The Black Body as Archive: Restoring Black Subjectivity in Coates & Whitehead
I n the violent history of our nation’s founding, it is undeniable that the physical and discursive destruction of the black body has always been necessary to the notion of white excellence. How does one live in a black body, knowing that its ruins are the fodder for America’s wealth? What does it mean to belong to a black diasporic community? For author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, the answer to these questions extends far beyond skin color, which, for America, has become the irrefutable evidence of essentialized racial difference. In his book, Between the World and Me, Coates critiques the naturalization of race and proffers the Dream as a metaphor for the illusion of white superiority. This Dream inscribes the black body with various meanings, rendering the African American a “magical negro” or else an animalistic brute — loud, lazy, sexual, and criminal. The consequences of these perceptions transcend the realm of bigoted sentiments, ultimately manifesting in frighteningly palpable ways.
Naturally, the only response to the violent machinations of the Dream is to capitalize on the radical possibility of the imagination in turn, thereby exposing the Dream’s faulty logic. This is exactly what Colson Whitehead does in his novel, The Underground Railroad, which follows the story of Cora as she flees her master’s plantation in hopes of freedom. Whitehead’s novel forgoes realism to imagine a world in which the Underground Railroad is a literal railroad. As Cora makes her escape by alighting from the railroad at each station, she is met with varying states of race relations, what one of the station agents calls different “states of possibility.” Throughout her journey, which collapses four hundred years of black subjugation into one timeline, Cora must continually adapt herself to each new environment and varying societal attitudes towards slavery. Reading The Underground Railroad alongside Coates, I hope not only to illuminate how the black body has historically been instrumentalized, exhibited, and exploited, but also to reveal the chinks in the armor of the Dream’s prevailing narratives. In so doing, I argue that a black consciousness is primarily recognized through the body, by the behaviors performed through it and the physical denigration inflicted upon it. Crucially, as both texts also suggest, a truly liberating black consciousness also recognizes that there is no singular black body, that the black diasporic community is not a one-dimensional monolith, but rather, is heterogeneous. Only by acknowledging the diversity of blackness can one begin to break free from the confines that limit its meaning and restore subjectivity to those who have been deprived of it.
Both Between the World and Me and The Underground Railroad, are written in the visceral register, an authorial choice that underscores the physicality of the African American experience. Racism, for Coates, is “a visceral experience” because it transforms the body, even when one is among his own (Coates 10). The consequence of racism is not only how it “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, and breaks teeth;” on the contrary, perhaps the most pervasive product of racism is the constant awareness of one’s vulnerability (Coates 10). In other words, as much as state-supported violence is exacted upon the black body, this violence exists even when there are no immediate wounds to bear, for the body is still imprisoned by the silent laws that govern its movements in space. Such a predicament is exemplified by Malcom X’s claim that “if you’re black, you were born in jail,” and though not cognitively aware of this as a boy, Coates “fe[els] the truth of this in the blocks…in [the] lack of control over [his] body” (Coates 37). Writing in the visceral register allows Coates to give the reader a glimpse into the structures of feeling that compose the black experience: the intergenerational trauma inherited from one’s enslaved ancestors and the vague yet ominous sense that the world is made to render one defenseless. In his description of life in “the streets,” Coates emphasizes how this dim awareness dictates how, when, and where black bodies move. One must avoid certain blocks at certain hours and always look tough — except, of course, when confronted with a cop, when looking too tough can justify one’s arrest or murder. Thus, black identity is rooted not so much in the shade of one’s skin tone, but by an acute awareness of one’s body at all times.
Looking back on his memories growing up in Baltimore, Coates recalls noticing how every black person around him was “powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid,” their fear manifesting in the way they “[gird] themselves” against the past, their ostentatious manner of dress, the “practiced bop” of their gait, and in their “customs of war” (Coates 14). All these actions, of course, serve as “an armor against the world” that obscures the precarity they face every day, granting them a sense of autonomy against the reality that so much of their fate has been predetermined by government policy (Coates 14). While performing these rituals grants one a sense of power over her own body, however illusory, it is only a brief respite from the knowledge that one’s body is not her own. If Coates gives voice to the fear that governs the movement and presentation of black bodies “in the streets,” then Whitehead reveals how this fear is a product of a much older system. In the modern police state, law enforcement officials have taken the place of slave master, literally determining the life and death of African Americans. In his novel, Whitehead makes the connection between slavery and today’s mode of policing black bodies clear. The book opens with a celebration in the slave quarters for the birthday of the oldest resident, Jockey. Giving into dance and music, this is one of the only times the enslaved are able to separate “the human spirits within from the degradation without” (Whitehead 28). For them, dance means gratuitous movement; it means laying claim to space, as Coates sees the young men and women do on the streets of Baltimore. Like these men and women, however, Cora knows that she can only be “a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude,” for the overseer’s cry to work is inevitable, the authority over her body always looming nearby (Whitehead 29). The dominion that her master, Randall, holds over her is most profoundly exemplified when she tries to protect another slave boy from being punished and endures the strike of his cane in the boy’s place. The silver wolf at the tip of the cane brands her with “a rueful scar shaped like an X,” marking her as his (Whitehead 36). The moment that Cora tries to assert her own autonomy and rejects the authority that Randall imposes upon her enslaved brothers and sisters, she is reminded that she does not have the freedom to act according to her own will, that her movements are restricted to the monotonous motions that yield profit for the capitalist machine. Any resistance to this, of course, results in severe discipline. The specter of punishment, once meted out by slave holders and now law enforcement, remains the primary drive behind the culture of the streets. There, vulnerable to state authorities, African Americans compensate for their loss of freedom by squaring up against one another[1].
The power that white hands have over black bodies, even as an omnipresent abstraction, is evinced by the character of Ridgeway, the slavecatcher who pursues Cora and seeks to return her to Randall’s plantation. For example, after Cora realizes she is being hunted upon seeing wanted signs with her face on them, her every action becomes determined by what will keep her out of Ridgeway’s clutches. Here again, Cora’s range of movement is limited by the threat of white violence, for her every action is but a reaction to the broader game of chase on which her life is staked. Of course, white dominion over the black body pertains not only to the former’s restricted spatial movements, but also to how the black body itself is morphed and mutated under white force. This is illustrated in the parallel between Ridgeway, the slavecatcher, and his father, who is a blacksmith. Comparing their professions, Ridgeway notes that both he and his father are “working for Mr. Eli Whitney,” for while one captures slaves, the other brands the iron to hold them (Whitehead 78). In this configuration, slaves are equated to the hot iron that Ridgeway’s father works with and which he sees as “his mission to upset, mash, and draw out” into “the useful things that ma[ke] society operate” (Whitehead 75). The way that the molten iron is manipulated to create infrastructure to hold society together mirrors the predicament of the African American, who, under the yoke of slave/prison labor, is beaten and bruised so that America can maintain its position as a leading global power. At every step in history, ruling powers treat the destruction of the black body as incidental to some larger goal. If not for the U.S economy or the maintenance of law and order, then for science. For instance, anthropology, medicine, and various other disciplines have long been implicated in the process that divorces the black body from human consciousness and subjectivity, rendering it merely an object to be studied or tested on. When Cora escapes slavery in Georgia and finds herself in what she believes to be a more tolerant community in South Carolina, she is horrified to learn that the freed black men are secretly being used as “participants in a study of latent and tertiary stages of syphilis” (Whitehead 124). Without considering these men as human beings, it does not even cross the doctors’ minds that they are doing anything immoral. Instead, they marvel at their research and how it will one day “prove one of the boldest scientific enterprises in history” (Whitehead 125).
Crucially, both slavery and unethical scientific experimentation were justified by the idea of race as biologically endowed and of the white race as somehow more human than the black. Believing blackness to signify sub-humanity, whites convinced themselves that there was no moral transgression in continuing these practices. This sentiment is shared by Dr. Bertram, one of the syphilis researchers who proclaims that through eugenics, science would be able to “perform adjustments to the negroes’ breeding patterns,” rid them of their “melancholic tendency,” and manage “other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures” (Whitehead 125). Here, seeing blackness as tied to certain fixed, intrinsic traits divorces the individual from her body and reduces her to a stereotype. As a result, skin color becomes the defining aspect of all African Americans rather than all that humanizes them — their intellect, emotions, personality, and feelings. In this sense, they are also thought of as a collective. Thus, despite the reality that race is a social construct, it is nevertheless a construct with material consequences, for it sets the conditions for the destruction of black bodies. Just as Ridgeway’s father heats, shapes, and morphs the iron to his will, so too are black bodies chained, mutilated, and tested upon by white hands. Even when she is far from the plantation, Cora behaves in ways that diminishes her own presence as a means of survival. Realizing this, she tries to “[straighten] her back and h[old] her head level” so as to “walk like a freemen” (Whitehead 96). Always, black bodies are inscribed with meanings and burdened with responsibilities that no white body can imagine and thus, are transformed entirely.
Until this point, I have illustrated only a few ways that black bodies have been subjected to violence and fear which restricts the freedom of their behavior and actions. However, as Cora’s plight demonstrates, black women are doubly fettered by both the white and male imposition of power. This is something Coates only briefly alludes to in his book, when he tells his son that the responsibility he must have for his body is not unique, for the women around him “must be responsible for their bodies in a way that [he] never will know” (Coates 71). Such a burdensome responsibility is exhibited when, at Jockey’s birthday celebration, Cora does not dance even though it is one of the few instances she is permitted any sort of pleasure. Amid the other carefree men and women:
Cora does not move. She [is] wary of how sometimes when the music tug[s], [one] might suddenly be next to a man and [ not] know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on [her], take both her hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought…She shr[inks] from the idea of loosening her leash on herself. (Whitehead 29)
The hypervigilance that African Americans must exercise in order to resist preconceived judgements of them as dangerous, angry, or uncouth is, for black women, compounded by the measures they must take to protect themselves from the male gaze as well. Cora’s reluctance to dance and let go of her inhibitions is a clear indication of how black women’s bodies are even more restricted than those of black men. Only in limited spaces does Cora feel safe, and as a result, she develops an instinctual aversion to touch. Raped by other slaves on the plantation, fondled by Randall, and nearly strangled by a slave catcher on her route to freedom, Cora recoils even from physical contact with those who help and care for her. After one of the station agents safely leads Cora and Caesar to the entrance of the railroad, for instance, he embraces them with much affection. Cora, however, cannot help “but shrink away” (Whitehead 67). Recalling how “two white men in two days had their hands around her,” Cora asks herself if this is the “condition of her freedom” (Whitehead 67). In other words, are African Americans truly free if their bodies remain subject to the whims of white fascination, desire, and violence, even after emancipation? Although Coates is not so attentive to the particular plight of the black woman, both his essay and The Underground Railroad seem to share this question as the crux of their interrogation. The answer, of course, is that such a condition cannot truly be called freedom, for even without the chains of slavery, black bodies do not have the privilege of occupying space in the same way that white bodies do. The mere absence of chains is not equal to autonomy, no matter how much the state tries to convince one otherwise. This is a reality Cora gradually understands while in South Carolina. There, although she initially believes herself free to live by her own will, her illusion is shattered when she notices how every authority figure in every public institution is devoted to leading black men and women down predetermined paths. For instance, although her doctor mentions birth control as an option she might want to consider, his suggestion does not offer her a choice in the matter so much as the façade that she has a choice to begin with. Even despite describing how this new method of sterilization was “perfected on the colored inmates of a Boston asylum” without their consent, Dr. Stevens does not recognize the irony in his presenting this procedure as “a gift to the colored population” and a “chance for [them] to take control over [their] own destiny” (Coates 115, 116). This exchange reveals how racism in South Carolina is no less rampant than in Georgia, but is more easily dismissed because it is so insidious. Here, Whitehead critiques those who will have African Americans believe that “the race problem” ended with emancipation. What he urges his readers to understand instead, is that the ruling powers have only become more adept at disguising their methods of subjugating minorities, at keeping racial tension alive so as to obscure the unsustainability and immorality of the capitalist enterprise. Today, this “disguise” can be found in the practice of redlining, mass incarceration (and thus, disenfranchisement), unofficial segregation in schools, the racial wage gap, and various other forms of systemic racism, all of which take a psychological and physiological toll on the black body[2].
However tenuous the façade of equality may be, the veneer is still one that allows whites to deny that racism continues to thrive today. For example, when asked to convince the other black girls to go through with the operation that would render them infertile, Cora asks why these girls are not allowed to decide for themselves. She tells her proctor that “on the plantation, master decided everything for [them]” and that “[she] thought [they] were done with that here,” to which her proctor becomes angry and “recoil[s] from the comparison” (Whitehead 131). When total control over black bodies is the precedent, the powerful believe that African Americans should be grateful for any concession made thereafter, even if these improvements fail to raise the black condition to include the full range of liberties afforded to whites. Thus, any argument pointing out the incalculable disparity between black and white is dismissed by the indignant retort that slavery ended hundreds of years ago, a point that negates the myriad ways that the legacy of slavery is embedded in the fabric of this nation and always will be. Certainly, then, the illusion of choice becomes the first defense of the white moderate who, supporting racial equality superficially, easily belittles the issue when it threatens their own privileged position.
The white moderate is arguably the greatest barrier to the liberation of the black body and in Coates’ text, is exemplified by the white woman who pushes his son outside of a movie theater. Coates imagines that, should he confront the woman with the fact that she acted “according to a tradition that held black bodies as lesser,” she would have denied being racist at all, believing racism to pertain only to some “tobacco-spitting oaf” or “something just as fantastic — an orc, troll or gorgon” (Coates 97). Critical to the Dream that beguiles Americans to believe in white exceptionalism is the idea that racism belongs to a bygone era, that no progressive, educated white could be capable of such unseemly prejudice. Whitehead undermines this myth through his portrayal of South Carolina, where although Caesar and Cora initially live as freedmen, they are eventually targeted for the killing of a white boy who had attempted to capture them. While Cora escapes, Caesar is thrown in jail and, before he is granted due process, is torn limb to limb by a white mob. As Ridgeway taunts Cora with this story, he accurately notes how “for all their talk of negro uplift and civilizing the savage, [South Carolina] is still the same hungry place it always was” (Whitehead 223). This outwardly tolerant society, which so quickly reverts to ravaging black bodies, mirrors Martin Luther King Jr.’s condemnation of those whites who prefer “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” (King 1963). It would be naïve too think that an absence of racial tension, that treating African Americans “nicely” while denying them rights is in any way morally superior to overt racism. For example, when remembering his previous master, Caesar feels betrayed that the old woman had treated his family kindly, taught him to read, and even promised their freedom after her death only to leave them to her niece after upon passing. Sold south and separated from his family, Caesar curses those “kindly white folks in the north” who are only “kindly in that they didn’t see fit to kill [slaves] fast” (Whitehead 238). Watching the old, withered slaves on the plantation, Caesar sees that the northerners’ “tolerance” is ultimately meaningless to the betterment of African Americans. Meanwhile, whites are unable to see how their cooperation with the institutions that maintain their privilege is immoral so long as they wear a mask of cordiality.
For her part, Cora is rarely blind to “all those white hands working in concert” to keep her in her place, even if she cannot immediately identify the forces arrayed against her (Whitehead 126). This silent knowledge, experienced viscerally rather than cognitively, is what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “la facultad,” or “the capacity to see in the surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface” (Anzaldúa 38). As she writes:
Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized…Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are pounced on the most have it the strongest — the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign. (Anzaldúa 38)
Clearly, like Cora, Coates also possesses la facultad, a hypersensitivity he describes as a kind of “nakedness” that is “not an error, nor pathology,” but “the correct and intended result of policy” (Coates 17). Coates’ claim that this sense is designed rather than inherent is reminiscent of his assertion that the Black diaspora is a tribe that is “on the one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real” (Coates 56). By writing this essay in the visceral register, Coates foregrounds how black identity is not simple skin-deep, but is comprised of the collective experiences endured by the body. In so doing, Coates denaturalizes the power structure that positions African Americans as inferior due to their biology, emphasizing instead how living in a black body means facing all those impediments forced upon one by institutional and interpersonal racism alike. As a consequence of these experiences, black men and women hold a larger responsibility over their bodies than whites do, a responsibility that encompasses both “the worst actions of other black bodies” and “the bodies of the powerful,” whose assaults on African Americans are justified by rendering black boys men or by imagined “furtive movements” that supposedly threaten law and order (Coates 71).
Certainly, Coates’ employment of the visceral is not all that makes Between the World and Me unique in terms of genre. Written as a letter to his son, the book is at once an intimate testimonial to their shared condition of blackness and an incisive look at race relations in America. Blending genres in this way, Coates’ lyric essay defies any categorization. The impossibility of classifying this book as a memoir or essay reinforces how the personal is political, how the issue of racism cannot be reduced to a mere abstraction for the convenience of whites when it is an everyday, physical reality for African Americans. Similarly, Whitehead also breaks genre conventions to foreground the unimaginable toil and torment African Americans have suffered throughout history. Simultaneously a historical and science fiction novel, the most mindboggling elements of the story are not the anachronistic, fantastical details, but rather, the sheer depravity of the punishments the slaves endure. After one slave is caught trying to flee from Randall’s plantation, for instance, he is tied up and roasted alive on a hog pit, his manhood severed and sewn inside his mouth. While The Underground Railroad is doubtlessly an inventive and original novel, horrifying scenes like this require no stretch of of the imagination for Whitehead because they are historically accurate, taken directly from archived accounts from the period. Evidently, then, Coates and Whitehead’s project of exhuming the black body from history is demonstrated even in their choices on form and style. Moreover, I argue that the authors’ reliance on the visceral register also points to the idea that the black body itself is an archive. Reduced to property in documents detailing sale transactions and the like, the humanity and adversities of the enslaved have been utterly effaced from history. What remains is la facultad, the nakedness, the intergenerational trauma inherited by black bodies from their ancestors. According to Fanon, “when the black man comes into contact with the white world, he goes through a process of sensitization” wherein he “epidermalizes” his inferiority (Fanon xiii). This shared sensibility is one that connects the international Black diasporic community.
In the face of all the powers that have tried to erase black subjecthood, the solidarity birthed from oppression is integral to resisting the tradition that insists the black body is inferior. This is evident throughout Coates’ letter, in which he continually reminds his son that he has “never achieved anything alone,” that he has “always had people” who would love, support, and guide him (Coates 50, 88). In one interaction with a stranger at an airport, Coates bumps into a young black man and apologizes, to which the man reassures him by replying, “you straight” (Coates 119). In this brief moment, Coates feels “so much private rapport that can only exist in that tribe that we call black,” a rapport that has been engendered by the unspoken acknowledgement of shared pains (Coates 119–120). Especially given history of slave traders separating the enslaved into disparate cultures and languages to prevent rebellion, the sense of solidarity among those of the Black diaspora is indeed a radical one. Such a radical solidarity is also one that transcends national borders. Recalling a trip to Paris, Coates urges his son to remember the Algerian cab driver who insisted that they were “all united under Africa” and the French black man outside the subway station protesting the death of Trayvon Martin (Coates 128, 129). Strangers to one another, living in different countries, and speaking different languages, where else can this solidarity emerge but from that one point in history when black men and women of all nations were together in the hold of a slave ship?
Throughout The Underground Railroad, the power of solidarity is symbolized by the only form of salvation for the enslaved — the railroad itself. Each time Cora marvels at the craftsmanship of the train system, she thinks about all the men and women who “excavated a million tons of rock and dirt, toiled in the belly of the earth for the deliverance of slaves like her” (Whitehead 310). Here, the great feat of engineering that rescues fugitives from bondage demonstrates what black solidarity can achieve. As Coates writes to his son:
Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen. The fact of history is that black people have not — probably no people have ever — liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. (Coates 96)
Thus, as much as living in a black body means experiencing a constant vulnerability, it also means sharing an intense bond with one’s black brothers and sisters.
While Coates emphasizes the necessity of recognizing a black consciousness, he does not suggest that this is a monolithic identity. Both through his intellectual journey and through his encounters with the diverse students at the Mecca, Coates discovers that the project of recovering the black body is tied to restituting agency to Black individuals, who are not all alike but rather, possess different economic backgrounds, political convictions, religious beliefs, etc. Acknowledging this heterogeneity is also crucial because it guards against another type of dehumanization, one wherein black people are rendered one-dimensional victims. Of course, it is true that the oppressed can, themselves, oppress, an idea that becomes clear when Cora thinks to herself that “white men eat you up, but sometimes colored folk eat you up, too” (Whitehead 55). Cora must grapple with the consequences of this realization when she meets Homer, a freed black boy with an inexplicable devotion to the slavecatcher Ridgeway, and when she is at Valentine Farm, where factions divide those who no longer want to accept runaway slaves from those who want to continue housing fugitives at the risk of inciting the nearby white communities. There are also disputes over methods of breaking the stranglehold of slavery, especially concerning the use of violence. For example, after one of the farm’s residents, Mingo, kills one of the white men who had been working with Ridgeway in an effort to help Cora, he is banned from the community and goes off on his own. The varied and disparate viewpoints brought up in the novel reflect those that Coates encounters on own intellectual journey at Howard University. Diving into the histories and theories of the African past, Coates is surprised when he “d[oes] not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions,” leaving him “with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other (Coates 47). The urgency in recognizing the diversity of the black community remains important today when so many political analysts, scholars, and leaders continue to treat African Americans as an ideologically homogenous group. Black conservatism is real, and a failure to recognize this would be to misconstrue the reality of the politics in America. After all, there is no singular black body or experience and realizing this is only the first step in restoring a complex subjectivity to diasporic Africans.
Ultimately, what both Whitehead and Coates urge readers to understand is that the invulnerability of whiteness is just as constructed as the vulnerability of blackness. In other words, the violent imagination that renders black bodies inferior exists to obscure the precarity of the dominant. Without the wretched antithesis of the black body, whites would “lose their divinity and tumble out of the Dream” that assures them they are worthier, smarter, and more human (Coates 105). But as Coates would argue, “despite their dreams, their lives are…not inviolable” (Coates 107). In the rare moments when whites are confronted with this fact, they resort to hatred of the other in order to regain a sense of control, or else are shocked at the fragility of their lives in a way marginalized groups could never be, for they are all too familiar with the feeling. The tenuous foundation of white power is illustrated when Cora travels across Tennessee as Ridgeway’s captive. There, Cora witnesses the destruction of the state’s land and cities by wildfire and yellow fever. Seeing this, she notes to herself that “plantation justice [i]s mean and constant, but the world [i]s indiscriminate,” for it is here that Cora first hears the cries of white babies, a sound that is new to her ears (Whitehead 220). Tennessee is what finally allows Cora to see that white people, though protected by the power they have conferred upon themselves through justifications of biological superiority, are at least as vulnerable as anyone else in the face of nature and disease. As she remarks, “if Tennessee had a temperament, it took after the dark personality of the world, with a taste for arbitrary punishment. No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dream or the color of their skin” (Whitehead 220). In other words, having seen the “indiscriminate” forces of nature that ultimately threaten all lives, Cora understands how any difference between white and black once thought “natural” and inherent is in fact contrived and “epidermalized.”
[1] As Coates writes, the harsh culture of the streets, which necessitates fearlessness and swagger, allows African Americans to believe that, against the odds, they do own their bodies. Even black-on-black violence is a product of the fear that their bodies are not their own. When his father beats him, for instance, Coates is told that it is better his father punish him than the police.
[2] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African Americans are more likely than their white counterparts to suffer and die from high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and various other health complications (“African American Health” 2017).
