Making a scene: performance and Black maternal remembrances | Henry Washington Jr. (30.2)

My (re)memory of the day Michael Brown was killed is monstrously vivid. ¹ After having been politicized by the event of Trayvon Martin’s killing two years earlier—which at the time, I assessed as a deplorable but exceptional institutional failure—Brown’s death marked the moment at which premature Black death began to feel ordinary to me. As I processed the devastation that accompanied this realization, I called my mother in search of reassurance. Her words to me were not, however, the soothing balm for which I had hoped. She was also clearly devastated and trying to process what the slaying meant for both her own sense of precarity and for the lives of her two Black sons in a world she had hoped was nearly redeemed of its racial problem. But she initially expressed those anxieties through interrogations of Brown’s character. Without having heard an account of his fatal encounter with former officer Darren Wilson, she speculated about how bereft he must have been of the respectable values she so emphatically instilled in her children, and about how his deviation from that proper performance must have provoked Wilson to kill him. Most urgently, she affirmed the importance of that performance for me, imploring me to never even appear to resist a police officer if I were to ever find myself in a similarly contentious scenario. When I called her, I had expected her to resolve some of the devastation I was feeling—to offer me some sort of acknowledgement that Brown’s death was wrong and that I could hope for justice—but her inability to do so is perhaps more instructive. This article is about the terrible insight I have come to glean from what I initially misrecognized as my mother’s excusal of Wilson. It is a keen awareness of, a profound devastation in response to, and a kind of powerlessness to resolve the fundamental constraints under which Black mothers must care for their children in the wake of slavery. ²

This is an insight that, when taken seriously, might also help to explain why the fight Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, waged on his behalf often seemed more directed at the public than at the criminal justice system. Through her appearances in the media, McSpadden foregrounded the injustice of the violence against Brown, largely by attributing to him the respectable, so-called quintessentially American values she likely imagined would make him seem less deserving of death in the eyes of the public. Of course, the narrative that McSpadden presented of Brown, as her respectable, college-bound, gentle-giant of a son, struggled against predominant imaginings of Black men. Brown was not only visibly a Black man; his physical stature—that he was dark-skinned, 6′4″ tall, and weighed 290 pounds—made him particularly identifiable within the pathologizing visual logics that, to use Maurice O. Wallace’s language, “enframe” the Black male Other in the public imaginary, particularly once his killer primed us to view his body as inherently threatening (2002, 29). ³ Public attentiveness to the supposed essence of Brown’s (im)moral constitution, which we were thus primed to believe his very body evidenced, often averted our gaze from the long-standing structural imperatives that produce his subjection as necessary and, subsequently, his death as legally justifiable. His body’s visual fidelity to Black men’s social taxonomy was thereafter compounded by the exposure of his unsavory record and the unflattering representations of his mother, family, and community that circulated in the media. ⁴ Altogether, the imperfections projected onto Brown, which are ontologically inseparable from his Black masculine subjectivity and embodiment, were made to distract from the violence of his execution by convincing us that he was nothing more than a thug with a single, teenage mother from a crime-infested, inner-city neighborhood. ⁵ Since the constitutive structures of this nation needed Brown’s Otherness to constitute the negative limit of the Hu/Man, ⁶ his “problems and promise” were made to seem somehow pertinent to the adjudication of his fatal encounter with former officer Darren Wilson, both in the court of law and in the court of public opinion (Eligon 2014, 1). This is to say that both the institutions that govern our social world and representational hegemony would doom any effort to defend Brown’s claims to justice; but nevertheless, McSpadden’s labor crucially disrupted the steady progression of this negative narrativization in public, even in the absence of formal legal charges against his murderer.

In the wake of slavery, to invoke Christina Sharpe (2016), neither McSpadden nor my mother have any institutionally cognizable authority to protect their children from the perpetual anti-Black violence and exploitation that lends the state its vitality. ⁷ And importantly, whereas my mother’s efforts are aimed at preserving her and her children’s lives, McSpadden makes this particular claim after her child’s violent death. She cannot get him “justice”; indeed charges have never been brought against Darren Wilson. Even if they had, furthermore, it is difficult to imagine that the very state that sanctioned Brown’s death could ever properly redress it. ⁸ Far from a consequence of his character, Brown’s death indexes the characteristic anti-Blackness that has organized our episteme since the invention of modern Man. His killing and subsequent misrepresentation are thus necessary to the maintenance of our epistemological order, dependent as it is on the foundational flesh of the Black captive. Mothering, under these conditions, is necessarily disfigured, such that the ways in which McSpadden and my mother show up for their children must be thought differently. Although McSpadden’s representational efforts may seem misdirected, her public advocacy and witnessing does work against attempts to publicly pathologize him in order to justify his killing. The occasion of the original attribution of value to Brown’s Black life through McSpadden’s acts of rupture further speaks to the value’s confounded possibility: positioned ontologically in that “matrix slot of Otherness …the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other,” Brown mattered only during the suspended and memorialized moment of his tragic demise by gratuitously violent means, largely foregrounded through his mother’s public performance of grief (Wynter 2003, 266). In the absence of any claim over her son that might offer a reasonable expectation that she could protect him from death in life or effectuate institutional recognition of his murder once he was killed, McSpadden nonetheless mothers by publicly grieving—through constructions of Brown’s memory that force our attention beyond the event’s spectacular portrayal and Brown’s fleshy disfiguration through the logics of History and Humanism.

In this way, McSpadden’s labor constitutes a noteworthy intervention. Her public displays, although not sufficient to resolve the fundamental anti-Blackness that sustains our ways of being and knowing in the modern world, does significant work to insist that Brown’s life mattered. As Saidiya Hartman writes of the resistance performed on the plantation,

these acts of redress are undertaken with the acknowledgement that conditions will most likely remain the same. This acknowledgement implies neither resignation nor fatalism but a recognition of the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery and the magnitude of domination. (1997, 51)

Indeed this “breach” is epistemic in proportion, its character furnishing the terms of order for our institutional lives well beyond the event of slavery; but McSpadden’s relentless performance of mothering through grief hailed fellow mourners and witnesses nevertheless, investing the significance of the scene in the value of Brown’s Blackness and not in his fitness for slaughter. ⁹ As Hartman further notes, “the forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it” (2016, 171). Following scholars Hortense Spillers, Patricia Hill Collins, Christina Sharpe, and a number of other Black feminist theorists, I think through the regimes of being and knowing that exclude Black mothers from the discursive category of maternity. I then invigorate attention to the work Black mothers do in spite of this categorical exclusion by delineating the role performance plays in their challenges to public narratives about their children at the point of violent, state-sanctioned death—an insistence on mothering despite the ways that they have been stripped of their maternity. Performance, as I will further explicate, here describes Black mothers’ intentional, often embodied action for a public that, by virtue of its political essence and iterative character, dramatizes the workings of power and racial capital that undergird anti-Blackness in the modern world. McSpadden’s public displays—performed as visible disruptions to her son’s misrepresentation and erasure in the media—help to shift our focus from Brown’s supposed criminality to the structural relations that indict all those who look like him as criminal long before that fateful encounter. ¹⁰ Attending to hers and other Black mothers’ performances at the site of Black death, I will show that even absent full claims to ownership of their children in life, Black mothers use performance to demand full remembrance of the always prematurely killed Black dead.

The archive and the repertoire are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of premature Black death that neither modality can redress or even fully represent; so I have culled this set of performances primarily on the basis of the formative function each has played for me in my development as a Black thinker and as a reluctant democratic subject. ¹¹ Thus, I do not endeavor to make any claim about the scenes’ representativeness (and, as will become clear, I am hardly interested in emulating Historical rigor), but I do intentionally discuss events and the performances they engendered in variant historical contexts and geographic locales. This is because I am convinced, as are many of my colleagues, that our current conjuncture is profoundly shaped by a set of ontological and epistemological arrangements that rely on what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has called the “plasticization” of Black life—arrangements that were perfected as they were rehearsed into hegemony under chattel slavery (2020, 11). ¹² This is why the calculus of violence that lingers in the monstrous decision Margaret Garner made to kill her daughter Mary rather than seeing her sent back to Archibald plantation and the violence that continued to animate many efforts to represent her are particularly foundational for my analysis: the impossibility of Garner’s choice as an enslaved mother and the performance it engendered are particularly poignant points of reference for the genealogy of scene-making I seek to outline. Margaret Garner kills her own child in urban Ohio in 1856. Mamie Till- Mobley’s ¹³ son is killed in 1955 by enraged civilians in rural Mississippi, Dr. Karla Holloway’s son is killed by a North Carolina prison guard in 1999, and Michael Brown dies at the hands of a suburban police officer in 2014. Though historically distant, all are victims of spectacular, state-sanctioned violence made possible by the ways that Black flesh was plasticized as legally fragmentary, and thus fundamentally inviolable, on the antebellum plantation. ¹⁴ Garner makes her scene by killing her daughter before anyone else has the chance, dramatizing the monstrous conditions of captivity in which she must mother. Till insists on an open casket funeral for her son and the subsequent circulation of that body’s portrait, badly mutilated as he was by his attackers, forcing others to tarry with white supremacism’s violence. Holloway lovingly witnesses her son’s life in death as pretext for her academic monograph on Black death and dying, both refusing the state’s assessments of his value as a prisoner and underscoring the reality of death’s proximity for the Black living as it intrudes upon the writing process of the supposedly objective researcher. Lezley McSpadden undermines the character assassinations attempting to kill her son again, fashioning new ways of seeing him by complicating the visual and textual narratives used to pathologize him in the media. All of these performances generate theoretically rigorous ways of displacing the “terrible spectacle” of anti-Black violence, problematizing the reduction of Black people to their utility as sources of material or symbolic labor, and refusing performance’s putative ontology in an unruly insistence that they “[are not stories] to pass on” (Douglass 1968, 25–26; Morrison 1998, 275). As theirs’ and others’ performances demonstrate, Black mothers often make a scene at the point of violent death—they publicly perform embodied acts that draw attention to the ways in which their children are ontologically positioned as proximate to death through spectacular and gratuitous acts of violence—violence which, without these interventions, would certainly be disappeared in the public record. ¹⁵

Monstrous maternities: mothering Black flesh in the wake of slavery

On the 27th night of January 1856, a pregnant Margaret Garner fled the plantation where she had been held captive in Boone County, Kentucky with her children, husband, and several of their other family members and friends. The group crossed the frozen Ohio River into “free” territory, where the Garner family split from the others to avert any unwanted attention that might follow such a large group of Black travelers. The Garners then headed for the residence of Elijah Kite, Margaret’s free relative who lived in Cincinnati. US marshals surrounded Kite’s house shortly after their arrival, demanding their peaceful surrender. Historians speculate that someone whom the Garners had asked for directions along their journey informed state officials about their plans, who quickly coordinated with the Garners’ owners to serve a warrant for the arrest of the fugitives. Upon registering her predicament in the house—that she and her family would likely be captured and taken back into enslavement (and probably also severely punished for the escape attempt)—Margaret Garner decided to kill her family. She grabbed a butcher knife and began to slash her daughter Mary’s throat, repeatedly stabbing her until she was nearly decapitated. The details about her violence against the other three of her children are far less clear in the historical record, but it is known that when arresting officials finally made entry into the house, they found the nearly lifeless Mary alongside two other bleeding children and another, of infant age, who was severely bruised. Only Mary perished from her injuries.

Garner’s act of filicide has become a touchstone in our national memory of American racial slavery. Her “nurturing instinct that expressed itself in murder,” as Toni Morrison has called it—to permanently protect her children from the violence of (dis)possession she had decided was too terrible to bear—speaks powerfully to the impossibility of maternity under the monstrous legal and social conditions borne by enslavement (as cited in Clemons 1987, 75). Because the profit that can be extracted from identificatory hierarchy is always racial capitalism’s top priority, that is, Garner’s maternity was reduced to the economic vitality it lent the nation through her reproduction of human commodities—a disfiguration of the maternal role perhaps most clearly evident in her virtual powerlessness to protect the children from state-sanctioned violence through means other than murder. ¹⁶ This is the context for the mothering Garner does. And indeed, “what kind of mother/ing is it,” as Christina Sharpe provocatively queries, “if one must always be prepared with the knowledge of the possibility of the violent and quotidian death of one’s child?” (2016, 78). Taking Sharpe’s question seriously, this section thinks through the implications of Garner’s murderous act in order to genealogize what I am calling “monstrous maternities.” This formulation extends Sharpe’s thinking in Monstrous Intimacies (2010) and across her corpus more broadly about how the unrepresented and unrepresentable horrors characteristic of enslavement shape Black subject/object formation and kinship intergenerationally in an effort to pinpoint how the ongoing subjugation of Black life beyond the historical event of racial slavery continues to constrain Black mothers’ access to the sociolegal rights and privileges that constitute maternity’s meaning. ¹⁷ I argue that the Black mother’s claim to her child remains expendable in its conflict with the circulation of value under capital. This is a violence done and done again in the historical archive, as the ongoing intimacies between capital and anti-Blackness regulate what can be known about Black maternity in the public record and subsequently written in disciplinary History. By clarifying the Historical and epistemological conditions through which Black maternity gains its categorical coherence, then, this section foregrounds the deep significance of Garner’s act that is often ignored because of its violence—a performative insistence on mothering despite the ways that the mother/child relationship is impossibly constrained under slavery and in its wake.

Ironically, it is precisely the spectacularity of Garner’s violent act that clothes the event in mystery. ¹⁸ Critical attention has so focused on the spectacular violence in the killing itself that the more insidious forms of violence to which Garner was routinely subject as an enslaved mother both before and after her daughter’s killing—violence that inarguably shapes her fatal choice(lessness)—is largely eclipsed. Saidiya Hartman warns of the consequences of “the routine display of the slave’s ravaged body” in the history of slavery, since our exploitation of these spectacles can serve to obfuscate the more insidious ways that the very calculus of value which founds itself on the production of the Black slave as the category of the Human’s underside pervades the social and institutional fabric of modern society (1997, 3). If we heed Hartman’s warnings to search for the “mundane and the quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle,” we can glean a more robust narrative of Garner’s act (4). But this searching requires thinking beyond the strictures of History-as-discipline. Consider, for instance, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette news report which noted that when Garner was apprehended she “had a scar on the left side of her forehead running down to her cheekbone. When she was asked how she had come by this mark, she replied only, ‘white man struck me’” (as cited in Reinhardt 2010, 96). Her scar, the material trace of her formerly exposed bodily matter, registers what Hortense Spillers has called a “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (1987, 67). Her body literally bears a trace of the violence she conditionally survived, a wounding that exposed not merely her literal flesh but also the abortiveness of her claim to its ownership. This is to say that Garner’s scar, although apparently too unremarkable and too fleeting to have been elaborated in critical detail, might actually reveal more about Garner’s act than any detail about the event itself. What lingers in Garner’s disclosure of her scar’s origin is not just the violent event—the white man’s strike—but the monstrous structuring relation that would give her aggressor the authority to strike her and the protection from any consequence for doing so. As Levi Coffin, the white reputed president of the Underground Railroad speculated in his memoir, the flatness and brevity of Garner’s response to the query about her scar “betrays a story of cruelty and degradation, and, perhaps, gives the key-note to Margaret’s hate of slavery, her revolt against its thralldom, and her resolve to die rather than go back to it” (1968, 562). The scar, virtually effaced from the dominant narrative about Garner for its unremarkable character and, relatedly, its lack of fidelity to the standards of evidence in disciplinary History, might suggest an awareness Garner held in her body about not merely the punishment to which she and her family would be subject upon their capture, but also about precisely how and why unfreedom might be worse than death.

Further, the matter of Margaret Garner’s children’s paternity, in its very historical ambiguity, attests to the repeated sexual violence to which she was also certainly subject on Archibald K. Gaines’s plantation. Between 21 and 23 years old ¹⁹ at the time of Mary’s death, Garner had four offspring in total, three of whose “faded faces,” white antislavery activist Lucy Stone Blackwell testified during Garner’s trial, “[told] too plainly to what degradation female slaves submit ” (as cited in Reinhardt 2010, 40, my emphasis). Submission functions here, rather instructively, as a loaded signifier at once illuminating and obscuring the (im)possibilities of pleasure and sexual agency in Gaines’s violation of his enslaved property, far beyond the possible event(s) of impregnating Garner (whether or not that ever happened). As Hortense Spillers has shown,

Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived “pleasure” from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask. Whether or not ‘pleasure’ is possible at all under conditions that I would aver as non-freedom for both or either of the parties has not been settled. Indeed, we could go so far as to entertain the very real possibility that ‘sexuality,’ as a term of implied relationship and desire, is dubiously appropriate, manageable, or accurate to any of the familial arrangements under a system of enslavement, from the master’s family to the captive enclave. Under these arrangements, the customary lexis of sexuality, including ‘reproduction,’ ‘motherhood,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘desire’ are thrown into unrelieved crisis. (76)

Importantly, the immanent nature of violation to any sex act involving a slave is present in and out of the violent sexual event. Thus, although “there is no answer that warrants confidence” to the question of the paternal mystery in this case, the Historical problem constituted by the unavailability of documentary evidence on the matter makes the ontoepistemological problem therein no less lucid (Reinhardt 2010, 15). ²⁰ In her paradoxical non-being under the conditions of racial slavery, Garner’s body and reproductive potential are fundamentally available for Gaines’s taking. Violence is to be found not merely in the spectacle of the violent sexual event, but also in this normalization of her vulnerability to sexual violation and, subsequently, reproductive theft—daily terrors under slavery, the evidence of which Black mothers had no authority to claim even when forced to carry it in their wombs. Regardless of Mary’s biological paternity, she was legally Gaines’s child; and it is certainly possible that Margaret’s (non)-choice to kill Mary may have been informed by the fact that she was produced under the conditions of that violation, whether or not Gaines fathered her.

The pursuit of the speculative here, despite its inevitable limitations, is meant to foreground how the monstrous misrepresentation and erasure of Black women and their reproductive labor this article intends to problematize is intimately tied to the historical record’s insistence on particular, exclusionary standards of archival presence. Disciplinary History, as Diana Taylor, José Esteban Muñoz, Saidiya Hartman, and others have noted, has no methodology for representing the disappeared. ²¹ This is a substantial problem for Black Studies, inasmuch as the disappearance of the Black past problematizes both efforts at redressing historical violence and explicating what Hartman has called “the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead” (2008, 4). The archive’s opacities are too often transmogrified into silences, and in this context, into misrepresentations of the constrained character of maternity under the conditions of impossibility racial slavery mandates, even in its wake. The evidence we would need to even begin to consider the ethics of Margaret Garner’s actions is lost to History-as-discipline. This is to say that the problem of the archive is, too, part of slavery’s monstrous maternities. Public records often serve to mystify, rather than clarify, racial capitalism’s enactments of power that materialize the unrepresentable horrors constitutive of her maternity, a mystification which lingers in the public scrutiny to which mothers of children slain by state-sanctioned violence remain routinely subject in the news and media today.

This sustained pathologization of Black mothers and their reproductive labor indexes the state’s ongoing regulation of the sociolegal category of maternity, such that certain discursive bodies are materially excluded. Representationally “unfit” mothers contemporarily manifest the abiding legacy of how Black maternity was made impossible by the structural constraints sedimented in antebellum law and perfected on the plantation; but the role of the structure is frequently disappeared, and the impossibility is blamed on the mothers’ putative pathology. ²² This is the logic by which the fact that Michael Brown was “the first child of teenage parents” is made to matter in public adjudication of former officer Darren Wilson’s culpability in his killing (Eligon 2014, 1). ²³ Part of what this attention to his parents, and to McSpadden in particular, underscores is the utility of “the Black mother” as “a resource for metaphor” (Spillers 1987, 66). This is an underexplored dimension of Black mothers’ reproductive labor: the unconsented, uncompensated symbolic labor she is made to do in order to validate the American project’s ongoing performance of orderliness; the way in which, because of the legibility and hypervisibility of her pathologized representation, her invocation lubricates the disappearance of routinized, systematic anti-Black oppression and violence, while reinforcing the innocence of capital and “democracy.” In this sense, Hortense Spillers’s country does “need [her],” and so much of her symbolic force was “invented” (1987, 85). The profit motive animates Black mothers’ (and their children’s) conscription into imaginative and “real” labors that birthed this modern nation’s material and epistemological infrastructures. Their fundamental availability for this labor is itself a kind of violence, and abrades Black mothers’ sociolegal authority to ensure their children’s welfare. The ontological condition Black mothers share with their children, then, which is secured in and by American law and letters and for which Douglass’s “‘terrible spectacle’” cannot fully account, render moot any claim to ownership they can hope to make on the children’s behalf (as cited in Hartman 1997, 3). ²⁴ Further, the immensely discursive nature of much of this routinized, monstrous violence exacerbates the paradoxically invisible visibility that the quotidian character of this violence and its archival erasure begets, ultimately rendering the problematics of Black maternity difficult to apprehend and to re-present. Even as this violence still so thoroughly shapes how we can think about and know the Black (m)other, it often escapes legibility by virtue of its immateriality. Largely through the work discursive representations do, Black beings’ negation and Black mothers’ pathology is rehearsed into hegemony, monstrously sustaining their objecthood in captivity. ²⁵

And yet even as Black women have been robbed of their maternity in that epistemological erasure, they have certainly managed to still mother. The distinction I make here understands mothering as embodied action rather than as institutionalized authority—a social and affective role registerable not in systemic recognition, but through performed acts of care. ²⁶ This follows a number of Black feminist theorists whose contributions demonstrate Black mothers’ exclusion from, or perhaps what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson might more precisely call the plasticized apportionability to establish, the maternal meaning-making process while legitimating what Black women manage to do on behalf of their children nonetheless. The very sanctity of the legally and biologically-constituted kinship relation is eroded under slavery, potentially rendering alternative models of mother–child kinship relation more viable in ways that feel important to distinguish. The community-based child care and Black communal ethic of “othermothering” that Patricia Hill Collins notes were formed as a result of the ways that racial oppression during and after enslavement constrain biological mothers’ maternal capacities is exemplary of this point (Hill Collins 1990, 296). Joy James notes, further, that “Captive Maternals,” who she notes can be “biological females or those feminized into caretaking and consumption” supplied the “reproductive and productive labor to stabilize culture and wealth” (2016, 256). The conditions under which Black women have mothered necessitated a way of honoring Black mothers’ reproductive labor that was not so thoroughly determined by legal regulation or its bio-logics.

Barred from the discursive category of maternity, these Black women nonetheless act as mothers in ways that—in line with performance theory’s insistence that we attend to action and embodiment rather than just literacy and meaning—necessarily complicate the category’s very coherence. As José Esteban Muñoz writes,

performance studies, as a modality of inquiry, can surpass the play of interpretation and the limits of epistemology and open new ground by focusing on what acts and objects do in a social matrix rather than what they might possibly mean. (1996, 12, emphasis added)

Having established the fact of Black mothers’ violent, monstrous excision from the discursive category of maternity through an unrepresentable violence constitutive of racial capitalism— violence that shifts the very terms of their relation to their progeny and its representation in disciplinary History—the next section will lay the theoretical groundwork for a performative analysis pursuant how Black mothers have managed to still mother under the conditions epitomized by Garner’s monstrous maternities, and in the final section I conduct that analysis. I ultimately suggest that attention to what Black mothers do even at the point of death, and not merely their intelligibility within the scripted play of meanings put forth by discourse, avails alternative knowledges about Black women’s reproductive labor under slavery and in its afterlives. The performative dimension of mothering is of course related to, but not encompassed by, the more regulatory, discursively dominant, and systemically cognizable understanding of maternity. The former, however, insists that the categorical exclusion of Black women from maternity’s modern meaning has not and cannot prevent them from mothering, even in “the wake’s” conditions of impossibility.

Re-presenting the disappeared: Black performance and/as critical method

Performance is an indispensable analytic for thinking through these monstrous maternities and the questions to which they give rise, since performance furnishes a way of legitimating and theorizing embodied, ephemeral knowledges not ordinarily legible as evidence to disciplinary History. D. Soyini Madison outlines the nature and impact of cultural performances, which may not occur in a theater proper, but nonetheless happen when “meaning and affect are generated by embodied action that produces a heightened moment of communication” (2005, 154). Importantly, then, performance transmits knowledge unavailable through historically acceptable and endlessly reproducible “evidence,” knowledge which performance studies takes seriously because of, and not merely in spite of, its ephemerality. This is why performance has particular import as a way of transmitting knowledge about the past, particularly for populations whose narratives are erased from or willfully misrepresented in the public record. Performances not just of formally scripted action but also of cultural ritual and social behavior can reflect and reimagine the “real” past, on one hand serving as a powerful means of memorial, but also simultaneously problematizing the assumptions that inhere our understanding of how the past must be re-presented. In this way, performance is not merely in conversation with history, but also necessarily constitutes it. Indeed, performance and history are not neatly separable; the former “has been strategically positioned outside of history, rendered invalid as a form of cultural transmission, in short made un- and anti-historical by conquerors and colonists who wanted to monopolize power” (Taylor 2006, 70, my emphasis). In this sense, to discount performance as insufficiently historical is to refuse to acknowledge, and thereby to erase, the evidence performance makes available about Black women’s reproductive labor and its centrality to the reproduction of capital and value in the United States. I turn to performance, then, not merely because the archival evidence available on Black maternity is scant (particularly in the archives of slavery), but also with an understanding that even if those records existed, there are some important dimensions of the circulation of capital and value it could never reproduce. ²⁷

I thus propose making a scene as an answer to Diana Taylor’s call that we “reconsider how performance studies and historical studies construct and position themselves in relation to their objects of analysis—the activated now of performance, the performed past of history,” a call particularly urgent to address in an archive so riddled with instances of Black mothers’ unredressed harm and uncompensated labor (2006, 68). Inasmuch as Black women have always been objects of analysis par excellence, ²⁸ the language and labor of their reproduction has been endlessly appropriated in accounts of capital’s circulation in and beyond performance theory; but the mothers themselves and their material lives are often disappeared. ²⁹ That erasure is abetted by this delimiting notion of performance’s putative non-reproducibility, which renders it disciplinarily lost to History. Indeed the foundational dichotomization of reproduction and disappearance proposed by Peggy Phelan in her landmark text Unmarked, as Joshua Chambers-Letson insists, is

not something that minoritarian subjects can afford to accept…If we insist that life is extinguished utterly and totally through death (and through the withdrawal from presence), we refuse the possibility that the lives of those we have loved and lost can extend beyond the point of their death to be reproduced in our present. (2016, 133–134)

As the very fact of our ongoing engagement with Margaret Garner’s narrative suggests, neither her performance nor her child’s life is totally lost in the event of her killing. Rather, under the constrained conditions in which she mothers, she does what she can to preserve her daughter from unfreedom; and in the process, she provokes attention to the quotidian conditions of captivity that beget her impossible situation. Making a scene is thus a gesture towards re-inserting the “absent presence” of Black mothers’ particular contributions to the reproduction of capital and its history through their labor (Chambers- Letson 2016, 133). ³⁰ These contributions uniquely position them to make a scene since their reproductive labor furnishes both a material and metaphorical resource for problematizing the purported ontology of performance. Altogether, it is important to take seriously the precarious knowledges Black mothers make available through their insistence on mothering even under the conditions of maternal impossibility and spectacular suffering in the longue durée of Black enslavement, particularly since the stakes of that labor’s disappearance are the erasure of Black mothers’ foundational contribution to the very development of racial capitalism.

Making a scene, then, describes the ways Black mothers often publicly perform acts of care on their children’s behalf in response to spectacular violence or its threat, hailing publics to differently see the violence waged against Blackness in and by history. These acts, like that of Margaret Garner’s filicide, may not always be legible as care, precisely because the discursively dominant category of maternity is constituted of rights and protections routinely denied to them in the system of racial capitalism. Accordingly, making a scene may not protect the children from anti-Black violence or state-sanctioned death. Nevertheless, the scenes these mothers make problematize the spectacularization of anti-Black violence, the reduction of Black people to their utility as sources of material or symbolic labor, and the presumptive disappearance that constitutes performance’s ontology, all of which are constitutive of the historical misrepresentation that attends premature Black death.

If we read Margaret Garner’s act of filicide with an eye to its performative dimensions and not merely through its re-presentation in the historical record, it becomes possible to ask more rigorous and dynamic questions about the act of violence and about the work of Black mothering more broadly. Through the lens of the discursively dominant meanings attributed to maternity, Garner is no mother at all; but as a cultural performance, her embodied gesture is significant. It troubles the ordinary progression of events, challenging not merely the state’s authority to discipline her daughter into corporeal captivity but also the regimes of being and knowing that reduce their lives to economistic determination of their value and, upon that value’s loss, would certainly have disciplined their narrative to archival oblivion. Garner’s physical act of murdering her daughter requires its audience —not merely those in and around the cabin that day, but also those of us who by virtue of the scene her act made, continue to learn about her story—to tarry with the monstrosity inherent to Black maternity under conditions of captivity. The sociopolitical power of her act, in this way, is characteristic of its performative nature, since the heightened and reflexive nature of cultural performances routinely provides opportunities to problematize social phenomena. Cultural performances “show ourselves to ourselves in ways that help us recognize our behavior, for better or worse” (Madison 2005, 154). The archive is always already an instrument for the reproduction of hegemonic meanings, only making available as knowledge the “evidence” that is compatible with and profitable for the narratives of the powerful. Read as performance, however, Garner’s act forces us to question the authoritative historical account of slavery, dramatizing the monstrous character of the conditions under which she must mother, conditions which make her act a murder an act of care.

In a legal and an extralegal sense, to this point, the charge of murder brought against Garner in the state of Ohio is the first affirmation of her or her daughter Mary’s humanity. At the scene of violent death inflicted by her own hand, Garner is finally privileged a kind of legal claim to her daughter she never could have had while the child was alive. The key issue in the trial that ensues is whether Garner will be extradited to Kentucky and charged for her escape (and thus charged as a piece of property) or remain in Ohio to be tried for the murder (an implicit affirmation of her and the child’s conditional humanity even if not their personhood). The lack of clarity over this legal question confounds not only the judge, but also the fundamental logic of enslavement, thus exposing racial slavery’s, which is to say democracy’s, faulty performance of orderliness. For indeed, how can propertied persons commit murder, especially when the descendant is also propertied?³¹ The trial lasts two weeks (significant since most trials of enslaved people lasted less than a day), and the judge takes another two weeks to deliberate. Beyond the legal drama, the legibility of Garner’s action as monstrous to the public—the inconceivability of her action which furnishes its sensational character—reflects a presumption that she would feel bound by the affective attachments and sociolegal responsibilities constitutive of maternity, responsibilities which the monstrous conditions under which she mothers constrain. This is to say that although her performance cannot yield unbounded access to the category of maternity, it does yield a noteworthy critique, an affirmative gesture of otherwise possibility.

Although the federal Fugitive Slave Law prevails in the case and Garner is eventually extradited back to Kentucky, Garner dramatizes the contradictions that inhere American democracy given its origins in the extractive subjugation she decides is worse than death, and foregrounds new ways of seeing both her and her child than are availed through the logics of History and humanism. This is evident in the way that the coroner’s jury in Garner’s case is captivated by the comparatively stark disjuncture between Mary’s lifelessness and her whiteness. They are charged with determining the youth’s manner of death, and are transfixed by her “rare beauty” (as cited in Reinhardt 2010, 97). Further, they explicitly note that “the murdered child was almost white” (97). There is a tenderness about their descriptions that obscures the theretofore legally subhuman status they fix on her. Indeed, even the mark of Blackness is “‘almost’” effaced from their description by Mary’s phenotypic whiteness (Hawkins, as cited in Yanuck 1953, 56). While alive, her proximity to whiteness would be legally and socially disavowed. In killing her, Garner makes a scene powerful enough to grant her daughter escape from the stronghold of captivity, albeit through death, and to secure their representation in history. That is, with her visible, performative act, she throws into disarray the epistemological protocols that condemn her and her daughter to Otherness and, subsequently, to Historical misrepresentation. Garner’s act is precisely not an institutional appeal nor does it constitute “justice,” but so troubles the stability of the counterlogic in anti-Blackness that, as the lengthy trial and deliberation in the legal case suggests, institutional protocols are literally and figuratively suspended, and the need for a new equation of value is foregrounded.

Wounded flesh, seen bodies: Black mothers’ scene-making at the point of death

Like Margaret Garner, Mamie Till-Mobley ensured, through making a scene at the point of violent death, that Emmett Till’s death would not be forgotten. Although initially reluctant to allow her Chicago-raised son to venture to the segregated South without her supervision, Mamie Till-Mobley eventually succumbed to her 14-year old son’s pleas that he be allowed to spend the summer of 1955 with their relatives just outside of Money, Mississippi. During a visit into town one day, Emmett, apparently after having been dared by another boy, walked into the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to get a closer look at Mrs. Carolyn Bryant. He covered this motive by purchasing bubblegum. Various witnesses have suggested that Emmett himself provoked the dare by bragging that in Chicago, he went to school with and had even dated white girls. Accounts of exactly what transpired thereafter vary considerably in written records and testimony, but what is certain is that Emmett somehow offended Carolyn Bryant, the 21 year-old wife of the storeowner. Perhaps, as was long the scholarly consensus, Till placed his money in Bryant’s hand, rather than on the counter as was custom in encounters between black and white people at this time. Perhaps his social conduct or verbal articulation—socialized as he was in the moorings of the different, albeit also thoroughly racialized social order of Chicago—transgressed the protocols of interracial encounter in that rural, deeply southern locale. Given that Bryant herself admitted verbally in discussions with historian Timothy Tyson that considerable portions of the version of events she told in court in 1955 were fictional, and the further doubt such an admission casts on the other parts of her story, perhaps Till’s mere presence in the store was his transgression (2017, 13). We will never know for sure. Exacerbating his ostensible offense, several witnesses agree that on the way out of the store, Emmett waved at Carolyn Bryant and told her “goodbye,” and that at some point during this exchange, he whistled. Bryant apparently went to her car and got her pistol and, realizing that they were in danger, Emmett and his cousins left the store. A few nights after Emmett’s visit to the store, Bryant’s very drunk husband and brother-in-law (and perhaps others) drove to Emmett’s uncle’s house to confront the boy. They kidnapped him, shot him and beat him severely, then affixed a cotton gin fan weighing about 150 pounds to his neck using barbed wire before throwing him into the Tallahatchie River. They must have imagined, or hoped, that his body would never be seen again.

Till’s mother insisted that in spite of, and really because of, the visibly horrific violence done to Emmett’s flesh during his lynching, she would have an open-casket funeral for him. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 600,000 people attended Till’s funeral and countless others encountered the casket portrait of his mutilated body when it was thereafter published in an issue of Jet magazine, and many others have seen the casket in which he was buried now that it is the featured artifact in the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s exhibit on Emmett Till. ³² It is doubtful that anyone who sees the photograph will forget it. Its grotesque nature seared it into the national imagination, inciting many to greater thought and action in the fight for civil rights. Karla F.C. Holloway recounts how the narrative traveled nationally and internationally as a signifier for the horrors of Jim Crow:

Till slipped from narrative to narrative, appearing not only in Jet and Song of Solomon but also in a Bebe Moore Campbell novel—all cultural commemorations that belied the assumption that our children were farthest away from the trauma of death. Instead, they were pitifully and despairingly near. (Holloway 2002, 134)

But in insisting that “the world could [see ] what they had done to her child,” did Mamie Till-Mobley not herself reproduce the violence done to her son’s flesh as a “‘terrible spectacle’” (Douglass, as cited in Hartman 1997, 3)?

In line with my overall effort to legitimate the ways Black mothers manage to mother under conditions of impossibility, I want to propose a distinction between the visual encounter Mamie Till-Mobley curates between Emmett’s dead body and the viewing public from the spectacles of violence against the Black body Saidiya Hartman bemoans as so terribly representable. ³³ Hartman writes:

I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass’s account of the beating of Aunt Hester in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances—and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. (Hartman 1997, 3)

Hartman importantly draws our attention here to the spectacular character of Black suffering and death, and the resultant urgency of enacting different representational practices in theorizing American racial slavery. Yet she also recognizes that there is an “uncertain line between witness and spectator” (Hartman 1997, 4). I too find the overwhelming representability of the “terrible spectacle” unnerving, but I propose that Mamie Till-Mobley’s performance might animate a meaningful distinction between seeing flesh and seeing bodies as a way to differentiate spectating and witnessing (Douglass, as cited in Hartman 1997, 3). I do this heeding the warnings of Fred Moten, who, writing about Hartman’s attempt not to reproduce the “terrible spectacle,” observes the dangers of “this displacement,” which “both acknowledges and avoids the vexed question of the possibility of pain and pleasure mixing in the scene and in its originary and subsequent recounting” (2003, 4). The tenor of this sentiment is also reflected in Nicole Fleetwood’s notion of excess flesh enactments, which reveal that the messy interplay between pain and pleasure, scene and spectacle, is customary to Black women’s reflexive engagements with their representations. I count Mamie Till-Mobley among those Black women artists and practitioners Fleetwood names, who draw on and reimagine Black female excess in dynamic ways that “can be productive in conceiving of an identificatory possibility for black female subjects that refused the aberrant representations of the black female subject in dominant visual culture” (2011, 122). In the context of making a scene, excess flesh enactments would seem to help clarify that just as the conditions under which Black mothers mother are monstrous, so too are their challenges to the regimes of being and knowing that constrain them messy and complicated. Nevertheless, in bolstering ways of witnessing and not merely spectating the dead, making a scene is importantly different from, even if not wholly antithetical to, the “routine display of the slave’s ravaged body” (Hartman 1997, 3).

The “scene,” as I am using it here, is not synonymous with the spectacle, just as the flesh is not synonymous with the body. Alexander Weheliye elucidates that the fleshiness of Black being is an intentional production and not a natural truth, writing, “In order for this cruel ruse to succeed, however, subjects must be transformed into flesh before being granted the illusion of possessing a body” (Weheliye 2014, 39). Which is to say, Black flesh is a gory byproduct of violence enacted on Black bodies in order to claim their ownership, discipline, and submission. But more importantly, Black flesh is raw material. Black bodies are produced and circulated as fleshy in order to legitimate the subjection of Black people that furnishes a global, hierarchical order. For modern racial slavery, the foundation of capitalism in the Western world, the sedimentation of that order availed a free labor force and plasticizable symbolic resource whose paradigmatic utilizability persists beyond the event of Emancipation. At the point of Emmett’s physical death, though, although he remains bound by his symbolic utility in ways evinced by contemporary conscriptions of his narrative to act as evidence of U.S. capitalist democracy’s purported progress, racial capitalism no longer laid claim to his material labor. ³⁴ The loss of the object here conditions the possibility for both performance and recovery through Black women’s scene-making, although life cannot be restored:

that performance reproduces through registers of sameness and difference is what gives performance the power to sustain and reproduce life past the point of death, breaking free from the cycles that reproduce the existing arrangement of things in order to give birth to something new. (Chambers-Letson 2016, 127)

Emmett travels to Money, Mississippi to spend the summer with his relatives as flesh; the “total objectification” Spillers describes as defining even the “liberated” captive in our modern, which is to say slave, episteme fixes him as physically and symbolically so proximate to death that the mere hint of his social transgression seals his fate.³⁵ Conversely, he is sent back to Chicago in a pine box, but as a body. That Mamie Till had to labor so intently to even receive his body is exemplary of why making a scene is necessary for Black mothers to claim their dead progeny, even once their deaths permanently obviate their material utility in the economy of racial capitalism. In her interview for The Untold Story of Emmett Till, Mamie Till-Mobley recalls having to rally state officials just to receive the dead body of her son (Beauchamp 2005). The sheriff of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi ordered Emmett’s Mississippi relatives to bury his body the very day it was found by a man fishing in the river. Emmett’s family members had made it to the graveside, even—the grave had been dug and the body was present—but they received word that, at Mamie Till’s urging, the body was to be sent back to Chicago to be funeralized. Though the state of Mississippi shipped the body to Chicago, at Mamie Till’s expense, the body was sent in a sealed wooden box, and “Funeral Director A.A. Rayner [was] prohibited from opening the box.” Recalling the actions of the Mississippi officials, Mamie Till says,

Sheriff Strider wanted an immediate burial because he knew it wouldn’t be good for the state of Mississippi for people to see what had happened to Emmett Till, and the only way you could stop people from seeing was to bury it, I mean, get it out of sight.

The family members’ compliance with Strider’s demands speaks again to the monstrous constraints white supremacism exacts on Black beings. The family members’ “submission” to Sheriff Striker’s demands also suggests that even once Emmett’s material utility was forcibly dislodged, he retains the capacity for symbolic significance. ³⁶ Thus, maintaining the orderliness of the Jim Crow race relations contouring the social and political lives of the Southern population required Emmett’s erasure from the historical narrative. The state had a vested interest in ensuring that Mamie Till never got the opportunity to stake a claim over Emmett’s body nor the chance to shape his memory. Her transgressive act ensures both.

Though Emmett is visibly disfigured in his casket, his face rendered unrecognizable by the violence inflicted on his former flesh, Mamie Till forces funeral attendees to see Emmett’s dead body, and thus to remember him differently than he will inevitably be produced by the archival spectacle. Harry Elam elucidates that the visual power in Mamie Till’s act lied in the paradoxical juxtaposition of the “piquant, boyish, innocent face in the photograph” that was pinned to his casket and “the unspeakable body” lying in it (Elam 2007, 175). Ruth Feldstein shares this view, and has done considerable work to reveal the ways that Mamie Till’s efforts at getting justice for her son—much like McSpadden’s after her—involved foregrounding both her and her son’s respectability. In part through her efforts, then, Emmett accrues legibility as body, albeit “unspeakable,” such that the heinous violence done to him is able to incite such indignation. Importantly, Elam notes that Mamie Till “disrupted the conventional funeral observance and memorializing through public display of the dismembered body and its brutalized face, devoid of features” (2007, 175). As Elam alludes, the funeral, like the archive, has its own characteristic techniques of display that help to facilitate Black families’ performances of memory. Emmett’s head is turned slightly to the right, a sort of “cheating out” toward the viewing audience that avails his image more easily; he is dressed in a dark tuxedo, its immaculateness dramatizing the deformity and indecorousness of the body it fashions; a glass covering between the casket lid and Emmett’s body ensure that the viewing audience cannot touch the body, but also heightens visual significance of the performative display. ³⁷ This scene requires the multiracial audience to have what Elam calls a “‘reality check,’ a moment that traumatically ruptures the balance between the real and representational. It is a moment that, in its dissonance, generates demands that the relationship between the real and representation be negotiated” (Elam 2007, 173). Whereas Elam is interested in the real and the representational as they manifest in their respective time periods, insofar as the dissonance he names forms the basis for subsequent political work, I point to how this visual display focalized the dissonance between the historical real and archival representation, thus bringing to bear the habits of archival misrepresentation that oppress the Black living by reproducing the Black dead. As Fred Moten insists, Mamie Till performs

the disappearance of the disappearance of Emmett Till that emerges by way of exhibiting kinship’s wounds (themselves always refigured and refinished in and as and by exogamous collision)… If he seems to keep disappearing as you look at him it’s because you look away, which is what makes possible and impossible representation, reproduction, dream. (2003, 200)³⁸

The “reality check” in this scene is a visual enactment of the insistent oversights that make Blackness representable.

Critical consideration of the scene Mamie Till-Mobley makes and the politics of death and dying in the twentieth century more broadly has been profoundly shaped by Dr. Karla F.C. Holloway’s work on African American mourning and burial practices. She writes powerfully about the way that both the industry and politics of Black death and dying have been shaped by its always already premature character:

instead of black death being unusual, untoward events, or despite being inevitable end-of lifespan events, the cycles of our daily lives were so persistently interrupted by specters of death that we worked this experience into the culture’s iconography and included it as an aspect of black cultural sensibility. (Holloway 2002, 6)

Given this reality of pervasive premature Black death, funerals and wakes—the rituals where the dead were honored in ways that they could not usually expect to be honored in their lives— became intensely aesthetic productions that allow Black people, and especially Black mothers of children gone too soon, to perform a visible rupture in the sociopolitical order that makes their deaths inevitable, producing images that shock and afterimages that linger. Together the visuals insist that youth’s Black deaths, and thus their Black lives, matter. In this way, the Black funeral and the Black wake are exemplary of the scene-making I describe. The tragedy in these deaths and the inevitability of their erasure imbues the project of memory and “the necessity of memorial” with urgency (Holloway 2002, 139).

Holloway’s text is particularly exemplary of this point, in significant part because Passed On is the scene she makes after her imprisoned son falls victim to “legislatively endorsed homicide” (2002, 11). Holloway’s son was serving a lengthy prison sentence when, in 1999, he was fatally wounded as he ran away from prisoners’ work detail in a North Carolina cotton field. Holloway’s narrative has not been imbued with the same kind of historical or political value as the other cases I consider, but—as I hope my ruminations on the significance of Black mothers’ work at the scene of violent, anti-Black death make clear—the story’s Historical illegibility absent Karla Holloway’s claim is what makes its inclusion here important. ³⁹ In the final lines of the book’s introduction, Holloway writes:

I could not have imagined that the series of insistent ideas for Passed On, which invaded my serenity many years ago (well before my son’s life took its tragic, final turn), would find its articulation in this manner. I do not tell my story for judgment or absolution. I tell it instead because it too has the characteristics of an ‘incident report’ that is, finally, community property. Although I neither sensed nor expected that the book I imagined while standing at the edge of an island facing a too-blue sea would eventually find its space so intimately and so tragically mediated through the lives of those I love the most, I have found that I have had no recourse but to give my son’s story and the one I imagined in that expanse of sea and sky their earned, shared space. (2002, 8)

It is noteworthy that Holloway’s and her son’s shared ontological Blackness dictate that she cannot uphold the standard separation between researcher and research subject, nor can her stance on the island shore of history disappear the trace of the slave ship’s wake and the horror inflicted on the captive body condemned to death in the “too-blue” waters of the Atlantic. The nonsense of Black (non)-being—still bound by the material trace of American racial slavery despite the monstrous discursive erasures of that history from the archive—here requires Holloway to shift into a different mode of knowledge production than that of History-as-discipline. In order to tell the story of Black death and dying, she must slip out of the historicist’s mode and into a kind of cultural performance praxis. Although textually represented, her inclusion of her own grief, particularly the way in which she foregrounds that grief analytically, and not merely rhetorically, powerfully begs a way of knowing not ordinarily legible to disciplinary History. This is a grief that she has felt in her body and, as its inclusion as prolegomenon after the traditional scholarly introduction suggests, is central to the story: her embodied reality, she understands, is as legitimate a way of knowing the story of Black death and dying as her more traditionally analytical formulations.

Indeed, the naming of her own denied maternity at the scene of her Black son’s violent Black death is the inaugural moment for her scene-making, wherein the facts of his death are subordinated to her truth of his life. Faced with the incomplete picture availed to the mass public, Holloway “is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical anchor” (Hartman 2019, xiii). ⁴⁰ According to Hartman, such a predicament is inevitable for the historian of the dispossessed, since a fundamental aspect of their abjection involves their historical erasure. Yet through the techniques of performance praxis, she continues, it is possible to “[craft] a counter-narrative liberated from the judgment and classification” that makes the subaltern’s position in the symbolic order so precarious (Hartman 2019, xiii). Although History ordinarily insists on the singularity and objective discoverability of the historical event, presumed separable from the investigator, in performance theory and praxis, as Diana Taylor writes,

the object is not out-there as text…but rather in the way I—as investigator—have chosen to formulate it. This molding of the object highlights the centrality of the investigator in oral and performed traditions who might be understood as creating the data rather than examining it. (2006, 70)

Holloway does not merely “[examine] the data” of Black death and dying (69). As a condition of her Blackness, she necessarily also creates it. It is ultimately a perverse testament to the argumentative potency of Passed On that the biopolitical order Holloway elucidates in her research study as conditioning the deathliness of Black life facilitates the untimely Black death of her own son, in a North Carolina cotton field, during the preparation of her manuscript.

Adding insult to literal injury, a spectacle is made of her son’s death, such that their shared institutional illegitimacy, which disallows for certain privacies and protections in their lives just as in the lives of Mary and Margaret Garner, extend to archival representation through their post-mortem pathologization and erasure. ⁴¹ Holloway’s initial efforts at memory and memorial are disrupted by the circulation of her son’s death in the news: memory and memorial are disrupted by the circulation of her son’s death in the news:

Although the local news station and even CNN were broadcasting the story of the attempted prison escape of the three inmates and the fatal shooting of one of them, all we wanted to know was whether or not our child’s final moments were as anguished as his life…Understandably, this was not the interest of the television newscasters or print journalists, for whom the ‘rest of the story’ was the details of his horrific criminal history and the circumstances of his death. But the story we wanted could only come from the coroner (eventually), or perhaps from the prison superintendent, or the chaplain—whose call to me, alerting me to the news that my son had been shot and was dead, was followed in seconds by a call from a local television news station. (Holloway 2002, 9)

Despite their most strenuous efforts, however, Holloway and her husband are unable to get an official accounting of their son’s death from the prison. The only narrative that was made available to them about their son besides their memories, and certainly the only narrative available to the viewing public, was that of the visual spectacle playing out in front of a live national audience as “breaking news.”

The image it centered, of the white sheet covering Holloway’s son, provides little in the way of clarifying the details of his death but, nonetheless, is a thoroughly evocative visual text. Viewers are invited to the scene of violent death and there is no body there. All that is left of Bem Holloway at that scene—the scene and the entire narrative constructed of him in public discourse overdetermined by what he did (his criminal record, his attempted escape and its visual trace, and the corroborative evidence they are presumed to lend to state authority) and not who he was—is “anonymous Black flesh” (Elam 2007, 175). As Hortense Spillers writes, insofar as Black flesh is anonymized in its atomization, “we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions” (1987, 68). Which is to say, though Holloway’s son’s wounded flesh is not visually depicted on the screen, the “terrible spectacle” remains. The sheet covering him does not, and indeed cannot, efface the spectacular Black flesh within the frame inasmuch as the labor his depiction provides is necessary to the state’s performance of orderliness. In search of both memory and maternity, then, Holloway milks the relative constancy of the print form in narrating her son’s story as a part of Passed On—which privileges a kind of afterlife if not an afterimage—“in defiance of memories that depend on our vitality” (Holloway 2002, 14). Because of his crimes, which are inextricable from his ontology, Holloway’s son would only be legible within the limits of how Black men are problematically figured through representation without Holloway’s curatorial intervention, a rendering that the context of his public exposure hastens. Without her scene-making, that is, he is not a figure who would be remembered.

Similarly, when Lezley McSpadden appears on Don Lemon’s show immediately after Michael Brown’s death, she tellingly targets the sedimented and iterative history of anti- Blackness dead set on delegitimizing her son’s narrative, a history that her performance of grief—how she makes a scene—is meant to rupture. And Don Lemon knows it. Throughout the interview, Lemon chooses to focus not on the legal drama or political unrest unfolding throughout the country spawned by Brown’s death. Rather, he repeatedly asks McSpadden questions about Brown’s character in life and about her own experience of grieving his death. Immediately after offering her his condolences, Lemon says, “Your son Michael had just graduated from high school, was set to start college today; tell us what kind of young man he was.” The “us” to which Lemon refers is necessarily the viewing public, since the only other person present for the interview besides the televisual audience is Brown’s stepfather. In what is thus an apparent appeal to the viewing public, Lemon repeatedly gestures to Brown’s supposed exceptionalism from the dominant narratives about Black youth, especially young Black men. This provokes McSpadden to speak directly to those who will assume that Michael had no future because of the pathology so symbolically tethered to Black beings. She says,

We don’t live like that, not our family. We feel like we can do anything and go anywhere. We’re just not subject to living in the city. And like I said, just because my son is a 6′4″ Black male walking down a city street does not mean he fits the profile for any, anything other than just walking down that street. That’s all he was doing. He didn’t do nothing wrong.

This comment is especially poignant since it pinpoints the intensely visual nature of Brown’s constitution in the public imaginary. His mother recognizes that the sustained image of her son in the minds of many is less an image of Brown himself than it is an image of Black masculine pathologization: its clarity lies not in its replication of Brown’s corporeal contours but rather in its resonance with the imaginative figuration of the fleshy Black male object, rehearsed into hegemony largely through the production and reproduction of imagery. ⁴² In drawing attention to his body, then, she invites the viewing public to no longer see him as flesh. Lemon continues, “You said that…he was your best friend. My mother is my best friend, and what she would say is that you shouldn’t go before I should go. Your son should not die before you die; sadly have to say that.” Of course, Lemon does not “have to say that,” but it does elicit a physical, emotional response from Lezley, who keels over in her chair and audibly weeps at his provocation. “By placing memories in the place of paintings,” McSpadden “asks that the ghosts of memory be seen as equivalent to ‘the permanent collection’ of ‘great works’” (Phelan 1993, 147). That is, despite the way her son is figured in the public imaginary, McSpadden’s public grief—her project of memory and memorial—requires the viewing public to see her son as some-body.

Former officer Darren Wilson conversely depends on the visual legibility of Michael Brown as violent and pathological, an image cohered by the visual representations of many historical Others before him, to justify his killing. Using incredibly vivid descriptive imagery,Wilson invites the public to supplement the images Brown’s mother provides with the dominant portrayal of Black men that operates in the symbolic order. Whereas Brown’s mother’s image of him depicted him as a loving individual with a bright future, Wilson invited us to view that image through the darkened lens of American history, diverting our attention away from Brown’s body back to Brown’s flesh. In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Wilson describes the physical difference between he and Brown as “like a five year old holding on to Hulk Hogan, that’s just how big this man was” (2014). Wilson Brown was 6′4″ tall and weighed about 290 pounds; Wilson is also 6′4″ and weighs about 215 pounds. It is thus safe to assume that Wilson’s analogy grossly misrepresents the power differential between them. After Brown punches Wilson in the face and he realizes Brown’s supposed physical prowess, Wilson says, “the next thing was how to survive” (2014). When Stephanopoulos challenges his assertion that one punch from Brown required him to enter survival mode, he replies,

Yes, I didn’t know if I’d be able to withstand another hit like that. I mean, he’s a…you hear all the time, one punch and someone gets knocked out…So that was my fear, is if he hits me again, will I be conscious after that hit to still defend myself. (2014)

Both of the ellipses here designate pauses and not omitted words; they represent moments when Wilson stopped himself short of completing a thought. ⁴³ One can but imagine what horrors linger in that first ellipsis and, monstrously, Brown is not here to challenge the spoken and unspoken meanings—hieroglyphics—ascribed to his flesh. Wilson goes on to describe a scuffle that ensued between he and Brown for his gun, heightened, he says, by “a look in his eye like something I’d never seen before” that was akin to that of a “demon” (2014). He then describes being

shocked by the whole interaction, because this escalated so quickly, from a simple request to now a fight for survival, and it still doesn’t make sense to me—why someone would act in that way, and be so mad instantly, so aggressive instantly. (2014)

At the interview’s end, Stephanopoulos says to Wilson, “it sounds like you don’t think you were responsible,” to which Wilson replies, “I did my job that day” (2014). Regardless, Lezley McSpadden sets the final stage.

As I have argued is customary in Black cultural traditions of death and dying, McSpadden makes her final scene at Michael’s funeral. That the funeral is live-streamed by several television news networks merely reifies the already intensely scenic nature of the live event. McSpadden leads the family processional into the church, wearing an incontrovertibly bright red dress. Once the entire family has filed in, McSpadden stands and walks over to Michael’s casket, which is placed dead center of the alter. Nearly five minutes of a virtually uninterrupted close-up shot thereafter depicts McSpadden glaring at the closed casket. The length of time is dramatized by the inaction of the clergy and viewing audience, as well as the choir’s sung repetition of the vamp in the Black funeral melody, “I Shall Wear a Crown.” Over and over again, they sing “I’m going to put on my robe, tell the story, how I made it over” (2014). And indeed, the scene McSpadden fashions in front of the viewing audience, at the church and throughout the nation and virtual world, tells a powerful, iterative story about Black life lived in startling proximity to premature death, not only in terms of those killed to maintain the orderliness of racial capitalism, but also in terms of those who live(d) to tell the tale. The handkerchief with which she wipes her tears has been imprinted with her son’s likeness, such that, just as is the case at Emmett Till’s funeral, the viewing public sees Michael’s body in this frame even without his casket ever being opened. Her public grief suspends the orderly protocols of memory and memorial such that the viewing public is forced to see the monstrosity of her son’s untimely death.

---

Acknowledgments

I would never have arrived at this argument without having had my friend and colleague, Umniya Najaer, as an interlocutor. The rigor and care she exhibits in her own work on the Black womb is largely responsible for any contribution this article can claim to make. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Michaela Bronstein, and Jakeya Caruthers lent particularly helpful insights as the argument developed into this article’s first draft, my qualifying paper for the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford. My fellow members of the Black Studies Collective at Stanford graciously invited me to workshop that earlier draft of the paper. The feedback I received there, particularly from Jameelah Imani Morris, Danielle Marie Greene, and Lucas T. Williams, was instrumental in developing that draft into the article proposal. Dionte B. Harris read so many drafts throughout the process that he can probably recite the introduction from memory. I am especially thankful to him, along with the editorial collective of W&P and my anonymous reviewers, who all made this work better while also treating it and me with care. Finally, I am grateful to Dr. Karla F.C. Holloway for authorizing my engagement with her personal story, and to all of the Black mothers performing in and against the pervasive reality of premature Black death.

---

Notes on contributor

Henry Washington, Jr. is a PhD candidate in the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. His research interests include African American literature, Black feminist and queer theory, performance studies, and the law. He is at work on a dissertation that investigates murder mystery in the post-slavery imagination.

---

Notes

1. I invoke Morrison’s rememory here in order to call attention to the way that the quotidian and iterative nature of state-sanctioned, premature Black death materially and psychosocially shapes the lives of those who live to tell the tale. In the afterlife of slavery, Sethe explains to Denver in Beloved, Some things go. Pass on.

   Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. (1998, 43)

   This is to say that part of the tragedy in Brown’s death for me was in its formative familiarity, inasmuch as the structurally mandated vulnerability to premature death I share with Brown haunts my supposed status as a person and citizen in ways I knew in my body even before I learned through experience and study. ↩

2. My thinking on this matter has been profoundly impacted by Christen A. Smith’s work in “Facing the Dragon,” where she notes that “although state terror often results in the immediate physical death of young Black men, it is principally, yet tacitly, performed for Black women and impacts Black women disproportionately” (2016, 31). Black women, she notes, are figured as sequelae who must bear the “gendered, reverberating, deadly effects of state terror that infect the affective communities of the dead” (2016, 31). ↩

3. In Constructing the Black Masculine, Wallace poignantly invokes the term to describe “an interpretive imposition on black men’s being in public space,” which “restricts, if not altogether dooms, a black man’s potential for transcending the chasmed otherness of race by establishing boundaries (screens, image repertories, stereotypes), mental parerga, that thwart sameness” (2002, 8). He insists that Black men are not merely seen, but enframed. When former officer DarrenWilson invoked the pathologized tropes of Black men in his interview with George Stephanopolous, then, he merely lubricated the invocation of that “interpretive imposition” (2002, 8). My discussion of Black men’s particular enframement here is also informed by Patrice D. Douglass’s important observation of “the conflation of all Black genders as male,” particularly in discussions about anti-Black violence and the political discourse such violence engenders (2018, 109). Such conflation, she clarifies, both “misaligns [anti-Black violence] as inherently without gender, since maleness is assumed as structurally unbound by the suffering of gender violence” and “reveals that violence deracinates Black gender into an unrecognizable state, such that what is seen does not account for all that has occurred” (2018, 109). Taking Douglass’s provocation seriously, I endeavor to explicate the specificity of the calculus of violence animating Brown’s encounter with Wilson and its gendered visual logic, but without suggesting that his vulnerability to gratuitous violence is exceptional to his maleness. ↩

4. Part of what I am trying to do here is to build on Christen A. Smith’s important observation of the oft forgotten affective and material impacts fatal anti-Black violence against Black men has on the communities they leave behind—their mothers in particular—to note that the enframement of Black men which justifies the violence against them (to use Maurice O. Wallace’s language) is inextricably tied to the enframement of their Black mothers. The presumed failure of the Black mother is indexed in her child’s putative pathology. I am indebted to my undergraduate thesis advisors, Wahneema Lubiano and Mark Anthony Neal, for helping me to begin to think about the relationship between the representation of Black men and the representation of the mothers who raise them. ↩

5. I am especially thinking about the article that John Eligon wrote in The New York Times shortly after Brown’s death delineating the “problems and promise in his young life” (2014). The writer bizarrely builds a case that Brown was troubled using details about Brown’s background and upbringing. These details, including that Brown “lived in a community that had rough patches,” “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” “had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar,” and “was born to ‘teenage parents’” who “split up” before he matured into adulthood leaving him to be raised by a single mother recall intensely racialized stereotypes and imagery about Black people as pathological in ways that expose Eligon’s intentions even in the absence of their explicit naming (Eligon 2014). No details about Wilson or his upbringing are included. ↩

6. I use Man and Hu/Man throughout the article following Sylvia Wynter, who uses “Man” to gesture to an exclusionary humanism whereby white heterosexual men were ontologized into the paragons of personhood, while

   the peoples of the militarily expropriated New World territories (i.e. Indians), as well as the enslaved peoples of Black Africa (i.e. Negroes), that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly religiosecular) ‘descriptive statement’ of the human in history, as the descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity. (2003, 266)

   ↩

7. I invoke Christina Sharpe’s “the wake” in both language and spirit, as I not only find it an extraordinarily clarifying analytic through which to understand “the contemporary conditions of Black life as it is lived near death, as deathliness, in the wake of slavery,” but also a necessarily horizon for theorizing possibility. That is, although this is a paper that is deeply concerned with the ways (or scenes) Black mothers make; I endeavor also to insist that these are interventions always waged in and by the conditions of impossibility the longue durée of enslavement mandates. Indeed, “the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on” (2016, 7). My task as a scholar, then, is to tarry with the question of “what happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who know, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who care?” (2016, 7). ↩

8. I am heavily indebted to Saidiya Hartman for this line of thinking. In particular, her ruminations on the futility of “focusing one’s appeal to the very state that has inflicted the injury” in response to Frank B. Wilderson, III’s query about reparations in “The Position of the Unthought” (2003) helps to clarify the contradictory nature of the integrationist impulse I see as insidious in the way that Black people killed by state violence often get animated in putatively progressive, even purportedly radical, political imaginaries. Getting true “justice” for Michael Brown, or for Breonna Taylor, or for Korryn Gaines, or for Trayvon Martin, would require nothing less than destruction of the calculus of value that undergirds racial capitalism in the afterlife of slavery. To imagine otherwise is to “reinscribe the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain situation, when, clearly, it cannot” (198). ↩

9. I am indebted to my colleague and co-conspirator at Stanford, Casey Wayne Patterson, for helping me to clarify my contribution to thinking about the relationship between spectacularity and value, and for helping me to develop this language to do so. ↩

10. To be sure, I am not suggesting that McSpadden’s grief is deceitful or insincere; rather, I am suggesting that she is not just passively represented. Partly because she is so adamant about distinguishing herself and her family from common pathologized tropes of Black representation, it is clear that she possesses an intimate knowledge of her own (hyper)visibility which she exploits to bring attention to her son’s death and the calculus of value that makes it possible. ↩

11. I invoke “the repertoire” as the archive’s foil following Diana Taylor: “all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, 20). ↩

12. Jackson challenges the logic of “exclusion” that has animated critiques of Enlightenment’s racializing schema, particularly in the context of the human/animal distinction. Rather than to exclude Blackness, she argues that these discourses were invested in the “violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition—of black(ened) humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity” (3). Owing to her incisive contribution, I understand my discussion of the ways in which Black mothers have been categorically excluded from the discursive category of maternity to be an exemplary, though not exhaustive, account of how exactly the category gets mobilized on the register of ontology. This is to say that the exclusion of Black mothers from the discursive category of maternity is but a mode of their fundamental utility—a testament to the “fluidification of ‘life’ and fleshy existence” that Jackson describes (2020, 11). ↩

13. I use Mamie Till-Mobley although she was Mamie Till-Bradley at the time of her son’s death because I mean to suggest that the labor of re-presenting her son continues well after 1955. Indeed, she was co-authoring an autobiographical account of her son’s death in honor of his memory and the ongoing fight for racial justice, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, at the time of her death in 2003. The book was published later that year. ↩

14. Here it is worth noting that Margaret Garner was never actually tried for murder. Although she was indicted on murder charges (and the Garner men as accessories) and the abolitionists fighting on her behalf tried to see those charges through in hopes of ultimately challenging the Fugitive Slave Act’s constitutionality, the actual legal question adjudicated by the court was whether the Garners were enslaved or free. It was determined that they remained propertied (and that they would thus be returned to Kentucky). The federal government, in establishing the Fugitive Slave Act as federal law, establishes the terms by which a murder charge can collapse under the weight of a property claim. ↩

15. I limit the number of case studies despite the capaciousness of the analytic because I endeavor to treat each of these narratives with nuance and care. I am particularly interested in the Black funeral and the Black wake as exemplary stages for the scenes Black mothers have made on behalf of children murdered by the U.S. state. But Black mothers can and have also “made a scene” in courtrooms, in corner stores, on red carpets, on the front lines, in the news and media, in memoirs, and in innumerable other spaces and places.My hope is that my provocations open lines for further inquiry about Blackness, mothering, and anti-Black state violence for others. ↩

16. Importantly, state-sanctioned violence and death can take many forms, from lethal injection to toxic waste dumping (see Berlant, 2007). ↩

17. Sharpe notes that “extraordinary sites of domination and intimacy, slavery and the Middle Passage were ruptures with and a suspension of the known world that initiated enormous and ongoing psychic, temporal, and bodily breaches. Monstrous Intimacies is my attempt to account for the long psychic and material reach of those passages, their acknowledged and disavowed effects, their projection onto and erasure from particular bodies, and the reformulation, reproduction, and recirculation of their intimate spaces of trauma violence, pleasure, shame, and containment” (2010, 4). ↩

18. This reading is resonant with Jacqueline Goldsby’s framing of Emmett Till’s murder (and lynchings more broadly) as a “spectacular secret” (2006, 6). She suggests that “our fixation on the extremities of the practice,” particularly in historical accounts, have produced accounts of lynching that understate its formative relation to the modern (284). ↩

19. In the most contemporarily cited accounts of the killing, which are that of Underground Railroad “president” Levi Coffin and historian Julius Yanuck, Garner’s age is variously given as 21, 22, or 23 at the time of her daughter’s death. That Garner’s age is contested in the public record is demonstrative of how institutions work to produce the enslaved as non-beings and the according precarious position of Black beings, especially Black women, in the historical archive. ↩

20. Kimberly Juanita Brown compellingly writes about Sethe, Margaret Garner’s fictional analog, that she

    reorganizes temporal order as she remembers events and emphasizes the intimate contingencies others may miss when, for instance, they focus on one aspect of her physical presentation (the tree on her back) as opposed to others that are less visible (her stolen milk, her missing husband, her dead child). (2015, 6)

    I am especially interested in how Beloved mediates Brown’s elaboration of “the generational lineage of black pain, literally ‘written on the back’ of black female subjectivity” historically and generally in Beloved-as-archive. Indeed, scholarly and popular engagements with the novel have textured the historical landscape, not only of Margaret Garner’s narrative but also more broadly of slavery and its afterlives (2015, 5). ↩

21. In particular, Taylor’s “Performance and/as History,” Muñoz’s “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” and Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” speak to the silences that attend dispossessed and ontologically negated populations (the primitive, the queer, the slave) in the historical archive. ↩

22. Wahneema Lubiano’s “Black Ladies,Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: IdeologicalWar by Narrative Means,” which I reference in other parts of this essay, elaborates this argument. She writes,

    categories like ‘black woman,’ ‘black women,’ or particular subsets of those categories, like ‘welfare mother/queen,’ are not simply social taxonomies, they are also recognized by the national public as stories that describe the world in particular and politically loaded ways—and that is exactly why they are constructed, reconstructed, manipulated, and contested. They are, like so many other social narratives and taxonomic social categories, part of the building blocks of ‘reality’ for many people; they suggest something about the world; they provide simple, uncomplicated and often wildly (and politically damaging) inaccurate information about what is ‘wrong’ with some people, with the political economy of the United States. They even stand for threats to ideas about what the relationship of the family to the state ought to be. (Lubiano 1992, 331)

    ↩

23. I will certainly not make space for them or engage them critically as part of this argument, but I can recall the vicious attacks of McSpadden I would encounter in the comments sections of media relating to Brown’s death published online. Insofar as she was always already a “marked woman,” upon seeing her body, these commenters needed no further evidence of her putative pathology (Spillers 1987, 65). ↩

24. Umniya Najaer was particularly instrumental in helping me to arrive at this point. ↩

25. Jared Sexton’s chapter, “Origins and Beginnings: On The Blind Side,” from Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing, demonstrates how filmic representation, as an ideological state apparatus, functions to solidify the pathologized imaginative of “the Black mother” and usefully links her pathologization to that of the Black man, Black family and Black neighborhood. Central to the development of the film’s white savior complex is the profoundly disproportionate maternal ability of the Black protagonist’s white adoptive mother. At one point, she literally wrests him from the bowels of a trap house, which the film depicts through a foil character who is violently killed in Michael’s neighborhood as his and all other Blacks’ inevitable plight in the custody of his Black Mother and on the geography of that Black neighborhood. Michael’s Black mother is “not only unable to protect him from dangers in his home and neighborhood or the regular incursions of the state, not only unable to ward against the structural conditions of ghettoization; she is also in need of protection herself” (Sexton 2017, 110). ↩

26. I am aware that neither these social and biological kinships nor mothering and maternity are neatly dichotomous under the conditions of anti-Blackness, a truth which has been explored in Black feminist work on mothering and that is explored in the “wake work” of Black women’s literature. What motivates this distinction is my critical (and ethical) desire to complicate what mothering must mean under the legal and social conditions of captivity. Angela Davis notes that

    The designation of the Black woman as a matriarch is a cruel misnomer. It is a misnomer because it implies stable kinship structures within which the mother exercises decisive authority. It is cruel because it ignores the profound traumas the black woman must have experienced when she had to surrender her child-bearing to alien and predatory economic interests. (1971, 3)

    For more work on Black feminism and mothering, see the Revolutionary Mothering collection edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams; Nancy Naples’s Grassroots Warriors; Jane Juffer’s Single Mother; Jennifer Nelson’s Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movements; Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body; and Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women, among others. ↩

27. elaborate my contribution to the question of reproduction and disappearance that has animated so much of the writing on performance since the publication of Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked later in this section. For now, suffice it to say that this paper follows Joshua Chambers-Letson in assuming that performance is characterized by “internal contradictions,” quintessentially “the paradoxical simultaneity of its ephemerality (its fugitivity from the sphere of reproduction and withdrawal from presence) and its inherent reproducibility (its capacity to reproduce the presence of that which has been absented or lost)” (2016, 127). ↩

28. I am thinking especially of Black women as the objects of analysis foundational to the development of the human sciences, and of modern gynecology in particular, through medical experimentation J. Marion Sims performed on their bodies without consent or anesthesia. For more on the bioethical implications of science’s objectification of Black women’s bodies, see Karla F.C. Holloway’s Private Bodies, Public Texts (2011) and C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides (2017), particularly its first chapter. ↩

29. Saidiya Hartman and Joshua Chambers-Letson point out the predominance of “gestational language” and reproduction-as-metaphor in accounts of racial capitalism’s origins by theorists of slavery and performance respectively (2016, 166; 2016, 126). For both scholars, this appropriation of the language of reproduction falls short of sufficiently accounting for the material contributions of reproductive laborers—here those Black mothers who give birth to the paradigmatic human commodity. ↩

30. There is a paradox—which is rather productive for my purposes—to be found in the fact that the Black mother both reproduces the foundational fodder for value under capital and, as Christen A. Smith so poignantly demonstrates, threatens the maintenance of that very order through her insistent challenges to the state’s constitutive anti-Blackness in response to spectacular acts of violence. My task here is to elaborate the centrality of performance to these challenges, or “scenes” that they routinely make. ↩

31. My use of “propertied persons” is informed by Saidiya Hartman, who generatively writes about how the vulnerability of the enslaved to statutory law (the slave codes) inheres a recognition of humanity, while they acquire no protections or personhood in common law. She further writes, “The dual invocation of the slave as property and person was an effort to wed reciprocity and submission, intimacy and domination, and the legitimacy of violence and the necessity of protection” (Hartman 1997, 80). In this way, the enslaved were rendered propertied persons, and not merely property, in the law, insofar as the law worked to both liberate and subjugate the enslaved according to its contradictory aims. This is part of the disorderliness of enslavement and anti-Blackness I reference throughout this paper, a disorderliness institutions work to disappear. ↩

32. Although I do not have the space here to elaborate, there is considerably more to be said about the Emmett Till display in the NMAAHC in light of the ongoing debates around memorialization, archives, and spectacle I am engaging in this paper. During my last visit to the museum, I was struck (and somewhat horrified) by the exhibit’s popularity with visitors of all races (there was a line to get in to the room where the casket is kept), and the way in which the display seems intentionally curated to stage a kind of psychosocial encounter with its visitors. The room is designed so that its visitors encounter the casket just as they would at a funeral: the very shape of the room is such that you must march around in a line, there is a mock pulpit and there are mock “pews,” and the lighting and sound effects in the room produce an atmosphere of sorrow. Many of the visitors I saw left the exhibit weeping. Among the questions worth exploring are: what effect does the display of Till’s casket absent his body produce? How do we properly assess the ethics of the display given that neither the curator nor the visitors are his mother, and she is no longer alive to make the choice? What does this exhibit reveal about the possibilities and/or limitations of “proper” historical representation? ↩

33. There are numerous other examples, I think, of people who have spectacularized Emmett Till’s image. One notable example is the white artist Dana Schutz, whose Open Casket painting sparked a huge controversy after its inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Aruna D’Souza thoughtfully analyzes the workings of culture and commodity in the scandal that ensued in Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. Although I do not pursue it here, I am fixated by a question that occurred to me upon reading it: is Mamie Till “responsible” at all for how her son’s image is spectacularized after his funeral, given her role in making his open casket photo widely available? ↩

34. Though it is not my endeavor here, there is more to be said about the symbolic labor the Black dead are called upon to do, particularly in the name of social justice. I appreciate Jameelah Imani Morris for helping me to discover the prevalence of this undercurrent throughout the scenes considered here. I also appreciate Abdul R. JanMohamed for the clarity that engaging his observations about physical death lent my analysis as I arrived at this point. He argues, “the road to freedom is revealed precisely by the slave’s ability to recognize that while the master can appropriate the value of his labor and, by confining him to the realm of social-death, even the value of his life, the only thing that the master cannot appropriate is the use-value of his actual-death” (2005, 18, emphasis in original). ↩

35. Here I am alluding to the decades long debate about the exact nature of the supposed transgression that resulted in his death. Of course, his very being was enough. In an interview with historian Timothy B. Tyson for his 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till, the woman he had been accused of flirting with admitted that he never did. My slight ambiguity about this in the body of the text has to do with the frustration I articulate in my earlier point about the way Michael Brown is narrativized post-mortem, toward the insinuation that one’s access to freedom should depend on strict adherence to a set of intensely racialized social codes. ↩

36. The aforementioned dimension of “submission,” which registers the gendered power relations and libidinal economy of anti-Blackness under slavery and in its wake, is also resonant here. Emmett’s legibility as a simultaneous object of fear and fetish is important context for the acts of violence done to him and their legal authorization. This is, of course, why the disproven myth that Till was castrated was so believable. For more on this, see Alexander G. Weheliye’s extension of Spillers’s notion of pornotroping to consider the violent homoerotic impulses of white masculinity in Habeas Viscus, particularly pages 93-96. ↩

37. “Cheating out” in theatre performance means to readjust one’s blocking or placement on a stage in order to ensure maximum visibility for the audience. It is common practice for morticians to turn the head of a decedent before public viewing. It is evident that this was done to Till in photos of his casket. ↩

38. Ruth Feldstein and others also note that Mamie Till-Mobley continued to share her son’s story and advocate for justice on his behalf. She testified at the trial of his killers, and became a sought after orator for the civil rights struggle, even touring with the NAACP for a time (2000, 103). ↩

39. I had a conversation with Dr. Holloway, who is a dear personal mentor, about her scene-making in my preparation of the article. Despite her ongoing commitment to honoring the memory of her son, she expressed having always had apprehensions about public enlistments of his story as evidence of the horror in state-sanctioned, anti-Black violence. Her legitimate fear that her son’s imperfections might threaten the legibility of the force that anti-Blackness exerted in his life to hasten his death (and that that illegibility would cause his inclusion as part of a narrative of anti-Black struggle to threaten the integrity of that struggle’s political claim) should raise questions about what it actually means for Black lives to matter. ↩

40. Saidiya Hartman has wrestled with the limits of the archive throughout her scholarly career. I quote Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in this particular instance because in that text, Hartman self-consciously enacts a critical mode that she calls “close narration,” which she characterizes as “a style which places the voice of the narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text” (Hartman 2019, xiii–xiv). Hers is a distinctly performative method that, like Holloway’s methodology of personal narration about her son, not only attempts to give voice to the now tragically voiceless but also dramatizes the persistence of Black, and especially Black female, waywardness. Although there is not room to elaborate this idea in this paper, Hartman enacts a kind of archival scene-making, using performance as a mode to birth otherwise knowledges that grant ex-slaves a claim to their history. ↩

41. Holloway’s own Private Bodies, Public Texts elaborates how Black people and women are systematically denied rights to privacy in medical and legal contexts. ↩

42. Although I think it important that I indicate the ways in which this representational project is gendered, the scope of this paper does not allow me to delve too deeply into the history of Black masculine representation. A few relevant works are Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, Marlon B. Ross’s Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era, and Maurice O. Wallace’s Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. ↩

43. Of course, my reliance on ellipsis here dramatizes the inevitable failure of textual re-presentation to document live and recorded events. But I am also drawn to the ellipsis as a signifier for Wilson’s violent silence in light of Jennifer DeVere Brody’s observation that ellipses perform by “[forming] a corollary between the different and yet analogically related experiences of silence and invisibility. They supplement experience and call attention to the scripted-ness and excess ascribed to black performance” (2008, 76). I follow the impulse Brody locates in Ralph Ellison’s fiction, then, in invoking the ellipsis as a way to call attention to the excessive meaning-making practices Wilson activates in his account of Brown’s killing by virtue of what he says and what he does not say. Yet the ellipses also announce absences that Brody notes are full of, rather than absent of, meaning; these are moments that emerge as “signposts and signals that provide viewers with opportunities to scrutinize” (2008, 68). ↩

---

References

Beauchamp, Keith, dir. 2005. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. DVD. Thinkfilm.

Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Slow Death (Sovereignity, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 754–780.

Brody, Jennifer DeVere. 2008. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham: Duke University Press.

Brown, Kimberly Juanita. 2015. The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chambers-Letson, Joshua. 2016. “Performance’s Mode of Reproduction I: Searching for Danh Võ’s Mother.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 26 (2–3): 122–145.

Clemons, Walter. 1987. “A Gravestone of Memories.” Newsweek, 74–75.

Coffin, Levi. 1968. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin. New York: Arno Press.

Davis, Angela Y. 1971. “The Role of BlackWomen in the Community of Slaves.” The Black Scholar 3 (4): 3–15.

Douglass, Frederick. 1968. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: New American Library.

Douglass, Patrice D. 2018. “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying.” Theory & Event 21 (1): 106–123.

Elam, Harry. 2007. “Reality Check.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt, and Joseph R. Roach, 173–190. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Eligon, John. 2014. “Michael Brown Spent LastWeeks GrapplingWith Problems and Promise.” The New York Times, August 24.

Feldstein, Ruth. 2000. Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-

1965. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Fleetwood, Nicole R. 2011. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldsby, Jacqueline. 2006. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2016. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls 18 (1): 166–173.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W W Norton & Co. Inc.

Hartman, Saidiya, and Frank B. Wilderson III. 2003. “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13 (2): 183–201.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Holloway, Karla F.C. 2002. Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press.

James, Joy. 2016. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal.” Carceral Notebooks 12 (1): 253–296.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. 2005. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham: Duke University Press.

“Lemon Interviews Michael Brown’s Parents”. 2014. YouTube video, 7:08, from an Interview Televised by CNN on August 12, 2014, Posted by “CNN,” https://youtu.be/crI27NgYrto.

“Live Stream – Michael Brown Funeral”. 2015. YouTube video, 4:20:32, from Live Broadcast Televised by WPDE ABC15 on August 25, 2015, Posted by “WPDE ABC15,” https://youtu.be/38vvdPgBOQs. YouTube.

Lubiano, Wahneema. 1992. “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means.” In Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison, 323–363. New York: Pantheon.

Madison, D. Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Morrison, Toni. 1998. Beloved. New York: Plume.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 1996. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8 (2): 5–16.

Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.

Reinhardt, Mark. 2010. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sexton, Jared. 2017. Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sharpe, Christina. 2010. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smith, Christen A. 2016. “Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas.” Transforming Anthropology 24 (1): 31–48.

Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 65–81.

Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

Taylor, Diana. 2006. “Performance and/as History.” TDR/The Drama Review 50 (1): 67–86.

Tyson, Timothy B. 2017. The Blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wallace, Maurice O. 2002. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995. Durham: Duke University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.

Yanuck, Julius. 1953. “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1): 47–66.