“I Kill White Mens … Cause I Can”: The Rewriting of Liberation and Mastery in <em>Dessa Rose</em>

Abstract

Introduction: Freedom and MasteryIn their quest for autonomy and freedom, Black1 writers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had to struggle with agonistic inception of Black identity in America. To be Black in America did not, of course, simply mean that one had African ancestors. To be interpellated as Black American additionally meant that one played pivotal role in symbolic production of white American identity. Toni Morrison explains that we cannot understand genesis of American identity without recognition thatnothing highlighted freedom - if did not create it - like slavery. Black slavery enriched country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of and enslavement could be found not only but also, with dramatic polarity created by skin color, projection of not-me. The result was playground for imagination.2Morrison identifies not only that American society was built upon slave labor, but that central principles of American identity, including ideal of freedom, took shape around symbolic economy in which blackness played foundational role of the not-me.3 To be Black was by definition to be excluded from principle of personal and collective principle that took shape in relation to its ideological counterpart, slavery.* The quintessential (white) American identity was made possible by, shaped by, activated by complex awareness and employment of constituted Africanism that was strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego reinforcing, and pervasive.5 Blackness generally, and enslaved Black bodies in particular, became location in American imaginary where anxieties, fears, and inconsistencies of symbolic (white) self could be projected or displaced in order to constitute self-consistent vision of autonomous American individual. To be American was to be to extent that ideals of autonomy, authority, and ultimately absolute power6 could be enacted upon slaves, not-free, ideological antithesis of free white citizen.7In effort to define and claim principle of freedom as their own within this historical context, many Black male writers have struggled with and, to varying degrees, adopted this symbolic economy in their own conceptualizations of freedom, and power, transferring role of not-me, dialectical counterpart of autonomous individual, from Blacks generally to Black women. Speaking of maleauthored slave narratives, Angela Davis explains that lurking within definition of black freedom as reclamation of black manhood is obligatory suppression of black womanhood.8 bell hooks traces this tradition of imagining Black male freedom into recent scholarship on slavery, where she notes predominance of belief that the subjugation of black women was essential to black male's development. According to this myth, Black men could not become proper patriarchs, and thereby develop a positive self-concept, without rite of passage of controlling Black women.9Yet, this very reality - that suppression of Black female agency has so often served as condition of freedom for Black male writers - has led many Black feminist writers and critics to suggest that unique possibilities for rethinking notion of freedom might emerge from Black female subject position. Hortense Spillers argues that because Black women's bodies have been site at which freedom as mastery has been ritualistically enacted, these bodies have served as degree of social for freedom and power, state of social being to which she refers as flesh.10 As ground zero for creation of autonomous individual, flesh offers a praxis and theory for new kind of writing and new conceptualization of freedom. In this essay, I examine how Sherley Anne Williams revisits and rewrites tradition of imagining Black (male) freedom through control of Black women in her neo-slave novel, Dessa Rose (1987). …