

well-intentioned, Lily syntactically evidences the mastery Curry points to in white texts,

absolving herself from the task of learning to recognize the cultural diversity of her own

community in the South by wishing difference away. Lily continues to express her

bewilderment, but continues to reinforce the very difference she desires to eradicate by

exoticizing the black women. Lily thinks, “for the very life of me I couldn’t understand how it

had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You

only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us” (209).

It is not long before Lily witnesses the first meeting of the Daughters of Mary that takes

place in the sisters’ parlor. The Daughters receive Lily and Rosaleen into their meeting

unhesitatingly and for their benefit, August delivers the history of “Our Lady of Chains”—the

carved statue that has intrigued Lily since her initial sight of it. “Stories have to be told or they

die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here,” begins August. The

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Daughters respond to her call, urging her to proceed and August recounts the narrative which has

obviously been passed down through successive matrilineal generations:

[B]ack in the time of slaves, when the people were beaten down and kept like

property, they prayed every day and every night for deliverance.

On the islands near Charleston, they would go to the praise house and sing

and pray, and every single time someone would ask the Lord to send them rescue.

To send them consolation. To send them freedom. . . .

One day . . . a slave named Obadiah was loading bricks onto a boat that

would sail down the Ashley River, when he saw something washed up on the

bank. Coming closer, he saw it was the wooden figure of a woman. Her body was

growing out of a block of wood, a black woman with her arm lifted out and her

fist balled up. . . .

Obadiah pulled the figure out of the water . . . and struggled to set her

upright. Then he remembered how they’d asked the Lord to send them rescue. To

send them consolation. To send them freedom. Obadiah knew the Lord had sent

this figure, but he didn’t know who she was.

He knelt down in the marsh mud before her and heard her voice speak

plain as day in his heart. She said, ‘It’s all right. I’m here. I’ll be taking care of

you now.’ . . .

Everyone knew the mother of Jesus was named Mary, and that she’d seen

suffering of every kind. That she was strong and constant and had a mother’s

heart. And here she was, sent to them on the same waters that had brought them

here in chains. It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered. . . .

And so, . . . the people cried and danced and clapped their hands. They

went one at a time and touched their hands to her chest, wanting to grab on to the

solace in her heart. (108-9)

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While August’s mythic-historical narrative evidences Kidd’s research of ways in which

African-American women authors might conceivably re-envision the goddess and, additionally,

demonstrates the author’s knowledge of the traditional African-American strategy of call and

response, August’s narrative elicits no such appreciation from Kidd’s protagonist. Instead, Lily

remains negligent of the black Mary’s unique signification within the Daughters’ spiritual

reenactment and her own problematic identity within that signification. The story enters Lily’s

heart, starved for the “solace” the black Mary provides. As she watches the Daughters, one by

one, approach the black Mary, Lily looks on with longing as they touch the heart which members

of the island’s slave community had painted on the statue’s chest. August encourages Rosaleen

to touch the heart, and Lily’s yearning for the transcendence the goddess offers prompts her to

participate. But just as Lily begins to touch the heart, June abruptly stops her cello

accompaniment. The conspicuous silence causes Lily to pull back thinking “I am not one of

you,” hears August reprimand her younger sister and, in a trope familiar to texts illustrating the

white female inability to deal with discomfiting issues, Lily loses consciousness. Lily’s loss of

consciousness, I argue, parallels the novel’s attempt to deal with, but fail to gain access to, the

insidious discourse of latent hostility that lodges in between Lily and June. Kidd resolves this

tension by strategically placing August as mediator; yet, the end result depreciates the value of

June’s indignation and imparts a childishly spoiled aspect to a character whose antagonism is

conditioned by actual and meaningful social inequities. June’s hostility never receives the

hearing it deserves. Several days later, Lily still wonders that June is not “a nicer person . . .

Somehow even me being white and imposing on their hospitality didn’t seem enough reason”

(119). Here, Lily comes closer to an accurate diagnosis; it is not Lily’s white skin that incites

June’s hostility. Rather, it is an ideological whiteness of which Lily’s skin assumes the status of

“sign,” an ideology which Lily remains unaware she is part of, but which is evidenced when she

feels that she is automatically entitled to co-opt the sisters’ spiritual and historical heritage and

obtain refuge in their home.

Neither August nor May possess such hostility, and this lack enables August to take on

Lily as an apprentice in her beekeeping business. As they label the honey jars and August

attempts to elicit more of Lily’s story, August describes the moment when the Daughters of

Mary first saw the black Madonna label. Taken aback by the appearance of their likenesses,

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August explains that “it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can

come in dark skin” (140). “[E]verybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily,” August

continues. Conspicuously absent is any acknowledgement by Lily that she does not look exactly

like the black Mary, although her first thought of the figure was that she “was black as she could

be.” How do we interpret this noticeable omission? Is it that Lily sees in the black Mary a female

with whom she identifies, unaware of the color of that female, and that this invisibility does not

prompt her to ask August whether or not she should seek a white “divine” whose skin color

reflects her own? This question is particularly expected, owing to events that have triggered skin

color to begin to become a site of complicated signification for Lily, and one would expect that

she would ponder such phenotypical difference and ask August if she is suggesting that the black

Mary does not belong to her. This is not to suggest that Lily should be forbidden from

constructing her own meaning within the sisters’ spirituality or from engaging in those

communal acts that reinforce such meaning; rather, it proposes an awareness that does not

register within Lily’s consciousness.

In fact, June apologizes to Lily during a festivity called “Mary Day,” a day created by the

sisters in order to celebrate both the Assumption and the black Mary’s particular significance to

the Daughters. The two-day celebration marks the height of annual spiritual observance for the

Daughters. As the Daughters form a circle in which they feed one another honey cakes that

represent “the body of the Mother” (226) Lily, included within the circle, is deeply touched and

thinks that “for some reason that circle of feeding made me feel better about the world”—a rather

superficial comment given the much deeper signification the ceremony holds for the Daughters.

Lily participates in the ceremony until the Daughters chain the Black Mary in the honey-house, a

ritual symbolizing a miracle. The white master of the island slaves had eventually learned of the

black Mary and had taken her from them and bound her in chains. She escaped, however—“fifty

times” (110), unshackling her own body. The black Mary’s escape allows them to re-vision their

strength and know that all injustice will eventually be righted. Lily, however, is unable to tolerate

seeing the black Mary in chains. August tells her that “It is only a reenactment . . . To help us

remember. Remembering is everything” (228). But this “remembering” is too uncomfortable for

Lily, and she leaves to think “into the warm hush of night” that provides her the space in which

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to silence the pain that, to confront more fully, might effect her awareness and a more genuine

dialogic exchange with June.

Lily’s participation in the ceremony having ended, her primary concern reverts to finding

out the truth about her mother, Deborah. She knows that, before her death, her mother stayed in

the pink house for a time, but she does not know why. She waits in August’s room for the

ceremony to conclude and when August arrives, she learns that August had been a housekeeper

in her mother’s childhood home and had taken care of her mother as a child. When Deborah’s

marriage to T. Ray had become unbearable, she had gone to the sisters’ house to escape what the

novel insinuates was an abusive situation. Obtaining asylum in the home of these African-

American sisters differs for Lily only in that Lily obtains strength from the goddess that perhaps

her mother did not; her racial awareness remains deficient.

Lily’s desire to obtain any shred of her mother’s past is all-consuming, and it does not

trouble her that August held a position whose meaning possesses demoralizing connotations

within the African-American community—the position of tending white children in white

homes. Joy James discusses the implications of housekeeping labor, explaining that that “Social

inequities still make domestic labor an economic mainstay for black women. For centuries

significant numbers of black females neglected their own homes and families to care for those of

whites. In the ‘freedom’ of emancipation, they sought to escape but were consigned to labor as

surrogate wives and mothers in millions of white households” (67-8). Lily finds no historical or

cultural meaning within August’s words, however; it is as if Lily and August speak a language

whose signifiers are culturally untranslatable or, rather, that Lily has not acquired the ability to

translate those signifiers in a way that would provide meaning to their interaction within a

racialized context. Instead, Lily reminisces about her mother as a child: “It seemed odd to think

of her with a roof over her head. A person who lay on a bed, ate food at a table, took baths in a

tub” (236-7). The incompatibility of such a refined and intellectual African- American woman

“iron[ing] her [mother’s] dresses and pack[ing] her school lunch in a paper bag” (237) does not

occur to Lily. It is not long before August, assuring Lily that everyone loves her, even June,

reveals the crux of June’s resentment. “Oh, it’s complicated, just like June. She couldn’t get over

me working as a maid in your mother’s house,” explains August who seems to be untroubled by

her previous work and its broader social implications. In fact, it is primarily August’s untroubled

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acceptance that allows for Lily’s fantasized entry into a world of mothers whose common and

“essential” femaleness override real cultural antagonisms that need articulation. Once again, the

substance of social issues is obscured by Lily’s nearly exclusive self-concern and subsequent

inability to recognize its rootedness within an ideology of privilege.

The success of Kidd’s novel has been enormous. At the time of this writing, The New

York Times Book Review notes The Secret Life of Bees as having appeared on its “Paperback

Best Sellers” list for ninety-one weeks. The novel’s theme is obviously one that appeals to a

wide audience, although it is possible that the novel’s audience is primarily composed of white

and female readers. If white females comprise a majority of the novel’s readership, then it may

be that the novel’s premise of relatively uncomplicated integration could facilitate erroneous

ideas that lead white women to neglect the reality of tension that exists between white and black

women, tensions that require prompt and sustained attention. While The Secret Life of Bees

expresses the deep desire for community between black and white women that many white

women possess, below its surface the novel provides intimations of attitudes suggesting that

community and integration are not effortless tasks based on a common female identity. Perhaps

that desire will impel white women to examine their racialized identities, their histories, and their

complicity within the ideology of whiteness, for without that examination it will prove

impossible not to perpetuate gestures of domination. Yet, this all-too-frequently unvoiced

problematic cannot be addressed, much less solved, until women whose racialized white identity

see the effects of whiteness both within culture and the specificity of their life experiences and

begin to respond to the charges women of color have been articulating throughout various

discursive channels. Much remains unspoken that must be articulated and heard; it will be an

uncomfortable dialogic, but an invaluable one in which the participants cannot afford not to

engage.

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CONCLUSION: ANALYSES AND AFTERTHOUGHTS

I began by positing Cocoa’s identity formation within a contextual framework. That

position was necessary to understand how racialized elements worked to form an African-

American female identity that white feminist critiques frequently ignore or miss entirely. White

feminist critiques often posit gender as the central determinant of oppression; Cocoa’s identity

formation is inextricably tied to racial determinants. Utilizing a white feminist lens, it would

have been impossible to understand Cocoa’s desire to work toward a heterosexual union that was

complementary rather than hostile. Though George failed to pass the test that would symbolize

his acceptance of Willow Springs’ women-centered economy, Africanist and womanist

cosmology establish no stark divide between George’s life and death, thus creating a hopeful

space for Cocoa and George’s continued exploration of issues that assail the heterosexual

relationships between African-American women and men. The possible range of those issues

posits stability, family, complementarity, sexuality, community, and the legacy of slavery as

central concerns.

The legacy of Sapphira assists Cocoa to turn and re-turn to the traumatic space of these

concerns. Sapphira’s blackness includes all shades of color that provide Cocoa a feeling of

affinity within her community and acceptance of a self infected with damaging white valuations.

Cocoa must exorcise these valuations and replace them with positive valuations of blackness.

Sapphira is the key to this exorcism. It is Sapphira’s strength and refusal to be enslaved that

anchors Cocoa; Sapphira is re-membered into the present and that re-membering is integral to

Cocoa’s future success. If the Moynihan report damaged the perception and self-perception of

African-American women, then Naylor posits Sapphira, not as the culprit whose forceful

independence resulted in “dysfunctional” family arrangements, but as a woman whose strength

and determination are the very characteristics that ensured her survival. This re-visioning of the

past and its trauma is integral to the psychological and spiritual health of women whose

communities and collective stories are seared with pernicious stereotypes. Chicana literature also

demonstrates how the image of Malinche serves to distort women’s notion of self-worth and trust

of both self and other women. Re-visioning such distortions, re-casting the archetype within a

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resplendent mold, allows healing and transcendence. It is essential for that healing to occur at the

site of injury—the body. Thus, sexuality is revealed as a major concern in both Chicana and

African-American literature, as suturing traumatic memory occurs at the site of corporeality.

This site has become a locus of contestation, as the body, its gestures, language, and movements

are fused with cultural meanings and performances that cause some members of the African-

American community to contest the ossification of identity.

The voices of Chicana authors deepen the understanding of the politics of sexuality and

broaden the awareness of the white female body as a site for the perpetuation of white

masculinist hegemony. If the white female has been historically “seduced” by material means

into perpetuating an ideology of whiteness, then in what ways can she “act out,” or as Butler

phrases it, vary that repetition? Is it possible, or effective, for white women to question and resist

white standards of beauty, the fallacious myth of white female purity, and the material lure

promised to those who remain within prescribed boundaries? If so, how can these “acting-outs”

become orchestrated within tangible political realities? In what ways can women of color act out

against exploitative treatment and white masculinist ideology that relegates them to the status of

disposable commodity? Without doubt, female reproduction is currently a site for political

contestation, legislation, and policing, and therefore it seems as crucial now, as it has been

historically, for women to resist dictatorial measures that aim to deny them autonomy over their

own bodies. Women must ask the critical question: are we engaging in white masculinist

ideology when we seek to police one another’s sexuality or when we insist that certain races,

genders, or classes must not venture outside prescribed boundaries? Kelly Douglass Brown

insists that homophobia is a result of white masculinist ideology’s infiltration into the African-

American church, and Naylor’s texts supports Brown’s assertion that “Only when one can boldly

confront the past, and perhaps present, of White exploitation of Black sexuality can one achieve

wholeness” (134).

In researching the context through which “a particular African-American female

experience” might be constructed, the analysis presents those voices that express critical attitudes

toward an African-American identity that, for such individuals, does not allow a full-range of

expression. This was necessary in order to undertake “an energetic investigation of the cultural

situation and the emerging critical tradition” (Awkward 61). Initially, my analysis argued that

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“difference” was the culprit creating the trouble that engages contemporary identity politics. I

felt that if a genealogical critique of “difference” could be established, then the cacophony of

discontented voices might somehow produce a more harmonious orchestration. Of course, that

assumption evidenced a colorblindness I was unable to see at the time—battling the ideology of

whiteness is a lifetime task. But as identities and movements continue to flux, coalesce, and

contest their very borders, I have found it necessary to listen and to consider voices of those who

find African-American identity restrictive. Certainly, “identity trouble” is present within the

African-American community, and there are individuals who feel that to be black is a

component, rather than “the” defining characteristic, of identity. Even as certain texts that are

considered “African-American” texts inscribe a positive identity through a series of stylized and

reiterative gestures enabling the wholeness of individuals who strive to obtain such wholeness,

there exist those who find the concretization of a black identity confining, and at times,

exclusionary. While the views of African-Americans are often at odds, in the final analysis I was

forced to ask whether one point of view had to be, absolutely, right or wrong. I do not believe

that it is necessary to take an absolutist stance on this issue. Indeed, discussing the construction

of a concept, ideology, or identity while indicating that there are exceptions to what has become

the rule has been the custom of liberal academic pursuit—to always stand alert at the margin for

the accretion of oppositional voices. And I believe that such voices are in the process of

accretion.

Even so, to say that identities are in a state of trouble should not imply that they are in a

state of peril. Trouble, as Judith Butler would have it, is a state that is always already. It moves

the performance of identity along, keeps individuals contesting and transcending the forces that

would have identities easily pegged. Toward the end of Gender Trouble, Butler writes, “In a

sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; “agency,” then, is

to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (185). Indeed, re-casting

blackness in positive terms is no less a variation than the resistance to a certain script that all

affiliations of identity entail. That present conditions still allow variation to be exhibited is a

good omen. But unless there are those who continue to challenge the status quo, the freedom to

engage in variation may disappear. These are times that challenge the academy and these

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challenges, while uneasy, must serve to revive our commitment to living in a world whose

webbing is becoming both increasingly intricate and increasingly transient.

White women’s search for the goddess differs from the search performed by women of

color. Because whiteness is not marked by difference, white women strive to re-cast positive

gendered identities. While this pursuit benefits the strengthening of a female identity, it likewise

tends to ossify definitions of womanhood that many white women find restrictive. And though

the affirmation of femaleness does benefit many white women, when it is coupled with a desire

to integrate within spiritualities that are inextricably linked to racial determinants, white women

fail to understand how their neglect of racial issues arouses antagonistic sentiments. One of the

fundamental tasks white women must engage in is to understand how the privilege of whiteness

works to oppress individuals of color. Obtaining such understanding requires knowledge of

historical realities that reveal the location of moments of rupture between African-American

individuals and communities and those individuals interpellated as white. The search for such

knowledge implicates white individuals in oppression, and it also implicates hegemonic systems

of power that benefited from cleavage along racialized and class lines. As Sue Monk Kidd’s

character of Lily demonstrates, arriving at a racialized consciousness invokes a sense of shame.

Thus, another task in the agenda of antiracist white consciousness is transcendence of that shame

by actively engaging racist politics. Such an engagement must be continually sustained in order

to deconstruct the ideology of whiteness.

My own challenges revolve around three fronts: regarding the contextual integrity of the

construction of African-American identities, acknowledging those variations that resist the

assignation of certain identities, and engaging in the deconstruction of the privilege of whiteness.

In my particular situation, I have found it productive to critique the historical flaws contained in

the texts of white feminists. For example, it has been useful to re-analyze feminist arguments that

neglect issues of race and class, not only in order to avoid this neglect in future work, but also to

isolate those features that have led to antagonistic relations between women of color and white

women.

Working to deconstruct whiteness means forming relationships with other antiracists

from all racialized identities who possess the same goal. The voices of African-American women

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and men are crucial to this endeavor, and by this, I do not mean to imply that integration within

the close-knit circles of friendship and camaraderie that characterize the solidarity expressed by

many individuals within the African-American community is requisite. I no longer expect

effortless integration or even believe that such integration is necessarily contingent to the

antiracist agenda that guides my politics. What I mean by this is that the “White ally,” as Beverly

Daniel Tatum explains, can become “the actively antiracist White person who is intentional in

his or her ongoing efforts to interrupt the cycle of racism” by becoming attentive to the voices of

men and women of color in order to form needs-based, or grass-roots based, decisions that

effectively guide anti-racist political endeavors. This direction is crucial in order to avoid

repeating the mistakes of the past, whose redress is only to be expressed by the manifestation of

future actions.

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Notes to Pages 1-11

NOTES

Introduction

1. John 1:1

2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace

& Company, 1981).

3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1975).

4. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

5. Suzan-Lori Parks, “From Elements of Style” in The America Play and Other Works (New

York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 6-18.

6. Ntozake Shange, For colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf

(New York: Scribner Poetry, 1997).

7. Paula Gunn Allen, “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres

Indian Tale” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York and London: W. W.

Norton & Company, 2001), 2108-26.

8. Sally Haslanger, “You Mixed? Racial Identity without Racial Biology,” in Adoption Matters:

Philosophical and Feminist Essays, ed., Charlotte Witt and Sally Haslanger (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2005): 265-89.

9. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

Chapter 1: Witnessing narratives of trauma in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

1. Although black feminist Joy James does not posit a divide between womanism and black

feminism, she includes either a subtle “or” between the two or a forward slash. In my readings of

womanist texts and black feminist texts, the subtle difference appears to hinge on whether the

text centers around Alice Walker’s delineations of womanism as outlined in her essay “In Search

of Our Mothers’ Gardens” or around “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” In

Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, (Palgrave: New York, 1999), James

writes that “All three writers [Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks] identify a

feminism/womanism with a unique cultural worldview that shapes gender consciousness. To

some degree, then, we can distinguish between a conventional feminism embraceable by all

progressive women, including those who happen to be black, and a black feminism or

womanism, one particular to women of African descent. Yet there is a third form of feminism

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Notes to Pages 16-52

applicable only to those black women who are left of liberal or stand outside conventional

politics [i.e., black radical feminism]” (Author’s emphasis 11-12).

2. Linda E. Thomas, “Womanist theology, epistemology, and a new anthropological paradigm,”

Cross Currents 48:4 (Winter 1998): 488—Available at

<http://www.crosscurrents.org/thomas.htm>.

3. Frankenberg’s footnote explains that “More than from a concern for purity or the

maintenance of racial hierarchy, the hostility of communities of color toward interracial

relationships may stem at times from a view of whites as oppressors with whom one should not

mix, or from a refusal to accept the terms of racism by being accepted as a ‘token’ or by

‘assimilating.’” Anger may also emerge as a response to an aspect of what may be termed ‘racist

sexism,’ which shapes standards of physical attractiveness in the culture and constructs white

women as more attractive than women of color, both to white and nonwhite men” (272).

4. Toni Morrison. Paradise. (New York: Plume, 1999).

5. For a discussion of racialized language, particularly white language, see E. V. Wolfenstein’s

Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork, (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1993), where

Wolfenstein writes that “languages have skin colors. There are white nouns and verbs, white

grammar and white syntax. In the absence of challenges to linguistic hegemony, indeed,

language is white. If you don’t speak white you will not be heard, just as when you don’t look

white you will not be seen” (331).

6. Moraga, Cherie. p. 101.

7. Ibid.

Chapter 2: Postmodern Identity Trouble and Gloria Naylor’s MamaDay

1. Luce Irigaray. “Divine Women.” Sexes and Genelogies. Translated by Gillian C. Gill (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 55-72.Irigaray argues that “There comes a time for

destruction. But, before destruction is possible, God or the gods must exist” (62).

2. bell hooks. “Postmodern Blackness.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.Edited

by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and

Jeffrey J. Williams Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

3. Written on the Body is also the title of a novel by British author Jeanette Winterson.

4. Rebecca Walker. “Pale as I Am.” Essence. 1 Jun. 2002. 23 Feb. 2005

<http://www.rebeccawalker.com/article_2002_pale-as-i-am.htm>.

5. Sigmund Freud. “The ‘Uncanny.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited

by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, and

Jeffrey J. Williams. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001): 929-52.

6. Kate Chopin. “The Awakening.” In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.” 2d. Ed.

Edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York and London: W. W. Norton &

Company, 1996).

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Notes to Pages 57-65

7. Michael J. A. Wohl and Nyla R. Branscombe. “Forgiveness and Collective Guilt Assignment

to Historical Perpetrator Groups Depend on Level of Social Category Inclusiveness.” Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology 88: 2. (2005): 288-303.

Chapter 3: Reading white Desire In Sue Monk Kidd’s THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

1. In the previous chapter I argue that, within the narrative of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,

Cocoa’s acquisition of blackness somatically performs identity. Lily’s comment posits

understanding at level of the body as do, in fact, most goddess texts. Therefore, a brief comment

is necessary. “Other ways of knowing” depart from and resist, historically masculinist and

rationalist paradigms. At times they also attempt to assert superiority over rationalist paradigms

even while they are themselves capable of misreadings. In Naylor’s Mama Day, the eponymous

character also believes that other ways of knowing allow her to “know” what takes place within

the minds of the predominantly white television audience of the talk show she watches, while I

argue that real knowledge of other cultures requires a determined, active, and sustained reading

of other cultures that demands a balanced amount of both intuition and rationality. Otherwise,

readers are prone to believe that the significations contained in their own culture allows for

reading all cultures. This, in fact, is my main argument with respect to white readers reading

black texts. Therefore, I would argue that privileging other ways of knowing demonstrates the

same, and erroneous, tendency of rationalist paradigms in asserting epistemological superiority.

2. As Becky Thompson observes in “Subverting Racism from Within: Linking White Identity

to Activism,” in Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity,

Edited by Christine Clark and James O’Donnell, (Westport, Conn. and London: Bergin &

Garvey, 1999), “models of racial identity development” are not without problems. For one, “they

tend to outline stages that are ahistorical. Ahistoricity leaves little room for understanding how

social movements and political activism shape racial identity. This limitation is particularly

unfortunate since Black identity models—which were the precursors to White identity theories—

initially evolved as a means of explaining the influence of the civil rights movement on racial

identity development. The psychological models also tend to see racial identity as somehow

separate from gender, sexuality, and class. With such compartmentalization, there has been little

room to consider, for example, how the feminist movement has pushed some White lesbians to

deal with race in ways not often afforded to White gay men. A third limitation of most White

identity models is their focus on whiteness as an identity constructed in opposition to Black

people. This duality has its limits in a multiracial society, where many White people form their

identities in relation to Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans as well as African

Americans” (69).

3. Quoted in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Lighting Candles in the Dark: One Black Woman’s

Response to White Antiracist Narratives” in Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and

Disowning a Racial Identity, Edited by Christine Clark and James O’Donnell, (Westport, Conn.

and London: Bergin & Garvey, 1999): 56-63.

4. See Judith Butler’s useful footnote in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of

“Sex”, (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), where Butler writes: “This consideration of

guilt as a way of locking up or safeguarding desire may well have implications for the theme of

white guilt. For the question there is whether white guilt is itself the satisfaction of racist passion,

whether the reliving of racism that white guilt constantly performs is not itself the very

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Notes to Page 68

satisfaction of racism that white guilt ostensibly abhors. For white guilt—when it is not lost to

self-pity-produces a paralytic moralizing that requires racism to sustain its own sanctimonious

posturing; precisely because white moralizing is itself nourished by racist passions, it can never

be the basis on which to build and affirm a community across difference; rooted in the desire to

be exempted from white racism, to produce oneself as the exemption, this strategy virtually

requires that the white community remain mired in racism; hatred is merely transferred outward,

and thereby preserved, but it is not overcome” (original emphasis 277).

5. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my classmate Aron L. Myers for directing me to

Menges’ article.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Joni J. Mayfield is a graduate student in English Literature at The Florida State

University in Tallahassee, Florida, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in

Humanities, Magna Cum Laude, in 2003. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi,

Phi Sigma Theta, The National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Golden Key International Honor

Society, and Phi Theta Kappa.

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