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Creeping Forest and (Dis)Placed Bodies: Relocating Racial Trauma in Angelina Weld Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2013

LINDSEY PHILLIPS
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Abstract

In this essay, I rethink place in terms of the traumatic experience of lynching through Angelina Weld Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie,” which fictionalize Mary Turner's 1918 lynching in Georgia. Grimké's stories, I argue, place racial tensions within an American landscape and challenge the potential erasure that often occurs by viewing landscape only through white experience. “Blackness” and “Goldie,” as examples of black nature writing, exhume the memory of lynching and reveal the constructiveness of nature. By analyzing the racialized construction of a southern landscape, I contend that racial terror impacts the meaning of nature and argue that place can be reconstituted in the mind through memories associated with it. Even though Grimké relocates “Blackness” in the North, the protagonist cannot escape traumatic memories of lynching. Instead, his memories of racial violence stay in “place” and begin to affect Reed, his law partner from the North, as well as the reader. Thus this essay reveals how racial trauma transforms the meaning of nature and reinvents place, and through the protagonists' traumatic memories of the trees and hanging black bodies, the southern landscape “creaks,” voicing black oppression that threatens to engulf both white and black.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 461 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 For a more detailed discussion of Mary Turner see Armstrong, Julie Buckner, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 Rice, Anne P., “Introduction: The Contest over Memory,” in Rice, , ed., Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 1–24, 22Google Scholar.

3 For a more detailed comparison between these stories see Miller, Ericka, “The Fly in the Buttermilk, or the Legacy of Margaret Garner: Despair, Agency, and Retaliation in Angelina Weld Grimké's ‘Birth Control’ Stories,” in Miller, , The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Wells-Barnett, Grimké, and Larsen (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 87–97Google Scholar.

4 Hull, Gloria T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 132Google Scholar.

5 For more on Angelina Weld Grimké's biography see Hull; Herron, Carolivia, “Introduction,” in Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, ed. Herron, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–22Google Scholar, especially 5–8; and Miller, 57–99, especially 58–59.

6 For more on Dyer and anti-lynching legislation see Mitchell, Koritha A., “Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama,” in McCaskill, Barbara and Gebhard, Caroline, eds., Post-bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919 (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 210–30, 214Google Scholar.

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11 Shockley, 152.

12 Hicks, Scott, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color,” Callaloo, 29 (2006), 202–22, 203Google Scholar.

13 Some scholars have already started to discuss the multiple perspectives on and experiences of nature. See, for example, Hirsch, David A. Hedrich, “Speaking Silences in Angelina Weld Grimké's ‘The Closing Door’ and ‘Blackness,’” African American Review, 26 (1992), 459–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slicer, Deborah, “The Body as Bioregion,” in Branch, Michael, Johnson, Rochelle, Patterson, Daniel, and Slovic, Scott, eds., Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment (Moscow: The University of Idaho Press, 1998), 107–16Google Scholar; Rice, , “Introduction: The Contest over Memory”; Rice, “White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimké's ‘Blackness’ and ‘Goldie,’” African American Review, 42 (2008), 75–90Google Scholar; Outka, Paul, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008)Google Scholar; and Hicks. For examples of scholarship rethinking black nature writing see Dungy, Camille, “Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry,” in Dungy, , ed., Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), xix–xxxvGoogle Scholar; and Shockley, Renegade Poetics.

14 Shockley, 167.

15 Grimké, “Goldie,” in Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, 282–306, 282.

16 Ibid., 283.

17 Ibid., 283.

18 Outka, 180–81.

19 Grimké, “Goldie,” 305.

20 Ibid., 288.

21 Ibid., 288.

22 Stephens, Judith L., “Lynching Dramas and Women: History and Critical Context,” in Perkins, Kathy A. and Stephens, Judith L., eds., Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 3–14, 9Google Scholar.

23 Grimké, “Goldie,” 300.

24 Ibid., 295.

25 Rice, “White Islands of Safety,” 86.

26 Ibid., 86.

27 Mitchell, Living with Lynching, 2. Mitchell argues that it is “within African Americans' homes that practices of black belonging become most visible” and within anti-lynching dramas that the black home operates as a “performance space” (Living with Lynching 14).

28 Grimké, “Goldie,” 296.

29 Ibid., 297.

30 Rice, “Introduction: The Contest over Memory,” 21.

31 Grimké, “Goldie,” 283–84.

32 Ibid., 305.

33 Grimké, “Blackness,” in Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, 218–51, 239.

34 Ibid., 233.

35 Outka, Race and Nature, 177, claims that the noise the lynching rope makes as the bodies sway in the breeze functions almost as a “ritualistic call and response.”

36 Grimké, “Blackness,” 241.

37 Ibid., 243–44.

38 Toni Morrison first uses the term “rememory” in Beloved (1987). See also Schreiber, Evelyn Jaffe, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

39 Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 147.

40 Grimké, “Blackness,” 233.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 229.

44 Ibid., 239.

45 Hirsch, “Speaking Silences,” 469.

46 Grimké, “Blackness,” 233.

47 Outka, Race and Nature, 176.

48 Tolia-Kelly, Divya Praful, Landscape, Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Citizenship (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 87Google Scholar.

49 Rice, “White Islands of Safety,” 80.

50 Lawrence Buell discusses the “collective memory of the traumatic displacement” experienced by the Babylonian captives, remarking on this shared sense of trauma, which had a historical impact on their sense of identity and place. See Buell, , “The Place of Place,” in Buell, , Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 55–83, 71Google Scholar.

51 Forrest in “Goldie” expresses guilt for abandoning his sister. Forrest asks if he had “been wrong to go”; upon returning to the South, he feels that he had been wrong to leave even though “at the time, he had felt he was right” (285).

52 Rice, “White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness,” 81, argues that the ending of “Blackness” suggests a resistance effort like the Underground Railroad, which assisted fugitives similarly to the way in which Reed assists the protagonist in his escape.

53 Grimké, “Blackness,” 231. For a further discussion on silences and African American voice see Hirsch, 459, who argues that Grimké's narrators in “The Closing Door” and “Blackness” “seek to substantiate and give voice to African Americans silenced by the historical narratives of a dominant discourse.”

54 Grimké, “Blackness,” 237.

55 Ibid., 247.

56 Ibid., 248.

57 Grimké, “Goldie,” 305.

58 Grimké, “Blackness,” 248.

59 Miller, “The Fly in the Buttermilk,” 90.

60 Grimké, “Blackness,” 251.

61 Grimké, “Goldie,” 306. Miller, 95, compares this ending image of a wood-ocean – one that threatens to snap at any time – to “divine intervention in Israel's exilic journey through the Red Sea,” which alludes, she argues, to the awakening of the black consciousness, whether by peaceful or by violent means.

62 Rice, “White Islands of Safety,” 88.

63 Grimké, “Goldie,” 305–6.

64 Rice, “White Islands of Safety,” 87. Rice, ibid., also suggests that the passive construction in describing the transplanted trees hints “at the concealment necessary for revolution.”

65 Rice, “White Islands of Safety,” 88.