"An Inappropriate Laugh": Ntozake Shange's Uses of Humor

Abstract

74 CLA JOURNAL “An Inappropriate Laugh”: Ntozake Shange’s Uses of Humor Jalylah Burrell Ntozake Shange’s novel Betsey Brown (1984) begins with the titular character’s morning routine. Deputized to help her cousin and three siblings get ready for school by virtue of being the oldest, we see the seventh-grader pursuing all vantage points of the sunrise that her family’s stately St. Louis home could provide. Between rousing her two little sisters and preparing her mother’s coffee,we learn that she would regularly perch in pajamas and overcoat from“where she was not ‘sposed to stand”: on a terrace near her second-floor bedroom and her home’s rear staircase, which her refined mother called “the servants’ staircase” in her haughtiest moments (13, 194). These trespasses foreshadow others to come in the novel’s knee-buckling narration. Shange called the sum of these trespasses a “discover[ing] with Betsey what her possibilities are” (Lyons 689). When the novel starts to move, “the sun and the stairways protected her, gave her a freedom that was short-lived and never failing” (Shange 14). As the novel “undulates” toward a freedom that lasts, Betsey’s expanded notion of what might be possible for a black girl with “rhiney skin,”“good strong nappy hair,” and a prominent pedigree in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision is achieved through a sense of humor that stages and criticizes the unfreedoms imposed on black womanhood and the divisions they engender and exacerbate among black girls and women (Lyons 691; Shange, 38, 123). In this essay I consider how Shange’s use of humor in Betsey Brown slips meanings and disorders thinking that cloaks and constrains black women’s identities. As a result, the racial, gender, and class orders are collapsed, not combatted, and complex portraits of black women in conflict and community are proffered and posited as essential to the development of a black girl artist. At a pivotal moment in the novel after Betsey runs away from home, Shange makes humor out of this foundering, writing Betsey in a beauty salon frequented by black bourgeois women: “Betsey burst out laughing. She could tell by the looks on the women’s faces that it was an ‘inappropriate’ laugh. As if being a Negro was appropriate” (18, 25). With that unspoken quip, the novel deflates the patrons putting-on-of-airs by demonstrating that the propriety—advocated and enforced within black communities and black arts and letters to unseat white supremacy— neglects the fact that a condition of white supremacy is defining impropriety as blackness. This joke agitates the novel and emblematizes its black feminist project. Shange’s broad contributions to black feminist practices of humor are critical to her legacy. Given humor’s presence in the seams of much of her multigenre CLA JOURNAL 75 “‘An Inappropriate Laugh’: Ntozake Shange’s Uses of Humor” output, this essay also considers how Shange’s work augments understandings of humor and black feminism while facilitating a more fulsome engagement of the black feminist humor rippling through Betsey Brown. As she illuminates, Shange locates humor in larger contexts that she, in turn, captures creatively in her writing and content: I thought that I was madly in love and this fellow I was seeing kept doing these things that made me feel like the woman in Stuff feels. Like he ran off with my toes, my finger nails, carrying me around in a plastic bag with a string in the wind, the rain. It was a very demeaning experience. But that’s another one, too, I got so involved in the comedy of it that it didn’t hurt when I wrote it. ‘Cause I just thought it was hilarious. I’d be writing and I’d say that’s funny. Then I’d write some more. And eventually it just became this rollicking sort of thing. Which is how I save myself. I laugh. It was my way of dealing with stress and demanding situations. (Pate 85) While Shange affirms the oft-cited therapeutic qualities of humorous practice—laughing to keep from crying—her discussion of humor’s function in her creativity...