Pedagogy of the Post-Racial: The Texts, Textiles, and Teachings of African American Women

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Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International,Volume 4, Number 1, 2015, pp. 24-50 (Article)

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Pedagogy of the Post-Racial

The Texts, Textiles, and Teachings of African

American Women

Shanna Greene Benjamin

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I…I don’t know you, Mrs. Keckley. Any of you.—Abraham Lincoln to Elizabeth Keckley in Steven Spielberg’s

Lincoln

When we are not “public,” with all the word connotes for black people then how do we live and who are we?

—Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior

Sparked by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page opus Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; stoked by Steven Spielberg’s part biopic, part historical drama, Lincoln; and fanned by 2013’s 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, battle scene reenactors, Civil War buffs, civil rights activists, and “post-race” babies have collectively, and sometimes reluctantly, found them-selves engulfed by twenty-first-century adaptations of the circuitous route to the Emancipation Proclamation. At the same time that this moment of looking back prompts a consideration of how race, specifically the “Negro Problem,” was “solved,” it collides with contemporary conceptions of why race, characterized as “skin color or phenotype,”1 should be rejected. Abraham Lincoln’s resurgence as man and myth, it seems, provides a perfect opportunity to consider the long arc of racial ideology and the implications of America’s “post-racialism.”

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Pedagogy of the Post-Racial 25

Immediately after Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States in 2008, post-race, post-racial, and post-racialism emerged as media soundbytes that took on lives of their own. As newscasters imagined America’s post-racial possibilities on cable and network news, legal scholars nailed down post-racialism as a term that was as nefarious as it was, for a time, nebulous. Defined by legal scholar and critical race theorist Sumi Cho as “a twenty-f irst century ideology that ref lects a belief that due to racial progress the state need not engage in race-based decision-making or adopt race-based remedies, and that civil society should eschew race as a central organizing principle of social action,”2 post-racialism would seem to provide those racially oppressed with an opportunity to “eschew race” and proudly proclaim, from the soapbox of their own merits, that “race is but a negligible human difference.”3 Nevertheless, as Cho argues, a postracial belief in colorblindness runs the risk of restoring whiteness “to its full pre-civil rights value” where “racial remedies…[are] off the table, [and] so are acts of collective political organization and resistance by racialized indviduals.”4 In other words, post-racialism limits the ways in which those who deem themselves color-conscious—individuals who are aware of the “irrelevancy of phenotypical differences among racial groups” yet appreciative of “the signif icance of race as a social construction”5—can argue for political action on the basis of racial discrimination. Suff ice it to say that at this current moment, post-racialism lurks as a wolf in sheep’s clothing: it masquerades as the realization of nineteenth-century emancipatory goals when, in fact, it delegitimizes racial discourse and stif les ongoing conversations about the eff icacy of civil rights and social justice in the twenty-first century.

Juxtaposed against the emergence and proliferation of post-racial discourse following Barack Obama’s political ascendancy in 2008, the retooled and mass-produced story of Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator” illuminates how the hope of a post-racial America merely masks an ongoing problem around the (re)presentation of black voices and black experiences in popular and political spheres. In Spielberg’s celluloid version of Lincoln’s story, which fixes stereo-types of black agency at twenty-four frames per second, Abraham Lincoln is in a race against time. The personal, psychoethical dilemma he faces is this: end the war early or end slavery permanently. In Spielberg’s portrayal, there are black bodies ready for war, but no Frederick Douglass. Elizabeth Keckley listens intently but says little. Reviewer A.O. Scott of the New York Times observes: “Lincoln falls short in that it completely omits dynamic, realistic portrayals of Black people at this time.”6 Furthermore, Spielberg neglects to craft whole, politically mobile black characters, more specifically black female characters, in favor of languishing over what historian Kate Masur describes as “generic, archetypal characters [who are] literally static, speaking on [their] race’s behalf.”7 By highlighting the film’s omissions, these reviews prompt us to consider the film’s missing facets of black life in the nineteenth century: the


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era when black itinerant preachers, both men and women, proselytized to many and traveled afar in willful defiance of the fugitive slave act; the period when black writers crafted the genre now known as the slave narrative and promoted abolitionist causes; the time when free blacks wrote and spoke extensively to “promiscuous” or racially mixed audiences to advocate for the humanity of colored citizens. By failing to nod to the richness of nineteenth-century African American cultural production, Spielberg misses an opportunity to portray black interiority as expressively as he renders Lincoln’s psychic distress.

This question of interiority—the inviolate spaces held by African Americans that remain sacred and healing in spite of racist vitriol in the material world—has long been a facet of the black experience but has, to my mind, been most eloquently expressed in black women’s texts and textiles. Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior, and its focus on the elements that constitute the lives of black people when they are not “public,” considers a range of experiences, some from black men, others from black women, and imagines how art and artifact gesture toward an alternative, interior, black life. If Alexander considers the inner workings of both male and female black subjects equally, what, then, makes the drive to foster an interior life unique for black women? The epigraph cited at the beginning of this essay, a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures the elements that set apart black women’s experiences: violence and patriarchy. This passage from Their Eyes comes when, after being slapped by Jody, whose embarrassment on the porch leads him to reassert his dominance not just as mayor of Eatonville but also as lord over his wife, Janie learns that there is no room for her voice, witty and assertive, in the discursive space of the porch where men rule and “lies” prevail. At this very moment, when something falls off the shelf inside of her, Janie claims her interiority as a discrete space where she can imagine herself beyond classism, patriarchy, and abuse, and cultivate a subjectivity beyond her disenfranchisement in the material world.

The tension between having a voice and finding space to express it is more than a tenet of black women’s creative practice; it is an enduring trauma that thwarts the ability of black female protagonists such as Janie to live a fully integrated identity where inner desire and public expression coexist. Likewise, representative literary and artistic works created by black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries propose wholeness—expressed as an integrated self that reunites the fragments of self, history, and culture—as the goal of women still in need of healing from the latent trauma of the Middle Passage, social engagements with racism and patriarchy, and violence done to the black female body. To cope with this trauma, literary protagonists and culture workers often embark on a symbolic return to Africa, either consciously or unconsciously, to reorient themselves with the “roots” of black culture.8 Sensitive to twenty-first-century post-black discourse, with its shifts “from



essential notions of blackness to metanarratives of blackness”9 that make the notion of black “roots” tenuous, this essay delineates how black women’s texts and textiles offer a methodology of sense-making, a pedagogy of progress, that heals the trauma of personal and cultural dislocation within ever-shifting definitions of blackness.

Through a text structured like textile and a textile that reads as text, Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and Heather Andrea Williams’s History Quilt, respectively, invite readers to consider how threads of memory, history, and narrative intertwine to stitch together a heterogeneous black experience despite post-racial moves to negate its existence or usefulness. This essay traces the provenance of black cultural fragmentation by juxtaposing Williams’s quilt against Keckley’s text—a text woven together by a black woman who wrestled with her shifting subjectivity during slavery and after emancipation—to estab-lish the search for wholeness as a consistent and persistent concern for black writers, culture workers, and public intellectuals.10 To be sure, the wholeness Keckley seeks is not of our modern era. But even as Keckley’s definition of wholeness (i.e., freedom, literacy, agency) is delimited by historically situated social parameters, Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and Williams’s History Quilt converse across the vast temporal distance between them. Therefore, whether achieved by piecing together disparate life events as a coherent autobiography, as is the case with Keckley’s text, or stitching together untold pieces of black history as a counterpoint to conventional historical narratives, like Heather Andrea Williams does in her textile—the black women who creatively engage with themes of fragmentation aim for wholeness on their own terms. In response, the theory I call the Ananse aesthetic elucidates how black women become whole (or move to the threshold of wholeness) by cultivating their interiors and finding self-satisfaction despite mass-produced iconography that reduces them to stereotype.

As a metaphor for the modes that define black women’s fixed yet shifting subjectivity across time, the spider trickster for whom this theory is named embodies the ambivalence of black women’s subjectivity: namely, the discon-nect between how others define them and how they define themselves. The web and weaving motifs in the literary and cultural texts produced by Keckley and Williams signal the presence of Kwaku Ananse, the Ghanaian trickster spider who mediates the territory between temporal, geographic, and epistemological locations. The history of Kente, rooted in a myth that narrates the origins of weaving, shows how black women have been overlooked as active facilitators (not just impulsive bearers) of cultural knowledge. According to Akan legend, two brothers, Nana Kuragu and Nana Ameyaw, set out on a hunting expedi-tion when, suddenly, they stumble upon Ananse the spider spinning his web. Mesmerized by the spider’s grace and taken with the emerging web’s beauty, the hunters watch intently. When they try to pick up the web to take it home,


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it collapses into a sticky, fibrous mass. Once back in the village, the wife of one hunter suggests that they learn the spider’s technique since they are unable to transport his web. The next day, the men return to the forest to watch the spider who generously shares his method. After a time, they return home to Bonwire and mimic the spider’s technique. The result is the strip weaving commonly known as Kente cloth.

As much as the story elucidates the symbiosis between the natural world and fiber art, the substance of the wife’s input offers a subtle yet powerful statement about gender, the creative process in general, and weaving in particular. At first, the strategy the hunters employ to learn the spider’s technique is watch, capture, and, unwittingly, destroy. Nana Kuragu and Nana Ameyaw are not in the forest to sightsee; they are in the forest to find, catch, and kill. Perhaps because their original intention—although driven by necessity—is to attack and contain, the hunters are ill-equipped, at first, to receive the spider’s process. The conquer-and-destroy ethos of the hunters, however, is unsuccessful. As much as the weaving intrigues them, they are unable to replicate the practice until the wife steps in. Her advice? Learn and integrate. The wife’s integrative approach requires the hunters to step out of their comfort zone, yield to the smaller spider, and master through mimicry. Even though this male-centered approach to the weaving process has yielded a primarily patriarchal system of Kente creation that exists even into the twenty-first century, the often overlooked integrative origin of weaving initiated by the wife is as much about man’s creation of cloth as it is about woman’s ability to teach him how to access the tools to craft it. In the same way that the gendered origins of Kente emerge when readers look to the margins of the story—a subtle shift in perspective that alters the narrative’s meaning—this essay considers the indirect ways black women disrupt conventional narratives of black female subjectivity and thrive in spite of the double bind of race and gender oppression. They do so in both domestic and public spheres by cultivating their interior selves and finding creative ways to unite the various components of their complex selves.

The vocabulary of the Ananse aesthetic, then, untangles the double bind of black women’s race and gender oppression and repurposes those threads by using them to piece together scraps of memory, culture, and psychology and cast new rituals out of the old. The black women who create within the Ananse asethetic use their absent presence to transform their position on the margins to a position of power while developing interiority to protect their private selves. As craftswomen, they create with what I call a conversant warp and weft to interlace their alternative perspectives into dominant discourses. (If warp threads, stretched north and south on a loom, define the parameters of a textile or tapestry, then the weft includes any pattern woven east to west into, over, and through the warp’s stabilizing strands.) These strategies encourage what I’ve termed integrative liminality: a practice that links disparate ideologies or



reconciles binaries in a discursive space both above and between racist, sexist, and other oppressive discourses. By finding power on the margins, black women employ “a mode of seeing”11 that enables them to appreciate “a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center”12 and use this understanding of wholeness in the “struggle to transcend poverty and despair.”13

“Pedagogy of the Post-Racial: The Texts, Textiles, and Teachings of African American Women” examines representative texts and textiles by Elizabeth Keckley and Heather Andrea Williams to outline how these works fore-shadow the material realities of African Americans who welcome reminders that even as definitions of race and descriptions of its attendant disparities change, this before-and-after moment need not constitute a moment of psychic undoing. Keckley and Williams teach valuable lessons about negotiating the politics of post-blackness and post-racialism, but I should note here that their lessons come from a uniquely black female perspective. Instead of reveling in “A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter,”14 contemporary black women writers producing in this post-racial moment—Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award–Winning Salvage the Bones is one example—have doubled down on realism, perhaps skeptical of the implications of what accepting post-racialism might mean to the salvific wishes of black women. Codified by Candice Jenkins in Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy, the “salvific wish,”15 characterizes the “complexities” black women face while “living at the intersection of blackness, womanhood”16 and describes how concerns over respectability impact the potential for intimacy. The salvific wish describes the desire among black women to be redeemed from portrayals of black woman-hood as pathological and, in the words of religious scholar Monica Coleman, to be “liberated from various forms of historical and contemporary assaults against the full realization of their personhood.”17 By delineating the specific practices black women employ to redeem their subjectivity from post-racial ideologies that threaten race-based political resistance, or post-black beliefs that erase black ancestral wisdom,18 my essay argues for a flexible, not fixed, approach to black rootedness as “new forms of [post]black identity that are multiple, fluid, and profoundly contingent”19 find twenty-first-century prominence.

“Pedagogy of the Post-Racial” offers a theory that looks back to the folk-loric roots of African American cultural retentions and names the struggles and strategies that have endured without reifying blackness as monolith. By bringing Keckley’s historical and Williams’s contemporary moments into conversation, this essay delineates a lesson from the past: cultivating a formidable interior allows black protagonists and culture workers to express agency when post-race discourse truncates it, or demonstrate rootedness when post-racial discourse denies it. To codify what I call the pedagogy of the post-racial, therefore, to outline the strategies black women writers have employed to negotiate the cultural consequences of assimilation, this essay examines a


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text and textile at opposing ends of a historical spectrum to demonstrate how the Ananse aesthetic, a theory of cultural permanence and racial transforma-tion, offers a litany of best practices, a series of selective strategies, for those who wish to affirm the strengths of black culture during a time when its very existence is being called into question.

Lessons on Post-Racial Respectability: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes

She is on the balcony at the courthouse. She is in the box at the opera. She is seen but rarely heard. She is Elizabeth Keckley: the modiste to Mary Todd Lincoln whose autobiography Behind the Scenes develops the interior life of the lovely Mrs. Keckley who, in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, rarely speaks but is often spoken of. Late in the screenplay and in an effort to acknowledge Lincoln’s love of opera, viewers see “[t]he Lincolns, in their [Presidential] box” watching Charles Gounod’s Faust.20 Screenwriters set the scene: “Mary turns to Lincoln. They speak in whispers. Mrs. Keckley tries not to listen but she can’t help hearing what they say.”21 In the on-screen portrayal, Gloria Reuben, as Elizabeth Keckley, casts her eyes down and over her left shoulder, in the direction of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln and Sally Field’s Mary, but remains perfectly still and seemingly focused on the players on stage.

The screenplay and enactment position Keckley solely as servant and go to great lengths to downplay the subversive agency she possesses to simultaneously function as spy. Much like Linda Brent who “assumes an absent presence and develops the critical and narrative skills that prepare her”22 to outwit Dr. Flint and send him on a wild goose chase while she hides out in a garret just above his head, Keckley, as a black woman and former slave, also occupies an absent presence in relation to the Lincolns and the whites she encounters. Adapted from Jacques Derrida’s presence/absence and inspired by actual spiders who “hang out” in rafters and on ceilings observing all even though they may not be seen, absent presence defines one way black women use their marginal presence to enhance their critical perspective. Throughout the film, Keckley is physi-cally present yet psychically absent to Lincoln who, in a conversation with her about the implications of freedom for “Negroes” admits: “I…I don’t know you, Mrs. Keckley. Any of you.” Fortunately, Keckley’s self-worth is not contingent upon Lincoln’s affirmation, a fact that becomes crystal clear when Keckley positions herself as one who helped birth the freedom she now stands to inherit: “As for me: My son died fighting for the Union, wearing the Union blue. For freedom he died. I’m his mother. That’s what I am to the nation, Mr. Lincoln. What else must I be?”23 But at the same time absent presence may be a source of empowerment for black women, it stands as a potential source of angst for white ones.



To be sure, no mistress in her right mind could contend that her servants were merely furniture, psychically absent in her presence. Scholarship on the intimacies of the plantation household testifies to as much. Nevertheless, it may seem that my definition of absent presence accepts reductive readings of black women domestics—as serviceable black bodies—only to reproduce them. My purpose here, in nodding to the absence and presence of the black woman, is to subvert plantation tradition myths and their portrayal in literature, while contributing to scholarship that rewrites our understanding of slave life, most notably the relationships between black women slaves and those who owned them. Absent presence, therefore, in response to plantation tradition myths that depict the antebellum era nostalgically as a period when blacks knew their “place” and “happy darkies” sang without a care, invokes the image of the black woman who is physically and psychically present, yet imagined to be intellectually and emotionally absent, to reproduce the sentimental image of the black woman as a serviceable body and simultaneously recast it as a fantasy that masked white fears of black backlash.

At the same time absent presence speaks to how black women’s bodies move materially in the nineteenth century while masking a psychology that led many to be “the first to make trouble” during the Civil War,24 absent presence gestures toward the existence of the black woman’s interior life and allows us to appreciate Keckley’s narrative for all the ways it transforms her from a silent observer and flat stereotype, to an active participant and self-actualized subject. The most significant difference between Keckley’s nineteenth-century body and that of the post-racial black female subject is in the move from invisibility in the nineteenth century to corporeal hypervisibility and emotional invisibility in the twenty-first. The slave-bound black female body that moves in and out of the kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms of whites performs intimate labor not in spite of, but because of, her marginalized position. She performs deferral and has mastered the art of masking. She is present but not seen. A specter.

Instead of a specter, the post-racial black female subject is an all-too-present spectacle that chafes the narratives of “respectability and uplift”25 dominating black women’s fiction, self-writing, and poetry from slavery through Jim Crow. In other words, the post-racial black female subject stills battles racism and the reach of its subtle and deliberate hand, but instead of occupying an absent presence in relation to the whites with whom she comes into contact, instead of being invisible because of her race, she is hypervisible, the enactment of “excess flesh,”26 that troubles the “normative gaze”27 and “doubles [the] visibility”28 of the subject. Moreover, instead of finding the agency that Keckley lacked until the Civil War when she, like other black women, spoke and acted in defiance of slavery,29 the post-racial moment has prevented black women from assuming agency and visibility beyond “their willingness to conform to already existing ideas of black womanhood and femininity.”30 Therefore, while the post-racial


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black female subject easily moves into physical spaces on the other side of glass walls instead of glass ceilings—the academy, business, government, for example—the experiences she voices are still scripted, either consciously or unconsciously, by many of the same narrow stereotypes that delimited the agency of nineteenth-century figures such as Keckley. The post-racial black woman may have access to the formal education that eluded Keckley, but she still exists in need of a safe interior space to imagine who she is beyond stereotypical “controlling images.”31 Keckley’s subtle gestures in the film, then, are not the substance of the woman. They hint toward something more. They hint toward an interior life, a life lived behind the scenes.

After years of stitching beautiful gowns for Mary Todd Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley pieced together her own life story in Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. In Behind the Scenes, Keckley chronicles how she purchased her freedom and lived a well-connected life as a modiste to the wives of Washington politicos during the mid-nineteenth century. The majority of Keckley’s narrative focuses on her life with Mary Todd: the extravagant and troubled widow of Civil War president Abraham Lincoln whom Keckley dresses, consoles, and champions during Todd’s life within and, literally, without the White House. In Keckley’s narrative, a masterful mix of slave narrative, abolitionist propaganda, sentimental fiction, and historical account, “‘Lizabeth,” as Todd affectionately calls her, applies her experience as a modiste—one who not only sews but also designs garments—in her patch-work construction of Behind the Scenes.

The important part of Keckley’s experience as a modiste, however, is not in her sewing expertise, but in her skills in construction, in manipulating pieces of pre-woven fabric to tell a story and elicit a particular response from the viewer. Keckley pieces together the snippets of history, literature, and media (i.e., letters, newspaper clippings, legal documents) with the thematic thread of respectability—both hers and Mary Todd’s—to form the quilt-like, text-as-textile composition of Behind the Scenes. As early as the preface, Keckley self-consciously addresses her technique, acknowledging that despite her romance-filled life, her narrative includes “much [that] has been omitted, but nothing [that] has been exaggerated.”32 What appears as a narrative that meanders aimlessly along is actually an interestingly contradictory yet curi-ously coherent patchwork text that begins with the in-and-out, up-and-down, push-and-pull rhythm of Keckley’s intention against ante- and postbellum America. Moreover, Keckley’s recognition of the gaps—the omissions within her story—suggests that they, too, are worthy of attention for the way they complement the substance of her narrative and delineate a multipurpose psychic space to be used in accordance with her desires. The secondary narrative, which occupies an absent presence in Behind the Scenes, involves Keckley’s intervention into preexisting historical narratives and traditions of black autobiography.



Keckley’s narrative, weft-driven response to the warp of history enacts the Ananse aesthetic’s conversant warp and weft, an exchange appropriately described by James Olney in the Introduction to the Schomburg edition of Behind the Scenes as the “contrary tension”33 between Keckley’s “frequent [employment of] novelistic means to tell the story”34 and “actual historical events”35—a tension that consistently serves to “complicate, to deepen, and to enrich the narrative texture.”36 According to Olney, what is most appreciable about Keckley’s text is its utter defiance of categorization and its inclusive approach to convention. Behind the Scenes exists beyond categories bound by genre while simultaneously referencing multiple types at once. Olney elaborates: “Behind the Scenes is thus not altogether a slave narrative and not exactly an autobiography, although it partakes in part of both of these, nor is it a romance or sentimental novel, even though it reads at times as if it could be so classified.”37 Like her lived experience, Keckley’s narrative brings together heretofore disparate life experiences—those as a slave and those with the president’s wife—into a narrative where these connections seem almost natural. Keckley skillfully links her life story to romance and seamlessly melds life in the slave quarters with life in the White House with a delicate, “scarcely perceptible”38 narrative line that joins disparate pieces in a text that is completely integrated without being absolutely uniform.

The symbolic thread Keckley uses to stitch together story fragments, anec-dotes, letters, and documents emerges most noticeably from the underlying movement between tension and release in her organizational strategy. The first part of Behind the Scenes depicts the thirty years Keckley spent as a slave; the second recounts the four years Keckley worked in the White House. Instead of allotting more narrative space to her thirty years as a slave and less to her four years as a freewoman, Keckley compresses the thirty years into three chapters and expands the four years into twelve. Certainly, Keckley’s choice to limit her focus on slavery aligns with her desire “to hasten to the most interesting part of [her] story” and focus on her achievements and success.39 But her manipulation of time and text has implications far beyond hastening the reader to the juicy bits of the tale. In fact, the internal narrative pulse that contracts and dilates both time and narrative allows Keckley to give birth to her creativity, bear a narrative weave that attempts to bridge disparate ideologies, and produce an organizational line that mimics the spinning of wool into thread.

The process of spinning wool involves two fundamental movements: twisting and drafting (the second of which involves a simultaneous pinching and extending motion). With the help of a hand or drop spindle (Fig. 1), or flyer wheel, carded fibers clean and free of debris are twisted into lengths of thread for weaving. A rudimentary yet effective apparatus, the hand spindle allows spinners to use gravity and the momentum of the twisting spindle to form thread. Most, however, are more familiar with the flyer wheel (Fig. 2), the foot treadle–powered counterpart of the high or walking wheel.40


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With the f lyer wheel, spinners use the foot treadle to power the larger wheel; with their free hand, they draft the f ibers, allowing the f lyer to “automati-cally [twist] the spun yarn”41 and thread it onto a bobbin. The drafting and

Fig. 1. Hand or drop spindle. © demid/Bigstockphoto.com



spinning, pinching and twisting, contracting and dilating of f iber continues, potentially, ad inf initum. Likewise, Keckley’s manipulation of temporal space—the amount of time that passes while she is a slave, and the amount of time that passes while she is a modiste—and narrative space—how much Keckley writes about those events—infuses the text with an inner pulse that contracts, dilates, and, as a result spins the thread of respectability that unites the narrative’s anecdotal and “extratextual”42 fragments.

The thread of respectability Keckley spins is formed out of her desire to rise above the limits of her racialized station and restore the reputation of the maligned and misunderstood Mary Todd Lincoln.43 This thread unites self-generated authenticating documents with her thread of respectability

Fig. 2. Flyer wheel. © Ints Vikmanis/Dreamstime.com


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to form the text-as-textile of her narrative. The act of authentication was a familiar necessity for black writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-ries where they required attestation from “some of the best judges”44 before publication could occur. Consider, for example, how the most respectable Characters in Boston,45 through careful evaluation of the poems produced “by a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa,”46 testified to publishers and the reading public that the poems published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral were, in fact, penned by a young Phillis Wheatley.47 In similar fashion, Lydia Maria Child in her “Introduction by the Editor,” substantiates Harriet Jacobs’s author-ship of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by insisting that, “those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction.”48 In stark contrast, Keckley audaciously inserts relevant documentation without prefatory substantiation and pieces them together to create authentication papers all her own. This documentation occurs in three forms: as a letter from her father—who is sold away to another plantation—to “Little Lizzie’s” mother;49 as transcribed legal documents veri-fying receipt of payment for her freedom; as letters from her former mistress; and as letters and lists from Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe fiasco in New York. Most important to this essay, however, is the documentation included in chapter 3—a chapter titled “How I Gained My Freedom.”

In chapter 3, Keckley incorporates transcriptions of freedom papers and other legal documents to self-authenticate her narrative and fill the deafening silence in other slave narratives around the practical strategies that facilitated the movement from slavery to freedom. Beginning with chapter 1, it would seem that Keckley follows the conventions of the slave narrative. From the “I was born”50 opening to the circuitous statement about the rape that produced her only child (“Suffice it to say, that [a white man—I spare the world his name] persecuted me for four years, and I—I—became a mother”),51 Keckley’s narrative aligns with others in the genre, most notably slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. A striking divergence from these seminal texts is the manner in which Keckley self-authenticates the veracity and significance of her narrative with documentation that simultaneously bears witness to the financial negotiations that earned her her freedom.

Keckley’s reprinted personal letters, legal documents, and IOUs mark the moment her freedom is officially paid in full; with her physical freedom assured, Keckley is then free to assume autobiographical agency. In other words, Keckley’s economic self-sufficiency becomes the mechanism by which she earns ultimate authority to tell her own narrative. After beginning chapter 3 with an overview of the moments that led to her purchasing her and her son’s freedom, particularly the interventions of “one of [her] kind patrons,”52 Mrs. LeBourgois, Keckley proclaims: “The twelve hundred dollars were raised,



and at last my son and myself were free. Free, free! what a glorious ring to the word. Free! the bitter heart-struggle was over. Free! the soul could go out to heaven and to God with no chains to clog its flight or pull it down.…Yes, free! free by the laws of man and the smile of God—and Heaven bless them who made me so!”53

By referencing the “laws of man” and insisting, throughout the chapter, that as an honorable woman she is committed to working within the rules of the land to secure her freedom,54 Keckley demonstrates a cultural literacy quite different than that demonstrated by Frederick Douglass. In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, when Douglass asks Master Thomas to intercede on his behalf with Covey and protect him from the abusive and domineering “nigger-breaker,”55 Master Thomas refuses, citing the loss of a year’s wages as the primary reason why Douglass needed to remain under Covey’s control. Without a financial incentive to warrant his release to another home, Douglass physically confronts Covey to show “how a slave was made a man.”56 The altercation does not free Douglass’s body from slavery; it does, however, free his mind and, in turn, his manhood. Instead of direct physical aggression—which was out of the question for most slave women—Keckley created space within the existing system to facilitate her movement from slavery to freedom. Specifically, Keckley pieces together legal, personal, and financial documents that testify to what she is owed from white people and what she is owed from the state, all in an effort to prove that she has earned her freedom.

Keckley offers “the history of [her] emancipation”57 through copies of “the original papers”58 to seize control over how these documents are contextualized and to take ownership over her narrative. From Anne P. Garland’s letter that reads: “I promise to give Lizzie and her son George their freedom, on the payment of $1,200,”59 to a statement from “Wm. J. Hammond, Clerk of the Circuit Court” of St. Louis that certifies “the foregoing to be a true copy of a deed of emancipation from Anne P. Garland to Lizzie and her son George,”60 Keckley pieces together legal, personal, and financial testimonies that docu-ment what she is owed from white people and what she has earned from the state, not how she is beholden to them. Whereas the inclusion of these docu-ments from white authority figures in her community may suggest a certain degree of attestation, Keckley’s manipulation of these fragments—particularly in her text-as-textile61 approach to resituating the pieces in a pattern that tells a story she controls—shows how powerfully working from the margins and within the gaps set by the “laws of man” can be.

The text-as-textile approach to self-authentication and conversant weft Keckley weaves onto the warp of nineteenth-century historical slave narratives is made possible, in large part, by her position on the margins. I do not mean to suggest that slavery is something to be romanticized for what those who suffered its horrors were miraculously able to produce. I aim, instead, to align


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Keckley with other “postbellum slave narrators”62 who depict the South “as a prison house or a contemporary Egypt from which a Moses must arise and lead his people to freedom.”63 The “excessively charitable”64 yet “subversively ennobling”65 approach Keckley assumes in penning her story is part of a social and political milieu that demanded delicacy and nuance for black voices to be heard.66 Even within the limits of her marginalized status, Keckley executes the text-as-textile technique and initiates a conversant weft with the historical warp of time in anticipation of a post-racial black female subject. In this way, the absent presence of the nineteenth-century black woman who exists as servant/spy is replaced by twenty-first-century culture workers who enact integrative liminality.

Seminar on Signs and Symbols: Heather Andrea Williams’s History Quilt

“Hit’s poetry, ain’t it?”—A slave comments on her quilting, Stitched from the Soul:

Slave Quilts from the Antebellum SouthI believe quilts were diaries for preliterate folks. There were all the family stories in the fables, Memories preserved.

—Joyce Scott, Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts

As much as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln complicates the myth of Abraham Lincoln as “The Great Emancipator” by explicating the collective, behind-the-scenes moves that made the Emancipation Proclamation happen, it does little to detail the specific ways African Americans worked together to destabalize the planta-tion system. Elizabeth Keckley organized other black women to raise money and collect donations of food and clothing for fugitive slaves who sought refuge in Washington; black soldiers fought in the Union Army; free and fugitive blacks lectured and wrote on behalf of their enslaved brothers and sisters. But in the same way Spielberg’s two-minute opera scene requred an audience full of extras in hand-sewn period pieces, two days of rehersals, and countless hours of research on how opera houses in the mid-nineteenth century were lighted,67 there are brief moments in the film that nod to more textured narratives of resistance than the film takes time to develop. Spielberg’s portrayal of Lincoln’s conversation with two black soldiers is one such example: a cinematic moment that signals the presence of counternarratives worthy of further exploration.

The scene is set on Jenkins’ Ferry battlefield in Arkansas, where President Lincoln converses with black soldiers Ira Clark and Harold Green. The former converses quite candidly with the commander-in-chief; perhaps too candidly for Green, Clark ’s tight-lipped comrade. Corporal Clark presses Lincoln



on how black servicemen are underpaid, restricted to noncommissioned positions, and denied access to the vote.68 Unfortunately, before we learn anything more about Clark and Green, Spielberg cuts to a scene with two white soldiers and leaves the image of Clark and Green—uniform-wearing, gun-toting black servicemen, as well as their oppositional approaches to authority and philosophies on black advancement—as grist for another mill. Even though this scene pauses to recognize the engaged presence of black Union troops f ighting for the manumission of blacks, the f ilm ultimately credits Lincoln, the man, with black emancipation. Historian Heather Andrea Williams’s History Quilt (Fig. 3) offers an alternative narrative to the myth that Lincoln “freed the slaves” and substantiates why revisiting America’s legacy of racial oppression and violence, especially in a post-racial world that discounts race-based resistance, is a necessary part of capturing the story of United States racial history.

Fig. 3. History Quilt. Image courtesy of the artist.


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Displayed in 2006 at The Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Heather Andrea Williams’s History Quilt combines advances in quiltmaking technologies and the creator’s expertise in black history in a tapestry that captures the history of African American advance-ment—the movement from slavery to freedom—as well as, if not better than, any textbook. In the introduction to this very special exhibition, art historian Lyneise Williams summarizes: in an exhibition meant to “examine the complexi-ties of African American lives,” the exhibition’s title, “Inbetween Spaces: Textured Imaginings of African American Lives,” marks Williams’s “choice to create the word ‘inbetween’ rather than the expected ‘in between’…to create room for reclamations of ignored and forgotten people and for personal introspections in her quilts.”69 The collective origins of Williams’s quilts harken back to the collaborative creative enterprise of women, both black and white, who worked together in quilting circles to create quilts that fulfilled the practical need for warmth within the household and the psychological need to create social systems of support. Pieced in a quilting group she joined as a graduate student at Yale, Williams’s History Quilt represents a modern take on this tradition. Instead of prioritizing the utilitarian focus of the traditional quilting circle where quilts were needed, however, Williams’s quilting circle privileged providing necessary emotional support for graduate women seeking an outlet from their academic demands.

Notwithstanding an exhibition title that seems particularly fortuitous considering the subject of this essay, Williams’s focus on “inbetween spaces” highlights the liminality, the hovering in between like spiders, central to the Ananse aesthetic.70 Moreover, as a quintessential example of text-as-textile, History Quilt also converses with the warp of American history to stitch a new story of the African American past constantly being formed. A striking textile made all the more beautiful by Williams’s careful selection of luxurious fabric with meaningful colors and patterns, History Quilt combines images that recount the resilience of black Americans throughout history with newspaper clippings, reproduced sheet music, and photographs. By themselves, the clip-pings, music, and images derive their meaning from a historical record that may or may not centralize black subjects; positioned within the context of Williams’s quilt, the images become recontextualized to situate black subjects as active participants in their manumission and education. The end result is a textured textile that appropriates the quilting practice of repurposing fabric scraps by repurposing pieces of history. In History Quilt, Williams signifies on snippets of American history to offer an alternative narrative of black patrio-tism, literacy, and love.

The quilt detail of a black Civil War soldier alongside the text of the Emancipation Proclamation (Fig. 4) replaces the prevailing narrative of nineteenth-century African Americans as passive recipients of emancipation, a narrative that represents the warp, or the prevailing rhetoric of American history,



with an image that portrays African Americans as active participants in their own manumission. Juxtaposing the soldier against the proclamation places violent intervention alongside the written declaration to assert that, despite the mytho-logical narratives about the Emancipation Proclamation’s actual power, it was, in fact, the Civil War that earned the slaves their freedom. In this singular artistic moment, William invokes a historical truth: that black freedom was not won solely by words on a page, but was earned by hard fought, violent engagement.

Absent from this image of an armed black man, yet present among stories of violent slave resistance, are the accounts of retaliation by slave women during the Civil War. Detailed descriptions of the household tensions between slave and mistress notwithstanding, slave narratives, especially those penned by black women,71 fail to articulate the direct and violent action undertaken by black women in defiance of slavery. During the Civil War, as Thavolia Glymph explains in Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, “enslaved women,” having decided early on that the Civil War and ensuing conflict concerned them directly, “risked their lives by refusing to minister to the needs of their mistresses by fleeing to Union lines.”72 Before

Fig. 4. Black soldier detail. Image courtesy of the artist.


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departing, these slave women made sure to leave destruction in their wake: while their masters were away fighting for the Confederacy, many enslaved women torched their mistresses’ homes to “prevent [them] from ever returning and occupying them.”73 White women who imagined themselves without fault74 were traumatized by the thought that their “subservient” and “docile” blacks could conceive of and execute open acts of retribution.

If black men’s militarized resistance and black women’s guerilla warfare signify the ways violence became a tool for social justice during the nineteenth century, then the Emancipation Proclamation symbolizes the empty promise of political hortatory in reaching the same goal. Lincoln, the film, dramatizes the wheeling and dealing that allowed Lincoln to secure the requisite signatures to make the Emancipation Proclamation a reality; prevailing popular discourse credits President Abraham Lincoln with freeing the slaves. Coincidentally, the proclamation offers a source for “The Great Emancipator” myth that pervades the American imaginary: “Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States,…order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.”75 Lincoln’s first-person pronouncement and the wholehearted accep-tance of this narrative by all segments of the American population, regardless of race, belies the personal sacrifice, the direct action in which African Americans engaged, in their quest for citizenship and inclusion in the emerging American republic. Within the context of Williams’s History Quilt, the Emancipation Proclamation represents a symbolic, textual freedom—mere words on a page—without the freedom fight signified by the armed, black solider woven beside it.

Williams challenges the warp of history, which credits a single man with black manumission, with an image of a black solider to mark the presence of a counternarrative—her quilted, alternative weft of history. Typically, text situated alongside image is meant to be illustrative; that is, the meaning of the image is summarized, or amplified, by the text itself. Williams challenges this expectation by using the image to comment on the text. In other words, instead of text contextualizing image—this is a picture of so-and-so, this is what he is doing, this is when he did it, and this is who is responsible for the photograph—image resituates text. The black soldier, voiceless and devoid of a text fashioned by his own hand, implicitly challenges the individualistic “I” of Lincoln’s proclamation. At the same time, the black soldier’s silent refutation of Lincoln’s claim to fame performs the indirect resistance of black Americans throughout history who, when faced with the consequences of lynching and mob violence, developed circuitous strategies to express resistance while staying “in their place.” Williams prompts readers of this image, and viewers of the quilt, to actively participate in the new narrative her History Quilt invites.



A new narrative where black men carry guns, are patriots, and play the role of active participants in the fight for black freedom.

If Williams’s image of the black soldier challenges the myth of the Emancipation Proclamation as a binding document that freed the slaves, her detail of a slave woman reading (Fig. 5) disputes the dominant narratives of nineteenth-century black literacy, which contend that slaves either did not,

Fig. 5. Black woman reading detail. Image courtesy of the author.


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or were to afraid to, learn to read. Williams stands as one of the foremost interpreters of the history of black literacy; her full-length monograph Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom attests to as much. But it is through Williams’s bridging of town and gown through both text and textile that her exploration of accessibility and black literacy finds its primacy. Despite its straightforward prose style, Self Taught is the product of a university press and primarily the purview of academics and scholars of American and African American history and culture. History Quilt, for all its intellectual intricacies, is crafted within a genre that welcomes participation from everyday people. Williams’s literacy in these domains—too easily reduced to the work of the academic and the work of the “folk”—allows her to reach across boundaries of race and class and unite otherwise disparate voices in a text-as-textile quilt that is simultaneously highbrow and lowbrow, oral and written, historical and modern.

This particular detail of Williams’s History Quilt features women and children beside what appears to be slave quarters. The image captures a black woman, older than the girls playing on the ground but perhaps younger than the black women to her right, reading a book. One interpretation of this image may be that it demonstrates a moment when the literacy formed in secret, as is the case when Linda Brent “contrive[s] to read and sew” in the garret while hiding from Dr. Flint, migrates to a communal space outside the home.76 The public nature of the woman reading suggests that textual engagement literally and figuratively moved women from the walls of the home to an open space of intellectual engagement and information sharing. The thought that the reading woman might share her insights is a reasonable one, since these “[r]esidential arrangements,” as Deborah Gray White observes in Ar’n’t I a Woman, created opportunities for “informal palavers, during which females could share their joys, concerns, gossip, and heartbreak.”77 The photograph of the slave cabin, where women congregate and one woman reads, also re-presents the discrete sites where black women could cultivate their interior selves. Symbolically, the image of the black women reading outside of the home places the black female subject in a public sphere that is not solely the domain of men (even though black women slaves labored as hard as their male counterparts); it is a woman-centered, child-friendly space that allows the black women represented here to collectively uphold responsibilities related to childcare and child rearing and individually engage in intellectual pursuits. By presenting the subject of this detail as one who labored to improve her mind at the same time she existed as a body of labor, this image promotes a both/and ethos that reflects integrative liminality—the linking of disparate ideologies as a comprehensive whole. As a result, this image encourages viewers to see nineteenth-century black women beyond the flesh and imagine them, instead, as in possession of an interior.



Through this woman, her head bowed, engrossed in the text before her, we witness an interior moment—one woman’s meditation and cultivation of her interiority. The psychic distance between the woman with the book and the women and children who surround her is especially remarkable. What is she reading? What is she thinking? Is she inspired? Frustrated? Emboldened? In The Black Interior, Elizabeth Alexander asks as much of Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture The Black Woman Speaks, the image poised prominently on the cover of her collection of essays: “The black woman’s mouth and eyes in Catlett’s sculpture are wide open. What is she seeing? What is she saying? What is inside?”78 Pausing to consider the meaning behind this “black-woman-reading” beyond its function as a symbol of her literacy engenders similar questions. How does the image of the reading woman allow us to recast her as complex, view her as human, and depict her as thoughtful? How might this image suggest the presence of an interior beyond her material circumstances?

Imagining interiority within this detail may not answer the questions I pose above or reveal the content of the reader’s thoughts, but this black-woman-reading provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which black women maintain interior spaces in spite of their material circumstances. In other words, imagining the interior workings of the black female subject allows us to cast her in three dimensions instead of the single dimension of stereotype; she is a worldly body; her body performs public (and sometimes political) acts; and she cultivates an interior space despite how her body is read in the material world. Even though interiority functions differently from woman to woman, identifying black women’s interiority names the space that corrects what Melissa Harris-Perry calls “misrecognition”:79 the ways in which black women—regardless of their education, stature, or status—are reduced to stereotypical portrayals by white men, white women, and even black commu-nities unable or resistant to appreciating them for their intellect and grace, or even their resistance to respectability politics. If cultivated to encourage self-love and to reject narratives of self-loathing, black women’s interiors can be transformed into healing spaces that delimit a safe terrain for the enactment of integrative liminality: the reconciliation of the seemingly irreconcilable polarizing representations of black women’s subjectivity.

The self-love encouraged by the cultivation of black women’s interiority is part of a larger love ethos, an epistemology that exists between African Americans in the New World despite slavery’s efforts to disrupt the familial ties black families creatively strove to maintain. A love ethos is more than Pollyanna platitudes; it is a powerful value system that, according to bell hooks, is the cornerstone of social change and the point of departure for healing.80 For black communities who identify as such, love is the motor that drives a people used as chattel and denied stable familial relationships to relentlessly reclaim the ties that bind.


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Saturated with love and longing, the image “Information Wanted” (Fig. 6) challenges the historical narratives that fail to represent or record how slaves responded to the forcible breakup of their families. Comprised entirely of text, this newspaper advertisement soliciting information about the whereabouts of a man’s mother, reflects Williams’s interest in weaving together historical counternarratives as well as her commitment to writing about them (Williams’s second book, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, is based on the stories behind “Information Wanted”). As this enlarged version of what would have been a small ad explains, Thornton Copeland, who was sold to Samuel Copeland in Richmond, Virginia, is seeking information about his mother “whom [he] left in Fauquier county Va., in 1844.”81 Copeland is able to recall the most obvious of details—specifically, his mother’s name—as well as other information that has nothing to do with her physical attributes, namely her history of ownership: “My mother’s name was Betty, and was sold by Col. Briggs to James French.”82 This ad, published in the Colored Tennessean, a weekly paper that ran for two years between 1865–67,83 is situated directly to the right of the details of the Emancipation Proclamation and black soldier and immediately to the left of the woman reading detail. “Information Wanted,” when read in context from left to right across the top of the quilt, completes the statement Williams makes about black persons throughout history: African Americans are more than victims. They are agents.

The visual and textual representation of African Americans as agents in Williams’s History Quilt empowers black Americans and their descendants to reject stereotypical portrayals with counternarratives grounded in the historical realities of black achievement. The text Williams weaves into her textile, therefore, is as important for its content as it is for its mode of presenta-tion. It is one thing for historians to represent a revised narrative of black achievement textually; it is quite another for historians to represent this same

Fig. 6. “Information Wanted” detail. Image courtesy of the artist.



history through textile. To that end, Heather Andrea William’s History Quilt incorporates a unique combination of features: a textile that functions as text, a quilt that challenges Western textuality-over-orality hierarchies, and a mode of presentation that affirms the permanence of the Ananse aesthetic and its promotion of interiority and drive toward integrative liminality in the creative work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century black women.

Keckley and Williams demonstrate that there is more to black women than their struggle. Beyond violence and patriarchy, beyond misrecognition and hypervisibility, beyond the mixed messages of mammy and sapphire, the black female subject, from the nineteenth century to the present, possesses an interior space with the potential of holding more than her secret thoughts and hidden dreams. When cultivated to produce healing counternarratives, this interior space becomes a source of power, a site of agency, for the twenty-first-century black female subject who claims blackness in spite of its erasure within post-racial discourse. Remembering Elizabeth Keckley for more than her on-screen portrayal, and inviting her into conversation with Heather Andrea Williams’s history quilt, codifies the continuity between text and textile to recast survival strategies of the past within the contemporary ritual of the Ananse aesthetic: a symbolic and systematic mode for healing psychic fragmentation and fostering loving relationships. The turn inward ignites what Kevin Everod Quashie elegantly claims as the “sovereignty of quiet,” a “consciousness that exists beyond the expectation of resistance.”84 This essay pauses to claim the interior, culturally located subjectivity of the black female subject before post-racial discourse demands, or she acquiesces, that it be let go.

Notes

1. Marlo Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, Trina Jones, “A Post-race Equal Protection?” Georgetown Law Journal 98, no. 4 (2010): 977.

2. Sumi Cho, “Post-racialism,” Iowa Law Review 94, 5 (2009): 1589.3. Shelby Steele, “The High Possibility,” in A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about

Obama and Why He Can’t Win. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 8.4. Cho, “Post-racialism,” 1596.5. Marlo Barnes et al., “A Post-race Equal Protection?” 977.6. A. O. Scott, “A President Engaged in a Great Civil War,” New York Times, Nov. 8,

2012, http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/movies/lincoln-by-steven-spielberg-stars daniel-day-lewis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Accessed June 28, 2013.

7. Kate Masur, “In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html. Accessed June 28, 2013.

8. See Shanna Greene Benjamin, “Weaving the Web of Integration: Locating Aunt Nancy in Praisesong for the Widow,” MELUS 30 (2005): 49–67.


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9. Thelma Golden, quoted in Paul C. Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” African American Review 41, no. 4 (2007): 627.

10. See Gay Wilentz, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Disease. (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

11. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), xvi.

12. Ibid.13. Ibid.14. Gene Andrew Jarrett, “A-World-in-Which-Race-Does-Not-Matter,” in Deans and

Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 167.

15. Candice Jenkins, Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 14.

16. Monica Coleman, Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2008), 3.

17. Ibid., 13.18. See Katie Cannon, “Moral Wisdom in the Black Women’s Literary Tradition,”

in Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995), 57–68. My sense of “black ancestral wisdom” is informed by Katie Cannon’s discussion of the un- and underappreciated moral wisdom held by black communities—moral wisdom, or black ethics, informed by, among other things, values that run counter to mainstream investments in wealth building or individual achievement.

19. Thelma Golden, qtd. in Paul C. Taylor, “Post-Black, Old Black,” 627.20. Tony Kushner, Lincoln, film. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Petersburg, VA:

Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, 2012.21. Ibid.22. Shanna Greene Benjamin, “A Trickster in Transition: Nineteenth-Century Repre-

sentations of Aunt Nancy,” in Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Cullen Gruesser and Hanna Wallinger (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2009), 45.

23. Kushner, Lincoln.24. Thavolia Glymph, “Nothing but Deception in Them,” in Out of the House of

Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 100.

25. Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 121.

26. Ibid., 112.27. Ibid.28. Ibid.29. Thavolia Glymph, “Nothing but Deception in Them,” 97.30. Whitney A. Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop



Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Second-Wave and Hip Hop Femi-nisms,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 8 (2008): 19–52.

31. Patricia Hill Collins, “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 77.

32. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. 1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xi.

33. James Olney, “Introduction,” in Keckley, Behind the Scenes, xxvii.34. Ibid.35. Ibid.36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 43.40. Shirley E. Held, Weaving: A Handbook of the Fiber Arts. (Belmont: Wadsworth,

1999), 312.41. Ibid.42. Olney, “Introduction,” 29.43. Ibid.44. Ibid.45. Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Foreword: In Her Own Write,” in Behind the Scenes or

Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. 1868 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), viii.

46. Ibid.47. Ibid.48. Lydia Maria Child, “Introduction by the Editor,” in Incidents in the Life of a Slave

Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), viii.49. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 43.50. Olney, “Introduction,” xxxvii.51. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 55.52. Ibid.53. Ibid.54. Ibid.55. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave,

Written by Himself (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 34.56. Ibid.57. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 56.58. Ibid.59. Ibid.60. Ibid., 61.61. See Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic” in

The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press,


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1986), 270–95. My use of Roland Barthes’s text as “textile” is informed by Nancy K. Miller’s insistence that we must acknowledge the spinner, author, or subject (in my case, black women) at the same time we consider the text.

62. Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118.

63. Ibid.64. Ibid., 119.65. Ibid.66. Ibid.67. Brian Wise, “‘Lincoln’ Reveals 16th President’s Passion for Opera,” Operavore,

Feb. 18, 2013, http://www.wqxr.org/#!/blogs/operavore/2013/feb/18/how-lincoln-portrays-presidents-passion-opera/. Accessed June 28, 2013.

68. Tony Kushner, Lincoln, 2012.69. Lyneise Williams, exhibit catalogue, Inbetween Spaces: Textured Imaginings of

African-American Lives, The Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum, Chapel Hill, Sept.–Dec. 2006.

70. Benjamin, “Loopholes,” 44.71. Harriet Jacobs’s, “The Jealous Mistress,” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,

is one such example.72. Thavolia Glymph, “Nothing but Deception in Them,” 100.73. Ibid., 106.74. A few mistresses remember one of their own, a mistress murdered “‘by her own

people. Her negroes’,” for the way she “‘indulged’ her household slaves ‘until they were like spoiled children.’” Glymph, 97.

75. Abraham Lincoln, “‘The Emancipation Proclamation,” National Archives and Records Administration, February 6, 2015, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/transcrip t.html.

76. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 93.77. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South

(New York: Norton, 1999), 123–24.78. Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press,

2004), xi.79. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 87.80. See bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: Perennial, 2001).81. Heather Andrea Williams, History Quilt (2006).82. Ibid.83. “About the Colored Tennessean,” Library of Congress. Washington, DC. June 7,

2011, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025745/.84. Kevin Everod Quashie, “The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black

Culture” (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 5–6.


Pedagogy of the Post-Racial: The Texts, Textiles, and Teachings of African American Women

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Transcript of Pedagogy of the Post-Racial: The Texts, Textiles, and Teachings of African American Women