Representing Segregation

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

Brian Norman, Piper Kendrix Williams

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438430348
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As a touchstone issue in American history, segregation has had an immeasurable impact on the lives of most ethnic groups in the United States. Primarily associated with the Jim Crow South and the court cases Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation comprises a diverse set of cultural practices, ethnic experiences, historical conditions, political ideologies, municipal planning schemes, and de facto social systems. Representing Segregation traces the effects of these practices on the literary imagination and proposes a distinct literary tradition of representing segregation. Contributors engage a cross section of writers, literary movements, segregation practices, and related experiences of racial division in order to demonstrate the richness and scope of responses to segregation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By taking up the cultural expression of the Jim Crow period and its legacies, this collection reorients literary analysis of an important body of African American literature in productive new directions.

Section III

Inside Jim Crow and His Doubles

In the Crowd series, Untitled #3 (Florida, 1935). Archival ink print, 14 × 11 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Shawn Michelle Smith.

Because the last section posed Chesnutt and the post-Reconstruction movement as formative to a literary tradition associated with segregation, the essays in this section work outward, geographically and chronologically, to see how later writers addressed Jim Crow segregation and its doubles, such as de facto urban segregation in the North. Anne Rice is interested in some of the more extreme forms of racially motivated violence in the South as she identifies “white islands of safety and engulfing blackness” in Angelina Weld Grimké's story “Blackness” and its reprinted version “Goldie” in the context of lynching in Valdosta, Georgia. Moving North, Michelle Gordon turns to A Raisin in the Sun to identify a segregation aesthetic in Hansberry's famed play. For Gordon, this segregation aesthetic helps to explain some of the historical misreadings of the play and the playwright as not radical enough or naively committed to American promises and the integration ideal.

Like Gordon's study of Hansberry, GerShun Avilez is interested in literary responses to the notorious racially restrictive housing covenants in the urban North. He argues for the importance of domestic space in our understanding of segregation's effect on African American experience in Trumbull Park by Frank London Brown and Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, especially the way the effects of segregation were not limited to the color line but penetrate seemingly safe black domestic spaces. Finally, Elizabeth Boyle Machlan also looks at domestic space in the segregated urban North, but this time by attending to architectural histories of the setting of Ann Petry's The Street in order to pose segregation's effect on the disintegration of American dreams of black homeownership and strong families.

White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness

Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie”

ANNE P. RICE

We with our blood have watered these fields

And they belong to us.

—Margaret Walker, “Delta” (1942)

Loss and the Literary Landscape

Jim Crow apartheid and Northern segregation alike operated through the racialization of space, in which geography and the built environment produced and expressed “the inequitable power relations between races” (Mohanram 3). Memory turns space into place, and a sense of place is “central to the formation of racial identity. The category of ‘black body’ can only come into being when the body is perceived as being out of place, either from its natural environment or its national boundaries” (ix). Segregation was all about place, the ownership of physical space conferred by memory, tradition, and the law, but also the elaborate social and symbolic code that signified such ownership. Knowing one's “place” for African Americans required giving up rights to physical space, including freedom of movement within and inscription of one's presence upon the landscape. Particularly prohibited, in the North as well as the South, were public monuments commemorating and celebrating the African American experience. The spatial environment thus normalized the silences and erasures of racial apartheid (as well as visual spectacles such as public lynching), making them seem indigenous to the land.¹

What does it mean to commemorate and to mourn your losses on a landscape designed to erase all traces of your presence? After catastrophe, memorials provide the “foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement,” underlining the crucial importance of returning to the place of loss, or at least having a place that “embodies that loss and allows collective mourning” (Winter 78). In the case of those displaced or traumatized by lynchings and race riots, what forms of commemoration are possible when there is no place to return to? Craig Barton explains that the intersection of space and race produced “separate, though sometimes parallel, overlapping or even superimposed cultural landscapes for black and white Americans,” resulting in a “complex social and cultural geography in which black Americans occupied and often continue to occupy distinct and frequently marginalized cultural landscapes” (xv). Barton insists, moreover, that the presence of “larger cultural landscapes, defined by custom and events as much as by specific buildings, and represented in text, image, and music” provides “invaluable insights into the memory of a place” (xvi). When the physical landscape remains mute, stories, images, and songs carry the burden of memory.

In this article, I examine mourning and memory, motherhood and citizenship, body and land in Angelina Weld Grimké's 1920 short story, “Goldie,” and an earlier unpublished version “Blackness.” These stories were based on Mary Turner, who at eight months pregnant, was lynched in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918—an event that I suggest constituted a primal trauma for the African American community. I place Grimké's text in the context of other African American women writing at the end of the World War I, particularly in reaction to the violence against women and children epitomized by the East Saint Louis Riot of 1917, and continuing on into the “Red Summer” of 1919. At the crest of this wave of violence, the killing of Mary Turner and her child because she protested her husband's lynching raised profound questions about how it could be possible to live in an America that had become a “sorrow home.”² For Grimké, witnessing and mourning demanded breaking through violently maintained boundaries of “blackness” and “whiteness,” those lines of force constructing the U.S. landscape as always raced white and gendered male. I argue that Grimké uses landscape images—the lynching tree, “white islands of safety” on segregation's road, and an unguarded house in the clearing—to mourn the violence done to Turner, her husband, and her child, to protest racial oppression, and to highlight white vulnerability in the face of certain retribution.

The Lynching of Mary Turner and the Landscape of Terror

While African American soldiers were off fighting for democracy in France, urban labor struggles and rural racial tensions flared at home, placing families under siege as never before. Scholars have scrutinized the violent backlash against returning veterans for demanding their rights, yet critical work remains to be done on the effect of home-front violence against African American women and children. Two wartime atrocities on the U.S. home front in particular drew expressions of maternal grief and outrage from female African American writers: the July 1917 race riots in East Saint Louis, Illinois, and the May 1918 lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child. During the war, U.S. cities erupted into racial violence against African Americans, but East Saint Louis was by far the worst. In a carefully planned rampage, mobs of white workers, incensed about black employment in factories holding government contracts, roved the streets attacking and murdering African Americans, including women and children. They set entire residential areas alight, leaving residents the choice of being burned in their homes or risking death outside. Witnesses described police and soldiers helping these uncontrolled gangs, which included among them white women and children. In a special report in the September 1917 Crisis, twenty-four-year-old Lula Suggs recalls hiding in a cellar with “about one hundred women and children” while “the School for Negroes on Winstanly Avenue was burned to the ground. When there was a big fire the rioters would stop to amuse themselves, and at such time I would peep out and actually saw children thrown into the fire” (Du Bois 231). Beatrice Deshong, age 26, reported seeing “men, small boys, and women and little girls all … trying to do something to injure the Negroes…. I saw the mob chasing a colored man who had a baby in his arms” (231). Newspapers put the death toll at 200, but Congress gave a low estimate of forty blacks and eight whites killed, with six thousand people displaced at least temporarily. On July 28, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) staged a silent parade down Fifth Avenue to protest the riots, marchers pointedly did not carry the U.S. flag. The silent men, women, and children streaming down the center of Manhattan instead carried signs reading: “Mother, Do Lynchers Go to Heaven?”; “Pray for the Lady Macbeths of East St. Louis”; “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?”; and “Give Us a Chance to Live.”

In May 1918, less than a year after the East Saint Louis riots, a convict laborer in Valdosta, Georgia named Sidney Johnson shot and killed Hampton Smith after the white landlord refused to pay him for hours worked in excess of his debt. Although Johnson made it known that he had acted alone, rumors quickly circulated of a conspiracy mastermind by Hayes Turner, who also had labored for Smith, and whose wife had been beaten by Smith on several occasions. With the apparent complicity of law enforcement, Turner was arrested, and then seized by a mob while being transported to a new jail. The mob hung him from a crossroads tree, allowing his body to remain on display where it was viewed by hundreds of people who came by automobile, wagon, buggy, and on foot. His wife, Mary, spoke out against the mob, only to be hunted and brutally murdered. The Turner lynching deeply traumatized the African American community, drawing an immediate and anguished response from black politicians, artists, and journalists.³ In a letter accompanying her submission to the Atlantic Monthly of “Blackness,” a short story based on the lynching, Angelina Weld Grimké wrote:

I am sending enclosed a story. It is not a pleasant one, but it is based on fact. Several years ago, in Georgia, a colored woman quite naturally it would seem became wrought up, because her husband had been lynched. She threatened to bring some of the leaders to justice. The mob, made up of “Christians” and brave white men determined to teach her a lesson. She was dragged out by them to a desolate part of the woods and the lesson began. First she was strung up by her feet to the limbs of a tree, next her clothes were saturated with kerosene oil, and then she was set afire. While the woman shrieked and writhed in agony, a man, who had brought with him a knife used in the butchering of animals, ripped her abdomen wide open. Her unborn child fell to the ground at her feet. It emitted one or two little cries but was soon silenced by brutal boots that crushed out the head. Death came at last to the poor woman. The lesson ended.⁴

Grimké's description of the incident makes clear that this lesson was “learned” not just by Turner, but by Grimké and others who witnessed its aftermath, especially as mediated through news reports and heightened by a horrified identification with the victim that produced an outpouring of words and art. Many connected the assault against Turner with the earlier riots.⁵ For instance, Meta Warrick Fuller's 1919 statue of a woman clutching her stomach protectively as figures swirl around her lower limbs bore the title: “Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Lynching.” Like the marchers in Harlem's Silent Protest Parade, Fuller's statue restores speech to the silenced, abjected black body through a physical presence that communicates dignity, anguish, and rage exceeding words.

Anne Spencer's poem “White Things,” on the other hand, written in outrage over Turner's lynching and published in the Crisis in 1923, seeks to make visible the unnatural and destructive power of white supremacy. Noting that “most men are black men, but the white are free,” Spencer describes a race of mutants who steal onto the earth and in a nihilistic rampage bleach everything of beauty they find. Her invocation of landscape recalls how this culture of violence displaced the native populations and destroyed the natural resources of the country to fuel its imperialistic industrial expansion. Reversing traditional Western associations of white and black as good and evil, Spencer shows that the white things consume people as well, burning “a race of black, black men” to “ashes white.” The white skull of the black man, “a glistening awful thing” and a “trophy for a young one,” becomes in Spencer's poem a prophetic symbol of the accelerating degeneration of white civilization (204).

The fact that Spencer, like Grimké, drew on nature imagery in much of her poetry provides one explanation for why she chose to express her anger and sadness over the murder of Mary Turner through a landscape ravaged by white supremacy. This devastated landscape was not simply a poetic device, however, but also is a faithful depiction of the landscape in which African Americans lived and moved in the years during and after the war. Twenty-six race riots took place during the summer of 1919, a period so bloody James Weldon Johnson christened it “The Red Summer.” White riots broke out in cities across the country, including Washington, DC, Chicago, Omaha, Charleston, and Knoxville. Violence swept rural areas as well, most infamously in the massacre of black sharecroppers who had dared to form a union in Elaine, Arkansas.⁶ In all, seventy-six lynchings were officially recorded for the year.

Perhaps Grimké drew on her own experience of five days of white veterans rampaging and killing near where she lived in Washington when she imagined Mary Turner's feelings of panic and fear during the invasion of her home. Inspired by Turner's lynching and published in 1920 in Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review, “Goldie” has enjoyed renewed attention as a critique of the racist underpinnings of the eugenics movement. Although scholars have examined in detail the space in which “Goldie” appeared (a magazine promoting birth control and catering to white women), a more detailed examination of the spaces appearing within the story itself can tell us a great deal about the lived experience of Jim Crow segregation. Lynching produced terror that disoriented people, changing their experience of space itself by dramatizing their vulnerability and lack of both public and private protection. Daylanne English has observed that African American women protested lynching “by stretching the literary form—to and beyond—its limits” (119). In both versions of the Turner story examined here, Grimké stretches the literary form to repair terror's disorientation by externalizing it, while also creating new possibilities for recovery through the remapping of psychic spaces.

The Revolutionary Space of “Blackness”

Grimké's papers contain three different stories, each with numerous draft versions, written in response to the murder of Mary Turner and her child.⁷ Claudia Tate maintains that Turner's lynching “so severely affected Grimké that not only did she rewrite that story over and over again, but the activity of rewriting it seems to have been more important than her desire to see it in print or performed” (217). Yet Grimké's letter to the Atlantic Monthly, in which she argues for the story's inclusion in a magazine devoted to exposing atrocities abroad, such as the Armenian genocide, suggests that the working through of her own wounding by this ongoing event demanded public as well as private expression. Close attention, moreover, to the evolution of her narrative from a nearly literal retelling of the lynching to the story of a home invasion that is avenged by a man who returns from the North reveals Grimké's desire to portray the lynching as part of a national assault against African American lives, in which denial of full citizenship and opportunity for advancement among even the most educated blacks is part of the same system of oppression as the brutal murder of a sharecropper's family in the deep South.

In Grimké's first retelling, entitled “The Waitin',” Mary Greene, “a little ignorant black woman with wool for hair and indeterminate large features” is murdered along with her unborn child by the same mob who killed her husband after he intervened to protect her from sexual assault. Mary's “crime” consists of her explosion of speech against her husband's murderers, whom she vows to bring to justice. The third-person narrative closely follows Mary Greene as she is escorted by the mob to her death, “shut in by a wall of horrible eyes and horrible breathing,” only to pause and draw the veil as the lynching party advances toward the tree and the bushes close behind them. Except for a blaze of light “so vivid it could be seen even through the underbrush,” the killing remains screened and available only through the shrieks of the burning woman and—after an excruciating two or three minutes—the “birth” by vivisection of her baby. Grimké obsessively reworked this scene in each of her stories, perhaps trying to find the right distance from which to witness an event at once beyond description and at the same time occupying a psychic space so overwhelming it demanded release through witnessing. Clearly, she found it difficult to imagine the scene without the possibility of redress. In one draft of “The Waitin',” the leader of the mob enters Mary's home—lovingly built by her husband John—and threatens to rape her. Although she is trembling with fear, Mary shows him a crack in the floor and warns him not to step over it. When he does, she nearly strangles him to death. It is interesting to note that Grimké abandoned this draft, along w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Section I: The Aesthetic Challenges …
• Section II: Imagining and Subverting …
• Section III: Inside Jim Crow …
• Section IV: Exporting Jim Crow
• Section V: Jim Crow's Legacy
• List of Contributors