Field (Negro) Notes: The Art of Infighting, Malcolm X, and the (Im)Possibility of the Black Indoors

Field (Negro) Notes: The Art of Infighting and the (Im)Possibility of the Black Indoors

We are still governed by the slave codes” 

—James Baldwin, “On Race, Language, and the Black Writer”

“Here then is war, war interminable, and war to the knife” 

—Rev. Francis Wayland, of Providence, R. I., “ Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution”

“We wait for narrative to do what war should or might do”

—Dionne Brand, “The Shape of Language” 

On November 10, 1963, the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference convened at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. At the conference, civil rights activist Malcolm X delivered his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in which he embarked on a now-infamous “off-the-cuff” chat with the audience. Though unscripted, Malcolm’s impromptu speech before the conference attendees was nothing short of intentional. In the interest of speaking in a language that “everyone here can easily understand,” Malcolm, as a skilled orator and organizer, made use of the familiar and colloquial in his political education efforts. Whilst speaking before a majority Black audience, he began by laying out the stakes of their shared condition. Nodding to W.E.B. DuBois’s infamous inquiry in The Souls of Black Folk, Malcolm turned DuBois’s question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” into a series of statements. “America has a very serious problem. Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America’s problem is us,” he asserted. As the embodiment of America’s problem(s), it is imperative, Malcolm argued, that Black Americans ought to understand themselves to be a part of a larger multiracial struggle against European imperialism and oppression, one which mandates the decorum of wartime affairs— discretion, discipline, and deference. Particularly where it concerns the matter of intraracial discord and community conflict, he zeroes on the danger infighting poses to liberation efforts. “We have to do [what other colonized people] did. They agreed to stop quarreling among themselves. Any little spat that they had, they’d settle it among themselves, go into a huddle — don’t let the enemy know that you got a disagreement.”

On the matter of performing racial unity to throw off the “enemy,” Malcolm proceeds to articulate the proper way by which intraracial grievance should be addressed. “We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man,” he explains.  “Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other.” Moving forward with this point, Malcolm does not shy away from the reality of communal strife. In fact, before this group, whom he refers to as a gathering of “ex-slaves,” he traces the legacy of intraracial infighting back to the plantation. Invoking the specter of slavery as one which possesses both the past and the present of Black life in the United States, Malcolm makes explicit reference to the history of bondage and betrayal. Tapping into a narrative his audience was sure to recognize as an inheritance of their own, his speech takes flight with the help of none other than the figure of the “house negro”— a historical configuration whose memory is mired and mocked by the declarations of slavers and “ex-slaves'' alike.

Grounding his argument in the pejorative consensus regarding the figure of the “house negro,” Malcolm cites slavery’s legacy in order to articulate the stakes of intraracial disloyalty and Black political conservatism at the boiling point of the Civil Rights movement.  Elucidating the political bifurcation of Black people, he goes on to argue that there are but two “kinds of slaves” in existence,  “field negroes” and “house negroes.” As he asserted, the difference between the two is relational:  “The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master's second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house—probably in the basement or the attic—but he still lived in the master's house,” he said. Where the matter of living with or near the masters is concerned, Malcolm articulates the position of the domestic slave or “house negro” as one which is privileged by mere virtue of their access to and existence within the domestic sphere of white power. What is most clear is that Malcolm’s speech relied not on a vast and untenable archive of slavery, but rather on a commitment to colloquialism which appealed to its audience’s presumed common knowledge. Malcolm’s confidence in invoking the so-called “house negro” as both pariah and pity, suggests not only a comfort with the narrative, but a sense of assurance that other “ex-slaves” would share the same a cultural contempt for said figure. Yet, in recalling the legacy of slavery in such a polarizing manner, his speech betrayed the complexity and brutality of domestic life on American plantations from the big house to the slave cabins. And worse yet, in keeping the “house slave” caricature alive, the skiller orator perhaps missed an opportunity to reshape our popular and political imaginations regarding slavery, complicity, and the relations which produce the slave as a sentient being whose capacity for self-interest and community formation is constantly under fire. 

In order to regard the “house Negro” as Malcolm and others have, one must be dedicated (explicitly or implicitly) to a particular fiction regarding Western domesticity—a narrative which affords little nuance to the complexities of bondage and what historian Stephanie Camp has since referred to as  ‘geographies of containment’. As scholar Thavolia Glymph notes in Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household,  “the plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production.” With Glymph’s assertion in mind, Malcolm narrative of the “house negro” must be placed within a larger discourse on the structure of white power and the domestic slave’s position in the master’s house as one overdetermined by the violence of social production. For one, it is commonly understood that a home which is not your home is neither designed nor intended to comfort, reflect, or even necessarily  protect those who are neither guests nor formally recognized inhabitants. And certainly, a slave who lives in the masters house, whether they be, in Malcolm’s words, stowed away in the basement or the attic, does not constitute family or invited guests. In fact, the slave’s very purpose in the home is to reproduce the boundaries of the domestic sphere’s offerings. Thus, this way, the popular construction of “house negro” versus “field negro” binaries overwrite the slave’s experience of space itself, and the plantation in particular. Striving to articulate a neat and familiar argument for the issue of Black community dissolutioment and interracial discord, Malcolm enlisted the house slave to do a particular type of narrative work, serving in the indispensable role of the antagonist.

Adding insult to injury, Malcolm’s invocation of the house negro explicitly assigns political righteousness to the field negro, essentializing each enslaved status in order to inscribe the former with a nearly pathological rejection of communal and/or self-interest. “If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, ‘What’s the matter, boss, we sick?’  We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself,” Malcolm elaborates. Of the field negro, he describes an uncomplicated foil to the house slave’s cartoonish self-evasion and proported luxury —a symbol fit for community identification. “On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro — those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog,” Malcolm adds. As he here articulates, the position of the house Negro is both unrelatable and politically repugnant in the eyes of “ex-slaves.” The house negro is thus an embodiment of unknowns and unmentionables. “He” is a slave who occupies space other slaves do not and for this alone, he is the subject of much pontification, fabrication, and narrativization. 

With regard to narrative’s surrounding slave pathology, intraracial rejection, and fidelity, there is perhaps, no better reference to draw from than the popular 19th century Southern Baptist claim that “the color of slaves was the Mark of Cain,” and that dark skin was a divine curse that necessitated Black enslavement. After all, the story of Cain is also a story of betrayal. The Biblical narrative of Cain, the first son of Adam and Eve, is a tale  of infighting orchestrated by the weight of divine power. As the story goes, upon having his offering to the Lord rejected, Cain spirals into a pathological rage that inspires him to kill his brother Abel, whose offering is approved and accepted. Cain, motivated by envy and insecurity, betrays his brother for gaining favor he was denied. “Let us go out to the field,” he summons Abel. Outside in the field, on the very land from which they both toiled for their offerings to the Lord, Cain slays his sibling. As punishment, the Lord sentences Cain to immortality and social death. “A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth,” the Lord declares. Ensuring that Cain’s suffering will be endemic and never ending, the Lord, “set a mark upon Cain so that whoever found him would not slay him.” In thinking of “mark of Cain” alongside enduring narrative’s regarding plantation politics, Malcolm’s characterization of the house negro as a kind of plantation-era pariah who is forever condemned as a selfish traitor, fits into a historic lineage of preoccupation with the cowardly slave as an amalgamation of white fantasies and Black fears. 

In Rev. Dr. Samuel Stanhope Smith’s 1814 essay “on the Variety of Complexion, and figure, in the human species,” published in The Port Folio, the status of the domestic slave is imagined as a host body for the successful assimilation of “white features'' (phenotypic, aesthetic, and affective) as facilitated by their geographic proximity to the master and/or master class. Throughout the essay, the reverend compares the comportment of the domestic slave to the field slave in order to articulate the impact of occupying white space. As one works their way through the essay, you find that Smith’s interest in the geographies of bondage is highly concerned with the visual and behavioral influence of white presence in the life of the slave.  With regard to phenotype and featurism, Smith asserts that, per his observations, “house slaves possess more symmetry of form and regularity of feature than field slaves because they are domiciliated in the dwellings of their masters” Of the house slave’s “comparative elegance and beauty,” Smith attributes the distinctive comportment of the domestic slave to an assortment of geographic and biological influences. “The size and form of the mouth (of the descendants of Africans domesticated in the families of their master,) is sometimes even beautiful and the composition of their features regular,” he writes. 

Moving beyond the influence of white geographic proximity, Smith also takes time to analyze the significance of white parentage as another kind of site for imagining the slave’s malleability. Offering a highly essentialized take on “mulattoes” as the “descendants of a white father and a black mother,” Smith is keen on laying out the phenotypic influence of interracial parentage on the bodily representation of the slave. In his words, the “[mulatto] inherit[s], with but little alloy,  their maternal complexion with much of the regularity and symmetry of the paternal features.” Despite this racialized logic of inheritance, where the matter of formal “racial mixture” is concerned, Smith notes that it would be a “mistake” to consider the “mulatto” house slave as a uniquely  “extraordinary” figure. For, as he understood it, the influence of whiteness was best assured by geographic oversight, surveillance, and instruction rather than mere biological infiltration. 

In the pseudo-scientific literature of the early to mid 19th century, the figure of the “mulatto” appears in the musings of many such doctors and reverends throughout the Americas. A one Dr. James Cowles Prichard is notably charged with “overrat[ing] the hardihood of mixed races” in his 1813 book, Researches Into the Physical History of Man. An avid believer in the idea that “intermixture improves progeny,” Dr. Prichard’s work emphasizes humanity's infinite capacity for “fusion” as a survival feature. In the tropical climates of the West Indies and Latin America, he asserts that “mulattoes or half-castes are destined to become the dominant race” for they presumably “bear a tropical climate far better than Europeans do” and “[...] inherit a portion of the white intellect and spirit, and often gain easier access to our practical art and science than falls to the lot of black men.” Most strikingly, Prichard builds upon this idea of the distinctive capacities of “mulatto” amongst the the “lot of black men,” and argues, using his own observations as evidence, that these individuals, by virtue of white biological imposition, are “more capable of rule, and more ambitious.” As he attests, it is the ability to dominate others (particularly Black and/or racialized others) that defines the transfer of white features to non-white or “mixed-race” Black social actors. 

Reverend Smith’s testimony diverges from Dr. Prichard’s assessments, however. Instead, the reverend asserts that the house slaves of the American South prove that it is, in fact, the geographic proximity to whiteness, rather than “mixed blood,” which aids in the most effective assimilation of Black features into white infrastructure. With regard to the house slave’s geographic acculturation into whiteness, Smith asserts that “the domestic servants [...] who remain near persons,”  are primed to “receive the same ideas of elegance and beauty and discover a great facility in adopting their manner.” He adds that “this class of slaves, therefore, has advanced far before the others in acquiring the regular and agreeable features and expressive countenance which can be formed only in the midst of civilized society.” As Smith’s assertions illustrate, the ongoing and historic imaginations of the house slave, as well as other such figures associated with white influence, are ultimately discourses concerned with geography and ontology. To be inside is to be near “persons.” To be in the house is, in a word, to be(come) human, or so we thought.