Abstract
From colonial times, through the Jim Crow era, and up until the Civil Rights movement the domestic kitchen was a battleground in the American South. White women attempted to wield their power over first their black slaves and then domestic servants, while black women reciprocated with covert acts of resistance against white domination in the domestic spaces connected with food production and consumption. Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You Baby (1989) offers an interesting perspective on the reconfiguration of the servant/ served paradigm. The recalibration of the said relationship takes on a spatial dimension in Douglas’s novel – it is visible in the meeting grounds of Cornelia O’Kelly and her black maid, Julia “Tweet” Carrier. The trajectory of Cornelia and Julia’s racial reconciliation spans the whole novel, beginning in a white woman’s kitchen and ending in a black woman’s living room.
Highlights
Through the Jim Crow era, and up until the Civil Rights movement the domestic kitchen was a battleground in the American South[2]
White women attempted to wield their power over first their black slaves and domestic servants, while black women reciprocated with covert acts of resistance against white domination in the domestic spaces connected with food production and consumption
Julia’s deep antipathy toward Cornelia results from her employer’s whiteness rather than from her personality flaws, the latter do not make the situation any easier. Even though in her employer’s kitchen Julia was shielded by Cornelia’s deafness and unwillingness to participate in her maid’s life, Julia employed a tactic developed by many an African American woman as a means of managing her relationships with white employers, referred to by Rebecca Sharpless as “cultivating dissemblance”
Summary
From a white woman’s kitchen into a black woman’s living room: a reconfiguration of the servant/served paradigm in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby[1] The trajectory of Cornelia and Julia’s racial reconciliation spans the whole novel, beginning in a white woman’s kitchen and ending in a black woman’s living room.
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