Worrying the Line: Reading Racial Enclosure in African American Literature

In Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition, Cheryl A. Wall explores how black women’s writing subverts the conventions of literary tradition to forge connections to the past, in the face of ancestral rupture and loss (9). While the book is primarily concerned with lineage, or the genealogical “line,” the figure of the line also represents the Anglo-American literary tradition that black women in the 1970s and 80s were writing both through and against. As Wall deploys it, “worrying the line” is a blues trope: “repetition in blues is seldom word for word and the definition of worrying the line includes changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues cries that often punctuate the performance of the songs. Black women’s writing, Wall argues, enacts similar changes upon the Anglo American and African American literary traditions in which they participate. This article invites us to consider yet another valence of the “line”—the border or boundary line that defines, arranges, demarcates, and separates. Black women’s writing, I argue, also worries the lines that structure modern space.

While the figure of the line itself may be politically neutral, lines give shape to our present world—borders, property lines, lines of latitude and longitude, coastlines and state lines. Lines not only demarcate space but are used as a material, political, and epistemic tool to produce and sustain racial capitalism: from the Mason Dixon Line, the color line, and redlining to assembly lines and chain gangs. Worrying the line then, might extend beyond experimentations with literary traditions and point toward a larger theory of black spatial practice. My forthcoming book examines how black writers and visual artists in the U. S. represent and engage in black spatial praxis, tracing the relationship between black aesthetics and black geographies. I argue that in their thematic and formal representations of the built environment, African American artists and writers offer critiques of racial capitalism’s geographies, particularly its racialized modes of enclosure. This article proposes the conceptual utility of “racial enclosure” for scholars of literature and cultural production, arguing that it elucidates a relationship between black geographies and black aesthetics. Cultural production, I suggest, is uniquely suited to address the complex and multi-scalar nature of racial enclosure. I demonstrate this with a reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel that illuminates the stakes of theorizing racial enclosure.

Theorizing Racial Enclosure

In recent years, “enclosure” has surfaced as a key word in Black Studies, extending beyond its typical definitions and usages by historians of land, ecology, and political economy, to describe more abstract spatial and theoretical phenomena. Enclosure’s definitions and applications proliferate—it is at once a spatial and geographic form, a historical and legal process, and an epistemic system of individuation and taxonomy. This article considers how we might work with a historically grounded concept of enclosure that neither reduces nor dismisses entirely its abstract and symbolic applications. I propose that it is precisely the relationship between its historical and material valences and its abstract and conceptual valences, that make “racial enclosure” an urgent formulation for study, and that compel us to see African diasporic peoples within the mass of those subjugated, dispossessed, and contained by processes of enclosure all over the world and throughout history.

Enclosure, ironically, defies boundedness—temporally, spatially, and conceptually. Writing on the enclosure of the countryside, Carolyn Lesjack observes:

without a signal moment when enclosure can be said to have begun, and with no clear endpoint—enclosure continues apace today—enclosure’s time frame threatens conventional modes of telling history and storytelling. Moreover, the effects of this process are multiple, varied, and often deferred and diffuse, marked only tenuously by their connection to the initial event that induced them. Therefore, as an event enclosure defies our common sense understandings of a historical event as discrete, locatable, and temporally bounded (7)

It is a term that signals, at once, part of the process of England’s capitalist transformation, which destroyed and privatized the commons, and the more general operation of privatization—“the action of surrounding or marking off (land) with a fence or boundary; the action of thus converting pieces of common land into private property. It is also used to describe the spatial forms that make enclosure possible—“an encompassing fence or barrier”—and the figure created by enclosure—“a space included within or marked off by boundaries. Thus enclosure itself proliferates—it is both subject and object; historically specific and conceptually abstract. And, as Lesjack notes, it is ongoing. If enclosure began, but “continues apace today,” we might say we live in the space and time of enclosure

But we also live in the episteme of enclosure. Enclosure instantiates the notion of private property, enforces and naturalizes the perception of land as property, criminalizes commoning, fortifies hierarchies, and uses partition to commoditize, individuate, contain, expropriate, and extract. Through partition, the violent taxonomies of the Enlightenment are reified, giving way to ecocidal practices like monocultural farming and the plantation, which function through the differentiation, racialization, categorization, and commoditization of land, human, and non-human life. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this “the disintegrating grind of partition and repartition,” the process by which racial capitalism is reproduced and “perpetuates the means of its own valorization” (491). Enclosure, then, is a significant technology and spatial expression of racial capitalism. And it is no surprise that it develops concurrently with what Foucault called the disciplinary society Peter Linebaugh describes the co-production of incarceration with these processes of privatization in early modern Europe: “imprisonment grew with enclosures replacing the old chastisements, like the stocks. A massive prison construction program accompanied the enclosure of agricultural production” (1). Thus, enclosure’s material, historical, and abstract definitions have always worked through one another as a foundation for modern capitalism and its epistemic structures. This is one reason to turn to cultural production, which can help us map such a complex and multi-scalar figure. Linebaugh himself opens Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance with a close reading of an English quatrain, demonstrating literature’s extraordinary capacity to narrate and distill the experience of enclosure

Enclosure’s intimate connection to incarceration is one obvious way that enclosure must be thought from within Black Studies. But what exactly is the “racial” in racial enclosure? I would suggest, the same racial as in racial capitalism. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson “reconstructs the history of the emergence of racial order in feudal Europe and delineates its subsequent impact on the organization of labor under capitalism” (2). For Robinson, racism “was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present” (2). Thus, what he called “racialism” is inseparable from the foundations of European civilization and capitalism and, I would add, from the processes, forms, and logics of enclosure. He writes, “this tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (26). If we accept this thesis, then the enclosure of the English countryside was shaped by the “architectonic” racial logics of feudal social order even as it created new racial categories. As Brenna Bhandar argues, “the violence of abstraction that transformed land more fully into a commodity over the course of a long transition (from feudal land relations to forms of ownership that facilitated agrarian capitalism and market capitalism) has a counterpart in racial thinking that figured entire populations in a hierarchy of value with whiteness at its apex” (8). And as Achille Mbembe reminds us, race is the product of enclosure: “Historically, race has always been a more or less coded way of dividing and organizing a multiplicity, of fixing and distributing it according to a hierarchy, of allocating it to more or less impermeable spaces according to a logic of enclosure. Such was the case under the regimes of segregation” (35). Thus, we see how enclosure and the development of racial logics were not parallel but radically intertwined.

The plantation is a key spatial form through which racial enclosure was established and refined in the United States and the Caribbean Native dispossession was the precondition for the plantation, not only to expropriate land for capitalist agriculture and transform communal lands into property, but to eliminate the primary obstacle to enclosure. The colonial order was threatened by Indigenous sovereignty and the prospect of European indentured servants and enslaved Africans becoming “new made Indians” by fleeing bondage and either living off the land or joining Native nations. To combat these forms of marronage and absorption into Indigenous communities, European indentured servants received land grants and muskets, making them property owners and enforcers of racial enclosure. The consolidation of racial slavery, whiteness, and settler power enabled the enclosure of Native lands and peoples, through war, forced relocation, reservations, and legislation—notably the Dawes Act of 1887, which further divided up Native lands into individual allotments in an effort to destroy tribal sovereignty, break-up communal lands and living arrangements, and make more land available for white settlers As Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita observe, “Since lands were often held in common, there was no documented native title, no legal evidence that the land was the property of a community. The absence of title was seen as justification for declaring native lands terra nullius (land belonging to no one, unoccupied land) and, therefore, “naturally” available to European settlers” (27).

Built on top of these stolen lands, plantations offered a new mode of enclosure that would reverberate far beyond the abolition of slavery. Plantations did not simply attempt to contain enslaved people, but the privatization of the land also enabled extraction, produced profit, and brought property into being—just as enclosure had done in England. At the same time, labor was tied to the land in more explicit and racialized ways that relied on containment, torture, legalized bondage, sexual and reproductive violence, and disposal—thus enclosure’s material definitions are perhaps even more relevant to the plantation economy where people were also property and privatized land was also a prison. The plantation, a site of containment, extraction, and capital accumulation, was also made through processes of enclosure: planters turned Indigenous land into monocultural commercial farms through expropriation, privatization, and clear-cutting. Slavery in the New World involved not only the enclosure of appropriated lands and their capitalist transformation into plantations, but also the enclosure of people through bondage, which converted them into private property, and through the partitioning logics of race and ontology. So plantation geographies added the enclosure of people and labor (according to racializing logics) to the enclosure of land and non-human life. What’s more, the plantation exerted its own violent logics; its imposition effected what Katherine McKittrick calls “rational spatial colonization and domination: the profitable erasure and objectification of subaltern subjectivities, stories, and lands” (x). In these ways, the plantation was not only produced through the enclosure of land, it also became its own specific mechanism of racial enclosure that reverberated throughout global plantation geographies and into the present.

Just as racial enclosure took different forms across the colonized world, Jim Crow did not merely reproduce plantation enclosure but asserted new forms of racial enclosure that sought to manage the South’s new urban spaces and forms of industrial capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Plantation enclosure laid the groundwork for our present day political economy. Clyde Woods writes, “the plantation was an asset stripping enclosure institution without peer…In many ways, the plantation social-economic model is the neoliberal ideal” (“Trap Economics,” 776). In the wake of what Sarah Haley calls “Jim Crow modernity,” new forms of racial enclosure, like mass incarceration and urban renewal, continually emerge to reassert racial order and containment. Scholars in black geographies and black ecologies, like Clyde Woods, J.T. Roane, and Carrie Freshour and Brian Williams help us conceptualize such post-plantation enclosure: while Woods theorizes “trap economics” and “asset stripping,” Freshour and Williams give us “plantation enclosure” and Roane offers “Jim Crow enclosure. Woods’s analysis, for one, demonstrates how race and racialization require us to think enclosure across scales and across time: “Throughout history,” he writes,

social-spatial enclosures have been used by dominant social movements to establish stable control over specific territories and their populations. This process typically involves the reorganization of property relations through the destruction of collectively held property, the commons. Enclosures are maintained by a system of militarized regulation, physical boundaries, and social, political, and economic traps…These boundaries are also defended by a representational system that provides intellectual justification for, and naturalizes, this form of social conflict. Capitalist societies in particular have developed through the establishment of multiple forms of social-spatial enclosures: colonization, slavery, reservations, ghettos, company towns, redlining, benign neglect, suburbs, gated communities, and prison complexes (“Trap Economics,” 774-775)

Not only does Woods remind us that enclosure is as much a representational system as a material process, he emphasizes that racial enclosure does not simply silo and separate but, in reorganizing property relations, actively generates capital.

Long after legal Emancipation, forces of containment, property, extraction, and exploitation haunt and shape black life in the Americas. For black people living under capitalism, enclosure is more than a simple act of privatizing land or building a fence or wall. It is the transformation of flesh into captive body, of entanglement into individuation, of ecology into speciation, of earth into world It is a process of definition that attributed “value to the lives of those defined as having the capacity, will, and technology to appropriate, which in turn was contingent on prevailing concepts of race and racial difference,” (Bhandar, 4) and that rendered humanity through the distinction of ownership:

The self-owning, earth-owning group sets itself apart from other groups – particularly, fundamentally, in violent speciation, from groups that do not own (either self or earth). The cost of this speciation, which is carried out in invasion and enclosure, accrues to those with whom the ones who would be one, say they don’t belong, as a matter of blood and soil – those whose failure to (want to) be exceptional, constitutes a sub- or pre-European (southern or eastern or negro or immigrant or terrorist) problem/question (Moten and Harney, 27).

In the wake of Emancipation, the plantation may appear obsolete, but its forms are reorganized and reconsolidated through racial enclosure. Saidiya Hartman calls “the emergent ghetto” of the early 20th century, “a form of racial enclosure that succeeded the plantation” (470). The plantation, she insists, “was not abolished, but transformed” and it, alongside the ghetto and the prison, “were coeval; one mode of confinement and enclosure did not supersede the other, but extended the state of servitude, violence, and death in a new guise” (476). To manage the “threat posed by black presence in the city” and “the wild experiment in black freedom,” entailed “solidifying and extending the color line that defined urban space, reproducing the disavowed apartheid of everyday life” (476) Here, we see Hartman deploy racial enclosure as form, to describe an enclave, neighborhood, section, or zone characterized by methods of racialized containment Racial enclosure also describes the production of voluntary enclaves. While she doesn’t use the modifier “racial,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes of U.S.-born white Californians “organizing themselves politically and economically into spatial and social enclosures” (Golden Gulag, 34). Thus, racial enclosure can take the form of residential segregation, ghettos, prisons—any kind of racialized containment, whether motivated by enclosure policies or individual actors.

At the same time, we must remember that commons and collective life persisted, constantly in tension with ongoing land privatization efforts. Today, against even more complex forms of enclosure and spatial privatization like subdivision, eminent domain, and “air rights,” flashes of the commons still illuminate the city. While I argue that Black spatial praxis “worries the line” of racial enclosure, enclosure is never complete, never totalizing. Focusing on enclosure as the obverse of black spatial praxis, is a reminder that we cannot eradicate antiblackness without eradicating capitalism. And that this must be a conjoined effort alongside Land Back and the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, the restoration of the commons, and, as Linebaugh reminds us, “since the commons and liberation are inseparable, the abolition of privatized, capitalist property and the abolition of prison must go together” (2). By asserting our structural position within analyses of enclosure, we suture the radical politics of black life to those of other peoples victimized and dispossessed by capitalism and its technologies. We suture the struggles of African Americans to broader struggles against property, extraction, imprisonment, colonialism, dispossession, apartheid, occupation, genocide, ecocide, and beyond.

Racial enclosure, then, can variously describe a place, a spatial form, a historical and/or legal process, and an epistemic order. As we’ve seen, these expressions of enclosure are often overlapping and interlocking—racial enclosure operates across scales. For this reason, I propose that cultural production gives us a more capacious way to examine racial enclosure across scales. In the introductory chapter to their foundational volume Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, McKittrick and Woods observe that “in the humanities, spatial metaphors abound through analyses of black creative texts, yet they are often theorized as detached from concrete three-dimensional geographies” (7). Bearing this in mind, I suggest that attending to the historical and material contexts of enclosure offers a way for literary geographies to move beyond the symbolic, metaphorical, or embodied and take seriously the innovations and contributions of geographic knowledge.

In what follows, I trace figures and forces of racial enclosure in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Their Eyes were Watching God, a novel that captures and clarifies how these different scales, levels, and forms of racial enclosure are entangled. Through plot, theme, characterization, and setting, Hurston documents black spatial praxis as an ongoing critical engagement with racial enclosure’s evolving forms and logics. Through narrative form, structure, and imagery, Hurston herself demonstrates how black writers engaged with enclosure’s aesthetic forms on the page. Thus, I reread this classic work of African American literature as spatial representation that does not just describe but theorizes the workings of geography, enclosure, and property.

Running Out on Ether’s Bosom: Enclosure as Narrative Form

The journey of Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, toward liberation and self-possession can be charted by the material enclosures that emerge across the novel’s geographies: fences and gates. A reading that takes racial enclosure into account—in all of its rich symbolism and historical specificity—makes visible the ways that Janie’s individual liberation is tied to the development of collective politics, the cultivation of the commons, and a black geographic praxis that critiques, repudiates, and transforms racial enclosure’s extended reach beyond the plantation.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Southern landscape underwent a process of widespread land enclosure, commonly referred to as “the closing of the southern range,” which intensified during the postbellum period. While the erosion of common access to land in the South had begun much earlier with the ascendancy of the plantation landscape in the mid-17th century, the fence and stock laws of the mid-19th century were the first to intentionally circumscribe common rights, following the English model. Stock-laws that placed the burden on those raising stock to fence in their animals (which not only meant very expensive fencing, but also owning enough land to raise and range that stock) protected and empowered the plantocracy and severely impacted poor white farmers and, especially, post-Emancipation, newly freed black people trying to earn a living. The presence of the fence now marked and enforced the privatization of land. As Stephanie Camp writes, “certainly the hunting and foraging that was permitted on unfenced land (even if privately owned) stopped when a fence was encountered” (5).

The postbellum closing of the range was, in part, a tactic to force black labor back onto the plantation and into the plantation’s economy and social relations Planters were well aware that “the labor question” was “linked inextricably with the land question” and, as Steven Hahn explains, they also “recognized that customary use rights, along with the availability of public domain in some states, jeopardized labor supply and discipline and, by extension, the revitalization of the cotton economy” (44). Once legislation was localized, planter-dominated governments moved immediately to pass stock-laws that mandated fencing schemas that would benefit planters and force destitute and vulnerable black communities back onto the plantation.

Along with the criminalization of trespass and game laws, both of which could be selectively enforced to target black people, stock-laws made it exceptionally difficult for black Southerners to eke out a living outside of the plantation economy and the snares set to sustain it after Emancipation. As Freshour and Williams note, “plantation owners intentionally deployed a racialized system of environmental enclosure as a means of both criminalizing Black freedom and mobility, and the relations of survival and sustenance that enabled a life beyond the plantation” (1565). Land use legislation conspired with the Black Codes, white supremacist vigilante violence, and carceral power to reinstate the economic but also the social relations of the plantation landscape. Amidst fence law debates, the fence represented the reconsolidation of plantocratic power, and attempts to restore plantation relations.

Camp argues that the closing of the southern range also led to “a plantation landscape dominated by fenced enclosures,” which symbolized the Old South’s gender, race, and labor relations (McCurry 11; Camp, 5-6). In Their Eyes Were Watching God, life is shaped by these relations, which collapse, shift, and reassert themselves, providing insight into the post-Emancipation renewal of racial enclosure. While Their Eyes is set in the Jim Crow South, fences and gates in the novel have a more complex function than racial division, as Hurston pays particular attention to the relations of gender and labor that the fence affirms, expresses, and protects.Here, too, we see the relationship between worrying geographical, racial, and literary lines. Like the later writers Wall takes up, Hurston explores “how gender and class differences within black America complicate the color line” (Wall, 6).

The first gates we encounter are the ones to which Janie Crawford returns “from burying the dead” (1). Her one true friend, Pheoby Watson, displays another kind of relation to Janie than we initially witness from those who sit on the porch, known as “Mouth-Almighty,” who watch her return in cold, judgmental silence. This other relation is made evident through her mode of entry: “Pheoby Watson didn’t go in by the front gate and down the palm walk to the front door. She walked around the fence corner and went in the intimate gate with her heaping plate of mulatto rice” (4).Pheoby is Janie’s “kissin’-friend,” and the intimacy expressed between them, while at times considered romantic, is also one of mutuality To kiss is to cross the boundaries of difference and subjectivity, to refuse separation. Hurston describes the darkness as “kissing,” some indivisible substance, some formless thing, perhaps some shade akin to what Fred Moten has called the “midnight of category’s beyond” (Black and Blur, 226). As the women talk, Hurston writes, “the night time put on flesh and blackness” (10). Already, the intimate gate has ushered in, and given way to, a volumetric assemblage of unbroken inseparable black forms, where women, flesh, and night merge and become indistinguishable through their intimacy. This merging is also a narrative device: it is through talking to Pheoby, described as a “hungry” listener, that the readers are told the story of what has occurred during Janie’s long absence from Eatonville.

Janie grows up in a house in the backyard of her grandmother’s employer, Mrs. Washburn. Because Janie is raised in “de white folks’ back-yard,” under her grandmother’s severe and watchful eye, she experiences the gate as a kind of geographical limit or boundary. “She thought awhile,” Hurston writes, “and decided that her conscious life had commenced at Nanny’s gate. On a late afternoon Nanny had called her to come inside the house because she had spied Janie letting Johnny Taylor kiss her over the gatepost” (10). That paradigm of kissing, which slides across multiple registers of meaning, sets us up for Janie’s first transgression against Nanny and the garden of southern order she keeps, which manifests as the division between imagined genders that conceivably prevents sexual contact, that disordering refusal of separation.

Of course, the division of genders could not stop sexual or intimate contact even if it were successful, but the atmosphere cultivated in the domain of the yard where Nanny keeps Janie (in all senses of the word keep) is one of cordoning and containment. At the same time, Nanny’s gate makes visible the complexities of boundary-production. While fencing may be a tool of enclosure, it is not synonymous with enclosure’s operations. The barricades that may encircle the fugitive or maroon community are not the borders that violently maintain difference and define ethno-nationalist exclusion, nor the property lines that enable parcellation and extraction. As such, the boundary line alone cannot be understood as a fixed expression of one single political orientation, philosophical order, or subject position. Likewise, it is a reminder that the fence is both porous and multivalent. It can be crossed by movements both sanctioned and unsanctioned; it can be escaped from, and it can be broken into. While the fence can be used to exclude, it is also used to protect, to provide sanctuary and refuge.

For Janie, the fence keeps her from the prospect of sexual relation, but for Nanny, the fence protects Janie from the prospect of sexual violence—both Nanny and her daughter Leafy (Janie’s mother) are survivors of rape. Thus the fence both asserts a gendered order and insulates Janie, who nonetheless exists in this hostile environment as a highly vulnerable subject—both black and a woman. Nanny did not spy Janie kissing Johnny Taylor, but rather, “Janie letting Johnny Taylor kiss her,” which she later describes as him “lacerating her with a kiss” (12). The kiss cannot be imagined by Nanny as pleasurable or mutual, let alone Janie’s idea. When Janie is eventually allowed to move beyond the confines of the gate and into a physical relation with a man, it is into the home of the elderly and exploitative Logan Killicks, to whom she is married off. This is not meant to change the conditions of Janie’s enclosure, but to fortify them: “T’aint Logan Killicks Ah wants you to have, baby,” Nanny tells her, “it’s protection” (15).

But before that period of extended displeasure that is her first marriage, there is that kiss across the gatepost, where, perhaps in the biblical sense of “knowing,” Janie states “her conscious life had commenced” (10). The scene that precedes the kiss is typically understood to be an allegory for Janie’s sexual awakening. She sits beneath a blossoming tree that “had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously.” After this ecstatic revelation, which “left her limp and languid,” she “went over the little garden field entire” (11). Through the power of her sexual awakening—one rooted in pleasure and nature, not in another, specifically male, human—the back-yard has been transformed from a site of shame and captivity to a “garden field,” evoking senses of productivity equally agricultural, biblical, and sexual. Rather than a plantation, the garden suggests a cultivation of subsistence, of the plot or provision ground.

For Nanny, and Janie too, the world is what waits on the other side of the gate. Hurston writes, Janie “searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” (11). The gate here is certainly a threshold, but it is less of a door and more of a fence. It is at the gate however, leaning over it, where another world is glimpsed and perhaps, through the kiss, touched

But the kiss, transgressing the divide of the gatepost, dissolves the boundaries that ordered the relations Nanny meant to guard. And dissolution is what follows:

Nanny’s head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered. The cooling palma Christi leaves that Janie had bound about her grandma’s head with a white rag had wilted down and become part and parcel of the woman. Her eyes didn’t bore and pierce. They diffused and melted Janie, the room and the world into one comprehension (12).

Because separation, category, and taxonomy have been unsettled, so has the division between things. An act of mercy, of protection, is also the containment of what Nanny perhaps suspects is Janie’s own desire, something powerful enough to go up and over the gatepost and into a world that Nanny knows is dangerous, disarranged and illegible. For Nanny, the arranged marriage to Logan Killicks both saves Janie from the chaos of that which lies without fences (both outside the fence and fenceless) and sets her back into an arranged place.

The gate is certainly the site of potential contamination, where the outside world interferes with the constructed interior. But for that same reason, it is also the point at which the illusory order upheld by the interior breaks down. The fence is the borderland where things mix, cross, touch, and interact. Thus, it becomes the site of possibility, scheming, dreaming, and potential escape, from which we can glimpse another world and another way of knowing. Right before she leaves Killicks, the weather of her sexual awakening has returned: “when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things” (25). Killicks’s gate, just like Nanny’s, becomes a site of desire and anticipation. But it also becomes the site of another order of knowledge. “She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, ‘Ah hope you fall on soft ground,’ because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed…the familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off” (25). The gate, which frames the promise of another life “way off,” is also a point of encounter, where Janie can experience bits of wayward nature that live and grow on the margins of the property—ecologies that thrive outside the terms of agricultural production, domestication, and enclosure. These ecologies are instructive; they reorient Janie’s senses and initiate her into other epistemologies.

The structure of the novel follows Janie from bondage to liberation, and in this way, it plots a kind of black feminist narration through the racial enclosures of the post-plantation geography. Janie is chattel to the first two husbands she endures. She is essentially sold off to Killicks, who seeks a young woman not only to perform sexual, domestic, and perhaps reproductive labor for him, but also “tuh plow.” Being unable to endure this loveless life of servitude and hard labor, Janie runs off with Jody Starks, smooth-talker and sharp-dresser, who insists that she is a different kind of property—not a mule, but a child. He first asks for her parents, calling her “a lil girl-chile” and “a pretty doll-baby.” Upon discovering she is married, he says, “you ain’t hardly old enough to be weaned. Ah betcha you still craves sugar-tits, doncher?” (28). Janie, in her desire to feel intimacy, prefers the kind of lordship that more closely resembles the familial, yet, as a productive subject in Jody’s household, her power and agency remain as circumscribed as they were under Nanny’s care.

As Jody’s wife, she becomes “a big woman,” but only within the structuring apparatus of the plantocratic “southern order.” Jody is the “founder” and now mayor of the experimental all black town of Eatonville, Florida. The town is indeed demographically black, but its civic, political, and economic infrastructure is an importation of the kinds of cities and towns made in and of plantation slavery. Hurston draws direct and explicit parallels between Jody as a settler and agent of the state and the social and material arrangements of the plantation landscape. When Jody “forced through a town ditch to drain the street in front of the store,” the townspeople “had murmured hotly about slavery being over.” Next, Hurston describes his new house: “it had two stories with porches, with bannisters and such things. The rest of the town looked like servants’ quarters surrounding the ‘big house.’” He painted it “a gloaty, sparkly white. The kind of promenading white that the houses of Bishop Whipple, W. B. Jackson and the Vanderpool’s wore” (47). As Camp writes of the antebellum use of neoclassical and Georgian architecture, Jody’s house is meant to communicate a “planters’ mastery of nature and their prominence in society” (5). The gate is a point of separation between the “big house” of the mayor and the townspeople, marking the post-plantation relations that have resurfaced in Eatonville: most of the townspeople, Hurston writes, “never had known what it was to enter the gate of the mayor’s yard unless it were to do some menial job” (83). The house becomes a complex of interrelated significations, where wealth, status, power, and dominion over land (such as the town ditch) and bodies (Janie’s, for one, but also of the townspeople, who dug the ditch, for instance), go hand in hand—unsurprisingly—with the color white.

Eventually Janie makes it to the “land of the unfenced.” Her deliverer is Tea Cake, her third husband and presumably, first real love. In the arc of Janie’s liberation, Tea Cake represents her first encounter with freedom. When he arrives to town, he invites her to play checkers, a game which Jody used to tell Janie “wuz too heavy fuh [her] brains.” Tea Cake “set it up and began to show her and she found herself glowing inside. Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play” (96). This is a kind of equality and visibility she has been denied in both of her previous marriages. Jody, who forced her to cover her hair, did not allow her to sit outside and convene with the menfolk on the porch, a site representative to her of social and intellectual production. The freedom Tea Cake allows her to imagine is ushered in by a gender relation of a different, heretofore unseen order. Tea Cake does not only introduce the possibility of alternative relations, he asserts that they are “natural.” Not only are normative gender relations disrupted, so are relations around age and class status. Tea Cake is considerably younger than Janie and a far cry from the wealthy political elite to which her late husband, Jody, felt he belonged. The fence bears the evidence of how Tea Cake disrupts these plantocratic orders of gender, class, and propriety: after her evenings with him, Janie is forced to smuggle him out the back gate. Throughout Their Eyes, the cartographies of front gate, intimate gate, and back gate allow us to map social worlds defined within and against racial enclosure.

Janie follows Tea Cake to Jacksonville, where she gets her first glimpse of the vertigo of fencelessness. She has awoken to find both her man and her hidden money missing. As she tries to pass the time she observes, “outside the window Jacksonville looked like it needed a fence around it to keep it from running out on ether’s bosom. It was too big to be warm, let alone to need somebody like her” (118). This imagery speaks to Jacksonville’s particular geography, but it also gestures to the newfound openness of her life. What would keep Tea Cake from “running out on ether’s bosom”? But Tea Cake returns. By the next week he has won back Janie’s money gambling and gotten badly injured in a fight. Life with him is thrilling but unruly. Later that night he informs her that they are going “on de muck…down in de Everglades round Clewiston and belle Glade where dey raise all dat cane and string-beans and tomatuhs. Folks don’t do nothin’ down dere but make money and fun and foolishness” (128).

The muck is indeed a black pastoral utopia in contradistinction to every other environment Janie has found herself in up until this point. “Ground so rich,” Hurston writes, “that everything went wild. Volunteer cane just taking the place. Dirt roads so rich and black that a half mile of it would have fertilized a Kansas wheat field. Wild cane on either side of the road hiding the rest of the world. People wild too” (129). Things on the muck are richer, bigger, blacker—precisely because they are free and wild. The cane is not only “wild” but “volunteer,” it is not borne through domestication, monoculture, enclosure, or imposition on the landscape. The “rich and black” dirt contrasts with the bounded “Kansas wheat field.” The muck is where human and non-human life is free, wild, unencumbered, and unfenced. Especially black life. For Hurston, the wildness of ecology and the wildness of people seem to emanate from the same source, a rich black soil that cannot help but cultivate and give life—unassisted and consensually—even where life is imagined to be untenable. Though the muck is still a site of agricultural production and labor, the black labor that goes into this land creates the possibility for black subsistence; it is not forced labor in service to a planter class or colonial power.

In the muck, distinctions and divisions do not totally dissolve, but they do fade and entangle. For one, the muck hosts a range of transient social formations, but is also multiethnic and multiracial, as Janie encounters indigenous peoples and Bahamians, among others. The gendered divisions of labor fade, too: Tea Cake and Janie fish together, and he teaches her how to shoot. Eventually, Janie even goes to work alongside him in the field. Compared to the horror of agricultural labor under Killicks, or her positioning as above agricultural labor with Jody, here Janie labors under her own terms, for the benefit of an imagined black commons, neither a mule nor an immobile and cloistered “doll-baby.” The pastoral happiness she has found is thus not so much because they labor together, but because they labor together. The very experience and narration of labor and agricultural production shift radically under the alternative conditions of this fenceless utopia.

After working alongside her, “Tea Cake would help get supper,” again marking a porosity of gendered divisions of labor that Janie has never known. This house, compared to the one she shared with Jody (which was Jody’s house) is filled with people. Of their shack on Lake Okeechobee, Hurston writes, “all around the doorstep was full.” This is in stark contrast to the forbidding gate around Jody’s house which reasserted the social arrangements of the plantation, and to the General Store porch as well, which similarly established a hierarchical arrangement of social space. She compares the two: “The men held big arguments here like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to. She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest” (134). There is no sense of an exclusionary boundary, only a sociality that spills over any line of property or propriety.

But when a hurricane comes, we find the unfenced land particularly vulnerable—“dis muck is too low and dat big lake is liable tuh bust,” warns ‘Lias. It is swamp land after all, and their homes are “quarters that squatted so close that only the dyke separated them from great, sprawling Okeechobee” (130). Not only is the land ecologically vulnerable to the devastation of a hurricane, but so are the social relations. “Through the hurricane sequence,” writes Sonya Postmentier, “Hurston’s novel offers a twentieth-century rehearsal of slavery’s destruction of individual bodies, social organization, culture, and the environment” (165). Posmentier’s suggestion that the hurricane and its aftermath offer a “rehearsal” of slavery’s destruction clarifies the muck’s representation of a sociality outside plantation enclosure—a place of flesh, before the violent, partitioning captivity of the body. The hurricane, however, renews the imposition of racial enclosure, repeats the violent rending, and restores the devastations of racial capitalism.

Under the threat of the hurricane’s “disturbance,” Tea Cake falls back upon enclosure’s taxonomic arrangements When Lias comes to convince Tea Cake and Janie to evacuate in advance of the storm, he tells Tea Cake, “De crow gahn up, man” and Tea Cake replies, “Dat ain’t nothin’. You ain’t seen de bossman go up is yuh? We all right now. Man, de money’s too good on the muck.” Lias presses harder, “De Indians gahn east, man. It’s dangerous,” but Tea Cake responds, “Indians don’t know much uh nothin’, tuh tell de truth. Else dey’d own dis country still. De white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous” (156). His adherence to dominant, white, settler epistemologies eventually kills him, and nearly kills Janie too.The futility of the wall, and of the entire project of human’s “mastery over nature,” is laid bare. “The people,” Hurston writes, “felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry.” The distinction between people and folks again restores an arrangement heretofore absent in the space of the muck. Rather than see the absurdity of these arrangements—why would a castle’s security ensure the security of a cabin?—they are fortified in the face of disaster. This restoration of social, class, race, and gender hierarchy, which valorizes “the castle,” the bossman, and his system of knowledge above all else, leads to the destruction of all: neither cabin, nor castle, nor seawall is left standing. The logics of enclosure destroy the commons.

The muck’s vulnerability is a reminder that the black commons remain exposed to racial capitalism’s brutal and swift machinations. Creating sociality, subsistence, or value outside of the post-plantation economy is not only a position of restricted resources, but a threat to racial capitalist order. Though the utopian black commons of the muck is fleeting, it nonetheless lives on in Janie’s personal transformation and in the collective memory of those who survive and their descendants. Against the vulnerability of its position within—but not of—the post-plantation landscape, the black commons must be perpetually restored, rebuilt, and rehearsed.

While the novel moves from bondage to liberation—or from fenced to unfenced—it also takes the shape of a circle, beginning at the end upon Janie’s return. Though Janie returns to the partially-fenced landscape of Eatonville, she does not return from the muck unchanged, in fact, it is she who has become unfenced and unfenceable, transferring the spirit of the muck into her person. Janie’s recursive journey not only marks what Valerie Smith calls “a story of a triumphant self-in-relation,” but also a journey where liberation does not require flight, migration or mobility but rather the transformation of the social and material conditions of one’s surroundings, initiated by an expanded imagination and sense of possibility (217).

Racial enclosure has been used variously to describe spatial and material forms, epistemological and representational systems, and historical and legal processes by which expropriation, expulsion, parcellation and commoditization occur. As I have tried to demonstrate with Hurston, racial enclosure is conceptually most effective when we consider these applications as not separate but inextricably bound to one another and mutually articulated. More precisely, when we retain an attention to racial capitalism and property’s instantiation in our analyses of racial containment, we can arrive at more nuanced understandings of the relationship between race and space. A framework such as racial enclosure allows us to see beyond simple separation or division and instead to fully recognize how racialization, containment, and the production of capital articulate one another. It helps us to work more precisely toward a common life and common earth, beyond racial capitalism.