Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature

Although much has been written in the nearly twenty years since Houston A. Baker Jr. published Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), his book offers a cogent place to begin discussion about home focused on Corregidora, by way of Toni Morrison’s Sula. African American feminist scholars like Ann du Cille, Barbara Christian, Michael Awkward, and Deborah Mc-Dowell have critiqued Baker’s work, in general, because of its significant oversights and phallocentricism.¹ Even when Baker discusses purportedly symbolic aspects of literature, Ann du Cille argues, he tends to collapse the symbolic into the material at the expense of women. Writing about Baker’s use of the Lacanian term “phallus” as a “signifier of the Father, or, better, of the Father’s LAW,” in his reading of Invisible Man’s Trueblood episode, du Cille suggests that Baker and Ellison both have “oversimplified” the fact that the “signifier and signified are not so easily separable.” She continues, “For while the phallus may not be a material object, its action, its ‘phallic energy,’ its ‘Father LAW’ are not immaterial—certainly not to Matty Lou Trueblood, Pecola Breedlove, and other objects of its power” (448). Nevertheless, I return to Blues Ideology, in particular, because Baker’s formulation of a blues matrix depends so heavily upon a metaphor drawn from the black female body. I do not mean to dismiss Baker’s Blues Ideology as antifeminist, but neither am I willing to blindly apply his framework without offering a critique. Instead I am hoping to reclaim the matrix and to suggest ways to use the construct of home to expand upon the lexicon used for reading African American literature.

In chapter 1, “Living (Just Enough) for the City,” and chapter 2, “Keep on Moving Don’t Stop,” the city is shown to circumscribe the experiences of “home” for the male protagonists, Bigger Thomas of Native Son and the narrator of Invisible Man. Ultimately, Bigger “can’t win” against the austere façade of Chicago’s Southside, and the invisible man cannot rest for running through the ever-changing face of Harlem. Neither can be “at home” in the Northern city—at least not for long. As limiting as home is for these characters, it is more so for Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye. Home decreases from the (male) outdoor place of the city to the stultifying site of the black (female) indoor place of the kitchen. Nowhere is this reality more clearly demonstrated than in the tragic climax of the novel when Pecola is pinned bodily to the kitchen floor by the incestuous “embrace” of her father. Similarly, in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, the geographically limited space of kitchens, which shape Pecola’s experiences of home, collapses into the even smaller site of the womb.

As illustrated in the previous chapter, “Get in the Kitchen and Rattle Them Pots and Pans,” the spatial politics associated with the site of home in the novel shift from the indoor site of the kitchen to the quintessentially interior site represented by the pregnant figure of Pecola, who carries her father’s dead seed. In its mapping of home, Corregidora follows a similar pattern, conflating kitchen and bedroom places that seem to lead inevitably to the womb.

In this chapter, I analyze Eva Peace from Toni Morrison’s Sula and Catherine Lawson and Ursa from Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. These characters, when read in succession, demonstrate the failure of the construct of Baker’s “black hole,” which is built upon the notion of a return to the womb, and show what is at stake for African American women at home. First, Eva becomes homicidal and kills her son when she perceives him as attempting to return to her as a “black hole.” Then Catherine connects the physical place of home, specifically black, female-assigned places like the kitchen, with the black woman’s body. Finally, Ursa’s experiences as a producer of the blues culture Baker foregrounds reveal the dire price exacted from African American women in their attempt to overthrow the power dynamics imposed by the site of home.

While Baker’s Blues Ideology makes a significant contribution to the field of African American studies by utilizing the blues in literary analysis, his “matrix” reconfigures the blues as a womb, embodied in the metaphor of the “black (w)hole.” But the body is the crucial aspect that the metaphor lacks. In Freudian terms, as Jane Gallop describes in The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, “Woman is then the figuration of phallic ‘lack’; she is a hole” (22). Hazel Carby’s critique of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk applies to Baker, who likewise “traces in its form, but displaces through its content, biological and sexual reproduction” (25). In his project, the woman has been discarded in favor of an asexual reproductive order that allows men to give birth to themselves. The man-made hole in Blues Ideology is given to do the work of the woman’s body.

Nevertheless, a character like Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator of Invisible Man cannot simply fall underground, “into a home of sorts,” and then, at the appropriate time, deliver himself fully actualized back into the world. Perhaps this is why we finally see him not reborn but trapped underground in a snapshot; he only appears to be in motion. The unsexed hole is neither a viable home place nor a place for rebirth. Instead, it can be described by Eva Peace’s violent response to her son, Plum, in Morrison’s Sula: “No!” she proclaims, “You can’t be ‘hole’ and ‘whole’ at the same time.” Eva kills Plum because, having come home from war addicted to drugs, he tries “to crawl back up into [her] womb.” She discovers his need. He is not “whole” in any of its connotations.

Eva adds rooms onto the house that took her years to build, so she is able to accommodate Plum in her house; but she has no room for him in her home, which she represents as womb. Here Morrison offers a more accurate representation of the power dynamics at work in Baker’s black hole than any that Baker himself chooses in Blues Ideology. Like the protagonists in “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “The Man who Lived Underground” cited by Baker, Plum seeks a hole wherein he can escape the damaging effect of his experiences outside the black community. Having found that regenerative place, Baker suggests that these characters may reemerge whole at some time in the future. He envisions a model that would allow the male to utilize the reproductive power of a type of womb, but it does so by usurping the agency of the mother.

As Eva’s son, perhaps Plum has a natural right to believe that if a place of healing and recovery exists for him, he will find it with his mother. From Eva’s perspective, Plum imagines an idyllic return to wholeness, without seeming to be aware of its costs. Her response to Plum’s effort to return home suggests that Eva is aware; in addition to the economic, emotional, and social costs, Eva would have to bear Plum’s return bodily. Though he returns carelessly, in coming home Plum asserts the privilege of a man-child in a patriarchal society. But instead of seeing this gesture as natural, his mother reads his behavior symbolically. He has not simply come home; he is seeking to return to her womb. In this way, Eva is not just his biological mother. She becomes his ideological matrix. Plum seeks to disembody her to serve his own needs.

As Laura Doyle explains in Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix in Modern Fiction and Culture, kinship patriarchy is created by a dominant group of males who “control marriage in order to define and mythologize kin boundaries in a way that serves their needs as rulers” (25), and it is maintained at the expense of the woman who, as “mother,” serves as the means through which men sustain their wealth, health, and control. “Not just psychologically but politically and aesthetically, then, the logic of kinship patriarchy turns a man against his kin source and leaves a woman to her own resources. The underlying problem, of course, begins when kinship patriarchy defines the mother as kin source” (27).

No matter how compelling Plum’s needs may be, despite his desperate circumstances, Eva acts as if she can only give him what he desires at the expense of herself. Marianne Hirsch suggests, “In trying to explain to Hannah an act that is so obviously beyond comprehension, Eva dwells on an intense need for self-protection, a clear drawing of her own boundaries, a definitive expression of the limits of what she has to give, and she insists as well on Plum’s boundaries, which, as a mother, she was forced to violate” (421). This seems contradictory since Eva repeatedly demonstrates her willingness to sacrifice herself on behalf of her children. After Boy Boy leaves she makes very difficult choices, the most legendary being the loss of her leg, which is rumored to have something to do with acquiring money for her starving family. Hirsch looks to this moment as the source of what she calls a “maternal discourse”: “Eva’s missing leg is the mark of maternal discourse in the novel and the key to its (thematized) ambivalence toward it” (419). Hirsch continues:

If we import Hirsch’s argument into Baker’s, the “maternal discourse” symbolized by the missing leg functions like a black hole within the text. The unspoken narrative becomes both the known origin and the mystery into which narrative attention is drawn. Not coincidentally, the moment that Hirsch points to in order to locate her “maternal discourse” is represented as an irresistible void, “the long fall of space below … [Eva’s] left thigh” (31). Morrison builds her image of the maternal around the significant something that is missing. In its absence the leg becomes central; I agree with Hirsch’s assessment that this absent something is central to the way that Eva functions as mother.

Of course, killing Plum comes with some emotional if not physical costs. What makes this different than any previous situation is the pressure exerted on Eva by Plum’s desire to return home—since she is identified as that original home. Eva chooses to see herself as “whole” rather than to allow herself to be made into a “hole” into which he can climb. She makes the choice to be woman rather than womb. Unfortunately, Eva has a narrow perspective. Having thus limited her options, she is forced to make a nonchoice—to kill rather than be killed. Her “death” would come in the form of a transformation from woman to womb and would be symbolic; on the other hand, Plum’s death is literally murder by his mother.

Eva refuses to distinguish between metaphor and reality. She is unwilling to bear the son, the child she fought so hard to keep alive, again. In her attempt to step outside the damaging gender dynamics of the black hole, she becomes alternately life-giver and destroyer. Hirsch argues that in Sula there is no escape from the “irresistible attraction” (to borrow Baker’s language) of the construct of the maternal:

The problem lies in the metaphor. Once something goes into a black hole, it never comes out; not even light ever comes out again. In witnessing Eva’s murder of her son, we learn in Sula what it takes four generations of women to discover in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora: the dynamics of the black hole that privilege the womb over the woman must be dismantled, or the blues matrix will consume itself and threaten everything around it.

The home Baker imagines is a womb without a woman; in Corregidora Gayl Jones tells the story of a woman struggling to be at home without a womb. The protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, has been given a directive passed down from her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—“make generations” in order to “bear witness” of past atrocities. The womb is the site her mothers insist she use as the means of bearing her (and their) experiences. Consequently, home becomes very local for Ursa. The women in this novel are sacrificed in favor of the womb and the men vilified in the name of the father.

The father in Ursa’s home is Corregidora. Ursa represents the fourth generation of women to bear the name of the Portuguese Brazilian slave owner who prostituted his slaves. Her great-grandmother bore a daughter by him and this daughter, Ursa’s grandmother, did too. The women keep the name Corregidora as a testament to this legacy of sexual domination and abuse. The boundaries of home for Ursa are constructed and maintained by a small (dying) community of women and still ruled by an absent father/lover. After her first husband, Mutt, causes her to fall down a flight of stairs, she is forced to have a hysterectomy. Ursa suddenly must confront a black hole, but a different one than Baker imagines. Rather than a womb, this black hole is the void left in place of her womb.

Ursa’s uterus is rendered useless, and its premature fruit, a month-old fetus, is discarded. The womb, a most private and intensely personal place, becomes completely public when it is literally thrown away. This new black (female) public place supersedes the black hole and in so doing, makes room for Ursa to imagine an alternative home. She fills this new black (female) place with the blues. Unlike the previous discourse associated with home—“make generations”—the blues are necessarily social. Home shifts markedly from the perverse incestuous place that Ursa bears bodily to a site that is externalized and created in concert with others.

I begin my reading of this novel, however, not with Ursa but with Catherine Lawson. Although she is a minor character in the novel, Catherine’s experiences are peculiarly black and female, and furthermore, they are characterized in terms of home. Catherine explicitly connects the built home with the black woman’s body and moves us from Eva’s resistance to the force exerted by the “black hole” (read as home) to Ursa’s blues. Catherine provides the crucial insight that helps illuminate the dynamics at work in the material place of home, which seem to demand that any radical reconfiguration occur first in the material rather than the metaphorical realm—even if that material is a woman’s body.

Catherine, called Cat, is not at home insofar as she has no assigned station that will afford her both liberty and humanity; instead, she struggles with being not home in the places where she lives and works. Cat struggles to explain to Ursa the relationship between her experiences at work, in Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hirshorn’s house, and her experiences at home. The recounting of those experiences allows us to import meaning into Ursa’s similar confrontations with the place of home.

Catherine appears soon after the novel opens, bringing soup to Ursa during her recovery from the hysterectomy. She leaves town abruptly, soon after Ursa uncovers her lesbian relationship with Jeffy, the teenaged daughter of a friend. Cat is absent throughout the rest of the novel and only mentioned in Ursa’s dreams and a passing conversation Ursa has on the street with an older Jeffy. Jeffy tells about a terrible accident involving Cat:

The relevance of this passage is obscured by its physical distance from a house, yet the forces at work in this scene are directly related to the power dynamics of home. As the older Jeffy states plainly in reference to the accident, “Bad thing to happen to a woman, ain’t it?” (176). Long hair is a hallmark of womanhood and beauty. In this accident Jones quite deliberately represents “a bad thing” that happens “to a woman” [emphasis added] as opposed to a man. This woman’s injury serves as blatant indication of those deeper scars that are more effectively concealed within Cat’s past. At the beginning of the novel, she makes her living doing hair out of her kitchen. This affords her both economic means and the freedom “to keep [her] own hours” (29). For the time being, working out of her own home liberates Cat from the oppressive demands of the factory and the domestic work she used to perform. Unfortunately, she does not emerge from this past unscathed. In fact, by the end of the novel, she wears a bad wig in an effort to hide her disfigurement. Rather than functioning as a mask, the wig serves as a sign of the injury and reinforces the reality of Cat’s debilitation.

The irony is that Cat knows employment in the factory is not very different from domestic work, in that black women’s labor is exploited in order to serve the needs of white men and women.² Despite the fact that Cat’s experiences, like Ursa’s, are bound up with the blues, she seems to have no received cultural framework within which to express the value of her life. So instead, she replicates (and in so doing, falls victim to) the very systems of her oppression. Unable to utilize blues expressiveness, Cat tries in vain to explain her motivations to Ursa:

In this scene, Jones lays out the black place of the kitchen as it has been constructed by the racialized, Southern past. Emancipation and the subsequent conditions leading to the Great Migration began dismantling the quarters and signaled the fall of Southern aristocracy. The kitchen is a “black” place in the ways that Jean Toomer describes in Cane in “Blood Burning Moon”:

Bob Stone’s prescribed place allows him free access to any and all sites within the plantation system. There are no limitations upon where and when he may enter any place—including Louisa’s vagina. His actions are justified by the authority that deems Stone (as would-be master) naturally “direct,” “honest,” and “bold” in regard to Louisa (as would-be slave).

Precisely because Cat is both black and female, she is assigned the role of domestic servant in a white family’s kitchen. Consequently, her body as the signifier of that black female identity becomes the focal point. White male attention is directed toward her, and thus, her assigned place (the kitchen) and her experience of that place are expressed bodily.

White patriarchy forced the black woman into the kitchen as domestic labor, then went further to dominate her body sexually. In response, Cat tries to move from the assigned black (female) “kitchen” place to invade and dominate Jeffy’s womb. Cat justifies her lesbian relationship with this teenaged daughter of a friend who has been entrusted to her care by saying, “I wanted to come back home to my own bed and not be made a fool of. You know what I mean?” (66).

Ultimately, Cat is unable to successfully explain herself. In this way she operates as the foil who highlights the value of Ursa’s contrasting experiences. Ursa’s singing signifies off of Cat’s experiences as a domestic worker and displaces her own would-be domestic experiences with the blues. However, Cat’s experiences as a domestic should not be dismissed because they are intrinsically bound with Ursa’s blues.³

The distance between the kitchen and the bedroom is compromised by the relatively unrestricted sexual appetite of Thomas Hirshorn, who sees Cat as simply an apparatus for feeding his hunger. She becomes, for him, an extension of the kitchen. As owner, Hirshorn can occupy Cat as territory almost as readily as he might eat the meal she prepares. In effect, the white man’s response to her presence in his kitchen transforms the kitchen into a “bedroom” place.

The discursive walls that might be established by place to prohibit particular activities are absent within the racist aftermath of the slave economy. The owner of the house asserts his position of power over Cat through sexual harassment. She is forced to negotiate the slippery terrain that separates her livelihood from her “private” life while confronting a treacherous adversary. As her boss, Hirshorn has both the access and the power to make Cat “feel foolish all day in a white woman’s kitchen” (64). Moreover, the experience is so destructive that it compromises the walls that might otherwise restrict “public” access to the “private” place of Cat’s sexual body. The barriers that might distinguish the site of the kitchen from the site of the bedroom are obscured, and Cat’s response is equally confused.

Through her relationship with Jeffy, Cat challenges the value she is assigned by the place of the kitchen and of the bedroom. Rather than acquiesce, she struggles to escape her designated place. Cat is seeking to reconfigure the nature of her own experience. In the effort, she becomes a “clumsy nigger” who is ultimately left a shadow of her former self, poorly masking her obvious disfigurement. Ursa, on the other hand, maps her journey home in the language of the blues.

Jones uses Cat to demonstrate the material significance of kitchen places in the lives of African American women, but she underscores the quintessential blues paradigm at the heart of the novel. Ursa retains the paradoxical impulse to “make generations” even while she is left wombless by her fall. The patriarch Corregidora rejects even the façade of the kitchen in favor of the bedroom and capitalizes on black women’s bodies as sexual commodities. The mothers dispute this relationship first by trying to assert their humanity, then by refusing to allow the testament to Corregidora’s inhumanity to die.

Unfortunately, they co-opt the womb as a site for domination and, instead of liberating themselves, thus risk reifying the terms of their oppression. Amy Gottfried considers the ironic implications of their response: “The Corregidora women respond to their early enslavement by defining themselves and their daughters as wombs intended for the literal bearing of witnesses. Sexual violence doubly limits desire and pleasure for these women. First defined as ‘pussy,’ they are now self-defined as womb” (560). Trying to liberate herself from Corregidora, Great Gram sought to make a home for herself and her daughters. She moves from her distinctly black (female) would-be kitchen/bedroom place as “little gold piece” in Brazil to her womb in Kentucky as an attempt to control the productivity of her own body.

By Ursa’s time, however, Great Gram’s desire to control her own body serves as a mandate for Ursa and her mother, Correy. The question they grapple with over the course of the novel is whether or not the position depicted by Corregidora is any better than the one Great Gram and Gram actually held.⁴ Ursa’s journey home must move her away from the kitchen as well as from the womb.

In “Mama’s Baby,” Spillers evokes the image of the Mother within the context of African America. In contrast to the symbolic realm overshadowed, in the Lacanian view, by the specter of the Father, here the Father is absent by design. While Lacan suggests that the Father is always in doubt, from Spillers’s perspective, he is both doubted and denied, and the offspring are given over to the “condition of the mother.” Such a shift requires more than a simple reading of race and gender and evokes a complicated lexicon upon which we might build a vocabulary for literary analysis.

Ashraf borrows an image from Salman Rushdie of a haunting, but it is the women themselves who are haunted.⁵ Ursa is charged to “make generations” in order to pass down the legacy as it was told to her: Corregidora is the incontestable paternal figure who shamelessly harbored Great Gram and Gram as property—his “little gold piece”—and sexual chattel.⁶

Ursa understands enough about this legacy to reject kitchen places and to seek a more viable home place. She chooses the stage as the place to begin the arduous journey away from Corregidora’s memory toward her own home, created through the blues. On the blues performer’s stage, female bodies are both liberated through the reduction of incomprehensibly painful experiences into manageable terms and policed by the intervening presence of mothers and men. Yet the stage is not the site of Ursa’s tragedy. She is knocked down a flight of stairs by her drunken husband on her way home after an evening performance. Ursa’s fall marks the violent flashpoint when all the dynamics of place making come together within the text.

On the surface, Mutt is angry about Ursa’s occupation because her performances arouse other men. He threatens her: “‘That’s what I’m gon do,’ he said. He was standing with his arms all up in the air. I was on my way to work. ‘One a y’all wont to bid for her? Piece a ass for sale…. That’s what y’all wont, ain’t it? Piece a ass’” (159). In isolation, Mutt’s actions might read as a domineering man trying to control his wife’s interactions. However, when read in the context of history as well as the Corregidora women’s quest to “make generations,” they reveal a more complicated dynamic at work.

While the kitchen collapsed into the bedroom for many black women, Corregidora was only invested in the latter. Great Gram’s assigned place within the Brazilian household was as a concubine—his “little gold piece.” In the tradition established by Great Gram, Ursa tries to walk away from her black (female) home place. But she is not completely liberated from the kitchen/bedroom dynamic simply because she resists it. The Corregidora women are subject to the force exerted by the larger construct of home. So when Ursa is ultimately scarred by place, it is as the result of a fall down a flight of stairs, a liminal place between the stage—the home of Ursa’s choosing—and the assigned black (female) kitchen and bedroom.

The Corregidora women use their bodies to establish a place for themselves secure enough to withstand Corregidora’s dominion. Unfortunately, as Gottfried asserts, “Sexual commodification is supplanted by a deliberate, political self-definition. But as Ursa … discovers, this political move has a double-edged drawback: The Corregidoras’ agenda severely limits their sexual identities, a limitation which in turn provokes domestic violence” (559). Like Ursa, Mutt is trying to secure a home for himself, and he responds violently to the perceived threat to it by transforming the site of Ursa’s body. In the process, Ursa loses her womb⁷—the place that had been configured as the enduring site of the Corregidora legacy. The absence of her uterus becomes a “well that never bleeds” (99). This black hole contains neither water nor blood with which to sustain life. In Ursa’s imagination she hears Mutt say to her, “Let me get up in your hole, I said. I wont to get up in your goddamn hole” (100). Mutt transforms the quintessential something embodied by Ursa’s womb into a void. In so doing, he physically expresses his desire to enter the place that was occupied by Ursa’s womb; once again, as with Eva and Plum, home is imagined in these terms.⁸

Although she resists mystifying the material site of home, at the end of the story when Mutt finally reenters her life, Ursa is drawn back to the specific place where they lived, presumably in the hope of rectifying past mistakes. The last pages of the novel offer a hope not present anywhere else, because at this moment language intersects with body, place, and memory as both Mutt and Ursa articulate what they want and need on their own terms:

Ursa’s epiphany comes at the end of the novel, when she finally understands that in order to construct a viable home place, she must shift the emphasis, bodily, from “the well which never bleeds”—its life-giving, and more important, life-sustaining powers all inarguably gone—to her mouth, the site that permits the expression of her blues. The difficulty as well as the deliberateness of this shift is emphasized by her concluding posture. Certainly, the novel ends ambiguously. But in its last pages, Ursa successfully integrates the past into what Deborah McDowell calls a “continuous present”⁹ that allows her finally to imagine a home built out of her experiences as well as those of her foremothers, Corregidora, and Mutt.

Much has been said about the concluding lines of Corregidora as a blues exchange.¹⁰ The blues, of course, have been associated with both movement and the translation of experiences into alternative terms. They permit disparate experiences to converge at a single moment in time and so facilitate Ursa’s epiphany. The suffocating site of the womb needs to be discarded, the novel suggests, in favor of a less “totalizing” narrative, to borrow language from Michel de Certeau.¹¹ The concluding blues song Ursa sings with Mutt is “jerrybuilt” from fragments of the past. The blues narrative produced in place of the womb opens up room for maneuvering outside the stultifying interior site configured by Great Gram and Corregidora.

The integrity of the structural blueprint introduced in Native Son and revised by Ellison in Invisible Man and Morrison in The Bluest Eye is threatened by complete collapse in Corregidora. Jones begins her demolition with the womb, but by the end of the novel, even the blues Ursa sings is compromised. In Song of Solomon, Morrison will recover the patronym and collect the remnants of the city, the kitchen, and the womb to reconstruct the African American place of home. Finally, in this novel, we find a representation of home, not without contradictions or completely unproblematic, but with enough conflict resolved that we can imagine laying down our bones to rest for a while.

1. The 1980s and ’90s were the backdrop for much infighting between women seeking to validate literary representations of their experiences at home and men seeking control over the master’s tongue and house. Alice Walker’s search for Zora Neale Hurston’s grave took her to her “mother’s house.” As a result of her efforts and those of many others before her, African American female authors like Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayl Jones rose to dominate the field of fiction writing. However, men sought a home of a different sort within the house of the academy. Into the twenty-first century, the most renowned criticism and theory continue to be produced by men like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston A. Baker Jr. Such a reality does not suggest an inherently divided house that opposes “writers” and “readers”; nonetheless, it seems a disparity between “writing” and “reading” arose along gender lines.

2. White Americans read the presence of African American domestic workers as a sign of their own domestic security. Nearly a hundred years after the collapse of the slave economy, home for white people continued to be stabilized at the expense of black laborers (even if much of the “stabilizing” was more symbolic than actual labor). For this reason, African American women had few employment opportunities besides domestic work. Home is invented in a contest for power from which someone will emerge victorious and someone will invariably lose. Domestic service is but a by-product of this struggle.

3. Lindon Barrett makes this connection between domestic service and the blues explicit in his reading of a scene from Billie Holiday’s autobiography. Despite the questions of authenticity that have been raised in relationship to this work, his discussion is relevant not only because Holiday (as character if not historical person) writes about her experiences of black (female) places as a domestic worker who employs relevant cartographical strategies, but also because, like the fictional Ursa, “the lady sings the blues.” Barrett’s discussion is in reference to the following scene he cites from Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues:

Holiday is housed insofar as she stays put, in those built places that require the services of black females—steps, kitchens, bathrooms. Yet, as Barrett suggests, designations such as “high” versus “low,” “rich” versus “poor,” “dirty” versus “clean” are relative rather than essential. Holiday gains a level of control over these home places by reformulating the terms of her oppression. She literally rewrites them through the language of autobiography and the blues. In the passage from Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday curses the women and calls them “nasty.” The white women whose homes she works in become “dirty” while she, by implication, is clean. See “‘In the Dark’: Billie Holiday and Some Sights and Sounds of American Value,” Callaloo 13.4 (1990): 872–85.

Leon Forrest also connects a discussion about Billie Holiday with Corregidora in his article “A Solo Long-Song: For Lady Day” in Callaloo 16.2 (Spring 1993): 332–67. Forrest writes, “The mythical power of Billie Holiday’s life, charged by the immediate abuse from men throughout her life, and the mythical-sexual victimization by the slave master of her great grandmother becomes an obvious scale-model for a most troubling and memorable novel Corregidora, by Gayl Jones” (364).

4. Nancy Jesser makes the following observation in her insightful reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “The specificity of historical moments allows for and demands certain and, at times, mixed-up choices. None are choices for all time, and none are apocalyptic enough to end the history in which we find ourselves. But, Morrison suggests [in Beloved], we bear a kind of haunting from these choices that in turn haunts the future” (341). The house in Bracktown is haunted with ghosts of her mother’s past, and Ursa must leave in order to begin her own journey toward “home.” See Nancy Jesser, “Violence, Home and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” African American Review 33.2 (Summer 1999): 325–45.

5. From the start of the novel, Ursa’s sense of place grows primarily from two directions: from the demand that she “make generations” in order to record past atrocities, as she literally has been born to do; and out of her desire to sing the blues. I do not mean to suggest that the command to “make generations” and the blues are divergent. In fact, at times they are nearly synonymous. Once we also consider the conditions that lead to Ursa’s hysterectomy, we have the necessary tensions established to nurture the blues. A black woman’s encounter with her assigned place, either in the kitchen (ultimately pinned to the floor by her father, as Pecola is in The Bluest Eye) or on the steps (like Pauline Breedlove ordering meaningless things or Billie Holiday polishing white marble) or in the factory (as Cat comes to be), ends with her wearing the scars of her experiences bodily.

7. Mutt’s perverse response to Ursa, in knocking her down a flight of steps, is similar to Paul D’s encounter with the ghost in Beloved. As Nancy Jesser observes in her reading of the novel, “[Paul D’s] coming [to 124 Bluestone Road] disrupts the physical spaces of the house. He ‘broke up the place, making room, shifting [the ghost], moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place that he had made’” (338). See Nancy Jesser, “Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” African American Review 33.2 (Summer 1999): 325–45.

9. See Katherine Boutry, “Black and Blue: The Female Body of Blues Writing in Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones,” in Saadi A. Simawe, ed., Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction From the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison (New York: Garland, 2000), 91–118; Melvin Dixon, Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones (Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984), 236–48; Gunilla T. Kester, “The Blues, Healing, and Cultural Representation in Contemporary African American Women’s Literature,” in Lilian Furst, ed., Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 114–27; and Claudia Tate, “Corregidora: Ursa’s Blues Medley,” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 139–41.

10. In The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Michel de Certeau theorizes that: “For the technological system [embodied by the city] of a coherent and totalizing space that is ‘linked’ and simultaneous, the figures of pedestrian rhetoric substitute trajectories that have a mythical structure … [for] a story jerrybuilt out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolizes” (102).