Intimate Antagonisms: Re-Imagining the Scene of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

The final scene of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) poses a challenge to how we think about the struggles for gendered and racial equality simultaneously. After a history of domestic violence and years of separation, the reunion between the novel’s protagonist Ursa Corregidora and her estranged husband Mutt climaxes in one of African American fiction’s most infamous acts of fellatio. “He came and I swallowed. He leaned back, pulling me up by the shoulders,” Ursa calmly describes on the last page of the novel.[1] The depiction of Ursa prostrate before the phallus may seem to contradict the typical narrative of feminist resistance and empowerment. As some critics of the novel conclude, the final sexual and narrative act appears as another instance of “traumatic repetition,”[2] portraying Ursa as still “unable to voice her desire.”[3]

Critics[4] who read the novel’s conclusion as female submission reveal pessimism about Ursa’s and Mutt’s collective future and therefore uncertainty about the opportunities for resistance to gendered and racist oppression. Conversely, some scholars invert the traditional patriarchal reading of fellatio in order to place the woman, metaphorically, on top. According to Amy S. Gottfried, Ursa’s refusal to castrate Mutt, although she is in the position to do so, reveals the protagonist’s ability to “resolve” the legacy of abuse. Gottfried argues that Ursa “must relocate the site of her desire and embrace a multiplicity of sexual pleasure.”[5] Such an embrace includes recognition of “her own potential for ruthlessness” and “becoming an active agent” in that final sexual union – even violently so.[6] Analyses of Corregidora and its final scene repeatedly seek a form of healing from the history of interand intraracial violence through a critical engagement with the meaning of Black sexual expression as a basis for staging resistance. Whether the interpretations find resistance or submission in that final scene, analyses of the novel hinge upon the reading of Black intimate relations.

The representation of intraracial conflict in African American literature points to what I call “intimate antagonisms.” The structure of gendered racism, as the battle between Ursa and Mutt makes plain, produces intraracial implosions rather than sustained battles at the color line. Yet this seeming contradiction is no contradiction at all, but instead evidence of a dialectical and dialogic relationship. Intraracial recognition and intraracial rejection are two sides of the same coin. The radical disunity enunciated in portrayals of intra-group rejection and repudiation serves as a key site for redefining racial resistance and augmenting understanding of racial justice for the entire group. These representations of conflict call attention to the ways that intraracial acts of aggression reproduce rather than resist the injustices of racism. Depictions of intra-group spaces and relations form critical sites where the realities of racist exclusion and subordination are negotiated, inculcated, and also resisted.

This article addresses Black intimacy and how the responses to gendered racism shape depictions of private life and intimate desire. While depictions of intimate antagonisms between Black men and women do not begin in the late 1960s, the intensification of such painful clashes during a period of social activism compel my analysis of the visions of struggle that Black Power and Black Feminist mobilizations produce. It is also the context for Jones’s neo-slave novel Corregidora. The neo-slave narrative, a genre that emerges during the 1960s, offers a complex literary revision of the antebellum slave narrative. I show how the neo-slave narrative questions the relationships between literacy and liberation and between liberation and freedom in the realm of Black intimate life as well. The radical disunity explicit in African American literary scenes of intraracial intimate conflict serves as a key site, because that is where the intimate antagonisms of everyday life become discursively transcoded into fiction. There they become subject to public scrutiny, debate, and analysis. In this way literature becomes what Claudia Tate (drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin) describes as a public forum for airing out the implications of developing social realities. Issues that may be too volatile, too divisive, too antithetical to the interests of currently powerful political actors and gatekeepers can appear in fiction, planted as seeds for perceptions and practices to flower in the future.[7]

Intimate Antagonism and the Neo-Slave Narrative

When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask if I’m lying. Because they didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done–so it couldn’t be held against them. And I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up. That’s why they burned all the papers, so there wouldn’t be no evidence to hold up against them.
—Gayl Jones, Corregidora.[8]

Authors of all races, nationalities, and social identities build reader investment and engagement through accounts of conflict and ideological tension. The radical divisiveness of everyday life, however, takes on a specific meaning in texts about African Americans. Centuries of slavery, segregation (and their successor systems of racial subordination) have constantly compelled Black people to confront a linked fate and to face conditions they experience in common that leave them with a common destiny. Yet while artificially lumped together by the negative ascriptions and oppressive actions of white supremacy, Black people remain deeply divided. They differ by gender and generation, class and color, religion and region, sexuality and psychology. Fighting tactically and strategically against outside oppression has often required focusing on similarities and disregarding differences. Even still, embracing what Chela Sandoval calls the “consensual illusion” of racial unity can permit and perpetuate internal oppressions against the parts of the group that are deemed weaker and non-normative.[9]

In Corregidora, the protagonist Ursa must revisit the past sexual abuse the Brazilian slave-owner, sex broker, and patriarch Corregidora inflicts on her female ancestors. Sexual violation is a uniquely painful form of suppression because it both humiliates and blames the victim. “Holding up evidence,” as Great Gram describes, is no simple project. Great Gram demands that Ursa Corregidora (and all the Corregidora women) leave evidence of the incestuous, interracial sexual violence suffered under slavery. The commitment of succeeding generations to tell that story (and presumably their own) would confirm Great Gram’s oral history and experiences. “And when it come time,” the cumulative remembering and retelling, Great Gram implies, would make justice possible—or at least an alternative to the continued degradation of Black women. Alternatives don’t always come easily. Great Gram testifies to the power of an alternative knowledge structure that is both intergenerational and collective. Yet the cost of maintaining the evidence needed for justice requires collective, constant remembering, and regular communion with a history of degradation. Within Great Gram’s schema, the “scar that’s left to bear witness” becomes the embodied identification of a politicized Black womanhood “as visible as our blood.”[10]

Holding up evidence in the novel refers as much to the silencing of crucial testimony Black subjects need in the struggle for racial justice, as it does to the radical act of bearing witness to the historical and political significance of Black women’s sexual violation. Sexual violation is a key mechanism through which racial subordination was implemented. Great Gram insists that Black women leave evidence because any official, incriminating evidence against the dominant was burned.[11] Her demand reveals the understanding that Black women do not control the hegemonic production of meaning and knowledge. Dominant, official histories of slavery disavow the systematic abuse of Black women. How could white patriarchy justify its right to power and acknowledge the torture, rape, and destruction of Black women’s bodies upon which such power depended? Recognizing the white power structure’s systematic refusal of Black women’s evidence and of their testimonies, Great Gram anticipates a future opportunity for justice that requires remembering Black people’s collective racial past.

Throughout the novel, the present represents the very intersection between the past and future. Corregidora portrays how the wounding Blacks have suffered collectively plays out in the most intimate realms of intraracial life and relationships. For example, Mutt’s physical attacks on Ursa and her resultant miscarriage instigate her reassessment of her responsibility to hold up evidence. “It was 1947 when Mutt and I was married,” Ursa states at the opening of the novel, positioning her oral narrative as the most recent expression of evidence stemming from Great Gram’s history.[12] In that same paragraph, the protagonist informs us that in 1948 her jealous husband stormed into Happy’s Café where she worked as a Blues singer. Enraged by the lustful gaze that male spectators cast over the songstress, an intoxicated Mutt attempts to reassert his threatened authority and ownership over Ursa. “That was when I fell,” she recounts, and then goes on to explain how this fall results in the loss of her womb through an emergency hysterectomy. The novel’s present is the story of Ursa’s fall and her process of healing. Intimate, intraracial antagonism is thus the impetus behind the narrative itself.

Although summarily stated at the outset of the novel, Mutt’s abuse, Ursa’s desire to sing, and her “fall” activate Ursa’s conundrum about the obligation to leave evidence. Processing the pain of Mutt’s abuse and the resultant loss of her ability to become a mother, Ursa initially struggles to reconcile her current plight with her maternal ancestors’ histories:

My great-grandmama told my grandmamma the part she lived through that my grandmamma didn’t live through and my grandmamma told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we’d never forget. Even though they’d burned everything to play like it didn’t never happen. Yeah, and where’s the next generation?[13]

In this passage Ursa’s language rushes together as she explains the imbrications of oral narratives and experiences that join her ancestors together. Their unity in narrative counters the hegemony of the incestuous link between them engendered by Corregidora’s sexual violation of Great Gram’s offspring. The final two sentences that reference the official strategies for recognizing and destroying evidence, and the intimate conflict that prohibits Ursa from testifying, interrupt the fluid description of the intersubjective relations between the Corregidora women. Mutt’s violence against Ursa symbolizes the impossibility of her motherhood, and his refusal to acknowledge why the Corregidora women privilege the “womb” as the site and source for carrying the history of racial subjugation. Sexual violence and the impossibility of Ursa’s parenthood conjure what Hortense Spillers calls the “originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation”[14] used to distinguish and define the condition of the enslaved. In other words, slavery as a point of origin in the formation of the modern Black subject includes sexual abuse centrally in the production of racial subordination. Although Ursa seems unaware at the outset of the novel, her narrative efforts to process her loss and her ancestors’ experiences do grant her a mode for bearing witness and leaving evidence.

Ursa’s need to wrestle with the past in order to establish alternative possibilities for the future situates Corregidora firmly within the neo-slave narrative genre. The neoslave narrative is one key Black[15] literary site where intimate antagonisms emerge and challenge our understandings of resistance. Ashraf Rushdy argues that the neo-slave narrative has “its origins in the social, intellectual, and racial formations of the sixties,” and describes how “these texts intervene in debates over the significance of race.”[16] Literary revisions of slavery challenge readers to come to terms with the ongoing pursuit of racial justice, rejecting the notion that matters of racial inequality no longer construct contemporary realities. The emergence of the neoslave narrative genre in the turbulent 1960s reflects the dominant literary interpretation of those texts as contesting the betrayals of democracy and human justice despite Civil Rights gains and Black Power activism. Four key themes persist in critical analyses of the neo-slave narrative’s form and historical development. The genre focuses on the betrayals of “freedom” and the continued refusal of Black Americans’s full inclusion and efforts at self-assertion in the 1960s and 1970s.[17] The neo-slave narrative interrogates the emancipatory promise of print literacy, a central premise of the nineteenth century slave narrative and its role in the pursuit of political and social recognition.[18] In its visionary aspects the neo-slave narrative explores postmodern forms of freedom, family, and community.[19] Finally, the genre rewrites slave history in contestation of the dominant, national accounts of the antebellum period that imagined slaves as docile, compliant, submissive, and content.

Analyses of the neo-slave narrative rightfully address how neoconservative viciousness and unrelenting poverty impacted the attitudes and conventions of African American novelists during the Post Civil Rights era.[20] Many of these analyses however focus on Black male political culture, gender normativity, and heteropatriarchy in response to the racist portrayals of the enslaved. For example, a key contestation of the neo-slave narrative emerges in imagining what kind of slave existed on the plantation with regard to gender normativity, traditional family formation, and oppositional consciousness.[21] Hegemonic re-readings of slavery were explicitly gendered. These authoritative revisions of slavery envisioned both Black men and women as non-normative—albeit a non-normativity the plantation regime produced. Scholars like Stanley Elkins and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, presented research defending the thesis of putative “black male dependency” and infantilization.[22] Because the slave-owner’s power was emphasized in their analyses, the Black man as “Sambo,” docile, lazy, and irresponsible, was reified as the real product of slavery. Rendering the Black male childlike and powerless, the Black female, according to this scholarship, assumed a larger role in the Black family, and further hindered the very possibility of Black patriarchy. Black male re-readings of slavery during the Black Power era (and beyond) therefore inscribed an insurgent enslaved male on the plantation site.[23] This figure was described as possessing the patriarchal characteristics necessary for the recognition of Black masculinity and outsmarting the machinations of white patriarchal authority.

Black women writers, however, refused to allow this narrative to go uninterrupted. They insisted on returning to the historical wound of sexual violence and the way it shaped intraracial relations and possibilities for racial justice. Black women writers also expressed their discontent over the traditional interpretation of slave history, particularly the silencing and erasure of their experiences that occur because of the patriarchal reimagining of the heroic rebel slave. The Black Feminist Movement and its corresponding consciousness produced a series of literary articulations challenging the presence of heteropatriarchy in the vision and organizing of Black radical mobilizations.[24] Beneath the umbrella of the Black Feminist Movement, these texts refracted the activist mobilizations around the intersection of race and gender. They provided an analysis of the unique position of Black heterosexual and lesbian women. They exposed Black people’s investment in masculinism as the quickest route to attaining power in a racist society, and they interrogated the role of class hierarchies in producing Black women’s vulnerabilities. Black women authors are actually a central voice in the neo-slave narrative genre from Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). These authors’ texts center the sexual violence, coercion, and instrumentalization of enslaved women that reinforced the system of chattel slavery. Such revisions of slavery emphasize racialized, sexual exploitation as an integral aspect, rather than a bi-product, of New World slavery. Instead of a demand for racial and gendered recognition as seen within masculinist re-interpretations of slavery, Black women instantiate a “politics of refusal” through their insistence on registering the decisive injury of racialized sexual violence.

While both hegemonic and counterhegemonic re-interpretations of slavery attempted to describe the slave in light of the social and political challenges of the 1960s, scholars and even state-appointed commissions attributed urban riots, Black poverty, unemployment, and spatial isolation and segregation in the ghettos of virtually every American city to the persistence of racial discrimination.[25] Even still, theories that defined and therefore produced the “black urban underclass” argued that Black disadvantage stemmed from the degeneracy of black culture generally, and from Black people’s inability to perform normative or socially recognizable gender roles. Rather than evaluating the abuses of power and continued structural inequality, the imagined cause of Black Americans’ inferior social, political, and economic position was traced ideologically to non-conformity to traditional gender roles.

Black women’s testimonies of sexual violence thus seem like a betrayal of male modernist notions of freedom. Black women’s vision of liberation would not permit them to align with a view of equality rooted in a traditional form of patriarchy—even in a moment of danger, of provisional victory, and of continued assault on Black people’s position in U.S. politics and society. What they challenge is the view that creating a form of Black masculinity equal to White masculinity would be the cure to white supremacy. As Angela Davis points out, dominant narratives of slavery grossly distort the lens for examining Black women’s lives and experiences, and by extension, that of Black men. Davis’s seminal essay and reevaluation of enslaved women’s role in the community of slaves also calls for a critical consideration of intraracial negotiations within such historical analyses and within the social movements of the 1960s.[26] A unified notion of racial community informed efforts by Black people to wage their collective struggles for social justice, racial equality, and civic inclusion. Shaping a shared identity as an aggrieved and insurgent people rested on appreciation of a linked fate that required reciprocal recognition. Yet representations of radical divisions inside the community appear again and again in African American literature. A central area of struggle over the gendered, sexual representation of the enslaved is the painful issue of sexual violence and coercion. One reason sexual violence incites such a strong response is because it raises issues about non-normativity and the bases for inclusion and recognition. The recurring depiction of racialized, sexual brutality and the struggle to “bear witness” to that narrative point to an unresolved collective trauma that both Black men and women grappled with during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.

Because Black people are positioned as witnesses to and symbols of each other’s degradation, representations of intraracial conflicts over the re-imagining of slavery and its legacies occupy a central role in the development of the Black radical tradition during the Black Power era and beyond. Cedric Robinson has called the Black Radical Tradition, a process of dialogue, debate, and struggle designed to give a political meaning to Black experience. The Black Radical Tradition entails the creation and cultivation of ways of being (ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) central to the evolution of Black humanity even as Black people grapple with the impositions and restrictions of racial capitalism. Writing by Black authors comprises part of what Robinson describes as the intergenerational “accretion” and transference of knowledge from struggle.[27] It is part of the tradition that Robinson defines as “a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being.”[28] This conception of the Black Radical Tradition incorporates everyday instances of resistance to subordination as well as their connection to broader understandings of oppression. A focus on intimate antagonisms shows how the process of creating collectivity can be sometimes tense or even chaotic, but generative of bringing into the view the complex negotiation over the terms and meaning of struggle.

Acknowledging Black women’s subjection to sexual violence as a form of racial terror is imperative to grappling with the exercise of racism and formulating strategies to subvert it. Nevertheless, an exclusive insistence on Black women’s specific racial injury risks minimizing Black men’s wounding around emasculation. While Black men and women can experience racism differently, addressing their unique grievances should not result in a zero-sum game over whose oppression is worse. Without recognizing that racial terror, whatever its form, operates to diminish the lives and worth of Black people collectively, we diminish the political implications of how Black men and women negotiate the imposition of non-normativity.[29]

The violence Mutt inflicts on his wife further symbolizes the threat to Black women’s voice, precisely because the abuse she endures imperils her ability to sing publicly (creativity), her ability to provide testimony (evidence), and her sexual identity (claims to her body). In turn, Ursa’s husband Mutt also bears evidence of the long history that shapes his name. The name “Mutt” signifies the denial or refusal of ancestry without legitimate or legitimating paternity. His name implies sexual transgression while simultaneously repudiating any legitimate claim to patriarchal authority. Mutt’s wish to stop men from possessing Ursa with their gaze and her desire to assert her sexuality for a collective political project stage the confrontation between wounds, between competing desires for the recognition of their racial and gendered subjectivities. The opening of Corregidora positions Black masculinist aspirations for patriarchal legitimacy and Black feminist insistence on their injury as a painful though necessary site of intimate antagonism.

Black men also need to hold up evidence and to remember the past, for such tasks are not merely the personal and parochial experience of Black women. In tandem with the spectacular torture and murder of Black men through lynching, the violation of Black women is also an exercise of white male authority and power. As Gerda Lerner argues, the rape of Black women also demonstrated Black males’ lack of power, for they were symbolically castrated in their inability to defend black women and lynched for associating with white women. Therefore, Black women were doubly instrumentalized as objects of forcible rape and as instruments in the degradation of Black men.[30] Corregidora portrays the inscription of patriarchal desire on Black women’s bodies and psyches, and the ways such abuses are entangled with Black men’s oppression. The Corregidora women all bear the surname of the slave-owner. Along with this genealogical reference to slavery, the intergenerational transmission of the narrative of racist and incestuous violence bonds the women to that primary experience as well. A central scene from Corregidora illustrates the multilayered constructions of memory, narration, and gendered violence in Mama’s and Great Gram’s overlapping narration of rape and abuse. As Ursa listens to this oral history, Mama and Great Gram merge into one voice: “Mama kept talking until it wasn’t her that was talking, but Great Gram.”[31] The slave-owner Corregidora considered Great Gram his “gold pussy, his little golden piece,” the property through which he amasses capital by selling black sexuality and enslaving the offspring.

Corregidora forbids Great Gram from having contact with Black men, but finds her in conversation with a Black male who like Mutt is denied a “proper name.” Having entrusted Great Gram with a secret, and later realizing that their meeting had been discovered, the man runs away pursued by mob and hounds. At this moment in the narrative the brutalization of this Black male and Great Gram’s sexual abuse converge, for:

[Corregidora] was up there fucking me while they was out chasing him … Couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. And he had this dream he told me about. That was all he wanted me for, was to tell me about this dream …. and then somehow I got it in my mind that each time he kept going down in me would be that boy’s feets running. And then when he come, it meant they caught him.[32]

Great Gram’s testimony refuses the construction of the putative hypersexual black female by returning the locus of sexual pathology to the slave owner and the system of racial domination. Her expression avows the violence done to Black women and their instrumentalization in producing subjugation. Great Gram’s depiction also positions sexual violation as central to the historical revision of slavery, demonstrating how, as Saidiya Hartman describes, sexual violation encompasses rape and castration.[33] Great Gram’s simultaneous narration of her rape and the boy’s murder leaves evidence of slavery’s evils against Black women and men.

Rape and castration are both instances of sexual violation “because enslaved men were no less vulnerable to the wanton abuses of their owners, … and because of the elusiveness or instability of gender in relation to the slave as property and the erotics of terror in the racist imaginary.”[34] What Hartman calls “the elusiveness” or instability of racialized gender, however, is sustained by the erotics of terror within the context of racial domination and tyranny. Racial degradation, gender instability, and pathologized sexuality are produced simultaneously and form part of the ideological reinforcing structure for making violence and disenfranchisement permissible.

Such dispossession also renders Black fatherhood, and the social and symbolic rights associated with it, an impossibility and threat to the maintenance of the slave system. The unavailability of the terms daughter, mother, son, and/or father for the enslaved point to the role of what Orlando Patterson calls “natal alienation”[35] in determining the status of the enslaved. Reducing human bodies to property denied the right of lineage and institutionalized rape in the maintenance of slavery. Black women’s experience of sexual exploitation provides them with a unique lens in the analysis of the gender specificity of racial terror under slavery. Black men’s experiences of violence, vulnerability, and dispossession shape their understanding of racial power and their visions of resistance as well. The dream the unnamed boy shares with Great Gram in Corregidora is his desire to run away to Palmares, a society of runaway slaves. His dream symbolizes his desire for freedom and recuperates Black men’s historical emphasis on Black male insurgency. Great Gram recalls:

He said he was going to join up with some black mens that had some dignity […]. I said the white men had killed all of them off but he wouldn’t believe me. He said that was what his big dream was, to go up there and join all these other black mens up there, and have him a woman, and then come back and get his woman and take her up there …. I said he couldn’t know where he was going because Palmares was way back two hundred years ago, but he said Palmares was now.[36]

The boy’s freedom dream of dignity, insurgency, and liberation is an appropriate response to the sanctioned terror and degradation of slavery. Yet his means for attaining this righteous dream of freedom is defunct, not because his vision of Palmares belongs to the past, but because his concept of liberation involves making a Black woman his possession, and considers her freedom secondary to his. What remains hidden from his view while he pursues freedom is Corregidora’s continued violation of Great Gram: “Don’t let no black man fool with you, do you hear? I don’t wont nothing black fucking with my pussy.”[37]

Looking to the past, to the history and representations of slavery carries the potential of enabling an alternative understanding about the intergenerational legacy of the expropriation of Black women’s reproduction, of the denial of Black paternity, and of racial subjugation. Apart from centering Black women’s experience of sexual violation and bondage, these feminist literary revisions of slavery attempt to take up Black men’s subordination as integral to the processing of Black women’s own. Rather than reifying Black men’s emasculation, these narratives seek to posit a vision of liberation by bringing Black men’s and women’s experiences into view. While we know that Black people are never fully disentangled from the dominant, these depictions of intraracial conflict still pursue a more capacious, a more expansive, and a more imaginative vision of liberation than what might emerge from an epistemology rooted in white supremacist and/or Eurocentric ontologies. Corregidora’s literary revision of slavery depicts the injuries that racial subjugation unleashes on Black men and women, as well as how these wounds can become invisible between them. Corregidora’s central plot develops around all of the characters’ struggles to grapple with what can only be called a public secret—the history of racialized sexual violence and its legacies. Intimate antagonism in the novel emerges in relation to how the female and male characters negotiate the demand to hold up evidence and express desire given the symbolism of Corregidora’s abuse. “You Corregidora’s, ain’t you? Ain’t even took my name. You ain’t my woman,” Ursa recalls Mutt saying to her in one of her flashbacks.[38] The memory of Mutt’s words emerges from Ursa’s recollections about what happened to Great Gram’s male offspring. “I think they told me there was some boys,” Mama confides to Ursa, “but Corregidora sold the boys off.”[39] Eliminating the presence of Black men enables the slaveowner to exercise control over the women as a privilege of his investment in the institution of slavery. In this way, the removal of Black men precipitates the exploitation of Black women, just as the sexual violation of Black women demands the disappearance of Black men within the racial and gendered logic of the plantation. Great Gram and Ursa are referred to as “my little gold piece” by the slave-owner Corregidora and by Ursa’s ex-husband Mutt, respectively.[40] Ursa’s father Martin even calls Mama “Correy.” These Black men’s appropriation of the various names used to hail these women participate in inculcating their position as property and recall the originary scene of violation under slavery. But they also signify their anxieties about the obliteration of Black masculine presence that their connection to Corregidora in name seems to indicate. Racial oppression forces Black women and men to be witnesses to and symbolic of each other’s subordination.

Given that Black women and men have been forced closer together because of racism, it may not be surprising that sometimes they would be at each other’s throats.[41] Emanating from his racial and gendered status as patriarch, Corregidora’s ability to name and possess the women reflect exclusive relations of domination over them and white male opposition to Black men’s desire for masculinist power. Just as these names align with the entrenched images of the hypersexual black female that render black sexuality abject, these names also conjure the dispossession of Black fathers and the disempowerment of Black men. As the characters attempt to create intimate relations, we see how Black women’s insistence on holding up the evidence of sexual exploitation conflicts with Black men’s demands for their recognition as men. Martin’s and Mutt’s expectations of feminine submission threaten to erase the women’s evidence of abuse. The Corregidora women’s constant communion with the history of degradation instantiates a politics of refusal by sacrificing their sensuality and desire in favor of maintaining exclusive focus on the history of violation. Additionally, their preoccupation with Corregidora unwittingly reifies his power as totalizing. These complexities emerge in the struggles to gain empowering forms of legibility in a context of racial and gender inequity.

As Great Gram and Grandma discuss their experiences of rape, the histories of violence against enslaved Black men, and the importance of passing these narratives down, “what they didn’t realize was they was telling Martin too.”[42] Martin is Ursa Corregidora’s father, Mama’s first husband. Mama and Martin meet at the cafeteria where Martin works and Mama often eats lunch and dinner. Though Mama claims that she “wasn’t out looking for no man,” she remembers Great Gram’s and Grandma’s demand that she make generations. At the same time, Mama desires to be the object of Martin’s gaze: “It was like I had to go there, had to go there and sit there and have him watch me like that.”[43] Martin watches Mama in a way that implies a demand; his gaze signifies to her that he wants something from her. While Mama recognizes that this demand is most often sexual, she is ambivalent, stating, “sometimes I think he wonted something else, and then sometimes I think that’s all he wonted.”[44] This “something else” points to the hope and possibility for sexual expression beyond the terms of exploitation and possession used to confine Black women. Mama’s recollections illustrate how an analysis of Black female desire must negotiate the historical legacy of sexual violence and intraracial forms of patriarchy. Mama’s longing is trapped between her female ancestors’ injunction—to bear witness to the sexual violation of Black women and provide evidence—and Martin’s desiring gaze. How can she possess her own body in order to bear witness, and submit to her desire for Martin as well?

Mama’s choice is a compromise between these two demands. “It was like my whole body wanted you, Ursa” she explains to her daughter as she narrates the single sexual encounter she has with Martin.[45] Mama, as her name implies, claims motherhood. Her identification as Mama, or Mother, opposes the historic and symbolic degradation of Black motherhood. Great Gram brokers the marriage between Mama and Martin, and he subsequently moves into the house with the Corregidora women. In that home Martin overhears the narratives about incestuous rape under slavery and about the boy who dreamt of Palmares. Corregidora’s control and possession of Black women’s bodies, the way his exercise of ownership emasculates Black men physically and symbolically, and again the need to pass these stories down intergenerationally are central themes in the narratives the women share. During the time Martin resides with the Corregidora women Mama also refuses him sexually: “I kept telling him it was because they were in there that I wouldn’t. But … even if they hadn’t been.”[46] Thus when Grandma berates him for gazing through an open window at her naked breasts, Martin is forced to contend with his lack of authority and control over the Corregidora women. Martin becomes so provoked by Great Gram’s and Grandma’s continual “testifying” to their sexual abuse by the slaveowner Corregidora that he finally asks, “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love?”[47],[48]

Rather than avowing the women’s narratives of sexual violence and abuse, however, Martin attempts to reassert patriarchal possession over Mama to break the hold that Corregidora seemingly has over her and the expression of her desire. When she later visits him after he has left their marriage, Mama encounters Martin’s anger and violence. After beating her, he rips her pants and sends her away from his home: “‘I wont you to go on down the street, lookin like a whore’.”[49] But why is this Martin’s response? Although he knows of the historical narratives about rape and violation, his awareness fails to produce understanding about the women’s “wound,” their desire for self-possession, and the impossibility of forgetting a violence inside the body. Instead, Martin also stages a conflict with Corregidora on Mama’s body, by trying to exercise masculinist control through the disgrace of the Black female body.

The mystery that surrounds the Corregidora women’s seemingly obsessive relationship to the plantation owner (rather than the basis of his tie to them) circumscribes intraracial attempts at intimacy throughout the novel. A significant factor of Ursa’s physical and emotional process of recovery from the abuse and miscarriage is to apprehend better the complexity of the relationship between Corregidora’s violence and her partner’s behavior, between the historical racist violence against Black women, and the intraracial violence Black women continue to face. “Always their memories, but never my own” Ursa recalls as she imagines what she would have liked to have given to her first husband Mutt.[50] Ursa remembers her childhood being filled by the stories of her Great Gram and Grandmama: “My mother would work while my grandmother told me, then she’d come home and tell me. I’d go to school and come back and be told. When I was real little, Great Gram rocking me and talking.” However, these are not the memories that Ursa longs to give to Mutt. What she wishes for is Mama’s “very own memory, not theirs, her very own real and terrible and lonely and dark memory …. Corregidora was easier than what she wouldn’t tell me.” So although Mama carries “their” evidence, or fulfills Great Gram’s demand for generations, it seems to Ursa that Mama “wanted only the memory to keep for her own but not his fussy body, not the man himself.” “How could she bear witness to what she’d never lived, and refuse me what she had lived.”[51]

Ursa’s thoughts and Martin’s violent reactions expose the entanglement between Black women’s politics of refusal and Black men’s desire for recognition in the realm of intraracial antagonism. Such an entanglement, the novel seems to indicate, exacts the sacrifice of intimacy and communion. Black women’s intimate, and seemingly infinite, refusal of Black men’s demand for patriarchal recognition does not disavow Black men’s injuries per se. Black women adopt a posture and attitude of refusal because they seek recognition for their unique wounds and degradations, for the pathologization of their roles as mothers, and for the denial of their evidence. Even still, the narratives of violence the women recount expose Martin’s disempowerment within a system of racialized patriarchal domination. Black men’s resistance of Black women’s evidence is not a denial of their experiences of exploitation per se, as much as it may be a safeguard against acknowledging the relationship between castration and sexual exploitation. The portrayal of intimate refusal and the demand for recognition recur as patterned iterations in the representation of intimate antagonisms in African American literature. Rather than a facile appeal to unity whereby gains are made at the expense of the other, the depiction of intimate antagonisms in Corregidora challenges readers to expose radical divisiveness in the process of redefining the meaning of resistance. The novel charges us with the task of developing collective consciousness about race, gender, and sexuality in our preparations to hold up evidence in the future.

Intimate Antagonism and Intimate Justice: The Literature of the Black Radical Tradition

“What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next,”[52] Ursa wonders as she performs fellatio on Mutt and thinks about the succession of relationships from Great Gram and Corregidora to her and Mutt. Thus Corregidora concludes in a manner similar to the way the Corregidora women’s narrative begins: in the realm of sexual violation and the imposition to bear witness. This final exchange between Ursa and Mutt, however, represents a repetition, but with an important difference. Ursa’s narrative, the text of Corregidora, compels her listeners to remember their own pasts, the consequences of that legacy, and the ways that racial and gendered violations have impacted the possibility for intimacy. In retelling these stories, in sharing experiences, we bear witness to the interlock between the wounding of Black men and the violation of Black women. Sharing these narratives of violation and betrayal is not without danger and complication, especially given Great Gram’s warning about the denials of formal documentation (“they burned all the papers”). Gaining understanding from the ancestors’ (and her and Mutt’s) experiences in order to grapple with contemporary conflicts requires communion as well as radical acts of interpretation and translation. Such acts of interpretation or of reading are radical because, in the case of the Corregidora women, they seek to learn from the singular and “unverifiable”[53] of Black women’s experiences. As the traditional channels for expressing grievances have been denied, the basis for seeking justice must be sought elsewhere. A key location is in the realm of Black intimacy.

Twenty-two years after Ursa Corregidora and her husband Mutt Thomas separate, they encounter each other again. Mutt inquires if Ursa remembers the story he told her about his great-grandfather. His paternal ancestor had worked as a blacksmith under slavery. Hiring himself out he was able to purchase his and his wife’s “freedom.” Unable to relieve his debt from a group of unnamed men, “they came and took his wife. The courts judged that it was legal, because even if she was his wife, and fulfilled the duties of a wife, he had bought her, and so she was also his property, his slave.”[54] Mutt’s narrative reveals the entrapment of recognition in the context of racial domination and patriarchal authority. For the great-grandfather, the limited and economic possibilities for attaining something “akin to freedom” reduce family relations to commodity exchange. Yet it is the wife who is remanded into slavery; her body is debased and used to castrate Mutt’s ancestor symbolically. For Ursa and Mutt contending with their, and each other’s, ancestors’ narratives provide an opening to develop new forms of collectivity and resistance that emerge from intimate relations. This methodology reflects what Tricia Rose describes as “(inter)personal justice” with its emphasis on “politically generative work that goes on in relational, private spaces and social interactions, as well as the development of political consciousness that goes on within these interpersonal spaces.”[55] The development of this political consciousness also claims Black creative writing as a space for the public debate and discussion of Black life, culture, and politics—or the terms for Black subjectivity. Even still, private interactions have public causes and consequences. These conflicts take place in the context of incessant demands for a unity that looks like uniformity, for an identity that cruelly insists people be identical. Because they reveal problems inside the community that have been largely unidentified and therefore unsolved such as the problems produced by racism’s intersectional amplifications of classism, sexism, and homophobia, the airing of intimate antagonisms provide a creative space for exposing, interrogating, and opposing the full reach and power of racism.

As the various characters in Corregidora discover, more is required of them than simply hearing and transmitting the story of sexual violence. The obligation to bear witness is also about developing a consciousness about that narrative of violation. The anxieties about racial belonging, injury, intimacy, and recognition that the novel provokes reveal how power works and how deeply social hierarchies become implanted inside of us. “I don’t want a kind of woman that hurt you,” Mutt asserts to which Ursa replies, “then you don’t want me.”[56] In the conversation between Ursa and Mutt the couple must risk vulnerability in order to achieve intimacy. Although Ursa denies Mutt three times, her posture of guardedness also demands something of him. De-investing from traditional forms of masculinity rooted in patriarchal authority is a way for Mutt to recognize Ursa not as “a kind of woman that hurt you,” “Black matriarch,” “Jezebel,” or as symbol of Black men’s emasculation. Once Ursa finally admits, “I don’t want a kind of man that’ll hurt me neither” the couple’s embrace illustrates the yearning for connection across distance.

Literary representations of intraracial, intimate antagonisms reveal how the development of collective consciousness within the Black Radical Tradition demands confrontation with alienation and vulnerability in the process of staging communal critique and nurturing communal bonds. The development, maturation, growth, and extension of the Black Radical Tradition demand a holistic engagement with the contours and shifts of Black experience. Works of fiction by Black writers reveal how the hegemony of white supremacy depends upon setting parameters of inclusion rooted in the very practices of exclusion that are legitimated through discourses of antiblackness and racial pathology. They speak to and participate in a Black Radical Tradition that develops from the lived experiences and shared struggles of vulnerable Black communities in opposition to white supremacist epistemologies.[57] Literary texts reflect their social and historical contexts, but they are not simple reductions of social relations. Texts like Corregidora recuperate lost histories and rehearse possible futures, but to be credible they must resonate with the realities of the here and now. Because of the long histories of sexual racism and racist sexism among African Americans, the realms of sexuality and private life serve as key zones for exercising control and envisioning freedom. In a society where racism and sexism remain hegemonic, even the freedom dreams of oppressed people are structured in dominance. The airing of intimate antagonisms in literature demonstrates the ways that systemic hierarchy and exploitation “out there” can be internalized “in here.” Even more important, authors indicate again and again that unless domestic contradictions among the people are addressed and adjudicated, there can be no meaningful public victory for the people.