Conclusion: On Trust and Belief

Conclusion: On Trust and Belief

I“The worst betrayal of all was Raven Quicksill, my trusted bookkeeper. Fooled around with my books, so that every time I’d buy a new slave he’d destroy the invoices and I’d have no record of purchase”

—Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada 

“The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage” 

—Colson Whitehead, The UndergroundRailroad 

“When we get the monster’s off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions” 

—June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas” 

In a 2014 Button Poetry performance, poet Aziza Barnes read aloud a poem entitled “Aunt Jemima” from the collection Me Aunt Jemima, and the Nailgun. Over the course of those three minutes, Barnes undresses an infamous corporate caricature of Black femininity, corpulence, and subservience, Aunt Jemima—the notorious pancake “mammy” to whom many stick up their noses. In a twist of events, Barnes’ poem does not stop after its triumphant judgment of the disparaged figure. Rather, in the end, after all the speaker’s self-righteous undressing of Aunt Jemima, it is Barnes who finds themselves naked before their elder. After assaulting Aunt Jemima with slurs and insults, referring to her as a “slave-gon-corporate” who “bottled shuck-n-jive,” finally, the poem and its embedded criticisms are flipped on their heads—calling into question our right to play “the dozens” with the dead.

Treating “the dozens” as a poetic form and treatise on Black relation in their 2020 collection of poems Homie, poet Danez Smith also explores the narrative possibilities of embracing a critical tension as a form of intraracial intimacy. In a poem entitled “how many of us have them,” Smith captures a communal comedy that relies on insult without injury. As book critic Parul Seghal wrote of “ the spirit of the dozens” within Smith’s work, this tradition is one where “deep love can be best conveyed through imaginative insult.” Using the style of “the dozens” to reconcile the “slave past,” Barnes’ poem does not begin with the “deep love” found in Smith’s poem. Without the intimacy of friendship with undergirds the latter’s engagement with “imaginative insult,” the former initially fashions “the dozens” with an intent to harm and critique the disparaged albeit familiar (or even, familial) figure of the mammy. 

Following the onslaught of jabs dished out by Barnes in the poem’s opening, “Auntie J” finally gets a word in edgewise. Confronting her accuser, she retorts: 

“quit talking like you know black/and the box it came in./you don’t know what it is./To smile for all dem folks./ To rot in everybody home ‘cept yours./To watch they children./To hear them call you ‘mama.’/To be hated by your own for trying/ to find a way out. /To feed your enemy/for a century and a quarter./To have them profit off you/ while you die slow./You don’t know me.”

Tempered by an elder’s intervention, Barnes, as the poem’s speaker, is catapulted into a spiral of self-reflection. An apologetic Barnes begs for Aunt Jemima’s forgiveness: “I try to console the has-been of blackness/Tell her I didn’t mean it/That I’m just a brown girl,/half-breed mutt that don’t know her place./Don’t know how to hold her tongue/or respect the dead.” In the end, Aunt Jemima has no use for Barnes’ apologies, only her undivided attention. Imparting her wisdom on Barnes, Aunt Jemima closes the poem and gets the last words: “rock with me, I am your kin./You come from me./And when they bury you, /you’ll have my face.”

Within the context of this project, and its interest in the pejorative purchase of the “house slave,” this poem makes plain the failure at the crux of our continued moral judgments of the slave. As Aunt Jemima speaks through Aziza, her words serve as a reminder of what it means to be enslaved by narratives about slavery while practicing little regard for the narrative death suffered by the slave. As “Auntie J” must remind the Black youngster personified in Barnes’ poem, this is a (narrative) death that slave descendants, too, inherit. After all, as C. Riley Snorton articulates, “as a matter of representation, the mammy was made to reproduce racial borders.” The products of this violent reproduction, the descendants of the domestic slave are thus, implicated in her  “social relation of production that brought surplus value to white families, private property, and the nation” Furthermore, as the mammy “came to epitomize the Black mother as a ‘problem,’” both for Black and white domestic life (on account of her intracommunal crime of neglect and interracial crime of existence), Barnes’ poem reveals the irony of our judgments. To laugh at the Black mammy (or the domestic, or the “house slave) is to laugh at which bore you. To laugh at your mother is to make a joke of yourself. 

In Laughing Fit To Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, literary theorist Glenda Carpio lays out the dominance of three main theories on humor: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and the Freudian narcissist’s theory of humor. Asserting the applicability of incongruity theory within most Black American humor (especially that regarding slavery), Carpio argues that it is the humor that hinges on the inversion of expectation and hierarchy which is most practiced and appreciated within Black comic traditions. Within this practice of incongruity, laughter, Carpio argues, is always preceded by a deep self-awareness. For this reason, as Carpio articulates, Black American humor practice is most invested in the momentary or situational revolution of the world or social order. In other words, we laugh to register a fleeting sense of uprising. Black humor is truancy.  In applying this lens to Barne’s poem, we might suggest that, perhaps, when we laugh at Aunt Jemima, we are merely laughing at the way death appears in our own reflections. We laugh to keep from dying. We laugh because we’re dying. We laugh because we’re dead. 

Still, jokes, like people, grow tired. With time, the comedic infrastructure that once helped a pun stand tall can grow weary. And without revival, what becomes of a tired joke? An insult caught in the throat? An epithet with no proper lodgings? The “joke” of the “house slave” is on the most enduring political insults, particularly within Black American political traditions. Black political leaders, artists, and intellectuals, the likes of Malcolm X to Harry Belafonte have at some point found themselves with the “house slave” in their mouths. Wielded in opposition to representation politics, conservatism, and otherwise “uppity” behavior, to call someone a “house slave” is to deploy an insult packed with accusations. To this day, so many political imaginations rely heavily on the very truncated plantation narratives that gave birth to the house slave’s second life as a slur. But what does the “house slave” mean when she is not deployed by her descendants? To whom does the “house slave” belong?

On the matter of narrative slavery without Slave narrative, Barnes’ poem intervenes in the tradition of muting the “house slave” in favor of alternative narratives of her experience. As Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes in “Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form,” this practice of “neo-slave” narrativization often relies upon the “dividing [of] black people into political parties during and after slavery that organizes them morally between the categories: ‘radical revolutionaries’ or ‘bourgeois accommodationists.’” In an effort to preserve this formulation, all narratives of the slave which contradict such dichotomies are roundly disavowed. To produce the domestic slave as an essentially bourgeois figure marked by leisure and luxury, one must forget the sinister call for ‘amused’ performance which slavery impresses upon the slave. It is to forget Harriet Jacobs’s words in Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl when she explains that “my heart was then ill at ease, but my smiling countenance did not betray it.”  As a house slave, Jacobs was faced with sexual violence as well as the terror of white capacity. In Incidents she describes hiding in the crawl space of her grandmother’s attic to escape the perverse entitlements of her master. “This continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light” Despite being unable to stand up or stretch, Jacobs chose the enclosed space for its anonymity. For it was, in her words, “the last place they thought of.” 

To think through the Black indoors is to think of the places others do not. Remembering the betrayal of self, “smiling countenance,” which lies at the heart of bondage’s burden, Jacobs’s admission requires that we build upon Anthony P. Farley’s astute assertion that slavery is perfected whenever “the slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief. ” The oppressive darkness of enclosure suffered by Jacobs does not fit into the narrative of the Black domestic which has been stained with pejorative intent. Hers and the suffering of all those confined to enclosures (crawlspaces, prisons, and other containment structures) suggest that slavery is perfected not only by legal deference but also narrative license. In our rhetorical usage of the “house slave” slur, we continue to regard the slave as a “subject awaiting its verb”—a figure always already available for conjecture and projection. If we are to be careful about the assumptions and assertions we make about our ancestors, we must also interrogate how we instrumentalize them to our own ends. For, otherwise, we run the risk of, in Hartman’s words, “stepping into the ancestors' shoes or negating the difference between us and them with the bludgeon of identification.” 

Contemporarily, the enduring citation of the “house slave” as a critique of power and complicity cuts across notions of community and history with this very bludgeon. Over the course of the 2010s, the run of the administration of Barack Obama—the first Black president of the United States—as well as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement have reminded us just how vital a sharp analysis of betrayal is. Notably, the betrayal of the people often emerges in rhetoric before action, speech before policy. The politics of “hope” which Obama offered up throughout his candidacy and presidency, proved to be a commitment to pacification and romantic narratives that sought to obscure his investments in imperial and domestic plunder. As Christina Sharpe articulates, his rhetorical approach to political leadership hinged on a “moral agency” that “was willing to accept a calculus that required Black death—and that depends, to quote Joy James, on the ‘screening out of black demands.’”

Returning oncee more to the poetics of intraracial critique, poet Morgan Parker’s“the President has not said the word ‘black,’” the first Black president is taken to task for his betrayal of the people at the level of language. “What kind of bodies are moveable/and feasts. What color are visions./When he opens his mouth/a chameleon is inside, starving,” she writes. In Parker’s words, Obama, the politician who starves creatures of color, embodies the state’s contemporary refusal to name its anti-Black foundation.  Ironically, this rhetorical resistance, which consitutes a formal betrayal of Black liberatory interests,  is what was used to establish white trust and belief in Obama as harmlessly Black political figure.  To appeal to white voters during Barack Obama’s 2nd presidential campaign in 2012, Chris Rock infamously described Obama as  “a white president you can trust”  And perhaps, nothing provided Obama’s “trustworthiness” to white Americans than his loyalty to the state. For, as Joy James states, “an empire compensates you for quelling rebellions or translating them into performatives or narratives that say there is a war as an abstraction, but not a war as a concrete phenomenon.”

With regard to the mobilization of Black ativists and organizers during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement era—which rose to national notoriety during Obama’s 2nd term when, following the 2012 vigilante shooting of 17-year old Trayvon Martin—high profile police murders publicly refuted notions of anti-Blackness as an abstract relic of the American past, as the then-president often characterized it.  Furthermore, the emergence of political personalities popularize by their involvement in movement work presented additional opportunities for the coopting of the social justice efforts and pro-Black rhetoric by American corporate interests. Almost a decade into the movement’s arc and several of its founders, regional leaders, and affiliates have faced criticism for collaborating with the state, making business moves with corporations, and otherwise profiting from the struggle in ways that put their political integrity in question. 

As Maya King wrote for Politico in 2020, “the Black Lives Matter movement is buckling under the strain of its own success, with tensions rising between local chapters and national leaders over the group’s goals, direction — and money.” Struggles to hold prominent leaders accountable and address the concerns of local chapters boiled over, leading to an open letter for 10 BLM chapters stating their grievances and staging critiques of the alleged powe- grabbing above their ranks. Of their commitment to the movement, their letter asserts, “we became chapters of Black Lives Matter as radical Black organizers embracing a collective vision for Black people engaging in the protracted struggle for our lives against police terrorism, [...] we expected that the central organizational entity … would support us chapters in our efforts to build communally.” In their pursuit of the risky work of liberation, these chapters were faced with the difficulty of negotiating community within a society where power and social capital threaten the integrity of leftist and Black liberation-oriented political organizing. 

 Throughout this essay collection, I have sought to illustrate the significance of the “house slave” slur as both a form of colloquial criticism, as well as a bridge to rethinking our approaches to community building and accountability. Informed by the intellectual and artistic aftermath of the Obama era and the BLM movement, this project engages contemporary history as a means of naming what we find ourselves up against in the ongoing and ever-evolving fight for abolition. Taking seriously Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theorization of Blackness as “difference without separability,”  Trust and Believe strives to enter existing discourses of slavery studies, rhetorical analysis, pop culture criticism, and Black liberation with a call for further investigation into the role of narrative in establishing political imaginations. Out of solidarity with the slave, whether she be in the house or the field, inside or outside of popular understanding, the essays in this collection were compiled in the hopes of capturing both the “slave past” and the “slave present” in action. Trust and Believe considers what Stephen Best terms the  “communitarian impulse” of Black studies, and indulges in precious presumption Black community in order to uncover the narrative structures with bing us to one another not in spite but because of the “fractures of dispossession and disaffiliation”  which mark our lives and those which we have inherited from our ancestors. And oh, what weight we hold. What weight “we” holds.