Who Set You Flowin?

The African-American Migration Narrative

Farah Jasmine Gri in

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195088960.001.0001
Published online: 03 October 2011 Published in print: 20 July 1995 Online ISBN: 9780199855148
Print ISBN: 9780195088960

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CHAPTER

3 Safe Spaces and Other Places: Navigating the Urban

Landscape 
Farah Jasmine Gri in

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195088960.003.0004 Pages 100–141

Published: July 1995

Abstract
The need of the African Americans to resort to safe spaces is discussed in the chapter. Safe spaces
manifested themselves as songs, memory, oral culture, and spirituality that reminded African
Americans of their ancestral origins. Urban spaces were the places where di erent social classes
struggled for control. These were created by urban power; migrants may either resist or subject
themselves to urban power. The experiences of di erent African Americans from the migration
narratives are described brie y in the chapter to show how each of them coped with the environment
brought about by urban power.

Keywords: urban power, safe spaces, African Americans, urban spaces, migration narratives
Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards), Literary Theory and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies
(American), Literary Studies (African American Literature)
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Jean Lacy’s Welcome to My Ghetto Land (Figure 3.1) depicts the facade of an urban kitchenette building. As
with The Women of Brewster Place, a variety of black women, alternately sensual and sacred, lean from the
windows of the tenement, each seeming to possess her own tale. The small 6″ × 3″ rectangular wooden
panel is divided into smaller rectangles that become the bricks, windows, and doorways of the building. The
dominant rectangular shape is softened by the addition of curved arches, which top the windows and
doorway. Intense primary colors along with the architectural elements—columns and arches—lend a
stained-glass quality to the painting. Together, these forms and colors align the building with a cathedral.
The cathedral motif is furthered by the gold leaf outlining and the female gures, who in this context
become religious icons. The technique of gold lea ng, the medium of wood panel, and the iconic gures are
all elements of medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance gold leaf panels, and Russian religious icons.
Outside, Lacy incorporates elements drawn from various West African traditions: sculpture-textured
drums, turtles, and twins are situated on the outside pavement and at the foot of the building as if to protect
 the house from the outside world. In other contexts Lacy uses the turtle motif to signify the historic
migrations that have characterized black life throughout the African diaspora.

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Figure 3.1. Jean Lacy, Welcome to My Ghetto Land. Paint, gesso, gold leaf on wood panel, 6″ × 3″. (Dallas Museum of Art,
Metropolitan Life Foundation Purchase Grant)

The combination of European religious motifs with those from West Africa indicate that the inhabitants of
the building are inheritors of both legacies. In Lacy’s painting, the kitchenette building becomes a sacred
space that is the domain of black women. The women are softly curved, echoing the roundness of the arches
and countering the harsh rectangular form of the painting. The arches and their curved bodies evoke both
the secular and the sacred. Such a combination is one that seems like a paradox in the Western tradition, but
in the West African tradition it is not as rare. Light emanates from the women like spiritual auras. The two
sets of gures on the rst oor are madonna and child images. The sensuous women of the second and third
stories are more like saints than madonnas. However, unlike saints of the Western tradition, Lacy’s women
p. 101 are both sacred and sexual. In this sense they share more with West African ancestors.

Lacy turns the kitchenette, the hell hole of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, into a sacred space of black
women. The di erence between Wright’s kitchenette and Lacy’s embodies the contest over migrant spaces
on the urban landscape. Lacy’s tenement as sacred and Wright’s as hell represent two extreme
p. 102 interpretations. In the context of the migration narrative, urban spaces—kitchenettes, workplaces,
street corners, prisons, and theaters—arc some of the sites where migrants, white powerholders, and the
Northern black middle class vie for control.

All these spaces are created by a sophisticated urban power, yet this very power is engaged in a constant
struggle to maintain control over them. The contest over space is symbolic of the larger contest over black
 bodies. Within these spaces, a struggle ensues in which the migrant tries to resist e orts to dominate him or
her.

Evidence of the subtleties and sophistication of modern urban power ll the pages of the migration
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narrative: the opening alarm clock of Native Son; the discipline and surveillance of Jake’s workplace in
Laved Today; the discourses on race, sex, and violence that confront Bigger and Lutie; the invocation of
desire in popular culture forms like movies and advertisements that a ect Bigger in Native Son, Lutie in The
Street, and Pauline Breedlove in The Bluest Eye; the desire for white women documented by Wright and
Malcolm X; the desire to meet white standards of beauty represented by Morrison’s Pecola and Hagar. This
power controls the migrant body not only by in icting violence upon it, but also by controlling its
experience of time and space, by regulating it, and by creating desire.

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Urban power separates and categorizes individuals. The ghetto dwellers are enclosed within neighborhoods
and kitchenettes. They are not allowed beyond certain borders. Urban power sustains a discourse around
race, sex, and desire which con nes the black migrant. This power also seeks to educate migrants and to
create in them a desire for those things available in the dominant society. Education is the task of a segment
within the black middle class who quell dissatisfaction and help to transform the migrants into e cient
workers and citizens. Finally, urban power will also resort to the use of force and repression when
necessary.

At times, the migrants themselves engage in acts of self-discipline. Often in their very attempts to resist
they have so internalized the e ects of the power that represses them that they become complicit in their
own subjugation. Nevertheless, this is not always the case. Migrants are not passive victims, subjected to the
whims of urban power. They are also agents who sometimes are capable of resisting. Often they can use the
very structures and ideologies that repress them as means of enabling their agency.

Whatever the case, in the city, black migrants come to the realization that their search for a freer space has
led to a space where they are con ned in ways they had never imagined. Houston Baker describes the
paradox the migrants confront in their search: “For place to be recognized by one as actually PLACE, as a
personally valued locale, one must set and maintain the boundaries. If one, however, is constituted and
p. 103 maintained by and within boundaries set by a dominating authority, then one is not a setter of place, but
2
a prisoner of another’s desire.” Even migrant-de ned “safe spaces” fall under the authority of the
dominant society. This severely circumscribes the resisting possibilities of these spaces, but it does not
prohibit them altogether. Consequently, safe spaces may play an important role in assisting migrants to
resist dominant constructions of them. In other cases, they serve only to create a sense of complacency.

He watched the clock

He was always behind
He asked too many questions
He wasn’t ready for the next step
He did not put his heart in his work
He learned nothing from his blunders
He was contented to be a second-rater
He didn’t learn that the best part of his salary was not in his pay envelope.
Young Negroes’ Progressive Association handbill

This poem, printed on pocket-sized cards, was pro ered to newly arrived industrial workers by the Young
3
Negroes’ Progressive Association of Detroit. The organization obviously sought to help the migrant make
 the transition from the rural South to his new urban industrial workplace. This poem seeks to assert a
degree of control over the migrant workspace by regulating time, movement, and attitude. Signi cantly,
these new habits are habits of punctuality and thrift. As outlined in the previous chapter, the migrants’
initial confrontation with the urban landscape is often portrayed as a confrontation with a new way of
experiencing time and speed. The un t worker of this poem is guilty of several crimes against modern
industry. He refuses to incorporate the measure of time by the time clock, he is slow, too inquisitive,
unprepared, not eager to work, and, worst of all, he places too much value on his salary. Thus the poem
suggests that anyone who falls into this category is destined to failure in the urban North.

This fraternal organization sought to ease the transition of the migrant as well as discipline him into an
e cient and productive worker. It is signi cant that the organization uses this written statement as a

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means of accomplishing its disciplinary work. Black middle-class fraternal and civic organizations as well
as the black press all served as disciplinary agents in the process of creating new urban subjects.

The role of the Northern black middle class is especially evident in the work of the Urban League. The
Chicago chapter of that organization issued the following yer to newly arrived Southern migrants as part
of its Education of the Migrants project:

p. 104 I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

I AM PROUD of our boys “over there” who have contributed soldier service.
I DESIRE to render CITIZEN SERVICE .
I REALIZE that our soldiers have learned NEW HABITS of SELF-RESPECT AND CLEANLINESS .
I DESIRE to help bring about a NEW ORDER OF LIVING in this community.
I WILL ATTEND to the neatness of my personal appearance on the street or when sitting in front
doorways.
I WILL REFRAIN from wearing dust caps, bungalow aprons, house clothing and bedroom shoes out
of doors.
I WILL ARRANGE MY TOILET within doors and not on the front porch.
I WILL INSIST upon the use of rear entrances for coal dealers, hucksters, etc.
I WILL REFRAIN from loud talking and objectionable deportment on street cars and in public places.
4
I WILL DO MY BEST to prevent defacement of property either by children or adults.

The “schoolbook” a rmations enforce notions of citizenship and patriotism. There is no scheme for
resistance here; instead migrants are encouraged to shun all their Southern mannerisms and make
themselves useful workers and citizens. While the rst a rmations focus on the creation of citizens, the
remainder seek to accomplish the literal transformation of the migrants in terms of deportment and
appearance. The goal is that they adopt a Northern middle-class outward appearance. It is as if their
citizenship is directly related to these external features and not to any real notions of democracy or service
to country and community. The nal line asserts a necessary respect for personal property which every good
citizen must possess.

As meditations, these rules are embedded in the migrant psyche. There is no separation from his will and
that imposed upon him. Note especially those lines that are rendered in capital letters: I AM A PROUD
AMERICAN CITIZEN ; I DESIRE ; I WILL REFRAIN ; I WILL ATTEND ; I WILL DO MY BEST .

In a special issue of the Survey Graphic, “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro,” published in March 1925, the
Urban League announced the establishment of the National Industrial Department. Among its stated goals
were the following:

1. To assure industrial employers “a more e cient group of employees.”

 2. To help develop a social program by which Negro families may more easily become adjusted to the
requirements for good living in the districts to which they go.

The link between industrial capitalism and the Urban League is evident in these goals. A segment of the
black middle class sought to ease the transition by which migrants could function in factories run by
Taylorism. In his prison notebooks, Antonio Gramsci explores the way highly rationalized systems of
p. 105 production like Fordism (associated with the Ford Motor Company) and Taylorism (a system of scienti c
management founded by Frederic Taylor) characterize advanced capitalist societies. Under such systems of
mass production, division of labor, and the “reduction of the worker’s movements and tasks to a simple
routine,” workers are further alienated from their labor. These systems are also characterized by “the
5
surveillance of workers lives outside working hours.”

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By providing a detailed description of the post o ce—the workspace of his protagonist Jake in Lawd Today
—Richard Wright documents the regimen for which migrants were trained. Jake’s supervisors not only keep
a running record of how often he beats his wife outside of work, but also subject him to “a high degree of
division of labor and the reduction of [his] movements and tasks to a simple routine”:

Bentbacked and with their eyes on the dirty steel, they shu ed in the direction of the small letter
racks. There were six rows, each row some forty feet long with letter racks on both sides of the row.
Each took his place in front of a case. Above their eyes swung an electric bulb with a green shade
which de ected a circle of light over the fronts of honeycomblike pigeon-holes. To all four sides
were suspended catwalks in which were slits for spying. Midway between their loins and knees was
a wooden ledge about twelve inches wide upon which rested their trays of mail.…

[Jake] held his left arm sti and straight, pointing oorward, about a foot from his body with the
open palm of his hand extended upward. From each Illinois hole he took a handful of mail and
stacked it in his left hand until it reached his chin, walking slowly from case to case. When he could
take no more, he went to the tray station where he dumped the mail into a large tray, set the metal
notch which would guide it to its section, and placed it upon a moving belt.…Jake turned on his heel
6
mechanically and started another cleanout.

In this model of a migrant workplace, the workers’ bodies become one with the workplace apparatus. The
wooden ledge between their loins and knees is like a third limb, located near their genitalia. This placement
of the ledge suggest that the tools of the workplace compromise or threaten their manhood. Jake’s body is
no longer human, but automated like a machine—sti , rigid, and mechanical. Human movement is
regulated by a highly structured work environment.

The postal work described by Wright was probably the best job available to a black migrant. Wright himself
worked in the post o ce. Urban post o ces were lled with highly educated men unable to nd work. For
many, the post o ce served as a kind of safe, communal space that was an intellectual center. However, the
post o ce was also evidence of the limitations placed on black professional mobility. In addition, the post
o ce was illustrative of a workspace dominated by the e ciency of modern power. The control of this space
ensures the control of workers’ movements and imagination. Here modern power, as embodied in this
institution of surveillance, acts to create automatized, e cient workers.

p. 106 The vast majority of male migrants were forced into even more menial labor than that just described.
Many migrant men found work on the assembly lines of the Ford Motor Company in the Detroit area. The
number of blues lyrics about the Ford Company are evidence of the centrality of this workplace in the lives
of many migrants. In Pittsburgh they worked in the steel industry; in Chicago migrant men often worked for
packing houses. Most often, migrant women found work as domestics; a rare few worked in garment
factories.
 For the most part, this type of factory work is the employment for which the black middle-class
organizations sought to prepare the migrant. Even the otherwise militant Chicago Defender, which had
incited many migrants to move north as an act of de ance, also published articles that aided their
transformation: “Quit calling the foreman boss. Leave that word dropped in the Ohio River. Also captain,
general and major. We call people up here Mr. This and Mr. That. Keep your hand o of your hat when you
7
pass men. There is no law that requires you to tip your hat to a man because he is white.” The established
black middle class began to do the work of Southern black colleges as outlined by Booker T. Washington in
his autobiography and as parodied by Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen in their novels. However, the tone of
the Defender article is slightly di erent from the Urban League publication in that it encourages migrants to
give up the submissive habits that characterized their behavior in the South.

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Earlier in the century this work of social management had primarily been the domain of middle-class black
women’s organizations like the White Rose Mission and the National Association of Colored Women
(NACW). As the functions of these organizations began to be absorbed by organizations like the Urban
League, they turned their attention to the migrants’ homes. In a 1929 issue of the National Notes of the
NACW, President Sallie Stewart wrote: “We want the mothers to take the children’s wearing apparel out of
trunks where they are stored, and allow the children to wear them…and give their children the right attitude
8
of life and to help them in the formation of their characters in the formative period of their lives.” Because
these organizations were often founded in response to attacks on black womanhood in the dominant
society, they sought to rede ne migrant women according to Victorian standards. The culmination was an
9
image of an idealized notion of motherhood and home. It is the failure to meet these standards of
motherhood as well as the con ning nature of discourse on black women and sexuality with which urban
female protagonists are confronted in the migration narrative.

In addition to attempting to regulate migrant women’s homes, black middle-class women’s clubs, along
with white agencies, also perceived “the need to police and discipline the behavior of black women in
cities.” According to Hazel Carby, these e orts marked an attempt to transform the “behavior of migrant
working-class black women to conform to middle-class norms of acceptable sexual behavior while
10
actually…[con rming]…their working class status as female domestics.” While Carby’s observation is an
important one, it should also be clear that many of the black women’s organizations were sensitive to the
p. 107 kinds of sexual exploitation experienced by women migrants in both the South and the North and hence
some of their e orts were attempts to protect the newly arrived migrants as much as they were attempts to
“transform” their behavior to conform to middle-class standards.

Organizations like the Urban League, the Young Negroes’ Progressive Association of Detroit, the National
Association of Colored Women, and the White Rose Mission represent the service tradition within the black
middle class. In seeking to make the migrant into a certain kind of urban dweller, they also sought to ease
the transition to city life. There is a long tradition of service within the black middle class. In contrast to the
service work of this segment of the black middle class, there is also the kind of distanced disdain of another
segment of that class. E. Franklin Frazier provides the most scathing critique of this segment of the black
middle class, who are also the subjects of panel 53 in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series: “The Negroes who
had been North for quite some time met their fellowmen with disgust and aloofness.”

Black migrants were not passive victims of white power or objects of black middle-class paternalism. They
actively created spaces and cultures where they sought to sustain themselves and where they sometimes
attempted to resist the negative impact of urbanization. These spaces might be identi ed as the pockets of
11
resistance created by modern power. A whole street and domestic culture provided migrants with an
alternative means to counter e orts to discipline them. These alternatives were housed in various forms
from parties, dance halls, pool halls, and barber shops to kitchens, churches, families, and friendships.
Some of these were sites of the ancestor.
 The degree to which the migrant is successfully disciplined by the e orts of a dominant white society and
the Northern black middle class, as well as the degree to which he or she resists, is of major concern in the
migration narrative. Representations of migration suggest that forces which serve to transform the
Southern migrant include the disciplinary work of institutions and their accompanying discourses and the
balancing and nurturing work of migrant-de ned safe spaces. The relationship of the migrant to any or all
of these factors determines his or her fate in the city. This experience is portrayed di erently for male and
female protagonists and the success of the resisting spaces is portrayed di erently over time. In the later
narratives, the migrant-de ned safe spaces emerge as more powerful in o ering the migrant possibilities
for resistance.

The writers discussed in this chapter focus on the migrants’ e orts to resist the detrimental e ects of

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urbanization. Two spaces are crucial to these e orts—a domestic “homespace” of women and the street
culture space of men. However, because these spaces are created by the power which migrants seek to resist,
they are sometimes complicit in oppressing them.

p. 108
II

It was there on the inside, in that “homeplace” most often created and kept by black women, that
we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits.

bell hooks, Yearning

That corner became our operations center…our school, our home away from home, our starting
point and checking point.

Nathan McCall, Make Me Wanna Holler

Gwendolyn Brooks documents the existence of both domestic and street spaces in two of her most
signi cant poems. The rst, “Kitchenette Building,” portrays the domestic space described by Wright, a
space where dreams are born, nurtured, and sometimes lost to more immediate, basic needs. The second,
“We Real Cool,” portrays young black men who inhabit street corners and pool halls in an e ort to create
community and who knowingly accept their fate—a quick, early death.

Brooks’s poems give complexity and humanity to the lives that haunt the pages of 12 Million Black Voices.
Through her, we know that the inhabitants of Richard Wright’s kitchenettes dare to dream in spite of the
overwhelming weight of their oppression:

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not
strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, ght with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
 We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
13
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

In some ways this poem represents a marriage between Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and
“The Hollow Men” and Hughes’s “Dream Variation” and “Harlem.” In one strike, Brooks both documents
the failed dreams of black ghetto dwellers and links their frustrations with those of millions of modern
people. Like Wright’s gray Chicago, here the inhabitants of the kitchenettes themselves are gray. The act of
dreaming seems a waste of time in light of the realities confronting them, realities of providing shelter,
p. 109 food, and some degree of sensual pleasure; but they dream nonetheless. The remainder of the poem is a
beautiful meditation of the dream’s attempt to escape, its struggle with the reality of the tenement, the

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smells and sounds. The second and third stanza echo Prufrock’s “would it have been worth it, after all”
queries. There is a building, mounting tension that leads to an anticlimactic intrusion of reality: “We
wonder. But not well! not for a minute! / Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now.”

Gwendolyn Brooks’s women attempt to make “homespace” out of their dilapidated kitchenettes. They
attempt to nurture and sustain dreams and to create community with the others who share their station in
life. More often than not, their e orts fail—the dreams die—but Brooks records the humanity of these
attempts with grace and beauty.

A reading of Brooks’s entire corpus reveals that the kitchenette dreamers are women. Annie Allen and Maud
Martha are keepers of the dream, even though the reality of their lives often intrudes. Because they seek to
make “homespace” out of their dilapidated living conditions and because they give birth to and nurture
“the children of the poor,” they continue to dream and their dreams are at best spaces of resistance and at
least spaces of sustenance and survival as necessary as food, clothing, and shelter. In fact, Annie Allen tells
her “children of the poor” to “First ght. Then ddle.” She sees a place for dreaming and for the creation of
14
art, but it is a hard-won place.

A closer reading of “Kitchenette Building” reveals a connection between “the dream” and “the work of art,”
or “the poem.” “Poetry” itself seems giddy and weak in light of the harsh lives of kitchenette dwellers. Art
and poetry require the time and nurturance that seem like unnecessary luxuries to poor people. However,
though the content of the poem suggests that it is impossible to create poetry in the context of urban reality,
its very existence asserts otherwise. Brooks herself was a kitchenette dweller, a wife and mother, who had to
attend to the life needs of her husband and children, and yet she was able to turn the elements of her reality
15
into poetry. That reality is not just a domestic one, but a less optimistic street reality as well.

The male personae of “We Real Cool” seem to laugh in the face of dreams and homespace. They create an
identity out of the urban despair in which they live, participating in a male-de ned street culture that
demands “cool” action and acceptance of death:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
16
Die soon.
p. 110 The poem—quick, spare, and tense—echoes the patterns of the lives it documents. As in Toomer’s “Seventh
Street,” the verbs are abrupt and hard-edged, urging the reader to speed through them as the collective
persona speeds through life. Hortense Spillers notes that the three-beat lines encourage a quick reading
that causes the reader to “run out of breath, or [trip] her tongue, but it seems that such [breathlessness] is
17
exactly required of dudes hastening toward their death.”

“We Real Cool” is a portrait of young men attempting to own their fates. They seem to say “If, as young
men, we must die quick and violent deaths, then we shall live our lives in resistance to all that is right and
proper.” There are no dreams here, simply harsh reality described by monosyllabic, action-oriented verbs.
As is the case with Bigger Thomas and his friends, these young men are active and energetic but possess no
outlet for the positive exploration of these attributes.

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The two gender-based perspectives recorded in these poems also dominate the migration narrative’s
portrayals of the migrants’ attempts to negotiate the urban landscape. For the most part, female
protagonists attempt to create “home” in hope of providing a space where dreams are possible. It seems
that male protagonists give up any hope of dreaming and seek instead to carve out some degree of manhood
in a male-de ned street culture and its accompanying spaces. Men and women respond to each other’s
spaces in opposing ways: Male characters nd domestic space sti ing; female characters nd streetspace
threatening.

III

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, ght with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Kitchenette Building”

Gwendolyn Brooks shows us that oppression does not hinder the birth of dreams but it does thwart their
realization. In her poetry, black women provide the space where these dreams are nurtured and sent forth.
Other black women writers concerned with the urban experience share her perspective.

However, as is the case with other aspects of the narratives, the degree to which these sites serve as “safe
spaces” or “spaces of resistance” di ers from author to author. Those authors who stress their importance
p. 111 portray them as sites where the South is evoked. In this context, the writers are not concerned with
Southern exploitation and racial domination, but with the South as the site of African-American culture,
community, and history.

“Safe space” takes shape in song, oral culture, memory, dreams, and spirituality. For purposes of this study
I use the term “safe spaces” to designate all such sites. They exist as places where ritual evokes a Southern
or African ancestor. In many ways they are spaces of “safe time” as well, for they evoke history and
memory, and their pace is often slower than that of the city. In these spaces linear notions of time are
challenged. The past exists alongside the present. The protagonist’s relationship to these domains
determines his or her fate.
 At their most progressive, safe spaces are nurturing, healing, and resisting; at their most reactionary, they
are provincial sites which discourage resistance and bind the protagonist to an oppressive past. The latter
portrayal tends to emerge in the narratives of male authors; this is by no means a hard-and-fast rule; we
need only recall Helga Crane’s various experiences with homespace in Quicksand. Often, black women
writers represent home-safe spaces as necessary to their characters’ survival. On the pages of their
migration narratives, these spaces distinguish themselves from the rest of the text in language, rhythm,
and notions of temporality. They often disrupt the otherwise straightforward linearity of the narrative.
Literary safe spaces t Michael Awkward’s de nition of “historically determined tropological
re gurations.” In other words they exist as gures of language revised according to the historical moment
in which they are used.

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Marita Bonner’s “The Whipping” (1940), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of
Brewster Place (1982) all portray poor, black, single, working mothers, who live in Northern urban ghettos
and who seek to provide for their sons. The women in the two earlier texts attempt to resist their
construction or objecti cation by a dominant white discourse on black women, which constructs them as
lascivious, lazy, and immoral. This discourse emerges in the words and images of white authority as well as
in popular culture. The women of Brewster Place try to resist the psychic and physical violence and
economic poverty in icted on them by white society and black men. In all three works, each woman has
varying degrees of access to safe space. Only Mattie Michael of Brewster Place takes advantage of that space.
As a result, only Mattie survives to act as a creator of safe space for other women of Brewster Place. Each
author exploits the literary possibility of “narrative” safe spaces di erently.

Until recently, Marita Bonner’s ction, drama, and essays have received little critical attention. Fortunately,
critic Joyce Flynn and Bonner’s daughter, Joyce Occomy Strickland, have brought her work to the reading
public. Bonner’s corpus of plays and short stories call for a reevaluation of received notions of a black
women’s literary tradition. Her ction depicts the lives of Chicago’s migrant community.

Consideration of Bonner’s writing reveals the foundation of a black women’s literary tradition of urban
p. 112 ction. Unlike Zora Neale Hurston, who was primarily concerned with rural blacks, or Jessie Fauset and
Nella Larsen, who focused their creative attention on the lives and experiences of upper-middle-class black
women, Bonner was among the rst to nd the lives of working-class and poor urban women worthy of
literary consideration. Her protagonists do not attend endless rounds of parties; instead they often work
di cult jobs. They are more likely to have a hard time putting food on the table than they are to host
elaborate dinner parties. And always they meet head-on daily confrontations with racism and sexism; they
live under the constant threat of incarceration, rape, and death. On the pages of Bonner’s stories violent
interracial confrontations and intraracial class and color con icts come to life. The rediscovery of Bonner
signals a new source for the urban ctions of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and
Gloria Naylor. She also serves as a literary ancestor to Richard Wright, whose Native Son shares much with
Bonner’s short story “Tin Can,” published in 1934 in Opportunity.

Marita Bonner’s “The Whipping,” is the tale of a Southern sharecropping family—Ma and her three adult
children, Lizabeth, Bella, and John—who migrate north. The story demonstrates the disintegration of the
family structure. Frustrated by her inability to feed her mother and child, Lizabeth, the eldest daughter and
the story’s protagonist, strikes her son. He falls from the force of the blow, strikes his head on the bed
frame, and dies. Lizabeth is charged with his murder and sentenced to a jail described like the opening
description of The South from which she ed. In the South, Bonner tells us, “Everything had been grey
around Lizabeth most all of her life. The two-room hut with a ragged leanto down on Mr. Davey’s place in
Mississippi where she had lived before she came North had been grey.” At the close of the story Lizabeth sits
in the prison’s commissary and re ects, “the same grey hopeless drudge—the same long unending row to
18
hoe lay before her.” The real whipping in the story is not Lizabeth’s fatal slap of her child, but her own
mental beating by urban poverty and the state bureaucracy which oversees it. Bonner deconstructs the
 “di erence” between the North and the South by using a title which suggests the oppression of the South
exists in the North in di erent but no less substantive ways.

“The Whipping” depicts the movement toward urbanization as a movement from the “mother” and
“motherhood.” First, the Southern-born children move away from their mother’s values, and second,
Lizabeth’s nal “unmotherly” act of striking her child leads to her institutionalization. The younger
generation moves further and further away from Southern styles. While Ma “screams and shouts and gets
happy in robust leather-lunged style of her storefront church run in the down-home tempo,” her daughters
“[loop] wider and wider in circles of joy.” These wider circles of joy lead to the departure of one daughter;
Bonner measures her distance in degrees of her changing appearance: “Straightened her hair rst. Then
curled her hair. Sassed Ma.” Movement away from physical signs of her race and away from her mother

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p. 113 signify her movement away from the South. This daughter moves into her own apartment; she eventually
becomes a prostitute.

The death of Lizabeth’s brother provides the second departure. Although his mother recommends Southern
home remedies to battle his illness, the Northern-born doctor immediately dismisses them. Instead, the
doctor asserts that the young man will die and does not attempt to aid him.

In the North, the biological family fails to provide a homespace for its members. There is no sense of an
extended family to ll the void left by the disintegration of the nuclear family. The community of Fryc Street
forms a gossip chorus, which only serves to advance Lizabeth’s demise. First, her neighbors harass her
about her husband’s disappearance. Second, they inform her that her marriage is illegal. Third, they spread
rumors that insinuate she earns extra income through prostitution. Finally, a member of her community
tells a social service worker that Lizabeth is a violent drunk.

The white social service worker believes this because she has already established Lizabeth as a social
deviant. “Her books had all told her that colored women carried knives.” The received understanding of
black women constitutes Lizabeth as crazed and violent; the social service worker acts upon the subject of
this discourse, not the individual. The powerful bureaucratic system that legitimated this written discourse
has the authority to feed the poor as well as institutionalize them. Driven to violence by hunger, poverty,
and the inability to provide for her son, Lizabeth has no safe space from which to resist her demise.

In her introduction to Bonner’s collected works, Joyce Flynn notes that the author refuses to romanticize
the South. Though she portrays the breakup of the family upon their arrival in the North, Bonner does not
19
present black Southern culture as a way of navigating the harshness of the urban landscape.

Bonner’s story illustrates the connections between Lizabeth’s downfall and her construction in the
dominant discourse on black women. The author dismisses three potential safe spaces—the family, the
church, and the community—as viable alternatives to the brutality of Northern oppression. While the
potential safe spaces are denied any power, the dominant discourse on black women acts upon them in
powerful and destructive ways. By the end of the text, Lizabeth, like the persona of Gwendolyn Brooks’s
“Kitchenette Building,” is destined to a life of grayness and debt: “The same grey hopeless drudge—the
same long unending row to hoe—lay before her.”

Not only does Bonner deny the power of material homcspaces; she does not exploit the narrative
possibilities of safe spaces either. Bonner shares with Richard Wright a tendency to dismiss the resisting
potential of safe spaces, but she di ers from him in that she does not portray these sites as sti ing or
detrimental. The harsh realism of her work precedes that of Wright. Writing on the heels of the Great
Migration and the Great Depression, Bonner only documents the devastating e ects of urbanization on her
migrant character. Her omniscient narrator has the distanced gaze of the stranger. It is not insigni cant
p. 114 that Bonner was a black New Englander, Boston-born and Radcli e-educated. Her rst contact with
large numbers of poor and working-class African-Americans came after her graduation from college when
 she moved to Washington, D.C. Her experiences there are documented in her powerful piece “On Being
Young—a Woman—and Colored.” Bonner’s New England upbringing and education provided her with the
critical distance from which she explored the devastating e ects of the city on ordinary black people.

Inheriting Bonner’s concern with working-class black women, Ann Petry, another New Englander,
experiments with the possibilities of safe spaces in both the content and the form of her urban narrative, the
best-selling The Street (1946). Petry was featured in an Ebony article following the publication of her rst
novel, and the book was widely reviewed by both the black and white press. Unlike Bonner’s work, which
received little national recognition, Petry’s novel, the rst by a black woman to sell over a million copies,
received a warm and enthusiastic reception upon publication. Much of her success resulted from her novel’s
resemblance to Wright’s realist classic Native Son. Surely, Petry captured some of the audience created by

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Richard Wright’s text. However, her novel also su ered from this connection to Wright, because male
20
literary critics deemed it lacking in the realism of Wright and Chester Himes.

Upon reconsideration, this comparison proves unfair. In its departure from the naturalism of Wright and
the realism of Bonner, Petry’s novel expands the means of representing the black, urban female experience.
By providing viable safe spaces that are rooted in Southern culture, she marks a shift from Wright’s view. By
utilizing memory and dreams as a means of informing her protagonist, Petry distinguishes herself from
Bonner. However, she shares with both of them the refusal to romanticize the South and a sense of urgency
in asserting the negative impact of the city.

Petry makes a few safe spaces available to her protagonist, Lutie: community, family, and the voice of her
21
grandmother. Lutie dismisses all of them. I will focus on the grandmother’s voice and Lutie’s relationship
to it, because as the ancestor of that text, the grandmother not only has the most potential for Lutie’s
resistance, but she serves as a resisting narrative device as well. Karla Holloway notes that texts privileging
22
the ancestor’s spoken word “dissemble EuroAmerican traditions that privilege writing.” In The Street,
Petry privileges the Grandmother’s voice over the written words of Benjamin Franklin. However, her
23
protagonist, Lutie, does not. The urban ction of Rudolph Fisher and Marita Bonner precedes Petry’s
assertion of the resisting potential of Southern ancestors. However, of the three, Ann Petry provides the
most profound exploration of the ancestor’s possibilities. Petry’s use of an ancestor gure joins Hurston’s
to lay the foundation built upon by Gloria Naylor and Gayl Jones in their ction and Toni Morrison in her
ction and criticism.

p. 115 Lutie’s psyche embodies the ground upon which her best safe space exists; here resides the ancestor of
the text—Granny. However, Lutie’s memory of her grandmother engages in a tug of war with her retention
of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. While her grandmother’s spoken voice tries to guide her through the
psychic maze of the street, the written text of Benjamin Franklin, espousing an ethic of hard work and
success, in uences her more. Lutie usually ignores the spoken voice of her grandmother while taking heed
of the written words of Franklin. She fails to read the silences and the absences which undergird his manual
for success. While he provides her with an ethic of hard work and thrift, she fails to see how Franklin’s
notion of success, grounded on a system of chattel slavery and on a discourse whose subtext constructs her
as inferior, acts to her detriment. Even though she continues to su er from and be de ned by de nitions of
black women that rst emerge in Franklin’s day, she does not make the connection. Her failure to make the
connection between Junto, the white owner of the building in which she lives and of the nightclub in which
she seeks employment, and the factors that serve to oppress her is an outgrowth of her blindness in relation
24
to Franklin.

The safe space provided by Lutie’s grandmother exists as an ongoing oral dialogue in Lutie’s memory. In the
urban North, the South—the ancestor—must live in the psyche because sophisticated, fragmented
Northern power most e ectively oppresses the urban dweller on this plane. Northern power constructs
 25
desire and a means of self-disciplining that precedes its need for physical force and coercion. The
grandmother always arrives when Lutie’s well-being is threatened.

The reader rst encounters the grandmother when the text’s villain, Jones, the superintendent, shows Lutie
an apartment. Here, Lutie makes a conscious e ort to dissociate herself from her grandmother’s in uence.
Throughout her rst encounter with the super, her grandmother warns her of the danger he represents to
her. “Granny would have said, ‘Nothin’ but evil, child. Some folks so full of it, you can feel it comin’ at you
oozin’ right out of their skins.’ She didn’t believe things like that.” Lutie justi es her rationalization of her
grandmother’s warning by juxtaposing her own rational understanding against Granny’s more instinctual
one:

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He probably wanted to hear his favorite program and she had thought he was lled with the desire
to leap upon her. She was as bad as Granny. Which just went on to prove you couldn’t be brought up
by someone like Granny without absorbing a lot of nonsense that would spring at you out of
nowhere, so to speak, when you least expected it. All those tales about things that people sensed
before they actually happened. Tales that had been handed down and down, until if you tried to
trace them back, you’d end up God knows where—probably Africa. And Granny had them all at the
26
tip of her tongue.

Here, in fearing and dismissing her grandmother, she dismisses the safe space embodied in the ancestor—a
space grounded in the oral tradition and emerging from an African past. This early dismissal of her
p. 116 grandmother’s advice will prove fatal for her. Not unlike the blues singers discussed earlier, Lutie’s
grandmother gives her a map for her own survival.

Still, subconsciously, Lutie knows that her grandmother’s voice provides protection and guidance:
Immediately after dismissing her grandmother’s warning about the super, she begins to sing a song to
soothe her discomfort. “She started humming under her breath, not realizing she was doing it. It was an old
song that Granny used to sing.” Her grandmother provides her with a song in the night to ease her fear and
discomfort. The grandmother exists so deeply in her psyche that Lutie uses her, unaware of her presence—a
presence which emerges even as she attempts to dismiss it.

When Lutie heeds her grandmother’s advice, it strengthens her against the attempts of white people to
objectify her. Considered a whore by the wealthy white women friends and relatives who visit her employer,
she turns to Granny’s voice to give her a sense of dignity in the midst of their constant accusing attack:
“[Mrs. Chandler’s mother] took one look at Lutie…and [said] in a clipped voice…‘Now I wonder if you’re
being wise dear. That girl is unusually attractive and men are weak. Besides, she’s colored and you know
how they are.’” Her employer’s friends invoke similar stereotypes in relation to her:

Whenever she entered a room where they were, they stared at her with a queer, speculative look.
Sometimes she caught snatches of their conversation about her. “Sure she’s a wonderful cook. But
I wouldn’t have any good-looking colored wench in my house.…You know they’re always making
passes at men. Especially white men.” [p. 41]

Instead of becoming defeated by their construction of her as whore, she turns to her memory of her
grandmother’s voice:

Of course, none of them could know about your grandmother who had brought you up, she said to
herself. And ever since you were big enough to remember…had said over and over just like a clock
ticking “Lutie, baby, don’t you never let no white man put his hands on you. They ain’t never
willin’ to let a black woman alone. Seems like they all got a itch and a urge to sleep with ‘em. Don’t
you never let any of ’em touch you.”
 Something that was said so often and with such gravity it had become part of you, just like
breathing and you would have preferred crawling into bed with a rattlesnake to getting in bed with
a white man. [pp. 45–46]

Here, Lutie is able to resist the white women’s construction of her because she has been prepared by her
grandmother and as a result she possesses an alternative de nition of black womanhood. Her
grandmother’s voice is a part of her very being, not something removed which she can rationalize away. The
grandmother’s voice is inseparable from her own heartbeat.

This voice also helps her to avoid the economic exploitation that takes place in Harlem grocery shops. Again,
p. 117 even though she seemingly dismisses the advice of the ancestor, it nonetheless informs her choices.

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While glancing over the o erings at the local butcher, Lutie recalls:

Someone had told Granny once that the butchers in Harlem used embalming uid on the beef they
sold in order to give it a nice fresh color. Lutie didn’t believe it, but like a lot of things she didn’t
believe, it cropped up suddenly out of nowhere to leave her wondering and staring at the brilliant
scarlet color of the meat. It made her examine the contents of the case with care in order to
determine whether there was something else that would do for dinner, [p. 61]

Granny’s advice serves to ensure Lutie’s survival on the street. However, Lutie, not satis ed with merely
getting by, eluding the danger of evil men like the superintendent, resisting her objecti cation by whites as
whore, or avoiding exploitation by Harlem merchants, wants large game plans to ensure success. Her
grandmother’s advice provides small day-to-day measures for survival. Like the daydreaming persona of
Brooks’s kitchenette poem, Lutie thinks that retreating to her grandmother’s voice wastes time in the face
of harsh realities of urban living. She does not realize that she needs small, local, day-to-day resistances;
she needs these safe spaces to act as foundation for her to make the big changes in her life.

The literate Lutie reads and grasps the written advice of Benjamin Franklin; the illiterate Lutie denies her
grandmother’s voice. For her it is “nonsense.” She fails to see that the ancestor does not spring at her out of
nowhere, when she least expects it, but instead it emerges just when she needs it most.

While the words of Benjamin Franklin provide her with steps to success for white men, they fail to inform
her of the foundation upon which those steps stand—a foundation where white men have equal access
because black men and women, Native Americans, and white women do not. His recipe for success depends
upon denial of access to people like her. She does not realize that with the foundation provided by her
grandmother, she has a much better chance of achieving a larger success; without it, she is destined to fail.

Marjorie Pryse’s “‘Pattern Against the Sky’: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry’s The Street” delineates all
the references to Franklin’s autobiography and illustrates Lutie’s fatal, blind faith in his text. According to
Pryse, “She fails to recognize the stigma of her race and sex and her consequent disquali cation for
27
achieving her particular version of the American dream.” Throughout the text Lutie unquestioningly
follows Franklin’s advice. Instead of listening to her grandmother’s voice, she thinks, “Now that she had
this apartment, she was just one step farther up on the ladder of success.” Her blindness prohibits her from
seeing that the apartment signals the beginning of her demise.

Lutie gains self-con dence from her dialogue with Franklin. Walking down 116th Street:

She thought immediately of Ben franklin and his loaf of bread. And grinned thinking, You and Ben
p. 118 Franklin. You ought to take one out and start eating it as you walk along 116th Street. Only you
ought to remember while you eat that you’re in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty long
number of years ago. Yet she couldn’t get rid of the feeling of self-con dence and she went on
 thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and prosper, so could she. [pp. 63–
64]

Again, here she dismisses what she knows to be a crucial di erence between her and Franklin. At this point
in the text, Lutie does not yet realize the degree of di erence between the streets of Philadelphia in the
eighteenth century and the streets of Harlem in the twentieth. She fails to make a distinction between
herself as a poor black woman and Franklin as a wealthy white man.

These are realizations that she stumbles upon only after she is faced with an endless web of exploitation and
domination. Seeking vengeance for her failure to return his attentions, the super, Jones, involves her son in
a scheme of mail fraud. It is signi cant that the same institution that surveys and controls Richard Wright’s

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Jake ultimately captures Bub as well. The child is arrested and Lutie is unknowingly led to believe she needs
a two-hundred-dollar lawyer’s fee to free him. She seeks the money from another black male who desires
her, Boots, only to have him attempt to rape her and then turn her over to his white boss, Junto.

Her recognition comes in three critical steps. First, she realizes that the street to which she moved provides
no possibility for her. Lutie notes that “streets like the ones she lived on [and like Wright’s kitchenette]
were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs.…The method the big cities used to keep Negroes in
their place” (p. 323). Again, like those before her, Lutie realizes that Northern power appears in a di erent,
more omniscient form than in the South. Nonetheless, it acts toward the same ends.

Second, she realizes the consequences of her failure to create community. She cannot turn to her co-
workers to borrow the necessary money to free her son: “She didn’t know any of them intimately. She didn’t
really have time to get to know them well, because she went right home after work…and she always took a
sandwich along for lunch, and when the weather was good she ate on a park bench.” Pondering her son’s
situation, she realizes that Granny had always provided a sense of security, a homespace for her as a child.

Her nal realization of her failure to utilize safe space comes when she recognizes: “From the time she was
born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was nearly walled in and the wall
had been built brick by brick by eager white hands.” One hundred pages later, when she meets Junto in
Boots’s apartment, she has a face to place with those eager white hands: “And all the time she was thinking,
Junto has a brick in his hand. Just one brick. The nal one needed to complete the wall that had been
building up around her for years, and when that one last brick was shoved in place, she would be completely
walled in.” The tone of this passage reeks with the resignation Lutie has sought to avoid. She makes no
p. 119 attempt to resist Junto, to prevent him from laying that last brick. The bricks of this wall are as fatal to
28
Lutie as Biggcr’s brick is to Bessie in Native Son.

While The Street ends with Lutie’s con nement by this psychic brick wall, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of
Brewster Place ends with a vision of the destruction of the wall by those it seeks to con ne. While the
characters of “The Whipping” move further and further from “the mother,” the women of Brewster Place
return time and again to a maternal safe space whether it exists as the neighborhood itself, as ritual, or in
friendships between the women. Unlike either earlier writer, Naylor explores the possibility of
“neighborhood” rst suggested in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha.

As I have demonstrated, Naylor’s rst novel belongs to a group of black feminist texts that emerged after
the Black Power Movement of the sixties. Along with Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Wlio Have Considered
Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and the works of Alice Walker, Naylor’s work asserts the vital necessity of
women-centered ritual and community for black women. More than either Petry or Bonner, Naylor exploits
the possibilities of safe spaces for her characters and her narrative strategy. Naylor’s safe spaces challenge
realism as an adequate form for portraying the lived experience of black women. However, like Bonner and
Petry before her, she does not retreat from portraying the harshness of their urban existence.
 The last chapter illustrated Naylor’s opening of her text with a description of a maternal Brewster Place: a
street that births several generations of immigrant children and in her old age grows fond of her colored
daughters. The women of Brewster Place play a similar role in each other’s lives. Mattie Michael, the
protagonist, acts as a maternal healing space to the younger generation of women. Her role as healer and
nurturer is most apparent in Naylor’s portrayal of the laying on of hands ritual between Mattie and the
younger Ciel.

When Lucielle almost dies from the grief of losing her toddler daughter, Mattie refuses to let her go. The
oppression of racism and poverty lead to the kitchenettelike living conditions, which in turn lead to the
death of the child and to Ciel’s death- lled stare. Witnessing this, Mattie yells, “Merciful Father, no!”
Naylor says, “There was no prayer, no bended knee or sackcloth supplication in those words, but a

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blasphemous reball that shot forth and went smashing against the gates of heaven, raging and kicking,
demanding to be heard.” This is no passive spirituality, but a demanding, active one. It is the ultimate act of
de ance for the very religious Mattie, for it resists the highest authority of all—God. “No, No, No.” Safe
spaces are spaces where black women nd voice; here, Mattie nds voice, as will Ciel.

Although these women nd voice, the ritual that provides them with it is conducted in silence: “She
approached the bed with her lips clamped shut in such a force that the muscles in her jaw and the back of her
p. 120 neck began to ache.” The silence with which she speaks marks this as a very signi cant space within this
narrative. Here, Mattie speaks with her hands. The laying on of hands ritual serves not only as a safe space
where Ciel is healed, but also as a discursive retreat within the text itself:

She sat on die edge of the bed and enfolded the tissue-thin body in her huge ebony arms. And she
rocked. Gel’s body was so hot it burned Mattie when she rst touched her, but she held on and
rocked. Back and forth, back and forth—she had Ciel so tightly she could feel her young breasts
atten against the buttons of her dress. The black mammoth gripped so rmly that the slightest
increase of pressure would have cracked the girl’s spine. But she rocked.

And somewhere from the bowels of her being came a moan from Ciel, so high at rst it couldn’t be
heard by anyone there, but the yard dogs began an unholy howling. And Mattie rocked. And then,
agonizingly slow, it broke its way through the parched lips in a spaghetti-thin column of air that
could be faintly heard in the frozen room.

Ciel moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that
room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over the Aegean
seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacri ced babies torn from their
mothers and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on,
past Dachau where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails o laboratory
oors. They ew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on
the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

She rocked her into childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into
the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it—a slight silver splinter, embedded just below
the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled and the splinter gave way, but its roots were
deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up the esh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to
them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satis ed. It
would heal.…

And slowly she bathed her…slowly, reverently as if handling a newborn.…

All of this had been done without either woman saying a word.…Ciel stood there, naked, and felt
the cool air play against the clean surface of her skin. She had the sensation of fresh mint coursing
 through her pores. She closed her eyes and the re was gone.…So Ciel began to cry—there, naked,
in the center of the bathroom oor.…

And Ciel lay down and cried. But Mattie knew the tears would end. And she would sleep. And
29
morning would come.

There are so many dimensions of safe space here. First, Ciel’s healing takes place in the space of the ritual.
Second, Mattie’s very body serves as a safe space as she holds and rocks Ciel. Her body constitutes the vessel
in which Ciel travels over the seas of history and through which Ciel is reborn. Finally, the passage exists as
a safe space. The phrase “back and forth, back and forth” provides the curve on which the paragraph itself
p. 121 rocks. Here spoken words and dialogue give way to silence. Naylor’s portrayal of the ritual resists the

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straight linearity of the rest of the narrative, taking both Ciel and reader back through space and time.

The ritual occupies a realm—a women’s sphere—where Ciel meets and melds her sorrow with the historical
sorrow of other women who have lost their children to the violence of racial, ethnic, religious, and class
oppression. Mattie rocks her back to her ancestral mothers—women forced to lose their children. She takes
Ciel through and beyond historical time, and only then, when her sorrow and pain are merged with those of
other women, only then does she return to that timeless place of origin—the womb. She must travel
30
through collective history before she can return to personal history.

The ancient laying on of hands ritual abounds in modern black women’s ction. Maya Angclou, Ntozake
Shange, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paule Marshall utilize this ritual as a central element of
31
their narrative strategy. It exists as a womanist reclamation of divine healing and resurrecting powers.
Some critics claim that the ritual’s ability to lead to a “reborn self” is in and of itself an act of resistance.
Ann Rosalind Jones credits French feminists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixous with
identifying the “direct reexperience of the physical pleasures of infancy and sexuality,” and the “return to
the pre-verbal identi cation with the mother” as a means of resisting the oppression of patriarchal society.
Kristeva charges that women write in a style which often involves “repetitive spasmodic separations from
32
the dominant discourse.” Although Naylor’s passage di ers from Kristeva’s description in that it remains
linear and is not totally disrupting, Kristeva does provide some insight into the passage’s portrayal of a
return to the mother. In the foregoing passage, Ciel returns to a preverbal identi cation with the mother;
however, in this case she is not resisting but healing from patriarchal oppression. Naylor does depict this
healing process in a style much like that described by Kristeva.

In the narrative safe space of the ritual, Mattie enacts a biblical rite revised and maintained by New World
Africans. Before she can be reborn the woman must be led back to the womb. Naylor portrays this ritual in
language which separates itself from the dominant language of the narrative. Ciel emerges as a literal
“newly born woman.”

Like the ritual, the dream provides a domain unhindered by time and space. Within the context of the dream
the limitations of Brewster Place are torn down by the power of the community of women. In the dream
space the narrative comes full circle: Ciel returns to Brewster Place, healed and whole, and the women
destroy, brick by brick, the wall which closes o the street.

We never know if Mattie’s dream is prophetic, for in the narrative time of the story, the women do not tear
down the wall that surrounds them. Perhaps like the dream of Brooks’s poem it is unable to survive in the
Brewster Place tenements. By the end of the text Brewster Place dies, but the women leave “some to the
arms of a world that they would have to pry open to take them, most to inherit another aging street and the
privilege of clinging to its decay.”

p. 122 Because the resistance of the women of Brewster Place occurs only in the context of these female spaces,
they are acts that serve to ensure survival but not to guarantee any ongoing resistance to the social order. A
 return to the mother is healing and nurturing, but alone it is not enough to dismantle the wall which
circumscribes their lives. As Ann Rosalind Jones asserts, “the female body hardly seems the best site to
33
launch an attack on the forces that have alienated us.” Michael Awkward extends Jones’s critique in his
reading of The Women of Brewster Plate: “However pro table individual acts of sisterly love…prove, they do
not have the power to alter signi cantly the deleterious conditions for Brewster Place’s females as a
34
group.”

The ultimate vision of Brewster Place asserts that the process of change is painful and ever so slow, one
nurtured by the existence of safe womanspaces. Naylor also provides an alternative to the fates of Lutie and
Lizabeth: the safe space of a women-centered community. However, it seems safe space is available only to
the heterosexual women of Brewster Place. The lesbian couple, Theresa and Lorraine, are denied entree into

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the sisterhood and Lorraine is forced to su er a violent death at the hands of young men. Interestingly, her
death occurs at the brick wall dead-end which encloses Brewster Place. The wall, domain of the street
culture of Brewster Place’s Bigger Thomas, C. C. Baker, here signi es the literal end that awaits women
denied safe space on Brewster Place. The dream of dismantling the wall is an e ort to reclaim a dangerous
street space and gain control of it.

The dream imagery, though displacing more material notions of resistance, is nonetheless very important
to Naylor’s vision. In a wonderful discussion of the dream imagery in the novel, critic Jill L. Matus has
35
argued that “the dreams of Brewster’s inhabitants are what keep them alive.” Their dreams ensure their
survival. The nal lines of her text are:

But the colored daughters of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their
dreams misted on the edge of a yawn. They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to
dry, they’re mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they’re diapered around
babies. They ebb and ow, ebb and ow, but never disappear. So Brewster Place still waits to die.
[p. 192]

Like the dwellers of Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building,” the women of Brewster Place manage to keep their
dreams alive and to pass them on in the healing sustenance they provide for their families. Who knows but
that one of those dreams “diapered around babies” will be realized in the future of one of Brewster’s many
children? After all, Naylor dedicates her novel to people in her own life who helped her realize the dream of
writing: “Marcia, who gave me the dream; Lauren, who believed in it; Rich, who nurtured and shaped it, and
George, who applauded the loudest in his heart.” As with Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Naylor’s dream is
realized in her art: a novel devoted to the dreams of countless black women of Brewster Placc(s).

p. 123 To the extent that safe spaces work in The Women of Brewster Plate they do so because the women su er
from sexual as well as racial oppression. Because of this, women’s spaces serve as healing spaces. Their sex
is one cause of their su ering as well as a source of their healing community. Naylor’s text revises the
tropes of the two earlier texts; her re guration of the tropes of entrapment—the brick wall, motherhood,
and the ctional urban neighborhoods—are directly related to the historical and political moment in which
she writes. Brewster Place does not simply emerge in response to the changing political and social
relationships between black men and black women following the Black Power Movement, it also helps to
helps to create that change. Naylor’s text emerges as a black feminist attempt to show that black women’s
intraracial gender-based oppression necessitates the construction of a black women’s community and the
utilization of safe space. Of the three writers considered here, her narrative technique best exploits the
literary potential of the safe space and also follows and contributes to a feminist literary construction.

Naylor’s vision is limited by her denial to extend the bene ts of women-de ned safe space to her lesbian
characters. While relationships between women serve as a source of safe space for other female characters,
 in the context of the lesbian relationship it is the source of oppression not only by whites and men but also
by other women.

IV

We
Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”

Melvin Dixon has argued that “one di erence between [black male] and [black female] writers…lies in the

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36
various ways their protagonists reinvent self through verbal performances in alternative landscapes.”
While the women of Brewster Place create women-de ned safe spaces in order to sustain themselves, male
protagonists participate in street space and often enact more violent e orts to counter their oppression. In
Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X domestic
space is sti ing and provincial. The male migrant characters of these texts attempt to develop a street
culture and/or attempt to acquire a critical consciousness as a means of resisting the negative impact of the
37
city. Malcolm X and Bigger Thomas actively participate in a street culture that is detrimental to women
like Lutie and those of Brewster Place.

The three factors that most concern Bigger Thomas, Invisible Man, and Malcolm X are an escape from the
sti ing nature of domestic safe space, the acquisition of a critical consciousness, and the attempt to resist
p. 124 the power of the dominant white society to control their acquisition of knowledge and to shape their
desire. In each case, the protagonist feels that any retention of the South inhibits his personal growth and
development. For Invisible Man this dismissal of his Southern past is further evidence of his arrogance and
ignorance. It is a stance of which Ellison is clearly critical.

All three characters seek to gain a higher level of consciousness. Because all other outlets are closed to him,
Bigger is able to gain a higher level of consciousness only by committing murders. Invisible Man seeks a
critical consciousness in all the wrong places—the black college and then a predominantly white left-wing
organization, The Brotherhood. Both prove to be sites that are hostile to critical thinking. Malcolm X revises
the tropes of the street culture and prison rst established by Wright, to stress their signi cance and
importance in his ability to acquire the consciousness to resist the dominant society.

It is signi cant that each character links resistance to his possession of white women. As noted in Chapter 1,
a black man’s desire for a white woman is the taboo which most likely leads to a lynching. In the mind of the
male migrant characters, white women are linked with fear. In the North, black men are bombarded with
images of white women that construct their desire for them; they also have access to and a physical
proximity with white women that was denied in the South. This fear-desire dialectic is dominant in these
urban male narratives and each protagonist responds to it di erently. At some point in each novel, the
protagonist is controlled through the manipulation of his desire. Interestingly, none of the authors presents
38
us with a healthy, loving interracial relationship. Although much of the narrative focuses on the
manipulation of the protagonist through his desire, in all three cases he is capable of sustaining a stance of
resistance.

Richard Wright establishes the tropes others who follow him must respond to and/or reject. The
39
relationship of Wright’s text to that of Ellison has been the subject of many critical and theoretical works.
Ellison’s Invisible Man is most often viewed as a revision and alternative to Bigger. However, critics have
paid little attention to the earlier text’s relationship to the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Not only did Malcolm
X read these narratives in prison, the writer who constructs his autobiography into a migration narrative,
Alex Haley, was certainly aware of the de ning tropes of Wright and Ellison. An exploration of X’s revision
 of the tropes rst presented in Wright and Ellison reveals new insight into notions of urban black male
subjectivity and resistance.

In “How Bigger Was Born,” Richard Wright asserts that African-Americans have responded in one of six
ways to their oppression: the acquisition of religion, e orts at reform, the creation of new art forms,
addiction to alcohol, formal education, and aimless rebellion. According to Wright formal education creates
bourgeois race leaders; uneducated men like Bigger Thomas (and the personae of Brooks’s “We Real Cool”)
act in aimless rebellion. Bigger revolts because he is estranged from the “safe spaces” of religion and folk
p. 125 culture and because he is “reacting to and answering the call of the dominant civilization” as it is set
forth in newspapers, magazines, radios, and movies. In other words, the religion and folk culture prove to
be too provincial, and the media create his desire for those things that the dominant society denies him:

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“Chicago…did so much more to dazzle the mind with a taunting sense of possible achievement that the
40
segregation it did impose brought forth…a reaction more obstreperous than in the South.”

The dominant discourse, represented throughout the novel in advertisements, newspapers, and social
41
service reports, constructs him as a troublesome, unintelligent, inferior being. The movies and
advertisements bombard him with images of power, wealth, and white women and in so doing create his
desire for all of them. Throughout the text there is evidence of the manner in which the dominant discourse
constructs Bigger. The social welfare organization constructs him as a good worker who is always in trouble.
The discourse of this bureaucracy seeks to turn him into a good and e cient worker. “Using the analysis
contained in the case record the relief sent to us, I think we should invoke an immediate feeling of
con dence,” says Mrs. Dalton. She and her husband act not on the real young man who stands before them
but on the character that emerges from the pages of the relief records. Their e orts will include formal
education so that he may enter the place that society holds for him and so that he might consider that place
a desirable one. Their e orts di er from those of the Urban League in that the latter also fought for better
living conditions, while the Daltons are the slumlords of the kitchenette apartment in which Bigger and his
family live.

“The long strange words they used made no sense to him; it was another language. He felt from the tone of
their voices.…It made him feel uneasy, tense, as though there were in uences and presences about him
which he could feel but not see” (p. 48). Here Bigger is confronted with a discourse that constructs him, but
he also realizes that he has no access to understanding that discourse. At rst this inability to understand
makes his e orts at resisting it somewhat futile. When nally he does nd a means of resisting it, through
the construction of an alternative narrative, another more powerful and more destructive discourse
emerges to contain him. The newspaper stories that cover his crime, his ight, his incarceration, and his
trial establish him as the oversexed black beast.

Bigger’s violent rebellion constitutes his e orts to create an alternative construction of himself. These
e orts take place on three levels. The rst occurs at the naive level of enacting petty crimes and his
participation in manhood rituals of signifying and bullying his peers. In this instance signifying and street
culture provide a space where he can claim verbal and physical authority denied him in the white world.
These are all responses to his frustration at having no in uence over a situation that controls him. “Let’s
play white,” he says after watching a plane overhead. The closest he gets to holding the power of the white
p. 126 man is through this game, and yet inherent in the game is a critique of white people. In mimicking white
people he parodies them. Here again, parody grants him a degree of verbal authority over whites. Bigger’s
desire to rob a white-owned store is another example of his aimless rebellion; however, fear paralyzes and
prohibits him from following through on the plan. Instead he internalizes the pain and frustration of his
desire by striking out at his friend Gus in the pool hall and establishing his power within this arena. He is
feared and admired by his peers.
 The dominant society denies him opportunity; however, it also creates his desire for access to what it denies
him. This is evident in the construction of his desire for white women. Like Petry, Wright uses the cinema to
illustrate the way that popular culture creates the desire for a mythological white woman and white society.
The same movies that give images of white wealth and power also provide images of black savagery and
primitivism:

Two features were advertised: one, “The Gay Woman,” was pictured on the posters in images of
white men and women lolling on beaches, swimming and dancing in night clubs; the other,
“Trader Horn,” was shown on the posters in terms of black men and black women dancing against
a wild background of barbaric jungle, [p. 32]

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Bigger and his friend Jack, choose The Gay Woman. Initially they desire the white movie star sexually, but it
soon becomes evident that the desire to possess her is linked with a desire to possess all that she represents
for them: “I’d like to be invited to a place like that just to nd out what it feels like,” Bigger says. To which
Jack responds, “Man, if them folks saw you, they’d run.…They’d think a gorilla broke loose from the zoo and
put on a tuxedo” (p. 33). Here the two images displayed on the movie posters have helped Bigger and Jack
construct an image of themselves in relation to the dominant white society. The cinematic representation is
one which Bigger desires; as a spectator he attempts to place himself in the picture on the screen. This
fantasy moment is ruptured by his own understanding, reinforced by Jack, that there is no place for him in
that world, that, like the characters of Trader Horn, he is no more than a savage beast. Like the gorilla in the
tuxedo, Bigger does not t; he is awkward and out of place in the world portrayed by The Gay Woman. Note
how he and Jack accept the racist construction of themselves as “gorillas.” Bigger does not challenge or
question Jack’s use of the term. Instead of challenging the “gorilla” as a racist construct, Bigger fantasizes
about the image of the white world presented on the screen. In his imagination he creates a space for
himself in the context of the white narrative. In Bigger’s imagined narrative possession of the white woman
by the black chau eur leads to the possession of white wealth and therefore a degree of white power.

While the dominant society creates his desire for opportunity and for access to white women, it also lls
him with fear of acting on that desire. It is this deadly combination which leads him to murder Mary Dalton.
p. 127 As he attempts to put the drunken Mary to bed, “He leaned over her, excited, looking at her face in the dim
light, not wanting to take his hands from her breasts. She tossed and mumbled sleepily. He tightened his
ngers on her breasts, kissing her again, feeling her move toward him.” When Mrs. Dalton enters the room,
this desire manifests itself in fear. The fear and desire culminate in the enactment of a murder described in
sexual terms:

Frantically, he caught a corner of the pillow and brought it to her lips…he grew tight and full, as
though about to explode. Mary’s ngernails tore at his hands and he caught the pillow and covered
her entire face with it, rmly. Mary’s body surged upward and he pushed downward upon the
pillow with all of his weight.…Mary’s body heaved.…

He clenched his teeth and held his breath.…His muscles exed taut as steel and he pressed the
pillow, feeling the bed give slowly, evenly, but silently.…

He relaxed and sank to the oor, his breath going in a long gasp. He was weak and wet with sweat.…
Gradually, the intensity of his sensations subsided, [pp. 84#x2013;86; emphasis added]

For the rst time in his life, Bigger acts on his desire for a white woman. Because of the circumstances, it
takes the form of murder and not sexual intercourse. The murder is described in very sexual language. He is
“tight,” “full,” “about to explode.” Her body “surges upward” to meet his downward pushes. The nal
sentences might have been used to describe Bigger after he achieved an orgasm. In contrast, Wright’s
description of Mary’s body following the murder is especially signi cant: “Her mouth was open and her
 eyes bulged glassily” (p. 87). This sentence uses a very familiar description to describe an unfamiliar
subject. The open mouth, the bulging eyes are descriptors used for lynched black bodies, echoing Billie
Holiday’s “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” The description is familiar to Wright’s audience (much
of which is made up of those same people to whom Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” at Cafe Society). The
description is familiar, but the sex and race of the victim is di erent. In this one sentence, Wright turns
centuries of terror experienced by black people on to whites. Here Wright does what Bigger will attempt to
do. He claims the power of fear over whites through his manipulation of their language and signs of racial
terror. Valerie Smith notes, “Not only do both Bigger and Wright rebel against the strictures of black and
white authority, but both also rely on their ability to manipulate language and its assumptions—to tell their
42
own stories—as a means of liberating themselves from the plots others impose on them.”

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Because of the context in which Mary’s murder takes place, this rst murder, though not a conscious choice
on Bigger’s part, initiates the beginning of his own critical awareness of his life. The murder of Mary Dalton
makes Bigger acutely aware of the mechanisms of power that dominate him and the means of his access to
it.

Crime allows him to snatch a modicum of power from white people. It provides him his only access to this
power:

He felt a certain sense of power, a power born of a latent capacity to live. He was conscious of…the
wealthy white people living in a smugness, a security, a certainty that he had never known. The
knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made
him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the
score, [p. 155]

p. 128 Here we have the true source of Bigger’s desire for Mary. It is not for Mary as woman, but for Mary as
symbol of that which he is denied. Her body becomes the means of acquiring power over her father. As he
initiates each of his crimes, he gains a greater sense of clarity. Action and the ability to construct something
heighten his intellectual sense, his own understanding of and disgust with the place society has created for
him. Because the dominant society considers him incapable of conceiving of a plot to murder and/or kidnap
Mary Dalton, he is able to strike his rst signi cant blow to the power that a ects him. Relying on their
ignorance, Bigger is able to hide his guilt as well as demand ransom money.

Bigger’s attempts to act on his own creativity are his most signi cant acts of rebellion. The writing of the
phony ransom note is another creative e ort linked to his crime. However, when he attempts to act upon
this creativity, his black girlfriend, Bessie, threatens to thwart it. His second murder, the killing of Bessie, is
another attempt to rebel against those things he thinks repress him. In killing Bessie, he strikes out against
the sti ing nature of black women as they appear in all of Wright’s texts. Black women bind Bigger to a
provincial racial past. Although he does have intercourse with Bessie prior to murdering her, it is not an act
of desire; it is rape—an act of violence. The murder of Bessie is not described in terms of desire:

Then he took a deep breath and his hand gripped the brick and shot upward and paused a second
and then plunged downward through the darkness to the accompaniment of a deep short grunt
from his chest and landed with a thud. Yes! There was a dull gasp of surprise, then a moan. No, that
must not be! He lifted the brick again and again, until in falling it struck a sodden mass that gave
softly but stoutly to each landing blow. Soon he seemed to be striking a wet wad of cotton, of some
damp substance whose only life was the jarring of the brick’s impact. He stopped, hearing his own
breath heaving in and out of his chest. He was wet all over, and cold. How many times he had lifted
the brick and brought it down, he did not know. All he knew was that the room was quiet and cold
and that the job was done. [p. 222]
 “Shot,” “short grunt,” and “thud” are not words of desire but words of violence. In contrast to the passage
describing the murder of Mary, here Bessie does not respond to him. She is like a “wet wad of cotton.”
Intercourse is no longer the appropriate metaphor for murder. There is no desire for the black woman’s
body. If the language is at all sexual, it is the violent sexuality of a rape. Her murder is not a mistake; it is
premeditated, calculated, and precise. Here he is no longer acting out of fear. He kills Bessie out of hate—
p. 129 hate for what she represents to him as a black woman. “He hated his mother for that way of hers which
was like Bessie’s. What his mother had was Bessie’s whiskey, and Bessie’s whiskey was his mother’s
religion.” The use of the sexual metaphor in the earlier murder suggested a distorted sense of human
connection. With Bessie, this connection is completely dissolved. James A. Miller notes, “when Bigger rapes
and murders Bessie, he e ectively severs his ties to the black community. From this point in the novel until
43

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its conclusion, Bigger functions essentially as a soloist.”

As was the case with Mary’s death, the murder of Bessie is followed by a greater consciousness, an
intellectual and spiritual longing that becomes clearer with each crime Bigger commits:

He did not want to sit on a bench and sing, or lie in a corner and sleep. It was when he read the
newspapers or magazines, went to the movies, or walked along the streets with crowds, that he felt
what he wanted: to merge himself with others and be part of this world, to lose himself in it so he
could nd himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black. [p. 226]

The language of this passage is exactly like that of 12 Million Black Voices, Bigger aspires to the position of
modern man as described in Wright’s vision in the documentary text. Up to this point, he has not
experienced such a clear understanding of that to which he aspires—the chance to participate in civilization
with other modern men; a chance denied him by the dominant society and by what he perceives to be the
provinciality of the text’s black women. After each criminal act Bigger grows closer to a critical
understanding of his actions.

As Bigger becomes a suspect in Mary’s murder, a discourse emerges that creates him as an oversexed black
beast. He becomes “some half-human black animal…climbing through the windows of [white] homes to
rape murder, and burn [white] daughters” (p. 373).

It is this Bigger of the media who is pursued, captured, tried, and executed. The overwhelming state
apparatus leaps to violence when it can no longer contain him through housing and discourse. Signi cantly,
he is tried in the court and in the press for a crime he did not commit—the rape of Mary Dalton. The media-
de ned image of him sparks the lynch mob mentality of the Northern judicial system. Like the Daltons, who
44
respond to the discursive Bigger, so too does the judicial system. It is the image of black man as rapist of
white women which is on trial, not Bigger Thomas. As was the case in the South, a black man’s greatest
crime is acting on his desire for white women. He is never tried for the rape and murder of Bessie.

While white society acts on the Bigger of their discourse, Bigger Thomas again attempts to create an
alternative Bigger, a young man who, through the acquisition of a critical consciousness, faces and takes
responsibility for his actions. However, Bigger realizes that this consciousness only makes him more
intently aware of his predicament, without providing him a means to escape it. He comes to possess it too
late to restructure the direction of his life:

p. 130 Having been thrown by an accidental murder into a position where he had sensed a possible order
and meaning in his relations with the people about him; having accepted the moral guilt and
responsibility for that murder because it had made him feel free for the rst time in his life; having
felt in his heart some obscure need to be at home with people and having demanded ransom money
to enable him to do it—having done all this and failed, he chose not to struggle any more. With a
supreme act of will springing from the essence of his being, he turned away from his life and the
 long train of disastrous consequences that had owed from it and looked wistfully upon the dark
face of ancient waters upon which some spirit had breathed and created him, the dark face of the
waters from which he had been rst made in the image of a man with a man’s obscure need and
urge; feeling that he wanted to sink back into those waters and rest eternally, [p. 255]

Like thousands of black men imprisoned in America’s jails, Bigger is one who possesses a critical
intelligence and the restless energy to act upon it. However, the society in which he lives provides little
opportunity for him; in fact, it seeks to crush his spirit and drive. The only realm Wright makes available to
him is the criminal realm, which thrusts him further outside society. Here he experiences a sense of
resignation that comes about as a result of his recognition of the futility of “hope.” Like Ciel, he travels over
ancient waters which obliterate the boundaries of race; unlike her, he travels there not to be reborn, but to

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die.

In Bigger’s world “safe” domestic space is female—sti ing and provincial—capable only of creating
complacent black subjects. Formal education is denied him, and if he had access to it Wright believes it
might have produced a petty bourgeois race leader, like those who ultimately fail him. The acquisition of a
critical consciousness comes too late to a ect his life in any signi cant way.

Of the male artists considered here, only Ralph Ellison suggests the signi cance and importance of safe
45
spaces and ancestors to his migrant protagonist. Though Invisible Man tends to ignore them, the reader
knows that this naive dismissal is to his detriment. In many ways Invisible Man is the male counterpart to
Ann Petry’s Lutie. Safe space is available to him throughout the narrative in the form of ancestors and
elders: the grandfather and the veteran in the South and Mary, Petie Wheatstraw, and Brother Tarp in the
North. He always greets them with “Why?” “What does this mean?” He blindly follows those characters
that embody the stranger, especially Bledsoe and Brother Jack, a literal stranger he meets in the crowd.

Invisible Man mistakes distance from ancestors for critical intelligence. He does not realize that his
“education” is an empty one if it denies the importance and signi cance of the wisdom embodied in the
text’s ancestral gures. Because Bledsoe and Brother Jack speak to his ambition, he mistakenly believes
them capable of informing his critical consciousness. He follows their advice while ignoring that of those
who possess wisdom.

p. 131 Shortly after his arrival in New York, the protagonist meets a blues-singing pushcart man, Petie
Wheatstraw. Immediately the man’s song takes him back home: “It was a blues and I walked along behind
him remembering the times that I had heard such singing at home. It seemed that here some memories
slipped around my life at the campus and went far back to things I had long ago shut out of my mind. There
46
was no escaping such reminders.” Instead of nding comfort in something familiar, Invisible Man hears
the blues as the remnant of a past he seeks to escape. Unlike the migrants of the last chapter, who sought
solace and comfort in blues performances, he is annoyed by them. By the end of the novel, Invisible Man
learns to nd safe space in black music.

Wheatstraw tries to engage Invisible Man in a dialogue whose language he cannot understand: “What I want
to know is, is you got the dog…. Now I know you from down home, how come you trying to ack [sic] like you
never heard that before! Hell, ain’t nobody out here this morning but us colored—Why you trying to deny
me?” asks Wheatstraw. The narrator notes, “I wanted to leave him, and yet I found a certain comfort in
walking along beside him” (p. 172). The comfort is that of safe space: through his use of a black vernacular
Wheatstraw invokes a coded language with which Invisible Man should be familiar. Like Lutie, Invisible Man
senses the value the man’s presence has for him, but he is unable to rationalize it su ciently. Instead, he
asks, “What does it mean?”

This question, “What does it mean?” is Invisible Man’s constant refrain. He is ambitious and somewhat
pretentious. He feels that in order to reach his goal of leadership, he must shun those elements that bind
 him to a racial past. While he seeks to lead black people, it is an empty aspiration that fails to recognize the
value of racial wisdom. Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in his relationship with Mary, the
black woman who takes him in when he decides to stay in New York.

Mary’s home, especially her cooking, provides him with safe space, a space that he values but nds
su ocating. When he is approached by the Brotherhood to join their ranks—requiring that he put his past
behind him—he thinks, “What a vast di erence between Mary and those for whom I was leaving her. And
why should it be this way, that the very job which might make it possible for me to do some of the things
which she expected of me required that I leave her?” (p. 315). If he is to represent Mary’s interest, it seems
he ought to maintain contact with her. However, once again, he fails to recognize the signi cance of his own
question and instead he asserts the sti ing nature of people like Mary. “They seldom know where their

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personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of ‘we’ while I have always tended to think
in terms of ‘me’—and that has caused some friction even with my own family.” Again Ellison demonstrates
Invisible Man’s fatal aw. He possesses the ability to raise crucial questions, but he fails time and again to
adequately address them. Instead, he pushes the questions aside with substantive, un-self-re ective
assertions that justify his empty ambition. For Invisible Man the sti ing provinciality of race is illustrated
by Mary’s kitchen—an important metaphor for the apronstrings of race.

p. 132 That Ellison is critical of Invisible Man is evident throughout the text as well as in the story “Out of the
Hospital and under the Bar.” The story, rst published in Herbert Hill’s 1963 anthology Soon One Morning,
was to have been the Mary chapter of Ellison’s novel. According to Ellison, the chapter—which illustrates
Mary’s pivotal role of freeing the protagonist from the surveillance of the hospital—was removed at the
suggestion of the publisher. Ellison later wrote, “[Harlem] was Mary’s world, the world of the urbanized (or
partially urbanized) Negro folk, and I found it quite pleasurable to discover, during those expansive days of
composition before the necessities of publication became a reality, that it was Mary, a woman of the folk,
47
who helped to release the hero from the machine.”

In the short story Invisible Man demonstrates the same ignorance of Mary’s importance that he shows
throughout the novel. This ignorance does not inhibit his aspiration to leadership; in fact, it fosters it. His
aspiration to black leadership consistently removes him further and further from those he is supposed to
represent. He rst aspires to a position of racial manager like Bledsoe; later he is selected by and groomed
through the Brotherhood. This grooming prepares him to be leader as stranger—a stranger with the
appearance of kinship. “You shall be the new Booker T. Washington, but even greater than he” (p. 307),
Brother Jack tells him. In order to acquire this status, he is told, “You must put aside your past” (p. 309).
The nal act in their construction of him is a new name: “Remember your new identity” (p. 310).

The nature of his leadership role and his new name link him to a past and a history from which he hopes to
distance himself. On the one hand, the trope of a new white-given name and the loss of his past are used
here to signify his slave status. On the other hand, his position of leadership is no di erent from that
created by white people in the post-Reconstruction South and embodied in the gure of Washington. In
making this connection, Ellison provides the reader with a sense of historical continuity. However, it is a
continuity of which Invisible Man remains ignorant.

When he accepts the name given him by the Brotherhood, the memory of his grandfather emerges to
remind him of this history and to warn him: “The thing to do was to be prepared—as my grandfather had
been when it was demanded that he quote the entire United States Constitution as a test of his tness to
vote. He had confounded them all by passing the test although they refused him the ballot.…Anyway, these
were di erent” (p. 315). Once again, Invisible Man raises and ignores the important question embodied in
the memory of his grandfather’s experience with those white people who established poll taxes. Like Lutie,
he fails to heed his grandfather’s advice. In fact, he misinterprets it. His grandfather’s example is to not
only be prepared for the test that white people place before you, but also (and this is most important) to be
 prepared when they still deny you even after you have passed it. The “prepared” of his grandfather’s advice
p. 133 is not to be prepared to perform—as Invisible Man mistakenly believes—but to be prepared for white
people’s continued refusal to allow a black man equal access.

In joining the ranks of the Brotherhood, Invisible Man suppresses all aspects of the ancestor even though he
knows that the only real promise of successful resistance lay in the possession of ancestral perspectives.
“Perhaps the part of me that observed listlessly but saw all, missing nothing, was still the malicious,
arguing part, the dissenting voice, my grandfather part, the cynical, disbelieving part—the traitor self that
always threatened internal discord. Whatever it was, I knew that I had to keep it pressed down” (p. 335).
Invisible Man denies that which would inform a critical consciousness. His “grandfather part” would help
him negotiate all of the situations in which he nds himself. As he gets more deeply entrenched in the

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Brotherhood, he more readily dismisses his grandfather. “For a moment I thought of my grandfather and
quickly dismissed him. What had an old slave to do with humanity?” (p. 354). His grandfather, an old slave
like Toomer’s Father John, is an ancestor like Lutie’s grandmother who survives in his memory and who has
everything to do with humanity.

Instead of realizing that the ancestor holds the key to his sustenance, he chooses to exploit white women to
gain power and control over white men. He claims to use them as a tool of resistance. In his rst encounter
with a nameless white woman, Invisible Man is forced to face his own fear and desire. “I was headed for the
door, torn between anger and a erce excitement” (p. 416). Unlike Bigger, his encounter does end in
intercourse. The white woman is sexually assertive, using the Brotherhood as a point of entree for
articulating her desire for him. Though Ellison makes explicit her seductive intentions, Invisible Man does
not recognize them until she blatantly ushers him into her bedroom and removes her clothing. In this
instance, his grandfather’s advice would have been useful, if only he had understood it. While he is
“prepared” to perform, he is not prepared for the compromising situation in which she places him. As she
lies in his arms in a postcoital slumber, her husband returns home. Invisible Man is surprised when he is
able to escape without incident. Still, he is unable to answer the crucial question he raises: “Why did they
insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them—all human
motives?” (p. 418).

By his second encounter, he is better “prepared” to read the signals being thrown him by another white
woman, Sybil. This time, he wishes to take advantage of her in order to gain access to information about the
Brotherhood, an organization of which he is now skeptical. She requests that he indulge her in a rape
fantasy, the very suggestion of which brings fear and images of lynching to his mind. This time, he has no
desire for her. Instead, white men have created her desire for him, by creating the stereotype of black male
sexuality and then making relations between black men and white women taboo. In this instance, Invisible
Man does not indulge the white woman; instead he intoxicates her and leads her to believe that her fantasies
have been ful lled.

p. 134 Having done this, he begins to pump her for information about her husband. It is not long before he realizes
that his grand scheme is a dud. Sybil “had no idea of the schemes that occupied her husband night and day.”
Although he is “prepared” to manipulate her fantasies, again, he is not prepared for what has always been
the case—she provides him no access to the power that controls his destiny.

By the end of the text, Invisible Man has been constructed as a false leader of black people. Though he seeks
to resist this construction, he fails to utilize the power of the ancestor and the elders. Re ecting on his failed
career from his underground refuge, he nally realizes his grandfather’s humanity: “Hell, he never had any
doubts about his humanity—that was left to his ‘free’ o spring. He accepted his humanity” (p. 580).
Situated underground, at his greatest physical distance from the ancestor, he nally becomes closest to him.
This closeness to his grandfather is embodied in Invisible Man’s ability to nally understand the language
of another ancestor—the music of Louis Armstrong. In the prologue he says: “I want to feel [the music’s]
 vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear ve recordings of Louis Armstrong
playing and singing ‘What did I do to be so Black and Blue’—all at the same time” (p. 8). Robert Stepto notes
48
that here Invisible Man moves beyond “embracing the music” to hearing and claiming that music. To both
feel and hear is a distinct contrast to his hearing the ancestor but not listening to it. By hearing and feeling
he can experience the music (and the history and culture it embodies) as safe space, a space like Naylor’s
ritual space where one has

a slightly di erent sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and
sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible owing of time you arc aware of its
nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the
breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music, [p. 8]

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Interestingly, in the epilogue, Invisible Man tells us: “Gin, jazz, and dreams were not enough.” As was the
case with the women of Brewster Place, “safe space” and “safe time” are necessary components for healing
and coming to terms with one’s history; however, in and of themselves they are not acts of resistance.

In creating Invisible Man, a Negro leader who distances himself from racial history, Ellison suggest that
such leadership is the construction of whites who do not have the best interest of black people at hand.
Malcolm X o ers an alternative conception of black leadership, one that is constructed in radical resistance
to the dominant society.

Alex Haley’s Malcolm X is aware of his naveté and of the control white society has exerted over him. The
Autobiography is a constant commentary on white dominance as well as a documentation of the various
ways Malcolm attempts to resist it. While Richard Wright documents the failure of an attempt to construct
p. 135 an alternative self, Haley uses some of the same cultural tropes to illustrate a successful attempt, one
that also leads to a violent death but that ultimately leaves behind a legacy that acts as an alternative space
for a younger generation of black people. The image of Malcolm X refuses to die and remains a space where
contemporary urban black men can create their own sense of identity in contrast to the construction of
49
them by the dominant society.

For Malcolm X the street provides an alternative for the creation of an urban identity in stark contrast to
that of white racists or of black middle-class organizations like the Urban League. Within his narrative, the
Northern safe space of home is but an agent for the socializing work done by these organizations. He values
the street over the provinciality and sti ing atmosphere of the middle-class-de ned safe spaces. This is
something he seems to share with Wright, who dismisses homespaces as viable alternatives to oppression.
50
He too seems to think that the street life provides a resisting alternative. However, unlike Wright, the
preconversion Malcolm sees safe space in the culture of the street, especially in its night life and music.

Finally, for Wright and Ellison lack of access to white women is a fundamental aspect of the limitations
placed on their freedom. For Malcolm X desiring and acquiring white women is primarily evidence of the
hold white society has on black men. The dominant society produces desire for white women and then
punishes those who act on it. For Wright and Ellison to act on that desire is an act of de ance. For Malcolm X
it is an act of compliance. In his autobiography, white women become consumable objects.

51
“I looked like Li’l Abner. Mason, Michigan, was written all over me.” So opens the “‘Homeboy’” chapter of
Malcolm X’s autobiography. His body is the text on which his country status is written. The signs of this
identity include “kinky, reddish hair…cut in hick style” and a green suit that is too small. The chapter
“‘Homeboy’” painstakingly details his transformation from Midwestern hick to Boston hipster. The name
Homeboy is one of the many titles he earns during the course of his life. It is the name given to him by
Shorty, a street-smart man he meets in Boston, who befriends and mentors him. I like Malcolm, Shorty also
migrates from Lansing, Michigan. In the context of the street life, Homeboy becomes a term of a ection, a
 symbol of friendship, a “safe space” not unlike Mattie’s use of Tut to identify her friend Etta in The Women
of Brewster Place.

The homeboy period serves as his high school education in the street life. It is followed by the “college” of
Harlem, where his edges are smoothed and his skills sharpened. Finally, the intense graduate training of the
Charlestown State Prison completes his education. His early education allows him to resist the disciplinary
e orts of his middle-class sister Ella. Instead, he surrenders to the discipline of the street. The prison stay
52
initiates his critical awareness but leads to his surrender to the discipline of the Nation of Islam.

Ella’s disciplinary work begins in her provision of domestic safe space, homespace. Upon arriving in Boston,
Malcolm immediately goes to Ella’s house and here begins the process of balancing and nurturing in her

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p. 136 “Georgia”-style kitchen: “She was truly a Georgia Negro woman when she got into the kitchen with her
pots and pans. She was the kind of cook who would heap up your plate with such as ham hock, greens,
black-eyed peas, fried sh, cabbage, sweet potatoes, grits and gravy, and cornbread.…I worked out at Ella’s
kitchen table like there was no tomorrow (p. 39). Like Ellison’s Mary, Ella uses food to physically nourish
the young Malcolm and also provides him with safe space by invoking the South through her culinary skills.
While Malcolm eagerly partakes of her food, he nds her other, more disciplinary work less appetizing. Like
Christian missions that provide balanced meals and follow them with attempts to convert those in
attendance, Ella encourages Malcolm to “mingle with nice young people” in her neighborhood. He responds
by progressively seeking company with the poorer blacks down the hill.

For Malcolm, it is immediately clear that the middle-class blacks of “the Hill” are middle class in a ected
manner only: “Eight out often of the Hill Negroes of Roxbury, despite the impressive-sounding job titles
they a ected [sic] actually worked as menials and servants” (p. 41). This class of blacks appears to be the
same class that Dorothy West portrays in The Living Is Easy. In stark contrast, Malcolm found the poorer
blacks were “Negroes who were being their natural selves and not putting on airs” (p. 43).

Although Malcolm X is aware of the control white society has in shaping the desires and aspirations of the
black middle class, at rst he is not as aware of its control on those with whom he identi es. Like the
daughter of Bonner’s “The Whipping,” he straightens his hair. The tortuous “conk scene” illustrates the
length to which he goes in order to imitate his oppressor. After his humorous description of the process
where kinky hair is burned into submission with lye, Malcolm notes:

This was my rst really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally
burning my esh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men
and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”—
and white people “superior”—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to
try to look “pretty” by white standards, [p. 54]

The street life embodies a love–hate relationship with the dominant white society. E orts to resist are
thwarted by an unconscious aspiration to “whiteness.” The rst step toward initiation into the street life is
the acquisition of a new language: stud, cat, chick, cool, hip: “Every night as I lay in bed I turned these new
words over in my mind. It was shocking to me that in town, especially after dark, you’d occasionally see a
white girl and a Negro man strolling arm in arm” (p. 43). In his consciousness, he juxtaposes a new
language with the possession of white women. While to walk openly with a white woman is an act of
de ance of American racial norms, the obsessive desire for white women documented by X is the direct
p. 137 result of the white society’s power in shaping the desires of those it oppresses. Many black women and
men desire white women. Some black women desire to look and live like the popular images of white women
and some black men desire sexual possession of these same images. The black subject who successfully
resists such a desire does so in the face of constant e orts to undermine him or her. At this moment in the
text, Malcolm X has not yet reached this latter point of resistance.
 Malcolm X illustrates the manner in which black peoples’ bodies become inscribed with the power of their
oppressors, not in the form of scars and dismemberment, but in the form of a self-in icted discipline which
quite literally “tames all the anger down,” as Gwendolyn Brooks so eloquently describes straightening black
53
hair. As long as he is willing to undergo this process, he is not willing to reject the standards of white
society. While he may consider himself a resisting subject, in that he participates in illegal activities of the
street—he sells marijuana, gambles, and eventually steals in order to support his drug habit—he is
controlled by the dominant white society without it ever laying a hand on him.

The great quest for whiteness does not stop here. Its ultimate ful llment in the streetspace is the acquisition
of a white woman. This gains him respect among hicks and hustlers alike. It is also the factor which
accounts for the severity of his punishment when he is arrested years later. His union with a white woman,

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Sophia, causes him to be given ve times the standard prison sentence for burglary. The social service
system that is supposed to come to his aid, the judicial system, and the prosecuting attorney all seek to
punish him for his agrant association with a white woman. To possess a white woman openly is a blow to
the dominant white society, but to desire one in the way that Malcolm’s friend Shorty does is to be bound by
this very society: “Shorty was so obsessed with the white girl that even if the lights were out, he would pull
up the shade to be able to see that white esh by the street lamp from outside” (p. 145). Shorty’s obsession
with white skin serves as a mental prison.

Unlike Invisible Man, who sought to use a white woman for access to white men, Malcolm X eventually uses
Sophia for nancial gain. His desire for her is not for her as a person, but as a symbol and a means to counter
his frustrations with white men. By emotionally and physically abusing her, he claims to “possess” her. He
believes that his possession of a beautiful white woman is indicative of de ant resistance as well as
acceptance of white male de nitions of manhood. When his domination over Sophia comes to the attention
of white authorities, he is severely punished. Instead of being lynched, as he would be in the South, he is
sent to the Charlestown State Prison. There is a particular irony in his prison sentence. While it is the
ultimate method, second only to death, of controlling a resisting subject, in this context it helps to create
one. In prison Malcolm begins the pursuit of knowledge that will eventually free his psyche from the reins of
white power:

I found books like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization. I read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History. Souls Of
p. 138 Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois gave me a glimpse into the black people’s history before they came
to this country. Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History opened my eyes about black empires before the
black slave was brought to the United States, and the early Negro struggles for freedom.…I will
never forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery’s total horror. It made such an
impact upon me that it later became one of my favorite subjects.…The world’s most monstrous
crime, the sin and the blood on the white man’s hands, arc almost impossible to believe, [p. 175]

During his prison stay, Malcolm X retreats into himself, he studies, he reads, and he begins to prepare for
the leadership role that awaits him. This period marks the true beginning of his construction of himself as a
resistant agent. Along with this study he starts a correspondence with Elijah Muhammad, who becomes his
spiritual and intellectual mentor. While at rst he is equally controlled by the power of this black demigod,
he eventually escapes this as well and emerges as an individually thinking subject, capable of resistance and
54
leadership. He undergoes the same kind of re ection, study, and meditation on his trip to Mecca, which
further leads to his independence from Elijah Muhammad.

Only after this myriad of experiences does Malcolm X become a leader independent of Elijah Muhammad. He
is not elected and he is not chosen by whites, but he is accepted by his poor, urban black constituency
because he has proven himself on their terms. Unlike Bigger, Malcolm X gains a critical consciousness of
America’s racism in time to share an analysis of it with other African-Americans. Unlike Invisible Man, he
never distances himself from the majority of black people. Instead, like Toomer’s Lewis, he is a man with
 the courage of his convictions; but Malcolm X o ers a challenge not only to whites but to the Black Muslims
from whom he arises. These challenges lead to his death.

Leadership is here de ned quite di erently than in Wright or Ellison. Because Malcolm X’s road to a critical
consciousness includes stopovers in streetspace and prison and not formal education, he emerges as an
alternative, resisting black male leader. He is not vulnerable to the compromising e orts of the power
structure.

Malcolm X closes his text with the prophetic prediction of his own violent death. This prophecy a rms his
understanding of the power of the dominant society to stop those who transcend e orts to construct them
and create their own resisting subjectivities. Interestingly, Malcolm X is murdered by those people whom he

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assumed o ered him safe space. When he ventures from the con nes of that space he su ers their wrath.
This is an extreme example of the negative possibilities of safe spaces. In this context, “safe space” is so
sti ing that one risks death in the attempt to leave it.

Although Malcolm X was murdered by an act of black violence, violence was also done to his legacy by the
dominant society in attempting to deny his place in history. In so doing, it sought to ensure that no other
would rise to his example.

p. 139 Interestingly, the link between his assassins and the racial powers that be has not yet been rmly
established or denied, so we still cannot determine the extent to which the American government might
have been involved in his death. Malcolm X’s life and death continue to carry a legacy of radical black male
subjectivity. He has become the resisting ancestor to whom younger generations of urban blacks
consistently return.

It is quite signi cant that X’s role of ancestor is most evident in black popular culture, because it is this very
culture that served as “safe space” for him during his homeboy days. Swing bands, jazz stars, and lindy
hopping all serve as moments of cultural pleasure and a rmation of black humanity for Malcolm Little.
Though he never implies that these spaces are resistant spaces, he acknowledges the signi cance of them in
sustaining a sense of community and joy. In fact, in his renunciation of dance and night life, he seems to
55
suggest that partaking of it is antithetical to resistance. The Malcolm who denies the resistant capacities of
black popular culture is the same Malcolm who is resurrected in the most in uential form of that culture,
lm and rap music. Many of the rap artists who resurrect him would claim that by so doing, they are indeed
acting in resistance to black oppression.

Don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close to the edge.”

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Message

Excerpts from Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet” speech frame the opening and closing of the rap song
“Self-Destruction,” the anthem of the Stop the Violence Movement. The movement is an e ort of hip-
hop’s most progressive artists, in conjunction with the Urban League, to discourage black-on-black
violence (particularly at rap concerts) and an attempt to reclaim and rede ne streetspace. Like Malcolm X,
56
the rap and the Urban League book that accompanies it attempt to provide young African-Americans with
a critical awareness of their history, in their own language, on their own grounds. This is indeed a departure
from earlier Urban League e orts outlined at the opening of this chapter. It is not an attempt to create
“complacent” black subjects, but to inform young African-Americans. While the lyrics and the text do seek
to contain aimless, self-directed rebellion, they also seek to turn that energy into more constructive ways of
resisting racial oppression.
 Much media attention has been given to those rap lyrics that encourage gang violence and the abuse of black
women. Rhymes by the Ghetto Boyz, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Doggy Dog are indeed re ective of the street culture
p. 140 from which rap emerges. However, the rappers of “Stop the Violence” as well as a growing number of
other hip-hop artists constitute another strain. Public Enemy, KRS One, Arrested Development, Salt and
Pepa, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Me’Shell NdegéOcello all create raps of resisting discourses: Two
examples are black nationalism and black feminism. They espouse doctrines of self-determination,
education, and social responsibility not unlike those espoused by Malcolm X. His legacy is central to all of
them. His words and image are peppered throughout their rhymes; his image graces their videos.

Just as rap groups “sample” earlier black musical artists as a means of paying homage to them, they also
57
“sample” Malcolm X’s speeches. While it often seems that the revival of interest in Malcolm X has only

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ensured that his image become a consumable object, it has also assured his place in the pantheon of cultural
58
icons revered by young urban blacks.

Few have spoken to the urban context in which these young people nd themselves. More than ever they
battle with the complexity of urban power, with fewer and fewer spaces available to them to gain a critical
consciousness that would help them understand and escape the morass that ensnares their lives. Like those
who came before them, they are in search of means to negotiate the urban landscape. For some, rap
provides a possible map. In some cases it has become their safe space. The Stop the Violence Movement
seeks to reclaim the spaces of rap as safe spaces which nurture and inform rap’s primary constituency. As is
always the case, the terms of the space are contested and the con ict is yet to be resolved.

Like the e orts of rap artists, the tropes which are used to represent the Southern migrant’s attempt to
negotiate the urban landscape undergo signi cant revision throughout the period considered. The earlier
narratives of both male and female authors portray this process as one leading directly to the destruction of
the protagonist. There is little or no use of safe space as a place of resistance. The middle narratives focus on
the possibilities of ancestors and safe space, but they give us protagonists who dismiss their value. The late
narratives—one setting the standard for sixties-era urban male narratives, the other responding to these
during the feminist-in uenced decades following the Black Power and Civil Rights movements—show the
possibility of constructing an alternative black self through the use of migrant-de ned spaces but warn us
against any Utopian notions of complete resistance and survival. The manner in which the protagonists
negotiate this process is deeply a ected by gender.

While the earlier narratives are fully aware of the subtlety and sophistication of modern power, of its ability
to construct subjects through the creation of discourse and desire, they do not provide successful models of
resistance. The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Women of Brewster Place provide us with two very
di erent attempts at resistance. Malcolm X asserts the necessity of a historically grounded critical
consciousness for the emergence of a resisting subject. Gloria Naylor asserts the necessity of participation
in nurturing female spaces for the emergence of a surviving one. Neither provides us with a realization of
p. 141 their alternative worldviews; instead they stress the necessity of working for it. However, because
Malcolm X is assassinated in an urban ballroom (an alternative space) by black assassins, and because the
women of Brewster Place leave only for other ghetto streets or to “ascend” into an unwelcoming world that
continues to treat them as daughters of a despised race, the vision of the city remains a pessimistic one.

Similarly, the majority of socially conscious rappers join the authors of the migration narratives in creating
an image of the urban landscape like that described by Grand Master Flash’s classic “The Message”:

Broken glass everywhere—people pissin on the stairs

You know they just don’t care
I can’t take the smell—I can’t take the noise
Got no money to move out—I guess I got no choice
 Rats in the front room—roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away but I couldn’t get far
59
Cause a man with a tow truck repossessed my car.

Here, as is the case with Richard Wright and Ann Petry, we have an image of a closed-in world from which
there is no escape. As readers of the metanarrative of migration, we are left wondering: “Where do we go
from here?”

Notes

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1. Werner Sollors, “Modernization as Adultery: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and American Culture of the 1930ʼs and
1940ʼs,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 18 (1990): 3.
2. Houston A. Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Womenʼs Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), p. 104.
3. Spencer Crew, Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987),
p. 44.
4. Chicago Urban League Campaign of Education of Southern Migrants, quoted in Crew, ibid.
5. David Forgacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 275.
6. Richard Wright, Lawd Today (1963; reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1969), pp. 119–21.
7. Arna Bontemps, Anyplace but Here (1945; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), p. 142.
8. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William
Morrow, 1984), p. 204.
9. Ibid.
10. Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Womanʼs Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 746.
11. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982).
12. bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press,
1990).
13. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: The David Company, 1987), p. 20.
14. Gwendolyn Brooks, Ibid., p. 115.
15. “Kitchenette Buildin” was published in 1945 in Brooksʼs first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville. At that time, she
had been married for six years and had a five-year-old son.
16. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks, p. 331.
17. Hortense Spillers, “Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems,” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her
Poetry and Fiction, ed. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 225.
18. Marita Bonner, “The Whipping,” in Frye Street and Environs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 185–95.
19. In another story, “Light in Dark Places,” Bonner does utilize a Southern-born grandmother figure whose presence and
wisdom protects her Northern-born granddaughter. See Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, Introduction to Marita
Bonner, Frye Street and Environs (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
20. Critics Bernard Bell and Majorie Pryse have addressed Petryʼs connection to and di erence from Wright in their essays,
“Ann Petryʼs Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character” and “Pattern against the sky: Deism and
Motherhood in Ann Petryʼs The Street” respectively. Both essays are found in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary
Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
21. Some might suggest that Mrs. Hedges represents a maternal elder who provides Lutie safe space which she also ignores. I
argue that because Mrs. Hedges o ers Lutie no alternative that allows her to maintain her dignity and integrity, she is, in
fact, a threat to Lutieʼs well-being.
22. Karla Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Womenʼs Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 123.
23. Fisher, “Guardian of the Law” and “Miss Cynthie,” in City of Refuge: The Collected Short Stories of Rudolph Fisher, ed. John
McCluskey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Marita Bonner, “Light in Dark Places,” in Frye Street and Environs
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
24. In ” ʻPattern against the Skyʼ: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petryʼs The Street, ” Marjorie Pryse makes the connection
between the name “Junto” and the historical figure Benjamin Franklin. According to Pryse, “Junto” was the name Franklin
 gave to “his secret group of friends.” The group “served its members [powerful white males] as a central sphere of social
and political influence” (p. 118).
25. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), and “Power and Strategies,” in
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p.
142.
26. Ann Petry, The Street (1946; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 15–16; page numbers cited in the text refer to this
edition.
27. Marjorie Pryse, “ʻPattern against the Sky,ʼ” p. 117.
28. This brick metaphor recalls the instance in Richard Wrightʼs Native Son when Bigger uses a brick to murder Lutieʼs literary
sister, Bessie. Interestingly, at the end of The Street, Lutie is headed for Chicago, home of Bigger. Her fate there might be
worse than in New York, where white hands build a brick wall around her, for in Chicago, she might encounter the brick-
wielding Bigger. This fate is one that is portrayed graphically in Naylorʼs text.

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29. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Viking Press, 1982), pp. 103–4; page numbers cited in the text refer
to this editin.
30. Michael Awkward notes: “Mattieʼs rocking ʻabove timeʼ o ers Ciel…a recognition of her connection with women
throughout history, a sense in other words of membership in a timeless community of women united by a common
su ering.” Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Womenʼs Novels (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989), p. 117.
31. Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters; Ntozake
Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow Is Enuf; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the
Widow.
32. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Towards an Understanding of lʼEcriture Féminin” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 345.
33. Ibid.
34. Awkward, Inspiriting Influences, p. 119.
35. Jill L. Matus, “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Spring
1990): 50.
36. Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1987), p. 57.
37. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin gives us another version of the urban black male in search of a critical
consciousness, but nonetheless defeated by the city. His Richard, named for Richard Wright, is brilliant, bitter, and
disdainful of black religion. Of Jesus, he says, “You can tell that puking bastard to kiss my big black ass.” Instead of the
Southern-inspired black church, Richard turns to other institutions, institutions of the city like the museum and the night
school. Richard is falsely accused of robbery and, like Bigger and Malcolm, he ends up in the prison where he is the victim
of police brutality. Instead of fulfilling his desire to live a resistant life, Richard is defeated by the injustices enacted upon
him, and he commits suicide.
38. Wright attempts to portray more well-rounded interracial relationships in his later fiction; however, this is usually done at
the expense of his portrayal of black women.
39. See Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp.
128–63.
40. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” in Native Son (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), p. xv; page numbers cited in the
text refer to this edition.
41. In one of the best essays I have read on Native Son, “Bigger Thomasʼs Quest for Voice and Audience in Richard Wrightʼs
Native Son,” James A. Miller argues that “it is within [the] world of ʻauthoritative discourse” symbolized by the billboard of
the Stateʼs Attorney in the opening pages of the novel, the distortions of African reality at the Regal Theater, the liberal
pieties of the Dalton family, the inflammatory rhetoric of the press, and the blatantly racist arguments of the Stateʼs
Attorney—that Bigger must struggle to discover his voice, and, presumably, an audience which will give assent to his
testimony.” Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 503.
42. Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987),
p. 70.
43. Miller, “Bigger Thomasʼs Quest,” p. 504.
44. Many critics have explored the manner in which the judicial system responds to the Biggers of these various public
discourses and not to the flesh-and-blood human being behind the media distortion. Valerie Smith notes: “Biggerʼs
misrepresentation in court and in the press epitomizes his lifelong struggle against other peopleʼs fictions. Buckley, the
State Attorney, considers him violent and subhuman and prosecutes him according to collectively held stereotypes of
black male behavior ” (Self-Discovery and Authority, pp. 81–82). James Miller underscores Smithʼs assertion: “The public
 exchanges between Max and the Stateʼs Attorney Buckley represent two attempts to define, in opposing ideological terms,
the meaning of Bigger Thomasʼs actions—and, by extension, his existence—in the public sphere of ʻauthoritative
discourseʼ ” (ibid., p. 505).
45. Rudolph Fisher is actually the first male author to assert the importance of such safe spaces and ancestors in the lives of
urban black male characters. See City of Refuge and the especially useful introductory essay by John McCluskey.
46. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947; reprint, New York: Random House, 1990), p. 173; page numbers cited in the text refer to
this edition.
47. Herbert Hill, ed., Soon One Morning (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 243.
48. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, p. 194.
49. Malcolm Xʼs autobiography spawned a spate of lesser urban male bildungsromans: Claude Brownʼs Manchild in the
Promised Land, Piri Thomasʼs Down These Mean Streets, and Eldridge Cleaverʼs Soul on Ice.
50. Baldwin also seems to find these spaces provincial and stifling, suggesting that cosmopolitan education and the life of the

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street are two opposing alternatives. In his texts, there are o en two young male characters who choose either of these.
While the one choosing cosmopolitan education usually survives, it is the other, more violent choice which seems the
most resisting one. Ellison and John Edgar Wideman suggest that homespaces do o er a viable alternative to
objectification by the dominant society. However, it would take a woman to explore fully this possibility for the urban
male: Morrisonʼs Milkman. Writing on the heels of the Black Power Movement, Morrison creates an alternative definition of
black manhood (as does Alice Walker in The Third Life of Grange Copeland).
51. Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), p. 39; page numbers cited
in the text refer to this edition.
52. A Boston Globe article focusing on Malcom Xʼs Boston years asserts Ellaʼs role as the provider of safe space for Malcolm X
throughout his life. According to the article, Ella was nurturing as well as disciplining. X himself acknowledged her
significance. However, just as the editors at Invisible Man lessened Maryʼs role by deleting the rescue from the hospital, the
Spike Lee film based on Malcolm Xʼs life deletes her significance. Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, February 16, 1992.
53. Note that Malcolm Xʼs description of this type of disciplinary activity comes years before the influence of Foucault on
current understanding of this process.
54. My reading here owes a great deal to Foucaultʼs “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p.
27. According to Foucault, activities like studying, reading, and writing were parts of the Care of the Self which classical
thinkers valued. Such techniques of the self can lead individuals to constitute their own identities (p. 146).
55. Manthia Diawara elaborted on the role of the “good life” in The Autobiography and in African-American life in general in his
provocative talk, “Malcolm X and the Black Public Sphere: Conversionists vs. Culturalists?” Keynote address, “Seeking
Ground: Figuring a Black Cultural Imaginary,” graduate student conference in Afro-American studies, November 12–13,
1993, University of Pennsylvania.
56. Stop the Violence: Overcoming Self-Destruction, Nelson George, ed., for the National Urban League (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1990).
57. According to Tricia Rose, “Samplers are computers that can digitally duplicate any existing sounds and play them back in
any key or pitch, in any order, sequence and loop them endlessly.” Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in
Contemporary America. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 73.
58. It is also significant that The Autobiography has never been out of print and that following the release of Spike Leeʼs film
on X, the book once again emerged on best-seller lists.
59. Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five, “The Message,” Sugar Hill Records, 1982.