“Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké

Abstract

Well before Billie Holiday’s doleful rendition of “Strange Fruit,” African American women playwrights directly confronted the subject of lynching. In addition, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké’s work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké’s oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. Grimké kept her own longings private, submerged in her literary output, yet similarities in themes, figures, and images suggest that Grimké resisted racism and homophobia simultaneously. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance. I urge a more expansive approach to women’s queerness in these incipient years, prior to Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), or the “downlow” coolness of Black women’s blues music.