Black Home As Contested Space
home | noun | hōm
1 a: the house in which a person or family lives
What is Black homemaking as represented in Black literature across slavery, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction through the 1940s?
To define Black homemaking, I must move beyond Merriam-Webster's definition of home as "the house in which a person or family lives." For enslaved and often free Black people, physical structures where at the end of "sunup to sundown" they were to lay their heads were spaces given and taken at the whim of whiteness. During slavery, home was a denied and commodified space, forcing the enslaved to build it from materials far less corporeal than brick or timber or stone.
Home As Contested Space moves between the numbers and the names — slave schedules, valuations, runaway advertisements — and the people already historically and systematically displaced by whiteness. It follows a letter from a paternal great-granduncle, Lloyd Christian, born in 1910, relaying how the founding fathers and mothers moved to Southeast Ohio in 1829 onto land given to them and other Black people manumitted from plantations in Virginia: "This plot of ground … was never to be sold to anyone it was to be handed to their off springs and so on. This was to be a black settlement…"
It follows a maternal third great-grandfather, William "Ben" Dickerson, enslaved in Rocky Mount, Virginia, who "spent the first 35 years of his life as a slave" twenty-four miles from where Booker T. Washington "WAS born a slave on a plantation" in Franklin County, Virginia. It asks what it means that "I was born somewhere, and at some time" — that when something is unnamed it seems originless, and that origins were also nameless.
It also takes up the work of naming what enslavement made nameless: a DNA search for the Black children Dickerson was hired out to produce as a "forced breeder" — the descendants of a man who "never worked the fields," who "was loaned out and lived on other plantations and was used to impregnate young, strong women." The bodies of Black women. The bodies of Black men. The bodies of Black daughters. The bodies of Black children. The bodies of Black babies.
And it moves through a childhood in the southeast Ohio of the 1970's and 80's, where home, both inside the walls of my family members and outside the walls in a predominately white town, felt anything but settled: constant threats of the Klan marching, Black people being beaten in sundown towns all around us, a grandmother with a scanner who'd rush us to the car to chase the sirens.
Home as contested space.Home as what parts of our origin we can name — as much as anything for Black people during slavery can be fixed.
1 a: the house in which a person or family lives
What is Black homemaking as represented in Black literature across slavery, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction through the 1940s?
To define Black homemaking, I must move beyond Merriam-Webster's definition of home as "the house in which a person or family lives." For enslaved and often free Black people, physical structures where at the end of "sunup to sundown" they were to lay their heads were spaces given and taken at the whim of whiteness. During slavery, home was a denied and commodified space, forcing the enslaved to build it from materials far less corporeal than brick or timber or stone.
Home As Contested Space moves between the numbers and the names — slave schedules, valuations, runaway advertisements — and the people already historically and systematically displaced by whiteness. It follows a letter from a paternal great-granduncle, Lloyd Christian, born in 1910, relaying how the founding fathers and mothers moved to Southeast Ohio in 1829 onto land given to them and other Black people manumitted from plantations in Virginia: "This plot of ground … was never to be sold to anyone it was to be handed to their off springs and so on. This was to be a black settlement…"
It follows a maternal third great-grandfather, William "Ben" Dickerson, enslaved in Rocky Mount, Virginia, who "spent the first 35 years of his life as a slave" twenty-four miles from where Booker T. Washington "WAS born a slave on a plantation" in Franklin County, Virginia. It asks what it means that "I was born somewhere, and at some time" — that when something is unnamed it seems originless, and that origins were also nameless.
It also takes up the work of naming what enslavement made nameless: a DNA search for the Black children Dickerson was hired out to produce as a "forced breeder" — the descendants of a man who "never worked the fields," who "was loaned out and lived on other plantations and was used to impregnate young, strong women." The bodies of Black women. The bodies of Black men. The bodies of Black daughters. The bodies of Black children. The bodies of Black babies.
And it moves through a childhood in the southeast Ohio of the 1970's and 80's, where home, both inside the walls of my family members and outside the walls in a predominately white town, felt anything but settled: constant threats of the Klan marching, Black people being beaten in sundown towns all around us, a grandmother with a scanner who'd rush us to the car to chase the sirens.
Home as contested space.Home as what parts of our origin we can name — as much as anything for Black people during slavery can be fixed.
|
|
Past Projects
To Reclaim Humanness Project
To Reclaim Humanness: the Forced Heroism of African American Women and their Struggle to Be Human
(excerpt) In the current discourse about African Americans considering police brutality, many of us find ourselves using the words “black bodies” to describe black people. Although this language clearly reflects the physicality of the overwhelming numbers of black people we see felled by police bullets yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily in this country, this seemingly benign act of separating body from breath or body from spirit is a revelatory reminder of the mind/body problem African Americans have been historically forced to reckon with since the first enslaved “negroes” were brought to Massachusetts in 1624. From these beginnings, a white power structure has always sought to make bodies out of black people and because of a racially rooted power structure set up to create and perpetuate racism, we black people have much too often had to reclaim these bodies that have been systematically stripped of breath. Our current striving in this country to convince that same power structure that black lives matter, will not keep black bodies from falling until we convince this same white power structure that we are black people and that the same animating principles that make them human are the same animating principles that make us human.
Historically, African Americans have made countless discoursive attempts to place ourselves in a family of humans as evidenced by Sojourner Truth’s asking the rhetorical question “Ain’t I a woman” in her speech posthumously titled the same and given at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 28-29 May 1851 or Frederick Douglass’ “To My Old Master, Thomas Auld” in 1855 where he states to his former master “I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons… You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bond to you, or you to me… I am your fellow-man, but not your slave”. However, the audience for these assertions so often attempted at the same time to erase black people’s humanness.
(excerpt) In the current discourse about African Americans considering police brutality, many of us find ourselves using the words “black bodies” to describe black people. Although this language clearly reflects the physicality of the overwhelming numbers of black people we see felled by police bullets yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily in this country, this seemingly benign act of separating body from breath or body from spirit is a revelatory reminder of the mind/body problem African Americans have been historically forced to reckon with since the first enslaved “negroes” were brought to Massachusetts in 1624. From these beginnings, a white power structure has always sought to make bodies out of black people and because of a racially rooted power structure set up to create and perpetuate racism, we black people have much too often had to reclaim these bodies that have been systematically stripped of breath. Our current striving in this country to convince that same power structure that black lives matter, will not keep black bodies from falling until we convince this same white power structure that we are black people and that the same animating principles that make them human are the same animating principles that make us human.
Historically, African Americans have made countless discoursive attempts to place ourselves in a family of humans as evidenced by Sojourner Truth’s asking the rhetorical question “Ain’t I a woman” in her speech posthumously titled the same and given at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, 28-29 May 1851 or Frederick Douglass’ “To My Old Master, Thomas Auld” in 1855 where he states to his former master “I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons… You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bond to you, or you to me… I am your fellow-man, but not your slave”. However, the audience for these assertions so often attempted at the same time to erase black people’s humanness.
Ligatures, a 2nd place winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Contest is a collection of poems that explore what it means to see the felling of black and brown people through the dash cams and body cams of the police officers that shoot them. It also seeks to highlight the ways in which these videos from police body cams and dash cams mirrors the taking of pictures and the sending of lynching postcards.
The viewing of the dying and dead bodies of African Americans made lifeless while surrounded by spectators is one of the driving forces or the manuscript. The persona poems offer the perspectives of the officers who ended the life of each of the African Americans in the poems. In order to write these poems, I scoured the news reports to find any explanations of their actions from their own mouths or the mouths of their lawyers. The framing poems are a narrator who reminds the viewer of the role they play and what they will encounter as the "view". There are also primary documents before each poem that tell the reader the media's take on each of the incidents.
Ligatures is out from Rattle Press. Please purchase a signed copy here or an unsigned one here at Rattle.
The viewing of the dying and dead bodies of African Americans made lifeless while surrounded by spectators is one of the driving forces or the manuscript. The persona poems offer the perspectives of the officers who ended the life of each of the African Americans in the poems. In order to write these poems, I scoured the news reports to find any explanations of their actions from their own mouths or the mouths of their lawyers. The framing poems are a narrator who reminds the viewer of the role they play and what they will encounter as the "view". There are also primary documents before each poem that tell the reader the media's take on each of the incidents.
Ligatures is out from Rattle Press. Please purchase a signed copy here or an unsigned one here at Rattle.
2014 Finalist for The Willow Books Literature Awards recognize literary excellence in prose and poetry by writers from culturally diverse backgrounds.
Hedgebrook 2014 Writers in Residence Award
2014 Writers in Residence Award
Hedgebrook retreat for women writers is on Whidbey Island, about thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle. Situated on 48-acres of forest and meadow facing Puget Sound, with a view of Mount Rainier, the retreat hosts women writers from all over the world for residencies of two to six weeks, at no cost to the writer. Residents are housed in six handcrafted cottages, where they spend their days in solitude – writing, reading, taking walks in the woods on the property or on nearby Double Bluff beach. In the evenings, they gather in the farmhouse kitchen to share a home-cooked gourmet meal, their work, their process and their stories. The Writers in Residence Program is Hedgebrook’s core program, supporting the fully-funded residencies of approximately 40 women writers at the retreat each year.
Hedgebrook retreat for women writers is on Whidbey Island, about thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle. Situated on 48-acres of forest and meadow facing Puget Sound, with a view of Mount Rainier, the retreat hosts women writers from all over the world for residencies of two to six weeks, at no cost to the writer. Residents are housed in six handcrafted cottages, where they spend their days in solitude – writing, reading, taking walks in the woods on the property or on nearby Double Bluff beach. In the evenings, they gather in the farmhouse kitchen to share a home-cooked gourmet meal, their work, their process and their stories. The Writers in Residence Program is Hedgebrook’s core program, supporting the fully-funded residencies of approximately 40 women writers at the retreat each year.