TEXTS/CONTEXTS
MAMA'S BABY, PAPA'S
MAYBE: AN AMERICAN
GRAMMAR BOOK
HORTENSE i. SPILLERS
Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.
"Peaches" and "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire" and "Earth Mother," "Aunty," "Granny,"
God's "Holy Fool," a "Miss Ebony First," or "Black Woman at the Podium": I
describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and
privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me,
and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
W. E. B. DuBois predicted as early as 1903 that the twentieth century
would be the century of the "color line." We could add to this spatiotemporal
configuration another thematic of analogously terrible weight: if the "black
woman" can be seen as a particular figuration of the split subject that
psychoanalytic theory posits, then this century marks the site of "its" pro-
foundest revelation. The problem before us is deceptively simple: the terms
enclosed in quotation marks in the preceding paragraph isolate overdetermined
nominative properties. Embedded in bizarre axiological ground, they
demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with
mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath
them to come clean. In that regard, the names by which I am called in the
public place render an example of signifying property plus. In order for me to
speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of at-
tenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular
historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.
The personal pronouns are offered in the service of a collective function.
In certain human societies, a child's identity is determined through the line
of the Mother, but the United States, from at least one author's point of view, is
not one of them: "In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a
matriarchal structure which, because it is so far out of line with the rest of
American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and im-
poses a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great
many Negro women as well" [Moynihan 75; emphasis mine].
The notorious bastard, from Vico's banished Roman mothers of such sons,
to Caliban, to Heathcliff, and Joe Christmas, has no official female equivalent.
Because the traditional rites and laws of inheritance rarely pertain to the female
child, bastard status signals to those who need to know which son of the
Father's is the legitimate heir and which one the impostor. For that reason,
property seems wholly the business of the male. A "she" cannot, therefore,
qualify for bastard, or "natural son" status, and that she cannot provides further
insight into the coils and recoils of patriarchal wealth and fortune. According to
diacritics / summer 1987 65
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