• “Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that
there was nothing to claim. The three (now four –
because she’d had the one coming when she cut)
pickaninies they had hoped were alive and well enough to
take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do
the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not. Two
were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood
down the dress of the main one – the woman
schoolteacher bragged about the one he said made fine
ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked
besides having at least ten breeding years left. But now
she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew
who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run.” (175-6)
“Whatever the risk of confronting the reader with what
must be immediately incomprehensible in that simple,
declarative, authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him
or her, I determined to take it. Because the in-medias-res
opening that I am so committed to is here excessively
demanding. It is abrupt and should appear so. No native
informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into
an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first
stroke of the shared experience that might be possible
between the reader and the noel’s population. Snatched just as
the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another,
without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no
entrance – a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one)” (161)
“Seduction upholds submission and asserts the alluring agency of the
dominated by forwarding the strength of weakness. As a theory of power,
seduction contends that there is an ostensible equality between the
dominant and the dominated. The dominated acquire power based upon
the identification of force and feeling […] The artifice of weakness not
only provides seduction with its power but also defines its essential
character, for the enactment of weakness and the ‘impenetrable obscurity’
of femininity and blackness harbour a conspiracy of power. […] Thus
power comes to be defined not by domination but by the manipulations
of the dominated. The reversibility of power and the play of the
dominated discredit the force of violence through the assertion of
reciprocal and intimate relations. In this regard, the recognition of the
agency of the dominated and the power of the weak secures the fetters of
subjection, while proclaiming the power and influence of those shackled
and tethered”
Saidiya Hartman Scenes of Subjection 89-90
“‘But still . . . I know what he means. He likes me in bed,
and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can
believe what people say.’
‘We look alike if we can believe our own eyes!’
‘I guess so. Anyway, all that means we’re two halves of the
same woman – at least in his crazy head.’”
“You know, he said, peering at me, ‘you look a little like
Alice’s mother. If you wore a dress and tied your hair up,
you’d look a lot like her”
“‘They were my ancestors. Even that damn parasite, the
patroller, saw the resemblance between me and Alice’s
mother’”
“ ‘Rufus sent me to talk to you.’ I hesitated. ‘He wants you
tonight’[…]
‘Where are you going?’ she asked quickly.\’To stall Rufus. If I
really work ot it, I think I can get him to let you off tonight. That
will give you a start.’She dropped the dress to the floor and came
out of her chair to grab me. ‘No, Dana! Don’t go.’ She drew a
deep breath, then seemed to sag. ‘I’m lying. I can’t run again. I
can’t. You be hungry and cold and sick out there, and so tired
you can’t walk. Then they gind you and set dogs on you...My
lord, the dogs...’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I’m going to him.
He knew I would sooner or later. But he don’t know how I wish
I had the nerve to just fill him!’
She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued
person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to dies a little”