Off the Grid: Zora Neale Hurston’s Racial Geography in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

On either hand, far down below, rolled the deep foamy water of the Potomac, and before and behind the rapidly approaching step and noisy voices of pursuers, showing how vain would be any further effort for freedom. Her resolution was taken. She clasped her hands convulsively, and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been denied her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted the railings of the bridge, and sunk for ever beneath the waves of the river! (Hurston 207)The following passage, taken from William Wells Brown's Clotel, famously depicts the death of Thomas Jefferson's fictional mixed-race daughter. It also helps establish a literary tradition in which bridges fail, at least for some.1 Part of what makes Brown's hybrid text so remarkable, though, is its ability to imagine the unexpected linkages that begin to emerge in response to society's own infrastructural defects. Particularly in this scene, Clotel's raised hands and upward gaze transfigure the body itself into a kind of bridge, one whose alignments call attention to the actual horizontal support systems that reduced the body to a mere property transaction. Clotel's suicide demonstrates what the de-propertying of American slaves looks like given a system that positions in terms of territorial expansion, ownership, and regulation. Rather than return to the land of her captors, she vault[s] over into water, and this act of self-(un)making is motivated by and dependent on a sequence of surficial arrangements that are themselves inseparable from the personal and political landscapes to which they are a part. For Brown, such freedoms are always performed within a spatial arena that is at once physical and political, topographical and social, concrete and discursive. He sensed the ways in which human and geographic bodies were managed according to similar logics of territorial importance. Clotel, for example, had intended the Long Bridge to communicate her to safety, yet the romantic ideal she crafts of being able to bury herself in a vast forest (205) ultimately reveals itself as little more than an ironic foreshadowing of her being routinely deposited in a hole dug in the sand (207). Situating Clotel's nameless, abandoned corpse in relation to other well-known bodies like the Potomac River enables Brown to plot those sites of resistance normally muted by the neutralizing gestures of commercial maps.To deny that these geographic spaces code subjectivity the same way as Clotel's living (and dying) presence ignores the geopolitical significance of water as a body, as a measureable thing whose meaning is generated by a combination of material and immaterial investments. For the slave owner, the river signifies a capitalist futurity which cannot be detached from the physical property it transports. For Clotel, it serves as a destructive force capable of stalling the violent economizing of human goods, while at the same time serving as a potential site of spiritual deliverance. Each case reveals agency as being intimately attached to the physical spaces in which it is activated. At stake too are the biogeographic equivalencies that organize separable bodies under a set of shared commercial rubrics. As Donald Sweig points out, the Potomac River was a major commercial artery (507) for the trafficking of slaves, and the catastrophe with which Brown ends his novel dramatizes the exact limit at which such capital/corporal investments are capable of being sustained. Clotel's suicide joins two distinct yet related bodies, the radical conflation of which-corpse is place, place corpse-threatens to remap dominant commercial and ideological terrains according to the associations of the sold rather than the seller. Clotel's vertical notion of freedom proves incompatible with those strong horizontal networks of corporal regulation, control, and distribution. …