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“From Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, this is a book for anyone interested in the
politics of Black female representation across the arts. In accessible language and
through cogent analysis, Janell Hobson’s When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical
Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination explores African Diasporic wom-
en’s lives as represented by others and by themselves through paintings, film,
novels, music and poetry, to vivify what it means, and has always meant, to be
Black and female under colonial eyes. The result is a text as freeing as it is edify-
ing for Black women of yesteryear as of today.”
Myriam J. A. Chancy, HBA Chair in the Humanities, Scripps
College, and author of Autochthonomies: Transnationalism,
Testimony and Transmission in the African Diaspora
“Janell Hobson’s When God Lost Her Tongue is an epic Black feminist story, one
that analyzes how Black women artists and writers engage the past in order to
imagine more liberatory futures. With deft analysis and dazzling insights, Hob-
son takes us across space, African Diasporic traditions, and academic disciplines
to reveal how Black women theorize their relationship to history and, by doing
so, opens up new possibilities and genealogies for our understanding of the Di-
vine, the Black Body, and Freedom itself.”
Salamishah Tillet, Henry Rutgers Professor of African Amer-
ican Studies and Creative Writing, Rutgers University, USA,
and author of In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of
an American Masterpiece
“When God Lost Her Tongue is imperative. It clearly and profoundly demonstrates
the liberating power of the Black feminist imagination.”
Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author
of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an
Antiracist
WHEN GOD LOST HER TONGUE
When God Lost Her Tongue explores historical consciousness as captured through
the Black feminist imagination that re-centers the perspectives of Black women
in the African Diaspora, and revisits how Black women’s transatlantic histories
are re-imagined and politicized in our contemporary moment.
Connecting select historical case studies – from the Caribbean, the African
continent, North America, and Europe – while also examining the retelling of
these histories in the work of present-day writers and artists, Janell Hobson uti-
lizes a Black feminist lens to rescue the narratives of African-descended women,
which have been marginalized, erased, forgotten, and/or mis-remembered.
African goddesses crossing the Atlantic with captive Africans. Women leaders
igniting the Haitian Revolution. Unnamed Black women in European paintings.
African women on different sides of the “door of no return” during the era of the
transatlantic slave trade. Even ubiquitous “Black queens” heralded and signified
in a Beyoncé music video or a Janelle Monáe lyric. And then there are those
whose names we will never forget, like the iconic Harriet Tubman.
This critical interdisciplinary intervention will be key reading for students
and researchers studying African American women, Black feminisms, feminist
methodologies, Africana studies, and women and gender studies.
Janell Hobson is Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Stud-
ies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, USA.
Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures
Books in the Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures series exemplify original research
in feminist histories that “subvert” dominant and normative patterns of histor-
ical narrative by centering women, gender, and feminist politics. This exciting
series delves into women’s histories, queer histories, people of colour histories and
reclamations of non-western world heritage and cultures through high-quality
research. The series aims to utilize intersectional historical analyses to revitalize
scholarship in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
When God Lost Her Tongue

Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination
Janell Hobson
Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities

Publics, Counterpublics, and Human Rights
Kanika Batra
https://www.routledge.com/Subversive-Histories-Feminist-Futures/book-series/
SUBFEM
WHEN GOD LOST
HER TONGUE
Historical Consciousness and the
Black Feminist Imagination
Janell Hobson
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Janell Hobson
The right of Janell Hobson to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hobson, Janell, 1973– author.
Title: When God lost her tongue : historical consciousness and the black
feminist imagination / Janell Hobson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015939 (print) | LCCN 2021015940 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367198329 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367198343 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429243554 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429513275 (adobe pdf ) |
ISBN 9780429516702 (epub) | ISBN 9780429520136 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Women, Black—Historiography. | Women, Black,
in art. | Women, Black, in literature. | Women, Black, in popular
culture. | African diaspora—Historiography. | African diaspora in art. |
African diaspora in literature. | Feminist theory.
Classification: LCC HQ1163 .H63 2021 (print) |
LCC HQ1163 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015939
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015940
ISBN: 978-0-367-19832-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-19834-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-24355-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
For my mother Jeanette Hobson and in memory of my
grandmother Iris, my great aunt Lizzy, and my aunt Bev, who all
disrupted silence with their tongues and kept our histories alive.
CONTENTS
List of figures xi
Reprints xiv
Frontispiece xv
Introduction 1
Prelude 11
1 A meditation on Black feminist divinity 12
2 Reframing portraits of Black womanhood 39
3 Revolving doors of no return 68
4 Cultural currency and the value of Harriet Tubman 93
5 To play the queen, to embody the goddess 122
Postlude 152
Epilogue 153
Notes 156
References 173
Acknowledgments 189
Index 191
FIGURES
0.1 Video still from Janelle Monáe, “Turntables” (Emotion Picture)

music video (2020), directed by “Child,” from the Amazon
Original Movie All In: The Fight For Democracy (2020) 7
1.1 Faith Ringgold, “We Came to America,” from The
American Collection series, 1997. Painted story quilt, acrylic
on canvas with fabric pieced border. 74 ½ × 79 ½ inches
(189.23 × 201.93 cm). Art by Women Collection, gift of Linda
Lee Alter. Reprinted with permission of Faith Ringgold/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York 29
1.2 Kara Walker Fons Americanus, 2019. Non-toxic acrylic and
cement composite, recyclable cork, wood, and metal. Main:
73.5 × 50 × 43 feet (22.4 × 15.2 × 13.2 meters). Grotto:
10.2 × 10.5 × 10.8 feet (3.1 × 3.2 × 3.3 meters). Installation
view: Hyundai Commission: Kara Walker – Fons Americanus,
Tate Modern, London, UK, 2019. Photo: Matt Greenwood.
Reprinted with permission 30
2.1 Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761–1804) and her
cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760–1825). Oil on canvas.
Scone Palace, Perth, Scotland, circa 1779 42
2.2 Portrait of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Allan Ramsay,
oil on canvas, 1761–1762. 58 ¼ inches × 42 ½ inches
(1480 mm × 1080 mm). National Portrait Gallery of London 43
2.3 Film still of Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle
Lindsay, from Belle, directed by Amma Asante, Fox Searchlight
Pictures (2013) 52
xii Figures
2.4 Film still of Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle

Lindsay, with Bethan Mary-James as Mabel and Sarah Gadon as
Elizabeth Murray, from Belle, directed by Amma Asante, Fox
Searchlight Pictures (2013) 52
2.5 Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768–1826), Portrait d’une Négresse
[Portrait of Madeleine], 1800. Oil on canvas. 81 × 65 cm.
Louvre Museum. Photo: Thierry La Mage 55
2.6 Ayana V. Jackson, “Lucy,” from Intimate Justice in the Stolen
Moment series, 2017. Archival pigment print on German
etching paper. 39 ⅜ × 27 ½ inches (100 × 70 cm). Edition of 8
plus 3 artist’s proofs. Reprinted with permission of the artist 61
2.7 Elizabeth Colomba, “Seated,” 1997. Oil on canvas. Reprinted
with permission of artist/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 62
2.8 Elizabeth Colomba, “The Portrait,” 2013. Oil on canvas.
Reprinted with permission of the artist/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York 63
3.1 Carrie Mae Weems, El Mina Cape Coast Ile de Gorée, from
the Slave Coast Series, 1993. Three gelatin silver prints and
one silkscreen panel on paper. 20 × 20 inches (each framed).
CMW98.014. Reprinted with permission of the artist 73
3.2 Fabrice Monteiro, from the Signares series, 2011. Reprinted
with permission of the artist 75
3.3 Maison de la signare Anna Colas à Gorée, lithograph print by
d’Hastrel de Rivedou, circa 1839 81
3.4 Thomas Stothard, The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to
the West Indies. This etching is a plate from the third edition
of Bryan Edwards’ “The history, civil and commercial, of the
British colonies in the West Indies” (1797–1801). National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 82
3.5 Signare et Negresse en toilette (Signare and Negro Woman in Full
Dress), (ca. 1849). Drawing by G. Boulanger after Edouard
Auguste Nousveaux in F. de Lanoye, “Voyages et expéditions
au Sénégal et dans les contrées voisines,” Le Tour du monde 1
(1861): 25. Bibliothèque Nationale de France 88
3.6 Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827–1905), African
Venus, ca. 1851. Bronze with silver and gold patination.
51.1 × 21.6 × 16.5 cm (20 ⅛ × 8 ½ × 6 ½ inches),
39.4 × 20.3 × 12.7 cm (15 ½ × 8 × 5 inches) (without base),
Jesse Metcalf Fund. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design 90
4.1 Photograph of Harriet Tubman (taken circa 1868 in Auburn,
New York), printed later 1871–1876. Silver and collodion
printing out paper. 5 ⅜ × 3 ⁷∕₁₆ inches (13.7 × 8.7 cm).
Photograph by Harvey B. Lindsey (1842–1921). Collection
Figures xiii
of the National Museum of African American History and

Culture, Smithsonian Institution 100
4.2 Harriet Tubman, full-length portrait, seated in chair, facing
front, probably at her home in Auburn, New York, 1911.
Library of Congress 102
4.3 Frontispiece to Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet
Tubman (1869), wood engraving on paper by John G. Darby.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 103
4.4 Photograph of Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Davies) by Camille Silvy,
albumen print, September 15, 1862. 3 ¼ inches × 2 ¼ inches
(83 mm × 56 mm). National Portrait Gallery of London 111
4.5 Carte-de-visite of Harriet Tubman, 1868–1869. Photograph
by Benjamin F. Powelson (1823–1885), albumen and silver on
photographic paper on card mount. 3 11∕₁₆ × 2 ¼ inches (9.4 × 5.7 cm) 115
5.1 Photograph of Ms. Magazine cover and cover story, “Beyoncé’s
Fierce Feminism” (2013) by Janell Hobson. Photo: Brandi
Phipps. Reprinted with permission of Ms. Magazine 125
5.2 “Queen or ‘Maam’ of the Set-Girls,” Slavery Images: A Visual
Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African
Diaspora, accessed February 21, 2021, http://slaveryimages.
org/s/slaveryimages/item/2310 126
5.3 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean
Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The
New York Public Library. “Ethiopia – Awakening, by Meta
Warrick Fuller.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Accessed February 21, 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/
items/510d47df-1ec0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 132
5.4 Video still of supermodel Iman with Eddie Murphy, from
Michael Jackson, “Remember the Time” music video (1992),
directed by John Singleton, from Dangerous album, Epic
Records, 1991 137
5.5 Video still from Nicki Minaj, “Ganja Burn” music video
(2018), directed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, from Queen
album, Young Money/Cash Money Records, 2018 139
5.6 Video still from Beyoncé, “Spirit” extended cut with “Bigger”
(2019), directed by Jake Nava, re-released in Black is King,
Parkwood Entertainment and Disney+ Streaming Platform, 2020 146
REPRINTS
Segments from earlier versions of articles appear in the following chapters:
Chapter 1:
Janell Hobson, “Black Mermaids, White Fantasies, and the Need for a Black Fem-
inist Imagination.” Ms. Magazine ( July 11, 2019). Available: https://msmagazine.
com/2019/07/11/black-mermaids-white-fantasies-and-the-need-for-a-black-
feminist-imagination.
Chapter 4:
Janell Hobson, “$20: George Floyd, Harriet Tubman, and the Value of
Black Lives.” Ms. Magazine (June 16, 2020). Available: https://msmagazine.
com/2020/06/16/20-george-floyd-harriet-tubman-and-the-value-of-black-lives.
Janell Hobson, “Of ‘Sound’ and ‘Unsound’ Body and Mind: Reconfiguring the
Heroic Portrait of Harriet Tubman.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 40: 2
(2019): 193–218.
Janell Hobson, “Between History and Fantasy: Harriet Tubman in the Artistic
and Popular Imaginary.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 12: 2 (Fall
2014): 50–77.
FRONTISPIECE Mapping Black women’s histories
INTRODUCTION
I live in a culture that dismisses history. Whitewashed stories. Forgotten names

on street signs or buildings. The constant erasure of any trace of unpleasant
memories (personal or national) substituted for more acceptable narratives.
Conversely, the same culture loves its myths and myth making. History filtered
through lore, rituals, ceremony, or ghost stories is somehow more digestible than
if it were given to us straight, no chaser. Whether we prefer the stories framed by
the imagination or the straightforward history based on empirical study, some-
where is the truth of the past that must inevitably shape our historical conscious-
ness as it navigates both approaches.
The aim of this work is to specifically explore historical consciousness as cap-
tured through what I call the Black feminist imagination. Here, I am interested
in reworking Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s definition, which posits that
the work of the imagination is … a central practice of black feminism –

indeed, it remains a black feminist necessity to explicate, develop, and dwell
in realities other than the Western secular empiricisms that deny black
women’s importance in knowing, making and transforming the world.1
The Black feminist imagination that engages historical consciousness creates

meaningful narratives to reimagine past events through an affirmation of Black
women’s experiences and ways of knowing.
Tinsley’s discourse on the imagination derives from her exploration of Ezili,
the Haitian lwa (spirit) of love. This deity’s particular story – of having lost her
tongue during the Haitian Revolution – is the driving and organizing metaphor
for this study. A maimed figure of divinity, who refuses silence even without
the ability to form words, presents the intersectional experience of race, gender,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554-1
2 Introduction
sexuality, and disability as well as situates power through marginalization.

Within Ezili’s narrative, I identify an apt symbol for Black women’s histories,
which are powerful enough to impact on the present moment, but too powerful
to be heard, hence the attempts at silencing. The Black feminist imagination lis-
tens for the silence, detects the whispers and mumblings of history, for it is here
that we will “find clues” to our enormously troubled and troubling past, as Alice
Walker reminds us2 – with glimpses of glory here and there.
In this regard, history becomes a haunted place, where ghosts from the
past are barely detected unless one actively seeks them through intermediary
spiritual means or through feeling this presence. In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gor-
don advances affect theory, based on figurative hauntings, by insisting that an
emotional approach is both revelatory and vital for research. As she argues,
“being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit
magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not
as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”3 Similarly, Hershini
Bhana Young posits that “at the margins of any discipline lies a haunted terrain,
seething with ghosts who embody those stories about the relationships between
power, knowledge, and experience that have been repressed in order to delimit
a discipline.”4
In Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander takes these approaches quite
literally when she draws on the history of Kitsimba, a captive African woman
who had survived the Middle Passage and who spoke to her through a Sante-
ria ceremony. Disrupting the secular and spiritual divides, as well as the lines
between the empirical and the intuitive, Alexander suggests a transformative
methodology beyond “cold knowledge” to engage in Black feminist praxis. As
she describes,
[Kitsimba’s] emergence is pedagogy in its own right: to instruct on the per-

ilous boundary-keeping between the [sacred] and secular, between dispos-
session and possession, between materialism and materiality – the former
having to do with the logics of accumulation, the latter with the energy
and the composition of matter. She has traveled to the heart of feminism’s
orthodoxies to illustrate that the personal is not only political but spiritual.5
Taken together, Gordon, Young, and Alexander illuminate the enormous ef-
forts that feminist praxis has mounted to dismantle and reconstruct the power
dynamics embedded in the concepts of objectivity, epistemology, and methodol-
ogy. Reaffirming embodied knowledge and marginalized ways of knowing, the
Black feminist imagination builds on this legacy. My particular study explores
the juxtapositions between the works of the imagination – art, literature, film,
music, and other compositions – and empirical historical research, between the
historical narrative and the contemporary imagining of history, between the
lives lived then and those lived now, between the lives lived “over here” and
those lived “over there.”
Introduction 3
The last point is an imaginative reworking of the African Diaspora, which, as

Brent Hayes Edwards notes, focuses “on issues of connection and collaboration
among people of African descent.”6 In rendering the Black feminist imagination
through a diasporic lens – as this work covers the Caribbean (Chapter 1), Europe
(Chapter 2), Africa (Chapter 3), North America (Chapter 4), and the Diaspora at
large (Chapter 5) – I aim to expand historical consciousness across eras and geog-
raphies. For what else is a haunting but a disruption of time and space?
From my own experience of the Diaspora, I am both fascinated and fright-
ened by the concept of haunting, which complicates my love of history and the
way it is framed within both a U.S. and Caribbean context. I often listen with
an eager ear whenever my mother tells stories of her encounters with “jumb-
ies” – the term used for ghosts on the island of Nevis where she is from – or of
her own mother’s fear of such spirits. Such cultural beliefs reflect the primarily
African tradition – intermixed with indigenous, European, and other immigrant
cultures – from which they emerged in the Anglophone Caribbean.
However, I also have a number of relatives who are Jehovah’s Witnesses who
believe that ghosts could only be deceitful demons and evil spirits, applying a
biblical definition in which such entities reflect the rigid binary of good versus
evil. These different responses to the ghostly encounter (spiritual rejection on
the part of some family members, the relative comfort of a few if the encounter
involves a loved one, or the abject terror regardless of whether the encounter
includes someone who was once loved) also frame my own feelings. I would
prefer to not have any encounter at all but would nonetheless accept any intuitive
and uncanny lessons such spiritual interventions might reveal without my having
to witness an apparition. In the wake of the electronic revolution, in which we
have lost much of our pitch-black night due to light pollution – and, thus, few
encounters of jumbies still take place, here in the U.S. or in the Caribbean – we
are slowly losing our sense of connection to both material and spiritual planes:
no accessible view of the milky way, no deep sleep uninterrupted by digital noise
and constant glow, no spiritual stillness. To engage the past requires deep learn-
ing, deep connection, and deep dreaming.
My only “encounters” with ghostly figures often take place in dreams, some-
times, including those historical figures that I have researched. Sara Baartman
(ca. 1789–1815) – about whom I had written in my first book, Venus in the Dark,7
and whose skeletal remains, seared in my memory, were once housed at the
Musée de l’Homme in Paris as a scientific specimen before they were returned
and buried in her native South Africa – had appeared to me in a dream, de-
pressed and resigned, on the bicentennial anniversary of her death on New Year’s
Eve 2015. I was willing to later mark this milestone with a reimagined Black
(Women’s) History Month anniversary celebration at my university, similar to
the symposium that I had organized in 2013 on the occasion of the centennial
anniversary death of Harriet Tubman (ca. 1822–1913) on March 10, 1913.
Interestingly, I did not dream of Tubman as I had with Baartman. Instead,
she spoke to me while I was feeling terribly ill on the day of the symposium. As
4 Introduction
resounding as any cymbal, I heard what I imagined to be Tubman’s voice: “Keep

moving!” Somehow, that voice spurred me onward, and over the course of the
day, I had gotten better, felt healthier, and was completely energized by a well-
attended event at day’s end. And I didn’t need to envision her pointing a pistol at
me to urge me on to freedom. Her voice simply insisted: You got this!
I have no interest in determining whether such encounters can be empiri-
cally measured. What strikes me is the imagination that we employ to empower
ourselves with knowledge of the past. And as a Black feminist interdisciplinary
scholar, such an imagination can fuel the spark for further empirical knowledge.
What began as a simple desire to mark Harriet Tubman’s anniversary turned into
my listening to an encouraging historical voice, which then led to a years-long
research agenda, tracing her presence in the present – pop-culture narratives, In-
ternet discourse, art, literature – and the past through archives and historical sites.
I have visited her gravesite at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York
three times – the first time completely bewildered as to its location as I wan-
dered through numerous headstones in a manner similar to when Alice Walker
searched for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked gravesite,8 the last time during an
annual pilgrimage attended by different Black church members from the north-
east. I brought my students to the Harriet Tubman Home and to her gravesite in
Auburn, and later visited and toured the areas associated with her life in slavery
in Church Creek, Maryland, where a visitor center named for her finally opened
in 2017. As an interdisciplinary Black feminist scholar, I am interested in engag-
ing both the fantasies we tell of the past and the actual past that needs our diligent
empirical research. I especially wish to combine history’s disciplinary approach
to women as historical actors and the interdisciplinary approach in women’s,
gender and sexuality studies to viewing the same women as agents of change
turned feminist subjects.
Those of us who do the research and teach it in colleges and universities are
witnessing its impact in the realm of the everyday. I am reminded of a group
of Black women activists who staged a protest back in 2017 over the statue of
modern gynecology founder J. Marion Sims (1813–83) in New York City’s Cen-
tral Park, a protest based on the history Black feminist scholars revealed about
his surgical experiments on enslaved women in Alabama from 1845 to 1850.9
These women’s names were recorded as Betsy, Lucy, and Anarcha, the last who
was surgically experimented upon thirty different times without anesthesia. It is
the affect, the imagined feeling of and feeling for Anarcha’s pain that motivated
these protests in the present. Until recently, Sims had been celebrated for his
medical breakthrough with the speculum, and it was not until feminist historians
refocused on the enslaved women, whom he had rented from their enslavers to
develop his medical technologies, that the narrative changed significantly.
This Black feminist protest joined with other memorial protests through-
out the U.S. South over contested Confederate monuments to the Civil War’s
“lost cause” of preserving chattel slavery. Because these monuments were cre-
ated in part due to backlash over Reconstruction-era gains of the formerly
Introduction 5
enslaved and later over challenges to legal Jim Crow segregation, the millennial
era is now seeking redress with newfound historical narratives that resist the
heroic constructions of pro-slavery enthusiasts. What will erect in place of these
monuments that are eventually removed remains to be seen, although it reflects
the contentiousness of American historical memory. As David Blight reminds
us in his work on Civil War commemorations: “Deflections and evasions, care-
ful remembering and necessary forgetting, and embittered and irreconcilable
versions of experience are all the stuff of historical memory.”10 At least with
the Central Park protest, Sims’s statue has been removed and will be replaced
by a statue designed by Black woman sculptor Vinnie Bagwell, titled “Victory
beyond Sims,” dedicated to the memory of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy.
There will be those who say that this new statue should coexist with the
previous Sims statue rather than force the latter’s removal. However, the very
commemoration of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy would compel his memory, but
one of violence instead of heroism. This cultural production reflects what Mi-
chelle Commander has identified as “plantation counternarratives” that promote
“alternative accounts about antebellum life by focusing on the interior lives of
enslaved persons and rejecting the dominant, sanitized narratives that gloss over
the brutality of the era.”11 The challenge now is to reveal the truth of these lives
in ways that honor their full humanity beyond victimization.
We see such narratives especially in contemporary films on slavery, from
Django Unchained (2012) to 12 Years a Slave (2013) to Antebellum (2020) – all
produced on the same Evergreen plantation where the enslaved once labored
and where these productions have been relocated to the “Hollywood South” of
Louisiana’s Red River region (Commander, 32). Antebellum – starring the pop
singer and actress Janelle Monáe and co-directed by Gerard Bush and Christo-
pher Renz – is particularly chilling because it reimagines the past in the present,
as the storyline opens on a “plantation romance,” unfolding in a continuous shot,
which later turns into a plantation horror that relies on the abduction and im-
prisonment of present-day Black people enlisted to “reenact” a history of slavery
that fully supports the southern fantasies of Civil War reenactments. The latter is
revealed toward the climactic ending when Monáe’s character Veronica Henley
escapes her prison only to find herself in the midst of an amusement park where
these reenactments blend into the brutal conditions that shaped her experience of
enslavement. Here, history collides uncomfortably and violently with the pres-
ent. While this movie was universally panned (unfairly in my view), it nonethe-
less reflects the “wake work” Christina Sharpe has argued as the contemporary
Black experience, which is “swept up in the wake produced and determined …
by the afterlives of slavery.”12
Interestingly, Monáe has constructed much of her persona around themes
based on Afrofuturism, a term first coined in Mark Dery’s essay “Black to the
Future” (1993) in reference to creative works that integrate Black experiences
from the past and present with futuristic themes in speculative fantasy and sci-
ence fiction. 13 This is portrayed in Monáe’s futuristic cyborg alter ego Cindi
6 Introduction
Mayweather or Jane 57821 on her albums The ArchAndroid (2010), Electric Lady
(2013), and Dirty Computer (2018), or in her appearance on the Amazon streaming
sci-fi series Electric Dreams (2018). As such, her cinematic forays into history in-
tertwine with Afrofuturism’s blurring of the past, present, and future in locating
Black resistance across time and geographies, whether in her portrayal of a fic-
tional friend to Harriet Tubman in Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet (2019) or, before that,
the historical figure Mary Jackson (1921–2005), one of the Black women who
worked as “human computers” at NASA during the space age alongside Kath-
erine Goble Johnson (1918–2020), portrayed by Taraji P. Henson, and Dorothy
Vaughan (1910–2008), portrayed by Octavia Spencer, in Theodore Melfi’s Hid-
den Figures (2016). Months before her star vehicle Antebellum premiered, Monáe
was also featured in a commercial for the New York Times’s 1619 Project (2019),
thus lending her support to the Pulitzer-Prize-winning special issue spearheaded
by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The 1619 Project is itself a reframing of history, suggesting as part of its
400th-anniversary commemoration that 1619 – the date marking the arrival of
the first Africans in captivity to the English colony of Virginia – reflects the
more accurate “founding” date of America instead of the recognized date of
1776. This 1619 moment – which ignores the earlier African presence in the
Spanish colonies of North America – is also about the Diaspora, in which these
captive Africans originated from the Ndongo region (present-day Angola) that
would be led a few years later by the fearless ruler Njinga Mbande (1583–1663),
a warrior queen who could be claimed as a Black protofeminist since she resisted
the gender binaries of her monarchical title and role and also saved her people
from falling victim to the transatlantic slave trade.14 Monáe’s appearance in the
1619 commercial, standing on the Virginia shoreline in a long and flowing white
dress, is evocative of a distant past within this diasporic framework.
This image is similar to the nude self-portrait, “The Goddess, Atlantic
Coast, Brooklyn,” by Nona Faustine, featured in her White Shoes series (2012),
which explores the merging of the artist’s body with sites of slave history, spe-
cifically located in what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “Black Atlantic.”15 Faus-
tine embodies Black women’s histories through geography and aesthetics – her
modern white dress shoes contrasting with her nude body laid out on the rocky
Brooklyn coast that recalls and reframes the enslaved Black body deposited
on the American shoreline through divine imagery akin to the rebirth of Af-
rican Venus. Likewise, Monáe erects on a different Black Atlantic coast her
own commemorative and futuristic monument to another Black goddess, as
captured in an Africanized Statue of Liberty (Figure 0.1) shown in her music
video for her single “Turntables” (2020), an original song for the documentary
film All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020), which is based on politician Sta-
cey Abrams and her fight against voter suppression among African Americans.
These commemorations inform the Black feminist imagination based in a dias-
poric history as well as an American national identity that reconnects with the
Black feminine divine.
Introduction 7
FIGURE 0.1 Video still from Janelle Monáe, “Turntables” (Emotion Picture), music
video (2020), directed by “Child,” from the Amazon Original Movie All
In: The Fight For Democracy (2020).
Interestingly, the 1619 Project’s thesis on the nation’s founding date led to
historical debates, as well as an attempt by the Donald J. Trump administration
to create a commission on “patriotic education” to refute such alternative narra-
tives of American history. While some historians debate the veracity of the claim
included in the 1619 Project – which argues that the American Revolutionary
War for independence was waged against Britain to preserve chattel slavery – the
patriotic education commission viewed this history project as a real threat to the
national narrative of American history and democracy, not simply because of
questionable evidence for its central argument but mainly because it suggested
that slavery is at the core of the nation’s founding. Hannah-Jones’s project chal-
lenged America’s origin story in ways that shocked the national memory. As the
late feminist historian Gerda Lerner once asserted: “To those in power, history
has always mattered.”16
Yet, the power of the counternarrative prevails, and those who wish to uplift
the lives of the oppressed are now required to reveal the truth of their lives. We
have official histories reflected in Smithsonian’s National Museum of African
American History and Culture, but the more popular histories reflected in pop-
ular culture also hold their own power. Damon Lindelof, the showrunner for
HBO’s Watchmen series (2019), an adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel,
immediately comes to mind. Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article, “The Case
for Reparations” (2014),17 which detailed the history of the Tulsa race massacre
of 1921 that destroyed the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood – also
dubbed “Black Wall Street” – Lindelof refitted this history as an “origin” story
for one of Watchmen’s superheroes, thus grounding and reworking the story
toward an African American narrative.
8 Introduction
The following year, showrunner Misha Green offered her own retelling of
the Tulsa massacre through her series adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft
Country, also for HBO (2020). Through these genres of speculative fantasy and
horror, audiences were able to digest painful histories set during the era of Jim
Crow without feeling that they were learning history with a capital H. More im-
portantly, such popular retellings propelled the Tulsa race massacre into national
discourse – from the search for mass graves in the city of Tulsa to nationwide
news coverage, presidential visits, and televised programming to mark the event’s
centennial during the Memorial Day weekend of 2021.
Lovecraft Country expanded beyond the Tulsa massacre to introduce its au-
dience to Black historical figures in different episodes. The spirits of Anarcha,
Betsy, and Lucy joined other victims of medical experiments to haunt a house
on the verge of desegregation. A friend of Emmett Till (1941–55) is spooked by
the grotesque racist stereotype of Topsy. A Black woman time-travels across the
universe in a quest to escape her confined role of wife and mother and find a
more empowering identity through the historical examples of Josephine Baker
(1906–75) and the Dahomey Amazons, while also replacing the missing arm of
her daughter – shriveled and disfigured by the Topsy creature – with an advanced
robotic arm from the future.
The last image seemingly alludes to Dana in Octavia Butler’s Kindred in
which, as Sami Schalk suggests, “disability is both presence and possibility, literal
embodiment and abstract threat/promise.”18 It is also a reminder that a distorted
and misshapen past can find wholeness in the as yet-to-be revealed future. In-
deed, the future transhuman self in Lovecraft Country, with its disruptive embod-
iment and disablement, may look more like a divine, magical rendering. Donna
Haraway once said, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,”19 but Afrofuturism
based in the Black feminist imagination insists that the cyborg and the goddess
are one and the same.
It is this conflation and fusion of past and future that makes the Black feminist
imagination compelling for historical consciousness. It also makes for a subver-
sive sacred narrative. As an active churchgoer who was raised in the Methodist
and Anglican/Episcopal traditions of Protestant Christianity – with forays into
Catholicism and the Black Baptist church and an open mind to various reli-
gious beliefs, including the secularism of atheism and agnosticism – I have always
maintained a deep interest in metaphysical knowledge and discourse. My invo-
cation of Black goddesses throughout this work reflects this intellectual exercise
as much as it also opens up space to widen my religious background to new ways
of revealing and interpreting the sacred.
Hence, the bookends to this work – the prelude and postlude – employ poetic
language, which as Audre Lorde once proclaimed, “poetry is not a luxury.”20 It
is the very economical and deliberate use of words to convey layers and depths
of meaning. Poetry is also the language of the divine. If the prelude begins with
the sound of a tongueless God, then the postlude closes on a “revelation” of Black
feminist divinity from the past and for the future, which precedes an epilogue
Introduction 9
that meditates on an apocalyptic “end of the world” advancing an Afrofuturistic

Black feminist imagination.
Within the pages of these bookends, I explore how historical consciousness
can recenter Black women as it derives its power through different elements
of history: religious lore (Chapter 1), art (Chapter 2), place (Chapter 3), icons
(Chapter 4), and rhetoric (Chapter 5). Chapter 1 unfolds in a multi-genre for-
mat, interweaving cinematic and playwrighting language with prose form to
invoke both the visual and the performative, as modeled in M. Nourbese Philip’s
“Dis Place: The Space Between.”21 I ruminate on the subject of Black feminist
divinity in ways that expand beyond a straightforward telling to capture the
non-linear and boundary-defying aspects of a divinity beyond Western secu-
larism. Opening on the lore of the origins of the Haitian Revolution – which
involves the lwa Ezili Dantor – I provide a genealogy of Black goddesses, who
crossed the Atlantic along with our enslaved ancestors, and situate their history
within contexts of revolution.
Chapter 2 juxtaposes two paintings in European art featuring the Black
women art models Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761–1804) and Made-
leine (dates unknown), the latter who was painted in Portrait d’une Négresse by
Marie-Guillemine Benoist (1768–1826). The chapter considers how these two
art subjects, who were previously unknown, emerged with full identities in con-
temporary Black feminist works. Chapter 3 shifts from art to architecture in
its examination of Gorée Island’s “House of Slaves” and its link to the more
obscure history of the domestic slave Venus Johannes (ca. 1770–1851), who was
eventually sold into slavery on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. Her history is
juxtaposed to the history of signares on Gorée, the mixed-race Afro-European
women who often maintained their wealth and power through interracial liai-
sons with European men. I argue in this chapter for a history that complicates the
mythical “door of no return” by recentering African women’s narratives.
While these African-descended women are lesser known, Chapter 4 focuses
on the iconic Harriet Tubman, who is analyzed in terms of her life history,
her iconicity, her photographs, her cultural relevance in popular culture, and
her eventual status on a future redesigned $20. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the
rhetoric of Black royalty and divinity in the African Diaspora. I especially in-
terrogate the imagery of Black queens and goddesses used by pop stars such as
Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Monáe, as well as other contemporary
music and visual artists. The invocation of “Black queens” attempts reclamations
of power through imaginary thrones via the Black feminist conjuring of a regal
and majestical past.
As disparate as these topics are, there are common threads holding them to-
gether, spun by ghosts from the Black Atlantic world haunting the margins:
from the Zong ship cargo in the ocean depths to the rebels and freedom seekers
to the African women called Venus crisscrossing ocean currents with lwas and
orishas bearing their names. In presenting these topics for meditation on histori-
cal consciousness, I attempt both an intersectional and diasporic approach to the
10 Introduction
Black feminist imagination. I write this book in the midst of global pandemic,
hence relying on a global and transnational perspective while necessarily operat-
ing locally. In writing during a crisis, I take inspiration from women of the past,
like Vodou priestess Marie Laveau (1801–81) and Harriet Tubman who both
did healing work during similar pandemics, as well as men like Isaac Newton
(1643–1727) and William Shakespeare (1564–1616) who, respectively, discovered
gravity and wrote complex tragedies when forced into social isolation during
their own experiences with pandemics.
I write knowing my life in the twenty-first century is made possible because
of those from the past who had ignited world-changing revolutions that rede-
fined for us the meanings of gender, race, class, sexuality, mobility, leisure, and
labor. This book has emerged because I have benefited from past social move-
ments that enabled me to write as a professional Black woman employed by a
university that allowed me to work from home, forced into social isolation yet
embarking on artistic introspection as I reconfigure distance-based social inter-
action via the connectedness of the electronic revolution. I write from a season of
hibernation, holding onto an eternal hope for a regenerative spring season, where
soon we will emerge from our isolated pods and assemble in large gatherings
with no restrictions and the ability to hug again.
I write with the memory of some of our enslaved ancestors who resided in
“loopholes of retreat” and also held out hope – as they had written in slave
narratives – to “breathe free air,” a desire for which we too must also hope.22
And not just for free but healthy, pollution-free air, breathed not just by humanity
but by all living organisms on this planet. The planet itself longs for free air.
I write about the past and historical consciousness when current circum-
stances required escape from the present. Subsequently, this book is already a
product of history. May it illuminate lessons for future generations with enough
sense to embrace historical consciousness made possible through a Black feminist
imagination.
PRELUDE
When God lost her tongue

she found other ways to speak
beyond words
through moans, shrieks, sighs,
the trace of laughter
carried in the wind or water’s surf
cackling in fire
or seeped in soil
shrouded in silence
she clamors for a kiss
Without her tongue
she slays with a mightier sword
transcribing the eternal
as she maps new worlds
with no mandate for conquest
DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554-2
1
A MEDITATION ON BLACK
FEMINIST DIVINITY
In the beginning there were no words.

In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
Invocation
They saw God in the blackness of night. They had called her name, and she
answered from the woods circling their ceremony to validate their quest for free-
dom. So, the story is told. So, the story is recalled. With variations, depending
on the storyteller. A gathering of enslaved Black people who went to the woods
to worship deliberately.
Like so many other enslaved communities forming “hush arbors” – much like
the “Clearing” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved1 – these devotees created a space of
resistance. Such space was needed to invoke their gods from the African moth-
erland without intrusion from their white enslavers. This particular gathering,
however, was a bit different. Not because it included women leaders – a common
occurrence among such communities throughout the African Diaspora 2 – but
because they ignited a revolution that changed the course of world history. It is
no small feat that, in such a shattering event, a Black feminine deity would lead
the way, one who – when tracing her elaborate genealogy – has a complex his-
tory and iconography.
This is the legend of Caiman Woods, or Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman), where
bondspeople on the island of Saint-Domingue – before it became Haiti (or Ayiti),
the first free Black republic in the world – participated in a Vodou worship cer-
emony; one of the leaders included a mambo (priestess) sometimes identified as
Cecile Fatiman, who sacrificed a black boar before the present company and gave
some of the blood from the animal sacrifice to rebel leader and oungan (priest)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429243554-3
A meditation on Black feminist divinity 13
Boukman Dutty to drink. The presence of the black boar indicates that the lwa
they had summoned was Ezili Dantor, a love goddess and protector of mothers,
women, children, and queer folk. As Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat once de-
scribed of Ezili/Erzulie: “She was the healer of all women and the desire of all
men.”3 She is also the mother of Haiti. According to local history, Ezili possessed
the mambo Fatiman and, through her, called on her devotees to rise up against
their enslavers and seize their freedom through bloodshed. So began the Haitian
Revolution on August 14, 1791.
Reclamation
Official histories are inclined to cast doubt on such stories. After all, the uprising
was demonized, the way the French told it, with its inversion of the Catholic
Holy Eucharist, an outright “parody” as religious scholar Elizabeth Pérez calls
it.4 Think of the oppositional consciousness: a priestess with the same authority
as a priest – the latter belonging to the exclusive order of male-only members
who may be ordained by God, according to the apostle Paul; the blood from a
non-kosher pig – at least from a Jewish context – instead of the sanctified blood
of Christ; and violent insurrection that reversed the order of slave-master rela-
tions. Certainly, no doctrine of “slave, obey your master!”
In accord with Vodou praxis, the black boar – a symbol of Ezili Dantor –
“would have become pork,” Pérez insists. “Women would have cooked it, after
seeing to its meticulous washing, skinning, and butchering” (334). These are the
sacred rites dismissed from official histories, dismissed perhaps because Black
women were in charge. No recording of their standards of cleanliness when in-
stead bloody rituals raise the specter of sullied blackness.
Because the tale is documented differently – orally from Haitian culture, ex-
aggerated written tales from white imperialist French culture – somewhere lies
the truth of the past. Subsequently, Bois Caiman is often written “outside of
history,” the way Hegel had written off the African continent.5 Situated in its
Caribbean geography, rife with colonial violence and revolutionary zeal, the
events of the Haitian Revolution are severed from the same radical impulse of
the American and French Revolutions. As Sibylle Fischer notes:
In the letters and reports of white settlers, the [Haitian] revolution is not a
political and diplomatic issue; it is a matter of body counts, rape, material
destruction, and infinite bloodshed. It is barbarism and unspeakable vio-
lence, outside the realm of civilization and beyond human language. It is
an excessive event, and as such, it remained for the most part confined to
the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, confidential letters, and
secret trials.6
It is precisely in its confinement to the margins of history that a project of rec-

lamation is imperative here, sifting through the silence where “there were no
14 A meditation on Black feminist divinity
words” and retrieving the sounds of history echoed through ritual ceremo-
nies, performativity, orality, and insurrection. Such sounds are muted by what
Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes as “the silencing of the revolution [which] was
strengthened by the fate of Haiti itself. Ostracized for the better part of the nine-
teenth century, the country deteriorated both economically and politically – in
part as a result of this ostracism … The revolution that was unthinkable became
a non-event.” 7 However, Marlene Daut complicates this silence, given the prolif-
eration of literature across the transatlantic world exploring the Haitian Revolu-
tion during and after this period, thus revealing that “these events were perhaps
less ‘silenced’ in literal terms than they were incessantly narrated in a particularly
‘racialized’ way that had the ultimate effect of subordinating the position of the
Haitian Revolution to the French and American revolutions.”8
In responding to this racialized discourse, how do we then reclaim a muted
history? When contemplating anti-colonial and/or postcolonial projects, Stu-
art Hall rightly asks, “Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial
experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden communities it
suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed – not the rediscovery but the
production of identity? Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the
retelling of the past?”9 What, in the retelling, might we produce with regard to an
identity based in anti-colonialism, Black feminism, and diasporic consciousness?
How does historical consciousness challenge or reinforce white imperialist and
patriarchal power embedded in this retelling? After all, the retelling of Bois Cai-
man, as Joan (Colin) Dayan argues, has become central to Haitians who “continue
to construct their identity not only by turning to the revolution of 1791 but by
seeking its origins in a [ceremony] quite possibly imagined by those who disdain
it.”10 The story of Bois Caiman may have derived from the colonial fever dream
of white settlers, but its rituals of desire resonate for those who are oppressed. In
connecting Bois Caiman to other religious gatherings throughout the Diaspora –
including the eighteenth-century creation of Nannytown, named for rebel leader
Nanny, by the Windward Maroons in Jamaica and the nineteenth-century cere-
monies led by Vodou priestess Marie Laveau on Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana –
Kameelah Martin reminds us that, historically, “the wilderness – the bayou, the
swamp, the bush – has served as the breeding ground for African religious syncre-
tization.”11 In the retelling of history, marginalized people engage in their own
history remix, in which radical possibilities emerge concerning freedom and its
links to nature, a Black feminine divine, and Black women’s leadership.
Often history derives its power from whether it is perceived as “truth” versus
a “lie,” depending on the storyteller. Signifying on the work of anthropologist
foremother Zora Neale Hurston who collected “big old lies” in Eatonville, Flor-
ida, Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us that men and colonial powers often “appro-
priate women’s power of ‘making material’ to themselves and, not infrequently,
corrupt it out of ignorance. The story becomes just a story. It becomes a good or
bad lie. And in the more ‘civilized’ contexts … women are replaced and excluded
from magico-religious functions.”12
Black magic women who invoke gods and conjure art are often excluded from
the annals of history and relegated to the realm of superstition. How else do we
undermine their oppositional discourse? What is that hard line drawn between
history’s realities and falsehoods? The goal of this chapter is not to blur that line
but, rather, to trace that line cautiously and surreptitiously in a bid to determine
how historical consciousness can politically and culturally awaken those in pres-
ent and future generations.
The goal is also to reclaim a historical presence, where only gaps and si-
lence prevail, or what Myriam Chancy calls a cultural lacuna when examining
Haitian women’s literature, by which she refers to “the absence that completes
the whole.”13 Such silences give way to the imagination, fueled by the sacred.
In this regard, Tinsley invokes Ezili as “the lwa who exemplifies imagination”
(2011, 424). Specifically, Ezili and her impact on the Haitian Revolution can be
reclaimed for the Black feminist imagination.
In Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexander calls for a transnational feminism that fully
integrates the Black feminist imagination – specifically with regard to the sacred –
if we are to include a wide array of women, especially those in the African
Diaspora, who have not eschewed their complex cosmologies. Indeed, this op-
positional worldview survived our enslaved ancestors’ traumatic experience of
the Middle Passage, the main conceptual metaphor of “crossing” that Alexander
engages in her critique. Vodou, which when translated means “spirit,” is one
manifestation of these ancestors’ cosmology with its complex system of material
and spiritual planes, the latter inhabited by lwas, our ancestors, and a supreme
deity. And yet, as Alexander notes, “African-based cosmological systems become
subordinated to the European cosmos … If Africa functions largely as an epis-
temic gap … then its cosmological systems cannot be made to figure legitimately
in (post)modernity’s consciousness and, therefore, cannot be availed to assist in
understanding the constitution and formation of self ” (297). It is within an Af-
rican context that Vodou cosmologies – where we find our powerful lwa Ezili –
are constituted and, subsequently, rendered incompatible with a modern femi-
nism invested in a secular worldview. However, what if an effective transnational
feminism, one rooted in the Black feminist imagination, were to redefine these
parameters? After all, as Gina Athena Ulysse argues, Vodou is often derided in
Western discourse (especially from Christian perspectives) and, therefore, must
be defended from what she calls “epistemic violence” stemming from “racialized
discourses … that continually demean blackness and its myriad manifestations in
order to extol the sanctity of whiteness.”14
When Haiti and its revolution – steeped in the iconography of Bois Caiman –
are negated as “the enfant terrible of the Americas [and] the world’s bête noire”
(Ulysse, 262), how do we reconcile this legacy of radicalism beyond the binary
of tradition and modernity? What new meanings of revolution might we hold?
Consider how revolutions, as historian Jane Rendall argues, “opened up the
possibilities of reshaping the social as well as the political order,” thus creating
space for late eighteenth-century European feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft,
Olympe de Gouges, and others responding to both the American and French
Revolutions to imagine “radical changes in the relationship between the sexes.”15
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1791, just as
Olympe de Gouges wrote Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
days after an Ezili-possessed mambo presided over the Bois Caiman ceremony.
Both Wollstonecraft and Gouges are recognized “founders” of modern feminist
theory, whose texts have emerged in response to the philosophical treatises on
natural rights, the social contract, and the state of the family as posited by John
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine, among others, during the
Age of Reason.
What if, in the complication of “rational” thought, a Black feminist imagi-
nation introduces the ir/rational premise of Ezili manifesting across space and
time to inspire and provoke revolutionary feminist thought leaders? What if the
Bois Caiman mambo were not the only woman she had possessed in 1791, much
like the Ezili character in Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction The Salt Roads in
her possession of different women from different eras and geographies? Placing
Wollstonecraft and Gouges in conversation with the mambo (possibly Cecile
Fatiman) via Ezili would be to force the issue of both gendered and racial lib-
eration in relation to modernity. Gouges had already contemplated the subject
when writing on the abolition of slavery in 1788. In reconfiguring such theories
of liberation across relational geographies, I am advocating for what Ella Sho-
hat calls a “relational feminism” that is “a situated practice in which histories
and communities are mutually complicated and constitutively related, open to
mutual illumination.”16 Elucidating further, Shohat suggests, “The point is to
place the often ghettoized discourses about geographies (‘here’ versus ‘there’) and
about time (‘then’ versus ‘now’) in illuminating dialogue. A relational approach,
one that operates within, between, and beyond the nation-state framework, calls
attention to the conflictual, hybrid interplay of communities within and across
borders.”17
The lwa Ezili is an apt conduit through which to cross these borders and en-
gage in relational dialogue. Her association with the sea when she manifests as
La Sirène situates her within a transatlantic discourse, indeed what Vèvè Clark
terms “diaspora literacy”18 and Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic.” Scholars and
practitioners recognize her similarities to other Black feminine deities of love,
beauty, sexuality, and wealth: Yoruba orishas like Oshún, a fertility and river
goddess whose colors are gold and yellow and whose ritual effects include fans,
mirrors, money, honey, and the peacock; and her older sister (sometimes mother)
Yemoja or Yemanja/Yemaya in Candomblé and Lucumi traditions, protector
of pregnant women and mother of many fishes and of the seven seas whose
colors are blue and white; even Mami Wata (or Mammy Water), a West Afri-
can mermaid whose worship was adapted across transatlantic routes in African,
European, and American contexts. Mami Wata, specifically, is described by Ifi
Amadiume as a “colonially derived” hybrid who offers both healing and afflic-
tion, who can “give her followers riches, but will deny them children.”19 Ezili’s
warrior counterpart would be the Yoruba orisha Oyá, also in Candomblé and
Lucumi, who is the goddess of war, stormy winds, and a guardian of the dead
donning the colors of the rainbow.
The Catholic manifestation is the Virgin Mary – specifically the Black
Madonna of Czestochowa who was rerouted to Saint-Domingue by Polish
soldiers conscripted in Napoleon’s war against the island before defecting to
the other side and whose image was adapted to represent Ezili Dantor.20 The
scratches that appear on Ezili’s cheek supposedly come from the battle scars of
the revolution, although the medieval Black Madonna image on which it is based
may have been disfigured by anti-Black crusaders seeking to erase her color. Ez-
ili’s iconographic journey is already multiracial and transnational.
However, Guérin Montilus suggests that Ezili is thoroughly African and may
have derived from the male spirit Azili, from the southern border between Benin
and Nigeria,21 thus reminding us of what Lisa Ze Winters calls “the ungender-
ing of the black body”22 in the male-to-female transition from Azili to Ezili;
whereas Tinsley suggests that the lwa – specifically for LGBTQ+ devotees who
believe it is she, and not “God,” who enabled their same-sex desire (2011, 426) –
confounds gender and sexuality and, therefore, represents the queering of a Black
Atlantic body that exists outside white Western parameters. Nonetheless, Dayan
argues that Ezili, or Erzulie, must be viewed as originating not from the African
continent but directly from “the soil of Haiti who has no precedent in Yoru-
baland or Dahomey. In her varying incarnations, her many faces, she bears the
extremes of colonial history. Whether the pale and elegant Erzulie-Fréda or the
cold-hearted, savage Erzulie-gé-Rouge, she dramatizes a specific historiogra-
phy of women’s experience in Haiti and throughout the Caribbean.”23 Indeed,
the different manifestations of Ezili – Ezili Dantor the fierce single (sometimes
same-sex desiring) Black mother; Ezili Fréda, the mixed-race coquette whose
heart (often visually represented with swords pierced through it), always gets
broken by lovers who don’t love her enough; La Sirène, the ambiguously raced
mermaid; Ezili-gé-Rouge, the fiery “red-eyed” angry Black woman; and Gran
Ezili, the wise elderly woman – reflect the complexities of a “women’s history of
Haiti,” from slavery and colonialism to revolution to occupation to the present
day. More than that, Ezili confounds women’s experiences, as Dayan argues the
following: “Called the lwa of love, Ezili demands that the word be reinvented”
(1998, 63).
Whether in the local context of Haiti or in the transnational context of the
Black Atlantic, Ezili transcends gendered, raced, and spiritual borders and forces
the issue of relational dialogue. In this way, Ezili represents paradoxes, as Dayan
suggests the lwa is known most for her resistance to duality: a goddess wor-
shipped by both sex workers and virgins and who accepts all genders in marriage.
She also speaks without speaking. As Ulysse reminds us about Ezili:
One of the most striking characteristics of this spirit is that she is incapable
of forming words. Her tongue had been cut during the Revolution. It is
disputed whether those who maimed her were French colonialists or her
own Haitian brethren. Either way, the belief was that she was too strong
a woman. In ceremonial spaces, when she appears, she is distinguishable
by her unintelligible speech. Utterances. Her power comes, not from her
words but from the fact that she dares to speak at all.
(275)
Ezili refuses silence even when she has lost her tongue. She also dances sensually –
another sign of the lwa, apart from the visual heart vèvè drawn in ceremonies.
Between sensual dancing and an incomprehensible tongue, these manifestations
of Ezili make her presence known when “riding” her devotees.24 In other words,
our African Gods may not form coherent words, but they just might twerk to
get their point across. A history archived in the Black body through “rituals of
memory” (Dayan 1998, 35).
Reconnection
“In the beginning there were no words,” only sound to which our bodies move,
and our tongues regurgitate. In the scene from which the epigraph opening this
chapter is taken, women encounter the eponymous character Beloved and try to
resist her force. Women speaking in and without tongues – much like Ezili –
to summon power in their tackling of a supernatural being. This entity, who may
be human or “much more,” as Sethe’s surviving daughter Denver surmises, is per-
ceived as violating the sharp binaries between living and dead, spirit and flesh, past
and present, parent and child. As such, her presence confounds the women, and
they, in turn, must ready themselves for spiritual battle: “Some brought what they
could and what they believed would work. Stuffed in apron pockets, strung around
their necks, lying in the space between their breasts. Others brought their Chris-
tian faith – as shield and sword. Most brought a little of both” (Morrison, 257).
The “little of both” informs the syncretic faith praxis steeped in the Black
feminist imagination. In this way, Morrison constructs what W.E.B. DuBois
calls “double consciousness”25 – or “marasa consciousness,” as Clark posits, based
on the twin energies in Vodou cosmology – within Black critical thought and
its engagement with the Black feminine divine, which is one way to interpret
Beloved. The ghost of a murdered toddler baby, whom both Sethe and Denver
believe she represents, becomes an inverted Christlike figure who negates the
hope of Christmas and echoes the “Slaughter of Innocents.” Her return from
the dead is a monstrous re-visitation of the worst memories of slavery for their
formerly enslaved community, bearing no joy in the resurrection. The women
may have exorcised Beloved from their midst, but unlike Christ who ascends
into the heavens with his apostles as eyewitness, no one bears witness to how
she descends back into the deep from whence she came, her lingering presence
detected in the woods and through a glimpse of “a naked woman with fish for
hair” (Morrison, 267). An exiled goddess can only be found in the hidden ter-
rain of nature, in the space before there were words.
Like Ezili, Beloved demands that she “be loved,” that she be remembered,
named, and claimed. Emerging from the water in her elaborate dress, craving
sweet things, this love goddess is repressed memory erupting unexpectedly,
powerful enough to force hardened men like Paul D to reveal his “red heart”
and fierce mothers like Sethe to repent for her “too thick” love. The paradox of
not loving enough or loving too much, to the point of killing one’s daughter to
save her from slavery, is captured in the novel’s epigraph – “I will call them my
people, which were not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved” –
and in Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing: “Yonder they do not love your flesh.
Yonder they flay it. You got to love it. You!”
The call to love that which is not loved – Black flesh, Black embodiment –
is the call to what James Cone terms a Black liberation theology,26 which opens
up a site of resistance as radical as the Bois Caiman call to freedom: to love one-
self and to free that self, love enough to kill. The novel’s epigraph is already lay-
ered, first as a reference to Paul’s letter to the Romans, which is itself a citation
from the minor prophet Hosea. In this way, Morrison’s doubled exponential
meaning – like the haunted house numbered “124” – is a reminder to peel away
at layers, to dig deeper into language, to find the origin of words and before the
words. A “rememory,” or reconnection to what came before and “is still there.”
So too is the epigraph to this chapter layered with meaning. Already steeped
in theological language, Morrison alludes to the Gospel according to John: “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.” This verse is itself an allusion to the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was without form and
void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hover-
ing over the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light.” In
this Judeo-Christian story, the spirit of God transcends the primordial waters of
a “formless” and “chaotic” earth, over which his power to speak generates order
and light, the beginning of Enlightenment.
This power to speak, to name, and to generate light recalls the power of nommo
in Afro-Diasporic religions, which refers to the divine power of words and nam-
ing to manifest into being. It also parallels the Age of Enlightenment manifesting
white masculine power and conquest over women, and Black women specifi-
cally, who are shunned from these sites of power or, in the role of the formless/
chaotic waters of earth, the site on which to conquer, to colonize, and generate
order and control. Peeling away the layers of this Judeo-Christian tale of creation
is an earlier Babylonian myth of the Enuma Elish, in which the patriarchal sky
god Marduk destroys the water dragon goddess Tiamat, whose mutilated body is
used to create the heavens and the earth. This is the beginning of the destruction
of the Goddess, as feminist thealogians/the*logians have recollected. Specifi-
cally, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that the body of the Goddess becomes
the site on which to create matter (dead matter/mater/mother) and on which her
powers are annihilated and then appropriated.27
During the period of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s,
second-wave feminists challenged patriarchy in every institution, including
religion. Mary Daly, for instance, called for theologians to move “beyond God
the Father.”28 Creatively, Alice Walker – whose coinage of “womanist” inspired
Black women to embrace womanist theology – made similar arguments in her novel
The Color Purple, when the sexually liberated blues singer Shug Avery convinces
the main protagonist Celie that “God ain’t a he or a she but an it” that “love all
them feelings” (referencing sexual pleasure).29 Celie, who had been writing let-
ters to God about her private experience with incest and domestic abuse, wrestles
with this theological conflict when attempting, as Shug urges her, to “conjure up
flowers, wind, water, a big rock” in lieu of the old white man that had served as
a stand-in for “God the Father.” As Celie admits, “Every time I conjure a rock, I
throw it” (Walker 1982, 201).
If Walker attempts to uproot the patriarchal deity with pure spirit and nature,
other Black feminists like Ntozake Shange offers the divine self in its place, as
she suggests in her celebrated choreopoem for colored girls who have considered su-
icide/when the rainbow is enuf: “i found god in myself & i loved her/ i loved her
fiercely.”30 Elaborating on this divine image infused with nature and Black femi-
nine embodiment, Shange writes in A Daughter’s Geography: “we need a god who
bleeds / spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet / thick & warm
like the breath of her.”31 This move toward identifying the Black goddess is in
keeping with Audre Lorde’s own poetic reclamations of erotic same-sex desire
in her embrace of the African trickster goddess Afrekete, the feminine precursor
to the Yoruba trickster orisha Eshu Elegba, who enables communication with
other orishas/lwas and who lives at the crossroads, the intersection between the
material and the spiritual. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, her “biomy-
thography,” Lorde rediscovers the divine both through herself and her sexual
encounter with another woman, whom she calls Afrekete: “Afrekete, ride me to
the crossroads where we shall sleep, coated in the woman’s power.”32
It is this self-revelatory embrace of the divine that caused her to be critical of
Daly, in an open letter, when the radical white feminist failed to envision god-
dess imagery beyond her Eurocentric gaze. Lorde thus reprimands Daly for “the
assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and
sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background”
(1984, 69). To reclaim a Black feminine divine is not just to move away from
heteropatriarchal power but to reconnect to an ancient memory unfettered by
white imperialist history.
It is that ancient memory that Toni Morrison invokes in this chapter’s ep-
igraph: a reminder that before there were words, or the Word, there was first
sound. The big bang. The Ooh and Oh of awe and pleasure. A newborn baby’s
cry. A laboring woman’s wordless groans as her water breaks. Before there were
words, there was water, dark, formless, and deep. In the documentary The Pieces I
Am, Morrison describes her struggle to write Beloved, doing so during the witch-
ing hours before dawn and gazing out on the river surrounding her home. It is
here that she sees a ghostly woman that inspired the first words she wrote for the
novel: “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water.”33
Could this be Ezili or Oshún or Yemaya or Mami Wata? The powerful love
goddess appearing like Botticelli’s Venus, or in more Afro-Christian terms, a
baptized woman “born again” like a resurrected and redeemed woman? This
may very well be the ancient image of the primordial goddess of the waters:
Tiamat who will later become Inanna, Ishtar, Hathor, Isis, Venus, Mary (whose
name means “sea”).
The Black feminine divine ascends to our material plane as memory, water-
as-memory, trauma, history, and the forgotten that refuses to be forgotten. She
is Beloved. She is also the monstrous mother in Lake Ontario in Nalo Hopkin-
son’s Sister Mine, or the drowned “Children of the Sea” and the slain mothers
of Massacre River in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! She is the queer manifestation in
Ana-Maurine Laure’s Erzulie’s Skirt, giving succor and comfort to the most mar-
ginalized survivors – same-sex desiring women trafficked across the Caribbean
Sea or captive Africans in the Middle Passage. Of course, in either scenario, the
victim remembers love in the midst of great pain, reaching out for what Gloria
Wekker identifies as “mi mati,”34 the Surinamese queer term for “my girl”; or as
Tinsley reminds us, literally “my shipmate”:
[She] who survived the Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of ex-
perience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial
chronicles, oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive Afri-
can women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated
holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing,
they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling
and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships.35
In the most horrific and nightmarish of circumstances, love finds a way. It is

certainly fitting, within the space of water on which slave ships crossed, that the
iconography of water-dwelling love goddesses loomed large in the memories of
captive Africans who reached the Americas. “I am in the water and she is com-
ing” is the plaintive cry of Beloved, the lingering “rememory” of the Middle
Passage (Morrison, 213).
In the transition from a Black feminine deity to a Black feminist divinity, this
worldview insists on recuperating the most marginalized and the most profane
parts of our humanity and reclaiming these parts for the sacred. I will call her be-
loved who was not beloved. A Black feminist divinity necessarily complicates both
the human and divine conditions. She also refuses binaries, much like the omnis-
cient narrator of the long forgotten but recovered Gnostic Gospel Thunder: The
Perfect Mind – “I am the First and the Last / I am the honored one and the scorned
one / I am the whore and the holy one” – recorded as an opening monologue for
Julie Dash’s cinematic masterpiece Daughters of the Dust (1991), which embraces
the multifaceted and contradictory aspects of Black womanhood while filming
in its opening shots the elemental scenes of a dark-skinned woman holding dust
in her hands or washing fully dressed before walking out of the water.
A grounding in the earth, a memory of the womb. This is the cinematic chal-
lenge to link the Black female body with divine nature. To see and envision Black
feminist divinity through the lens of a Black feminist imagination.
Restoration
1. EXT. OCEAN. ETERNITY.
A tranquil breeze softly stirs the blue surface of the ocean. In the distance, the sun dramat-
ically moves through the sky, from sunrise to sunset to nighttime, before rising again and
repeating the cycle. The speeded-up time lapse gives the effect of an endless eternity.
NARRATOR – Off-screen Voice
In the beginning was water. And above the water was the spirit of God.
And the water was God.
2. EXT. OCEAN FLOOR. ETERNITY.
Deeper and deeper, below the ocean’s surface, we reach the ocean floor. A genderless entity
is detected lying prostrate, face down, on the ocean’s floor, the lower torso resembling a
whale while the upper torso resembles a dark-skinned human. This being, with dreadlocks
resembling seaweed, turns over before slowly opening heavy-lidded eyes as if awaking from
deep sleep.
NARRATOR – Off-screen Voice (cont’d)
In the waters of the ocean, she saw her own reflection and asked,
“Who is that beautiful woman? I thought I was the prettiest in all the world!”36
Floating above this entity is a dark-skinned feminine figure with the same seaweed dread-
locks, clothed in white and blue flowing robes. She wears a white crown on her head, with
long white beads shielding her face. She cradles her pregnant belly while gliding up, up, up
toward the ocean’s sunlit surface.
And as she looked on that woman there came a rumbling in her belly, and it
grew and grew until it exploded and covered the land with lakes, rivers, and
streams. (Ibid)
This crowned and veiled deity goes into labor and hastily breathes out bubbles in the water,
which rapidly increase, forming a colossal wave on the surface.
3. EXT. RIVER. DAY.
A flowing river gleams in sunlight. The river below surface teems with life, including
various fish and other organisms. Above surface, a shimmering reflection of the crowned
and veiled deity is detected in the waters, distorted by the sun’s rays. The river fades into
a montage of nature scenes: The roaring rapids of a mighty river spilling into the heavy
steam of a thunderous waterfall; a geyser erupting its hot water and steam into the air;
the steady downpour of rain in a lush forest; and the crack of lightning illuminating the
night sky.
4. EXT. SKY. NIGHT.
The night is awash with glowing stars. A full moon beams against the dark sky.
5. INT. BEDROOM. NIGHT.
A dark-skinned woman in a white frock and white headscarf stands by an open window at
night, peering up serenely at the full moon while cradling her pregnant belly. She suddenly
goes into labor as her water breaks and floods the floor around her feet.
6. EXT. BEACH/OCEAN. DAY.
The feet of dozens of women edge their way toward the shoreline of a tropical beach. These
cis- and trans Black and Brown women and girls, wearing white, wade through the water
offering flowers and song to the Mother of the Sea.
In the ocean, she saw her own reflection and asked,
“Who are you beautiful women? I thought I was the prettiest in all the world!”
The women looked deep into her eyes and there they saw their own reflections.
“You are us, and we are you!” (Ibid)
Below in the ocean’s depths, we once again encounter our crowned and veiled deity. The
ocean’s deep waters glow a blue-green color with bioluminescence from plankton; a pool
of fish surrounding this deity rapidly swims into view before transforming into a band of
dark-skinned mermaids, whose seaweed dreadlocks resemble the deity’s. The devotees above
surface continue wading in the water in song and praise. Below in the ocean deep, the
crowned and veiled deity rises up, her hand outstretched. Above her is a dark-skinned and
short-haired woman who resembles the moon watcher from the previous scene, now appear-
ing naked and in shackles. She floats in the water in fetal position, her chains extending
like an umbilical cord while the shackles around her neck, wrists, and feet weigh heavily like
crowned jewels. She opens her eyes and sees the crowned and veiled deity below her. She too
reaches out her shackled hands. She struggles to reach the hand of the deity. Eventually, the
chain and shackles fall off, slowly drifting down to the ocean floor. The crowned and veiled
deity swims up to the ocean’s surface.
7. EXT. OCEAN’S SURFACE. EVENING.
An underwater figure surfaces above water. It is the moon watcher, now unchained and
unshackled, gasping for air. She then relaxes as she floats on her back, looking up serenely
at the colorful sky at dusk, which gradually darkens into the night sky filled with stars.
8. EXT. ATLANTIC OCEAN. NIGHT.
A slave ship sails across the ocean, illuminated by a full moon, which is especially bright.
9. EXT. THE MOON. ETERNITY.
On the moon’s cratered surface, our crowned and veiled deity now stands, this time in se-
quined golden robes, beads and crown, still cradling her pregnant belly. She is now exiled
from the earth – shining in the black sky – and withholding her gifts of life and love from
the planet while she resides in outer space. Her bare feet are planted firmly on the gray
moon surface. Her blackness is magnificent against the moon’s black atmosphere, her figure
illuminated by supernatural blue lighting. She gazes up at the earth.
10. EXT. EARTH RISING. TIME SHIFTS.
Our earth shines like a blue ball in the distance. From deep space, we get a closer view of
the earth before speed-zooming down through the layers of atmosphere, through clouds, and
down, down, down to the coastal landscape of West Africa, which glows at sunset before
darkening into night.
11. INT. SLAVE DUNGEON. NIGHT.
The full moon shines through a high open window of a dungeon used to hold captives for
the transatlantic slave trade. The dark-skinned woman we had seen watching the moon in
a previous scene, and who had reached out to the crowned and veiled deity, now lies asleep
on the dungeon floor, illuminated by moonlight. She is again naked and in shackles. The
ocean’s surf is audible.
12. EXT. OCEAN FLOOR. TIME WARP.
Lying prostrate on the ocean floor is the half-whale deity from an earlier scene. Upon closer
inspection is a polluted ocean floor, overwhelmed by the debris of human consumption –
including a buried ship. A realism unfolds to contrast with the magic of earlier scenes.
FADE TO BLACK
Reformation
Within African cosmology, as elsewhere, “God” as a concept is so incom-
prehensible that this ultimate consciousness necessarily exists beyond the im-
agination. Such a supreme being remains inaccessible, hence the reliance on
intermediate spirits and their association with elements of nature. Within a
Judeo-Christian worldview, this supreme being is separate from nature: one
who hovers over the waters, not identified with the water. How then do we
visualize or imagine that which is beyond the imagination? Both African and
indigenous American worldviews suggest that nature in our material plane is

the spiritual gateway.
In his critically acclaimed film The Tree of Life (2011), Terrence Malick cat-
alogues scenes of nature and the cosmos to invoke a distant Judeo-Christian
“Creator” and his indifferent response to suffering, as the epigraph to the film
cites from the Book of Job, the ultimate sufferer who is disdained for his human
insignificance when confronted by the grandeur of a cosmic and immortal de-
ity: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … When the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” A contrast-
ing cinematic thesis unfolds in Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, which captures the
spiritual force of the sea connecting the Gullah islands off the coast of Georgia
and South Carolina and channeling the energies of “saltwater Africans.” The
film’s protagonist Yellow Mary – finely dressed in all white and described in
the notes of Dash’s screenplay as Yemaya, mother of the sea – communes on the
beach by herself or with her lover Trula, identified as Oshún in her trademark
yellow.37 In this sea, African Gods absorb our pain, not indifferent to it, as in
the retelling of “Ibo Landing” – adapted from Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the
Widow – in which slave-ship captive Africans refused the new life awaiting them
in the Americas, collectively returning to the waters, which would take them
“home,” as in Africa, as in the ancestral plane.
Taking obvious inspiration from these films is Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016),
which makes explicit an African worldview similar to Daughters of the Dust, as our
pop star nose-dives into the underwater world, after a suicidal jump, where she
encounters a version of herself asleep like La Sirène before she resurrects on the
material plane as a yellow-clad, elegantly dressed Oshún, smiling her coquette
smile and destroying everything in her wake. This orisha resurfaces again in her
Disney-sponsored audio-visual project Black is King (2020), in which Beyoncé
– as Oshún, as Yemaya, as Mami Wata, as the Black Madonna – dwells near or
within the ocean and rivers. These are manifestations of Black feminist divinity
reflected in the mirrors of otherworldly water, a veil that separates the spiritual
and material planes. In Yemaya’s creation story, as Yoruba priestess Luisah Teish
tells it and as cited in my brief twelve-scene script above, God is the creation,
doing the difficult work of self-reflection and birthing herself into being: first
as ocean water, then rivers, then the stars and moon, and finally women whose
bodies keep rhythm to the moon and tide. This is the primal watery, womblike
image of a Black goddess multiplying herself, seeing herself in her mirror (a tool
of Ezili, Oshún, and Yemaya), for sometimes we have to envision that which we
cannot imagine.
Chicago-born artist Harmonia Rosales ruffled more than a few feathers when
she attempted such a vision as she signified on Michelangelo’s masterpiece, The
Creation of Adam, to visualize the Black feminist divine in her reinterpretative
painting, The Creation of God. Part of a series (2017) sardonically titled B.I.T.C.H.
(Black Imaginary to Counter Hegemony), Rosales’s artwork simply inverts divine im-
agery: Black womanhood in lieu of white manhood, and even, as her title suggests,
the work of the Black feminist imagination in reimagining God. This, of course, is
similar to what womanist theologian Katie Geneva Cannon calls Black liberation
theology’s “reimaging” of Christianity, which she believes was “necessary in order
to redeem it from the desecrated imagery of white Christians who snatched black
Africans from Africa in slave ships named Jesus, Mary, Liberty, John the Baptist, and
Justice.”38 In a different reimaging, Rosales invokes “bitch” as a reclamation of a
gender slur that harkens back to an earlier history of witches who kept female pets,
including dogs and cats, which stems from their worship of such Greco-Roman
goddesses as Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt and wild or domestic ani-
mals, and Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and magic, who were both depicted as
wolves. The original “son of a bitch,” according to Barbara Walker,39 was a devo-
tee of these goddesses. Indeed, Diana was often depicted as Black, sometimes with
African features, within ancient art that used dark stone to visualize this goddess.40
In the spirit of this reimaging, Rosales gives birth to God as a Black woman,
which to her “makes sense” when considering that “all of human life came out
of Africa, the Garden of Eden and all.”41 Rosales also offers a different signifi-
cation in the B.I.T.C.H. series with her reworking of Sandro Botticelli’s The
Birth of Venus through the insertion of African cosmology in The Birth of Oshún
that celebrates Black beauty. This gestures toward what Raquel Z. Rivera calls
“liberation mythology,” which concerns “the use of spirit-based myth making
as a component of political action.”42 For Rosales, replacing the Greco-Roman
Venus with the African-derived Oshún – replete with splashes of her trademark
yellow and peacock feathers – is part of her own political action to ensure that
girls like her daughter are able to see themselves reflected in art while invoking
her Afro-Cuban heritage (Ruiz 2018).
Both The Creation of God and The Birth of Oshún invert spiritual paradigms. But
is this enough of a shift? Are there other ways to move beyond a flip-the-script ren-
dering of classical paintings? Apart from the replacement of a white male god with
a Black female one, what if the worldview shifts completely, in which a downward
focus on divinity is possible? Where we envision not the heavens painted on the
Sistine Chapel but ocean waters of the deep, drawn in chalk vèvès on the ground,
an earthbound sacred vision of God on a watery throne dreaming up new worlds
like the Vodou lwa Agwé or the Yoruba orisha Olokun or the Hindu god Vishnu,
surrounded not by angels (gendered masculine) but instead mermaids (gendered
feminine), themselves hybrid forms of the oldest living organisms on the planet.
While the late mythologist Joseph Campbell43 interpreted fish-like creatures as
representing our basest nature from which we must transcend, another interpre-
tation is possible: that of the return to our original form, a rebirth that is its own
transcendence. When contemplating this watery sphere, what would that Creation
of God look like? It may look like the birth of Oshún, or Mami Wata, or Ezili-la-
Sirène, or Yemaya birthing herself. Tiamat again rears her dragon head.
Perhaps Tiamat’s water dragon, that most ancient of deities, survives as our
mermaids of lore. Given the cultures of the Caribbean – not just in the prolifera-
tion of water spirits from Vodou and Lucumi but also in the sea-faring adventures
of pirates, sailors, merchants, and explorers like Christopher Columbus, who

once described seeing three mermaids off the coast of Hispaniola (now Haiti and
the Dominican Republic) – the mermaid is a useful framework for liberation
mythology. Indeed, her very hybridity as half-human, half-fish serves as a cru-
cial nexus between land and sea as well as cultures and races colliding in these
transatlantic encounters. This certainly occurred when the mermaid stories from
Europe, Africa, and Native America syncretized to give African water goddesses
like La Sirène, Mami Wata, and Yemaya mermaid forms in iconography.
It is not coincidental that Afro-Caribbean mermaids tend to be mixed race.
They also tend to disrupt binaries in their gender fluidity. Such queer reimag-
inings are captured even in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1836 fairy tale The Little
Mermaid, a story of unrequited love – very much in the realm of Ezili. Andersen
had allegedly fallen in love with another man who belonged to an elite class.44
The Little Mermaid therefore serves as an allegory for the pain of unrequited love
and unbridgeable differences, since Andersen’s beloved cut ties with him to enter
a socially approved heterosexual marriage.
In Andersen’s tale, our little mermaid does not get her prince. Instead, she, as
a queer symbol, has her tongue cut out – much like Ezili – rendered silent by a
sea witch in exchange for human legs that bleed each time she walks on them in
order to be with a human prince who lives on land. Despite this painful and gory
sacrifice of unsuccessful assimilation, our heroine endures the heartbreak of her
prince, whose life she had saved when out at sea, marrying another woman from
his own class. The heroics in the tale concern the little mermaid being offered a
chance to return to the sea to her family and to get her tongue back, if she would
only pierce a sword through the heart of her beloved. She chooses instead to spare
his life, and so she fades away from existence into sea mist. Into the realm of the
deep, where exiled goddesses are long buried and repressed from memory.
This allegory of unbridgeable differences relocates to the Caribbean in Trin-
idadian young adult author Rosa Guy’s My Love, My Love, or the Peasant Girl.
Guy’s revisionist story appeared four years before Disney’s animation of The Little
Mermaid (1989) and was adapted a year after the animation film into the Broad-
way musical Once on This Island. Guy infused Andersen’s tale with a Caribbean
sensibility even before Disney’s film with its calypso tunes “Under the Sea” and
“Kiss the Girl.” Disney of course chooses a happy ending in which its heroine,
named Ariel, gets her prince.
Offering a postcolonial rift on Andersen’s tale, Guy instead sets her story
on the island of Haiti, where her dark-skinned peasant heroine, Desiree Dieu-
Donne, falls in love with a young light-skinned Creole man of an elite class,
whose life she saves. The magical elements of Andersen’s tale are replaced with
a pantheon of Vodou gods, including Erzulie, who warns Desiree of the doom
of unrequited love. Desiree, too, meets a tragic end when her lover marries a
woman of a similar color and class. The beloved who was not beloved.
With the promise of a Disney live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, star-
ring Halle Bailey – a protégé of Beyoncé who had already appeared in the
pop star’s Oshún-invoking Lemonade – we will get our first Black dreadlocked
“Disney princess” mermaid in cinema. However, we need more than a Black
princess. We need Black liberation mythology. We need a Black feminist
imagination.
Performing with the rap group The Clipping, Daveed Diggs – who will voice
the character Sebastian the Crab in this Disney remake – gave us the Hugo
Award-nominated rap song “The Deep” (2017), an homage to Drexciya, a
Detroit-based electronic duo who created for their album The Quest (1997) the
Afrofuturistic story of “Drexciya” as an advanced hi-tech underwater world pop-
ulated by the descendants of pregnant African captive women thrown overboard
from slave ships. Drexciya as both a mythical world and an ancestral plane has
since been explored in Simon Rittmeier’s short film of the same name (2012),
Rivers Solomon’s science fiction novel The Deep (2019), and artist Ayana V.
Jackson’s Take Me to the Water series (2019). It is also captured in Gabrielle Tes-
faye’s stop-motion animation The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018) in which
Tesfaye utilizes cut-out prints and sketches from historical documents on the
transatlantic slave trade and imaginative drawings of orishas to envision Yemaya
rescuing drowned African cargo as she transforms them into mermaids.
In plunging ocean’s depths of the Black Atlantic, we find the Black imagi-
nation giving way to what Robin D.G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams,”45 where
time disrupts notions of past and future, as Afrofuturism often blurs these lines,
and where we can imagine ancestors who were never in chains or who managed
to escape the burdensome slave past. Whether as Ibo Landing or Drexciya, the
dream remains deeply fixed to the realm of our watery lwas. A different dream
takes place in Faith Ringgold’s We Came to America (1997) from the American
Collection series, a story quilt painting of the Middle Passage that depicts our
enslaved ancestors out at sea, as dreamed by Ringgold’s doppelganger Marlena
Truth Simon, a fictional character.46
In this profound work of historical memory (Figure 1.1), the scene of a slave
ship in the background set on fire by the torch of liberty held up by the Statue
of Liberty in the foreground dramatically unfolds against the bright sun in the
distance, while dozens of captive Africans appear in the ocean. This artwork re-
verses the history of drowned Africans in J.M.W. Turner’s iconic Slave Ship (Slav-
ers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840), which
depicts the brutal story of the 1781 Zong massacre, where slavers tossed over-
board more than 130 dead and diseased captives in a bid to claim insurance on
cargo worth more dead than alive. While Turner memorializes the captive Afri-
cans who never made it to the Americas – reimagined in Afrofuturism as giving
birth to the population of Drexciya – Ringgold instead evokes Ibo Landing, as
her daughter and art critic Michele Wallace argues:
Ringgold reconceives this harrowing experience as a triumphant revela-

tion in which the slaves manage to escape the ship and walk on the wa-
ter, which could also figure as a reference to the many African American
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on which those citizens have granted power to that legislature to
command them.
That we may intelligently so insist, and that our insistence may be
made in the proper place and at the proper time, let us briefly
consider on what subjects, in the making of our Constitution, our
predecessors, as American citizens, granted their enumerated
national powers to our only government of all Americans. Like those
predecessors, assembled in their conventions, we find all those
enumerated powers in the First Article of the Constitution proposed
from Philadelphia.
In substance they are the war power; the power of making treaties;
the power of regulating commerce between ourselves and all people
outside of America and between the citizens of the different states;
the power of taxation; and all other incidental and supplementary
powers necessary to make laws in the execution of these
enumerated and granted powers.
Noticeably absent from these enumerated powers granted to the
only general government of the citizens of America is that power,
then existing and still in the national government of each nation or
state, known (rather inaccurately) as the police power or the power
to pass any law, in restraint of individual human freedom, reasonably
designed, in the judgment of that particular legislature, to promote
the general welfare of its own citizens. It seems hardly necessary, at
this moment, to refer to the innumerable decisions of the Supreme
Court that such power was not among those enumerated and
granted to the American government by its citizens. It was solely
because such power had definitely not been granted by them to it
that the government of the American citizens made its famous
proposal that a portion of such power, in relation to one subject, be
granted to it in the supposed Eighteenth Amendment of our
Constitution.
As a matter of fact, the police power of any government is really all
its power to pass any laws which interfere with the exercise of
individual freedom. In that respect, the American people made a
marked distinction between the quantum of that kind of power which
they granted to their one general national government and the
quantum they left in the national government of the citizens of each
state. The quantum they granted to their own government was
definitely enumerated in the First Article. On the other hand, except
for the limitations which they themselves imposed upon the
respective governments of each state, they left the citizens of each
state to determine what quantum the government of that state should
have.
In other words, the police power of the American Congress is
strictly limited to the enumerated powers of that kind granted by the
citizens of America. And, although the fact does not seem to be
generally known, it is because the First Article vests in the sole
Legislature of the whole American people nothing but enumerated
powers to interfere with the freedom of the individual American that
our American government has received its universal tribute as a
government of nothing but enumerated powers over a free people,
who are its citizens.
In the Constitution are provisions in separate Articles for the
three great departments of government,—legislative,
executive, and judicial. But there is this significant difference
in the grants of powers to these departments: the First Article,
treating of legislative powers, does not make a general grant
of legislative power. It reads: “Article one, section one. All
legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a
Congress,” etc.; and then, in Article 8, mentions and defines
the legislative powers that are granted. By reason of the fact
that there is no general grant of legislative power it has
become an accepted constitutional rule that this is a
government of enumerated powers. (Justice Brewer, in the
Supreme Court, Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U. S. 46.)
Among the national powers, which are enumerated in the First
Article, there is one which (whenever operative) approximates the
extensive police power of a state government to interfere with the
freedom of its citizens. That is the war power of the Government of
America. As the purpose of the Constitution of the American
Government is to protect the freedom of the American and as such
freedom needs effective protection from foreign attack, the
Americans of that earlier generation made the war power of their
government almost as unlimited as that of a despotic government. All
history and their own human experience had taught them that the
war power, if it was to be effective for their protection, must be
practically unlimited. If we grasp this extent of the American war
power, we realize why our sole American government, without the
grant of a new national power to it, could validly enact what we know
as the War Time Prohibition Statute, although without such a new
grant, it was powerless to enact what we know as the Volstead Act
or National Prohibition for time of peace. It is because the citizens of
each state, in their Constitution of their national government, had
given to it a general (although specifically limited) ability to interfere
with their own human freedom in most matters, that each state
government could validly make prohibition laws for its own citizens. It
is because the American citizens had not given to their government
any such general ability to interfere with their freedom, that the
American Government, for any time except that of war, could not
validly enact National Prohibition for the American people without a
new grant of a new national power directly from its own citizens. In
the days of those earlier Americans, the legal necessity of deriving
such power directly from the American citizens themselves was “felt
and acknowledged by all.” In our day, among our leaders and our
“constitutional” lawyers, there was none so humble as to know or
honor this basic legal necessity.
The other enumerated national powers, which American citizens
ever gave their national government, are few in number, although
they vested a vast and necessary ability in that government to
protect the freedom of its citizens and promote their happiness and
welfare by laws in certain matters. For our present purpose, they
need only be mentioned. They require no present explanation. They
are the power to make all treaties with foreign nations or
governments; the power to regulate commerce, except the
commerce within any one particular state; and the power of taxation.
Having now some accurate conception of the limited and specific
quantum of national power which American citizens consented to
grant in those earlier days, it is pertinent to our inquiry, as to whether
we (their posterity) have again become subjects, to dwell briefly
upon the reluctance with which they made even those grants. In
considering that attitude, it is essential always to keep in mind the
status of the citizens of each state, at that time, and their relation to
their own national government and the relation of each state to the
federal government of all the states. Under the existing system of
governments, the citizens of each state were subject to no valid
interference whatever with their own individual freedom except by
laws of a legislature, every member of which they themselves
elected and to which they themselves granted every power of such
interference which that legislature could validly exercise. To those
free men in those free states, men educated in the knowledge of
what is real republican self-government, these two facts meant the
utmost security of their human rights. No government or
governments in the world, except their own one state government
could interfere at all directly with those rights, and they had given to,
and they could take from, that government any power of that kind. As
for the respective states and the relation of each to the federal
government of all, each state had an equal voice in the giving to or
taking from that government any federal power and each had an
equal voice, in the federal legislature, in exercising each valid federal
power. These existing facts, respectively of vast importance to the
citizens of each state and to its government, influenced, more than
any other facts, the framing of the new Articles, particularly the First
Article, at Philadelphia and the opposition to those Articles in the
conventions in which the people of America assembled.
The First Article, as we know it, starts with the explicit statement
that all national powers, which are granted by Americans in that
Constitution, are granted to the only American legislature, Congress.
It then provides how the members of each of the two bodies in that
legislature shall be elected. It then enumerates the granted powers,
confining them to specific subjects of interference with the human
freedom of the American citizen. It then, for the particular security of
that human freedom, imposes specific restraints upon that legislature
even in the exercise of its granted national powers. Finally, it
prohibits the further exercise of specific powers by any state
government.
No American, who reads the debates of the Philadelphia
Convention of 1787, can fail to realize that the grant of any national
power,—power to interfere with human freedom—is the constitution
of government. The First Article was the subject of almost all the
discussion of those four months at Philadelphia. Seemingly invincible
differences of desire and opinion, as to who should elect and the
proportion (for citizens of the new nation and for states of the
continuing federation) in which there should be elected the members
of the legislature which was to exercise the granted national powers,
almost ended the effort of that Convention. This was in the early part
of July. For exhausting days patriotic men had struggled to reconcile
the conflict of desire and opinion in that respect. One element,
mainly from the larger states, insisted that the members (from each
state) of both branches of the new legislature should be proportioned
to the number of Americans in that state. The other element, mainly
from the smaller states, insisted that the Americans in each state
should have an equal representation in each branch of the new
legislature. Each element was further divided as to who should
choose the members of that legislature. Some held that the people
should choose every member. Others held that the state legislatures
should choose every member. Still others held that each state
should, by its legislature, choose the members of one branch, so that
those members might speak for that state, and that the American
people themselves, divided into districts, should choose the
members of the other branch, so that those members might speak
for the general citizens of America.
Mason of Virginia, later one of the great opponents of the adoption
of all the Articles, insisted that election by the people was “the only
security for the rights of the people.” (5 Ell. Deb. 223.)
Madison “considered an election of one branch, at least of the
legislature by the people immediately, as a clear principle of free
government.” (5 Ell. Deb. 161.)
Wilson of Pennsylvania “wished for vigor in the government, but
he wished that vigorous authority to flow immediately from the
legitimate source of all authority.” (5 Ell. Deb. 160.) Later he said, “If
we are to establish a national government, that government ought to
flow from the people at large. If one branch of it should be chosen by
the legislatures, and the other by the people, the two branches will
rest on different foundations, and dissensions will naturally arise
between them.” (5 Ell. Deb. 167.)
Dickenson of Delaware “considered it essential that one branch of
the legislature should be drawn immediately from the people, and
expedient that the other should be chosen by the legislatures of the
states.” (5 Ell. Deb. 163.)
Gerry of Massachusetts, consistent Tory in his mental attitude
toward the relation of government to people, insisted that “the
commercial and moneyed interest would be more secure in the
hands of the state legislatures than of the people at large. The
former have more sense of character, and will be restrained by that
from injustice.” (5 Ell. Deb. 169.)
On June 25, Wilson, at some length, opposed the election of
senators by the state legislatures. He stated that: “He was opposed
to an election by state legislatures. In explaining his reasons, it was
necessary to observe the two-fold relation in which the people would
stand—first, as citizens of the general government; and, secondly, as
citizens of their particular state. The general government was meant
for them in the first capacity; the state governments in the second.
Both governments were derived from the people; both meant for the
people; both therefore ought to be regulated on the same
principles.... The general government is not an assemblage of
states, but of individuals, for certain political purposes. It is not meant
for the states, but for the individuals composing them; the
individuals, therefore, not the states, ought to be represented in it.”
(5 Ell. Deb. 239.)
There came a day, early in that memorable July, when all hope of
continuing the Convention was almost abandoned, by reason of the
difference of desire and opinion on this one subject. Let us average
Americans of this generation remember that this one subject was
merely the decision whether the people were to choose all the
members of the legislature which was to exercise granted national
powers to interfere with the human freedom of the citizens of
America. Happily for all of us, there were many patriotic as well as
able leaders at Philadelphia. From their patriotism and ability they
evolved the compromise, on that question, which is expressed in
their First Article. When it came from Philadelphia, it provided that
each state should have equal representation in the Senate, senators
to be chosen by the state legislatures, and that the House of
Representatives should consist of members chosen directly by the
citizens of America, in districts proportioned to the number of those
citizens in it.
No one has read the recorded debates of the Convention which
proposed and the conventions which adopted our Constitution
without learning that the Americans in those conventions knew that
the grant of enumerated national powers in the First Article was the
constitution of the American government of men. In and out of the
Philadelphia Convention, the greatest and most persistent attack
upon its proposal was the insistent claim that it had acted wholly
without authority in proposing an Article which purported to grant any
such national power to interfere with the human freedom of all
Americans. Since July 4, 1776, no legislature or legislatures in the
world had possessed any national powers over all Americans. The
Americans in each existing nation elected every member of the one
legislature which had any such power over them. It was felt and
stated at Philadelphia, it was felt and urged and insisted upon,
sometimes with decency and reason, sometimes with bitterness and
rancor and hatred, between the closing day at Philadelphia and the
assembling of various Americans in each state, that the Americans
in each state would be unwilling to give any such national power
over themselves to any legislature whose members were not all
elected by the people in that state. In all the conventions which
adopted the Constitution, the one great object of attack was the
grant even of enumerated powers of a national kind to a legislature
whose members would not all be chosen by the Americans in the
state in which the convention was held. The record of the Virginia
convention fills one entire volume of Elliot’s Debates. Almost one-
half of the pages of that volume are claimed by the eloquent attacks
of Patrick Henry upon those grants of enumerated powers in that
First Article. The basis of all his argument was the fact that this grant
of national power in the First Article would make him and all his
fellow Virginians, for the first time since the Declaration of
Independence, citizens of a nation—not Virginia—who must obey
the laws of a legislature only some of whose members Virginians
would elect.
“Suppose,” he says, “the people of Virginia should wish to alter”
this new government which governs them. “Can a majority of them
do it? No; because they are connected with other men, or, in other
words, consolidated with other states. When the people of Virginia,
at a future day, shall wish to alter their government, though they
should be unanimous in this desire, yet they may be prevented
therefrom by a despicable minority at the extremity of the United
States. The founders of your own Constitution made your
government changeable: but the power of changing it is gone from
you. Whither is it gone? It is placed in the same hands that hold the
rights of twelve other states; and those who hold those rights have
right and power to keep them. It is not the particular government of
Virginia: one of the leading features of that government is, that a
majority can alter it, when necessary for the public good. This
government is not a Virginian, but an American government.” (3 Ell.
Deb. 55.)
How forceful and effective was this objection, we average
Americans of this generation may well realize when we know that the
Constitution was ratified in Virginia by the scant majority of ten votes.
In New York and Massachusetts and other states, the adoption was
secured by similar small majorities. In North Carolina, the first
convention refused to adopt at all.
Furthermore, it is recorded history that, in Massachusetts, in
Virginia, in New York, and elsewhere, the vote of the people would
have been against the adoption of the Constitution, if a promise had
not been made to them by the advocates of the Constitution. It was
the historic promise that Congress, under the mode of procedure
prescribed in Article V, would propose new declaratory Articles,
suggested by the various conventions and specifically securing
certain reserved rights and powers of all Americans from all ability of
government to interfere therewith. This historic promise was fulfilled,
when the first Congress of the new nation proposed the suggested
declaratory Articles and ten of them were adopted. These are the
Articles now known as the first ten Amendments. It has been settled
beyond dispute, in the Supreme Court, that every one of the
declarations in these ten Articles was already in the Constitution
when it was originally adopted by the citizens of America.
The most important declaration in those amazingly important ten
declarations, which secured the adoption of our Constitution, is the
plain statement that every national power to interfere with the human
freedom of Americans, not granted in Article I, was reserved to the
American people themselves in their capacity as the citizens of
America. That is the explicit statement of what we know as the Tenth
Amendment. In itself, that statement was but the plain and accurate
echo of what was stated by the American people (who made the
enumerated grants of such powers in Article I) in the conventions
where they made those grants. Their statement was nowhere more
accurately expressed, in that respect, than in the resolution of the
Virginia Convention, which ratified the Constitution. That resolution
began, “Whereas the powers granted under the proposed
constitution are the gift of the people, and every power not
granted thereby remains with them, and at their will, etc.” (3 Ell.
Deb. 653.)
After the same statement had been expressly made (with
authoritative effect as part of the original Constitution) in that Article
which we know as the Tenth Amendment, it was again and again
echoed, in the plainest language, from the Bench of the Supreme
Court.
As far back as 1795, in the case of Vanhorne’s Lessee vs.
Dorrance, 2 Dall. 304, Justice Patterson stated that the Constitution
of England is at the mercy of Parliament, but “in America, the case is
widely different.”... A Constitution “is the form of government,
delineated by the mighty hand of the people, in which certain first
principles of fundamental laws are established. The Constitution is
certain and fixed; it contains the permanent will of the people, and is
the supreme law of the land; it is paramount to the power of the
legislature, and can be revoked or altered only by the authority that
made it. The life-giving principle and the death-dealing stroke must
proceed from the same hand.... The Constitution fixes limits to the
exercise of legislative authority, and prescribes the orbit within which
it must move.... Whatever may be the case in other countries, yet in
this there can be no doubt, that every act of the legislature,
repugnant to the Constitution, is absolutely void.”
To us average Americans, who have lived with those earlier
Americans through the days in which they constituted their nation
and distributed all granted national powers between governments in
America and reserved all other general American national powers
exclusively to themselves, the Virginia Resolution, the Tenth
Amendment, and the quoted language of the Circuit Court are in
strict conformity with the education we have received.
What, however, are we to think of the Tory education of so many of
our leaders and “constitutional” lawyers, who have calmly accepted
and acted upon the amazing assumption that state governments in
America can exercise and can grant to other governments any or all
general national powers to interfere with the human freedom of
American citizens, including even the national powers expressly
reserved by those citizens to themselves in the Tenth Amendment?
If they adopt their familiar mental attitude that all these statements
were made more than a hundred years ago and have no meaning or
weight now, we refer them to the Supreme Court, in 1907, when it
stated:
The powers the people have given to the General
Government are named in the Constitution, and all not there
named, either expressly or by implication, are reserved to the
people and can be exercised only by them, or upon
further grant from them. (Justice Brewer in Turner v.
Williams, 194, U. S. 279.)
For ourselves, we average Americans turn now to examine in
detail how clearly the Americans at Philadelphia in 1787 did know
and obey the basic law of America that all national powers to
interfere with individual freedom are the powers of the people
themselves and can be exercised only by them or upon direct grant
from them. We find their knowledge, in that respect, evidenced by an
examination of the reasoning by which they reached the correct legal
conclusion that their proposed grants of general national powers, in
their First Article, could only be made by the citizens of America
themselves, assembled in their “conventions”—that grants of such
powers could not be made even by all the legislatures of the then
independent states.
CHAPTER VII
PEOPLE OR GOVERNMENT?—CONVENTIONS
OR LEGISLATURES?
It is no longer open to question that by the Constitution a

nation was brought into being, and that that instrument was
not merely operative to establish a closer union or league of
states. (Justice Brewer, in Supreme Court, Kansas v.
Colorado, 206 U. S. 46 at page 80.)
Instructed by living through the education of the earlier Americans
to their making of that Constitution, we accurately know that they
themselves, by their own direct action, brought that new nation into
being. Through our course in their education, we have their
knowledge that only the men, who are to be its first members, can
create a new political society of men, which is exactly what any
American nation is. “Individuals entering into society must give up a
share of liberty to preserve the rest.” So said the letter which went
from Philadelphia with the proposed Articles whose later adoption
created the new nation and vested the delegated and enumerated
national powers of its government to interfere with the liberty of its
citizens, (1 Ell. Deb. 17.)
Furthermore, through our own personal experience, we
understand how all societies of men are brought into being. There
are few of us who have not participated in the creation of at least one
society of men. Most of us have personally participated in the
creation of many such societies. For which reason, we are quite well
acquainted with the manner in which all societies of men are brought
into being. We know that ourselves, the prospective members of the
proposed society, assemble and organize it and become its first
members and constitute the powers of its government to command
us, its members, for the achievement of the purpose for which we
create it.
For one simple reason, the Americans, through whose education
we have just lived, were “better acquainted with the science of
government than any other people in the world.” That reason was
their accurate knowledge that a free nation, like any other society of
individuals, can be created only in the same manner and by its
prospective members and that the gift of any national powers to its
government can only be by direct grant from its human members.
This is the surrender “of a share of their liberty, to preserve the rest.”
The knowledge of those Americans is now our knowledge. For
which reason, we know that they themselves created that new nation
and immediately became its citizens and, as such, gave to its
government all the valid and enumerated national powers of that
government to interfere with their and our human freedom. We know
that they did all these things, by their own direct action, “in the only
manner, in which they can act safely, effectively or wisely, on such a
subject, by assembling in conventions.”
Thus, whatever may have been the lack of knowledge on the part
of our leaders and “constitutional” lawyers for the last five years, we
ourselves know, with knowledge that is a certainty, that the ratifying
conventions of 1787 and 1788 were the American people
themselves or the citizens of the new nation, America, assembled in
their respective states.
Our Supreme Court has always had the same knowledge and
acted upon it.
The Constitution of the United States was ordained and
established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities
[the respective peoples or citizens of each State] but
emphatically, as the preamble of the Constitution declares, by
“the people of the United States” [namely the one people of
America].... It was competent to the people to invest the
general government with all the powers which they might
deem proper and necessary; to extend or restrain these
powers according to their own good pleasure, and to give
them a paramount and supreme authority.... The people had a
right to prohibit to the states the exercise of any powers which
were, in their judgment, incompatible with the objects of the
general compact [between the citizens or members of the
new nation], to make the powers of the state governments, in
given cases, subordinate to those of the nation, or to reserve
to themselves those sovereign authorities which they might
not choose to delegate to either. (Supreme Court, Martin v.
Hunter’s Lessee, 1 Wheat. 304, at p. 324.)
Instructed by experience, the American people, in the
conventions of their respective states, adopted the present
Constitution.... The people made the Constitution and the
people can unmake it. It is the creature of their will, and lives
only by their will. But this supreme and irresistible power to
make or to unmake resides only in the whole body of the
people, not in any subdivisions of them. (Marshall, in
Supreme Court, Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264.)
The Constitution was ordained and established by the
people of the United States for themselves, for their own
government, and not for the government of the individual
states. Each state established a constitution for itself, and in
that constitution provided such limitations and restrictions on
the powers of its particular government as its judgment
dictated. The people of the United States framed such a
government for the United States as they supposed best
adapted to their situation, and best calculated to promote their
interests. The powers they conferred on this government were
to be exercised by itself; and the limitations on power, if
expressed in general terms, are naturally, and, we think,
necessarily, applicable to the government created by the
instrument. They are limitations of power granted in the
instrument itself; not of distinct governments, framed by
different persons and for different purposes. (Marshall, in
Supreme Court, Barron v. Mayor of Baltimore, 7 Peters, 243.)
When the American people created a national legislature,
with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor
proper to define the powers retained by the states. These
powers proceed, not from the people of America, but from the
people of the several states; and remain, after the adoption of
the Constitution, what they were before, except so far as they
may be abridged by that instrument. (Marshall, in the
Supreme Court, Sturges v. Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122.)
We average Americans know and will remember the clear
distinction, the substantial distinction, recognized by the great jurist,
between “the people of America” and “the people of the several
states,” although they happen to be the same human beings acting
in different capacities, as members of different political societies of
men. It is a matter of constant mention in the Supreme Court that we
ourselves, in addition to our capacity as human beings, have two
other distinct capacities, that of citizen of America and that of citizen
of our respective state; that, as citizens of America, we alone validly
give to its government any power to command us, and, as citizens of
our particular state, we alone validly give to its government all its
national power to command us. The decisions of the Supreme Court,
in that respect, are mentioned elsewhere herein. Meanwhile, we
average Americans understand these matters perfectly and will not
forget them. We are quite accustomed, while retaining our status as
free human beings, to be members of many different societies of
men and, as the members of some particular society, to give to its
government certain powers to interfere with our freedom.
We have in our political system a government of the United
States and a government of each of the several states. Each
one of these governments is distinct from the others, and
each has citizens of its own who owe it allegiance, and whose
rights, within its jurisdiction, it must protect. The same person
may be at the same time a citizen of the United States and a
citizen of a state, but his rights of citizenship under one of
these governments will be different from those he has under
the other.... Experience made the fact known to the people of
the United States that they required a national government for
national purposes.... For this reason, the people of the United
States ... ordained and established the government of the
United States, and defined its powers by a Constitution, which
they adopted as its fundamental law, and made its rules of
action. The government thus established and defined is to
some extent a government of the states in their political
capacity. It is also, for certain purposes, a government of the
people. Its powers are limited in number, but not in degree.
Within the scope of its powers, as enumerated and defined, it
is supreme and above the states; but beyond, it has no
existence. It was erected for special purposes and endowed
with all the powers necessary for its own preservation and the
accomplishment of the ends its people had in view.... The
people of the United States resident within any state are
subject to two governments, one state, and the other national;
but there need be no conflict between the two. Powers which
one possesses, the other does not. They are established for
different purposes, and have separate jurisdictions. Together
they make one whole, and furnish the people of the United
States with a complete government, ample for the protection
of all their rights at home and abroad. (Justice Waite, in
Supreme Court, United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542.)
It must seem remarkable to us average Americans, with the
education we have acquired at this point, to realize that our leaders
and “constitutional” lawyers have not known why only we ourselves,
in our capacity as citizens of America, can give any new national
power to interfere with our freedom and that we, for such new giving,
must act, in the only way in which the citizens of America “can act
safely, effectively, or wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in
convention,” in our respective states, the very “conventions”
mentioned for valid grant of such national power in the Fifth Article of
the Constitution made by the citizens of America, so assembled in
such “conventions.” Before dwelling briefly upon the accurate
appreciation of that legal fact displayed by those first citizens in
everything connected with the making of that Constitution and that
Fifth Article, let us realize how well the leaders and great
constitutional lawyers of other American generations between that
day and our own did know this settled legal fact.
After the Americans in nine states had created the new nation and
had become its citizens and had (in that capacity) granted the
national powers of its First Article, the Americans in Virginia
assembled to determine whether they also would become citizens of
the new nation. As the president of the convention, in which they
assembled, they chose Edmund Pendleton, then Chancellor of
Virginia.
Very early in the debates, Henry and Mason, great opponents of
the Constitution, attacked it on the ground that its Preamble showed
that it was to be made by the people of America and not by the
states, each of which was then an independent people. Henry and
Mason wanted those peoples to remain independent. They wanted
no new nation but a continuance of a mere union of independent
nations. They knew that a constitution of government ordained and
established by the one people of America, assembled in their
respective “conventions,” as the Preamble of this Constitution
showed it to be, created an American nation and made the ratifying
Americans, in each state, the citizens of that new nation. For this
reason, the opening thunder of Henry’s eloquence was on that
Preamble. “My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude
for the public welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to
speak the language of We, the people, instead of, We, the states?
States are the characteristics and the soul of a confederation. If the
states be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great,
consolidated, national government, of the people of all the states.”
(Henry, 3 Ell. Deb. 22.)
The learned Pendleton, sound in his knowledge of basic American
law and quick to grasp the plain meaning of the Fifth Article of the
new Constitution, quickly answered Henry. “Where is the cause of
alarm? We, the people, possessing all power, form a government,
such as we think will secure happiness; and suppose, in adopting
this plan, we should be mistaken in the end; where is the cause of
alarm on that quarter? In the same plan we point out an easy and
quiet method of reforming what may be found amiss. No, but say
gentlemen, we have put the introduction of that method in the hands
of our servants, who will interrupt it for motives of self-interest. What
then?... Who shall dare to resist the people? No, we will assemble in
convention; wholly recall our delegated powers or reform them so as
to prevent such abuse; and punish those servants who have
perverted powers, designed for our happiness, to their own
emolument.... But an objection is made to the form; the expression,
We, the people, is thought improper. Permit me to ask the gentlemen
who made this objection, who but the people can delegate
powers? Who but the people have the right to form government?...
What have the state governments to do with it?” (3 Ell. Deb. 37.)
We average Americans know and will remember that this learned
American lawyer, only twelve years earlier a subject of an
omnipotent legislature, already knew the basic American principle to
be that the delegation of national power was the constitution of
government of a free people and that only the people, assembled in
convention, could delegate such power and that the state
governments, under basic American law, never can have the ability
to delegate that kind of power. We regret that our “constitutional”
lawyers, all born free citizens of a free republic, have not the same
accurate knowledge of basic American law.
But the knowledge of Henry and of Pendleton, that the document
under consideration was the Constitution of a nation whose citizens
alone could give to its government any valid power to interfere with
their human freedom, was the knowledge of all in that and the other
“conventions,” in which the one people of America assembled and
adopted that Constitution. Let us note another distinct type in that
Virginia convention, the famous Light-horse Harry Lee of the
Revolution. “Descended from one of the oldest and most honorable
families in the colony, a graduate of Princeton College, one of the
most daring, picturesque, and attractive officers of the Revolution, in
which by sheer gallantry and military genius he had become
commander of a famous cavalry command, the gallant Lee was a
perfect contrast to the venerable Pendleton.” (Beveridge, Life of
Marshall, Vol. I, page 387.) Lee also replied to Henry’s attack on the
expression “We, the people” and not “We, the states.” In his reply,
there was shown the same accurate knowledge of basic American
law. “This expression was introduced into that paper with great
propriety. This system is submitted to the people for their
consideration, because on them it is to operate, if adopted. It is not
binding on the people until it becomes their act.” (3 Ell. Deb. 42.)
In the Massachusetts convention, General William Heath, another
soldier of the Revolution, showed his accurate conception of the
legal fact of which we average Americans have just been reading in
the decisions of our Supreme Court. “Mr. President, I consider
myself not as an inhabitant of Massachusetts, but as a citizen of the
United States.” (2 Ell. Deb. 12.)
In the North Carolina convention, William Goudy seems to have
had some prophetic vision of our own immediate day. Speaking of
the document under discussion and clearly having in mind its First
Article, this is the warning he gave us: “Its intent is a concession of
power, on the part of the people, to their rulers. We know that private
interest governs mankind generally. Power belongs originally to the
people; but if rulers [all governments] be not well guarded, that
power may be usurped from them. People ought to be cautious in
giving away power.... Power is generally taken from the people by
imposing on their understanding, or by fetters.” (4 Ell. Deb. 10.)
In that same North Carolina convention, James Iredell, later a
distinguished judge of our Supreme Court, in replying to the common
attack that the Constitution contained no Bill of Rights, displayed
clearly the general accurate knowledge that, in America, any grant of
national power to interfere with human freedom is the constitution of
government and that the citizens of any nation in America are not
citizens but subjects, if even a single power of that kind is exercised
by government without its grant directly from the citizens themselves,
assembled in their conventions. “Of what use, therefore, can a Bill of
Rights be in this Constitution, where the people expressly declare
how much power they do give, and consequently retain all that they
do not? It is a declaration of particular powers by the people to their
representatives, for particular purposes. It may be considered as a
great power of attorney, under which no power can be exercised but
what is expressly given.” (4 Ell. Deb. 148.)
When we average Americans read the debates of those human
beings, the first citizens of America, one thing steadily amazes us, as
we contrast it with all that we have heard during the past five years.
Some of those first citizens were distinguished lawyers or statesmen,
quite well known to history. Some of them bore names, then
distinguished but now forgotten. Most of them, even at that time,
were quite unknown outside of the immediate districts whence they
came. All of them, twelve years earlier, had been “subjects” in an
empire whose fundamental law was and is that its legislative
government can exercise any power whatever to interfere with
human freedom and can delegate any such power to other
governments in that empire. The object of the American Revolution
was to change that fundamental law, embodying the Tory concept of
the proper relation of government to human being, into the basic law
of America, embodying the American concept of that relation
declared in the great Statute of ’76, that no government can have
any power of that kind except by direct grant from its own citizens.
During that Revolution, human beings in America, in conformity with
their respective beliefs in the Tory or the American concept of the
relation of human being to government, had been divided into what
history knows as the Tories and the Americans. Many of the human
beings, assembled in those conventions of ten or twelve years later,
had been sincere Tories in the days of the Revolution.
Yet, if we average Americans pick up any volume of their recorded
debates in those “conventions,” we cannot scan a few pages
anywhere without finding the clearest recognition, in the minds of all,
that the American concept had become the basic American law, that
the Tory concept had disappeared forever from America. All of them
knew that, so long as the Statute of ’76 is not repealed and the result
of the Revolution not reversed, no legislatures in America can
exercise any power to interfere with human freedom, except powers
obtained by direct grant from the human beings over whom they are
to be exercised, and that no legislatures can give to themselves or to
another legislature any such power. It was common in those
“conventions” of long ago to illustrate some argument by reference to
this admitted legal fact and the difference between the fundamental
law of Great Britain and of America, in these respects. In that North

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Ebook When God Lost Her Tongue Historical Consciousness and The Black Feminist Imagination 1St Edition Janell Hobson Online PDF All Chapter

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When God Lost Her Tongue Historical

Consciousness and the Black Feminist

Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination 1st Edition

Suffering and the Vulnerable Rule of God A Feminist

The Black Butterfly Brazilian Slavery and the Literary

Black Feminist Literary Criticism Past and Present

Reality Boxes And Other Black Holes in Human

When We Were Reckless (Lost Stars #3) 1st Edition Emery

God Is a Black Woman 1st Edition Christena Cleveland

When God Lost Her Tongue

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities

ISBN: 978-0-367-19832-9 (hbk)

1 A meditation on Black feminist divinity 12

2 Reframing portraits of Black womanhood 39

3 Revolving doors of no return 68

4 Cultural currency and the value of Harriet Tubman 93

5 To play the queen, to embody the goddess 122

0.1 Video still from Janelle Monáe, “Turntables” (Emotion Picture)

2.4 Film still of Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle

of the National Museum of African American History and

Segments from earlier versions of articles appear in the following chapters:

I live in a culture that dismisses history. Whitewashed stories. Forgotten names

the work of the imagination is … a central practice of black feminism –

The Black feminist imagination that engages historical consciousness creates

sexuality, and disability as well as situates power through marginalization.

[Kitsimba’s] emergence is pedagogy in its own right: to instruct on the per-

The last point is an imaginative reworking of the African Diaspora, which, as

resounding as any cymbal, I heard what I imagined to be Tubman’s voice: “Keep

that meditates on an apocalyptic “end of the world” advancing an Afrofuturistic

When God lost her tongue

In the beginning there were no words.

It is precisely in its confinement to the margins of history that a project of rec-

In the most horrific and nightmarish of circumstances, love finds a way. It is

2. EXT. OCEAN FLOOR. ETERNITY.

3. EXT. RIVER. DAY.

4. EXT. SKY. NIGHT.

5. INT. BEDROOM. NIGHT.

6. EXT. BEACH/OCEAN. DAY.

7. EXT. OCEAN’S SURFACE. EVENING.

8. EXT. ATLANTIC OCEAN. NIGHT.

9. EXT. THE MOON. ETERNITY.

10. EXT. EARTH RISING. TIME SHIFTS.

11. INT. SLAVE DUNGEON. NIGHT.

12. EXT. OCEAN FLOOR. TIME WARP.

indigenous American worldviews suggest that nature in our material plane is

of pirates, sailors, merchants, and explorers like Christopher Columbus, who

Ringgold reconceives this harrowing experience as a triumphant revela-

It is no longer open to question that by the Constitution a

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