Inheriting the criminalized black body: race, gender, and slavery in Eva's Man.

The question is not whether slavery still exists but whether people still treat each other as if it did. (Roach 231)

It is secret that racial minorities constitute a disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated in the United States. According to the Human Rights Watch ("World Report 2000"), blacks in 1999 constituted 46.5 percent of state prisoners and 40 percent of federal prisoners, even though they only make up 12 percent of the national population. For women, the statistics are particularly striking. "Black non-Hispanic females (with an incarceration rate of 199 per 100,000) were more than 3 times as likely as Hispanic females (61 per 100,000) and 5 times more likely than white non-Hispanic females (36 per 100,000) to be in prison on December 31, 2001. These differences among white, black, and Hispanic females were consistent across all age groups" (Harrison and Beck 12). These statistics raise the obvious question of why black women are being incarcerated at such alarming rates. One could argue that race does not play as important a role in predicting the likelihood of incarceration as do the socioeconomic conditions that growing numbers of Americans face in an era of postindustrial decline. Perhaps the emphasis on the racial breakdown of prison populations obscures the socioeconomic similarities of the prison population, where poor people, regardless of race, lack access to key factors (such as education) that determine economic success.

Angela Davis dismisses this "culture of poverty" argument, instead accounting for the high rates of black female incarceration by insisting that while traditional forms of racism have become largely unacceptable, structural racism is even more deeply entrenched in American society. The vast populations of black people in prison indicate that, even under the guise of a colorblind judicial process, racism becomes reinscribed onto the black body in the act of brutal confinement (Davis 265). While both socioeconomic factors and institutionalized racism are crucial to understanding the rates of black incarceration, here I explore another avenue based on my reading of Gayl Jones's Eva's Man, a prison narrative concerned specifically with the Gordian knot of race, gender, sexuality, agency, and criminality. Higher today than in 1976, when Jones's novel was first published, the high rates of black female incarceration suggest that public discourse only recognizes black women in their criminality, a direct legacy of slavery in which blacks were without agency except when that agency was criminalized. The prison, as a mechanism to control a society's alleged abject and its aberrant, naturalizes and continually reinvents the relationship between black agency and criminality that was established during slavery.

Of course, black agency has always been articulated in multiple forms limited only by the rich imagination. I am interested in the moment when that agency is recognized within public discourse, when the voice of the subaltern enters the public realm dominated by (white) patriarchal Law. Only by the recasting of black female subjectivity as criminal can black women's voices be officially heard. This official hearing does not attest to the vibrancy of black articulation, but rather confirms notions of black femaleness as inseparable from criminality. Thus, black female agency can only be officially recognized when it is reconfigured as inherently criminal.

In mapping out black female agency, Jones privileges sexuality, and draws direct links between agency and desire. For Jones, the most over-determined sites of agency are the expression of desire and the lack of desire, twin themes that she uses to structure Eva's Man. She shows repeatedly in all of her novels that, from slavery forward, black women's sexuality forms the painful site where battles over agency take place. Even while female slaves were configured as property entirely subject to the will of their respective "owners," black women have also paradoxically been seen as sexual predators, asserting their (sexual) agency to seduce and consume the white master. This sexual will, where no agency theoretically existed, was read as "primitive," as uncontrolled, and as deviant. (1)

Consider Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which describes the response of a slave mistress, Mrs. Flint, to her husband's sexual persecution and abuse of Linda Brent, the eponymous slave girl. Jacobs writes: "She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband's perfidy. She pitied herself a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed" (30). Jacobs uses Brent to demonstrate how black female sexuality is continually appropriated for purposes that do not recognize the abuse that black women suffered at the hands of their white masters. Callous before Linda's suffering and insistent upon her sexual perversity, Mrs. Flint begins a new regime of terrorizing Linda for her sexual misconduct until Linda begins to fear for her life.

Incidents illustrates how the role of sexual predator becomes displaced from the white master onto the body of the slave. Slavery names slaves themselves sexual criminals, not victims of sexual abuse, for to acknowledge that slaves can suffer would be also to acknowledge that slaves experience desire, that they have will, and that were they not enslaved, they could assert that will. Implicit in the myth of the slave woman's hypersexuality was her refusal of domestication and her supposed deviance from nuclear configurations of the family. In her alleged seduction of the (white) man, the female slave not only was said to undercut, via her corruptive presence, the domesticity of the white household with its racialized bourgeois structures of family, but also to dismantle the already fragile black family structure with its emasculated male patriarch. The female slave's sexual agency continually surfaced, belying the hegemonic claim of its ostensible absence, and thus was quickly recast as inherently criminal. Its criminality theoretically lay in its subversion of notions of white domesticity via the seduction of the white master. The criminal act of white masters raping their slaves was thus thoroughly displaced onto the will-less/willful black female body.

The notion of black (female) agency as always already criminal and therefore in need of punishment has been inherited by black women today. The tortured figure of Eva, incarcerated for murdering her (black) lover, is the direct descendant of the antebellum slave woman. Using Jones's Eva's Man, this paper explores how notions of black female criminality and the need to constrain these deviant bodies have sustained the history of the physical and sexual abuse of slave women.

Many scenes in Eva's Man are eerily foreshadowed in the story of the sale of Sukie, as recounted by Fannie Berry, a fellow slave. To demonstrate the difficulty of talking about a slave woman's will particularly as it relates to her sexuality, Saidiya Hartman introduces Sukie, and thereby shows how various discourses of agency and criminality have been reiterated with little difference from slavery to the present.

   Sukie was her name. She was a big
   strappin nigger gal dat never had
   nothin' to say much. She used to cook
   for Miss Sarah Ann, but ole Marsa was
   always tryin' to make Sukie his gal.
   One day Sukie was in the kitchen making
   soap. Had three gra' big pots o' lye
   just comin' to a bile in de fireplace
   when ole Marsa come in for to git arter
   her 'bout somep'n. He lay into her, but
   she ain't never answer him a word.
   Den he tell Sukie to take off her dress.
   She tole him no. Den he grabbed her
   an' pulled it down off'n her shoulders.
   When he done dat, he fo'got 'bout
   whippin' her, I guess cause he grab
   hold of her an' try to pull her down on
   de flo'. Den dat black girI got mad. She
   took an push old Marsa an' made him
   break loose an' den she gave him a
   shove an' push his hind pats down in
   de hot pot o' soap. Soap was near to
   boilin', an it burnt him near to death.
   He got up holdin' his hind parts an'
   ran from the kitchen, not darin' to yell,
   'cause he didn't want Miss Sarah to
   know 'bout it.

   Well, few days later he took Sukie
   off an' sol' her to de nigger trader. An'
   dey 'zamined her an' pinched her an'
   den dey opened her mouf, an' stuck
   dey fingers in to see how her teeth was.
   Den Sukie got awful mad, and she pult
   up her dress an' tole de nigger traders
   to look an' see if dey could find any
   teef down dere. (qtd. in Hartman 40)

This brief account suggests a lifetime of sexual abuse, a lifetime of being relegated to the status of sexual object/ beast of burden within the economy of slavery. It also briefly demonstrates the quotidian negotiations that Sukie had to make, given the master class's continual refusal to recognize her desire and agency (except when criminalized). Fannie Berry immediately identifies Sukie as someone with little to say. While Berry's understanding of Sukie's reticence is not clear, we must be careful not to mistake her silence as a tacit acceptance of the situation, a resignation to the nightmare of her life.

Jones's Eva, too, is quiet. Eva's Man repeatedly refers to Eva's hesitation to talk, particularly when other characters try to elicit a response from her: "Nobody knew why I knifed him because I didn't say" (99), or "'Why don't you talk to me, Eva?' 'There's nothing to say'" (101), or "We were at another long table. I only stared at them. 'Why won't she talk?'" (82). Like Sukie's, Eva's silence could easily be misinterpreted as passivity, as a painful denial of agency and acquiescence to the reality of others' domination. (2) However, for both Sukie and Eva, silence is juxtaposed with radical action. Sukie burns the "hind parts" of her master, and threatens other men with castration by pointing to the "teeth" between her legs, ready to bite off the unwelcome fingers/penis; Eva both stabs Moses Tripp and later poisons Davis and bites off his penis. In spite of an apparent initial obedience to the law, both the antebellum slave and her descendent, if only for an instant, dramatically seize the power from the master/man who holds her body captive. Significantly, given the human relations of domination, both women resort to a vocabulary of the body. For Sukie to articulate her will verbally, a discursive field in which a slave's speech act can be recognized is required. (3) Since the space within slavery where her speech would be recognized is severely circumscribed, Berry leads us to infer that Sukie does not waste her breath. Her verbal communication can seldom be recognized within a context where she has no agency; the subaltern can never be heard even if her scream echoes around the world, for one to hear her means that one acknowledges the fundamental paradox of the personhood of the slave as property.

The emergence of a slave's subjectivity presents a crisis in the epistemic category of slave. Given the problematic ways that black women are often reduced to their intractable physicality, Sukie's and Eva's choices should not be construed as mere happenstance. Rather, their use of the black female body to articulate resistance, no matter how constrained that resistance is, reflects what can only be an attempt to counterinvest the body with meaning. Resisting the fallacy that the body is only flesh that power can violently act upon, Sukie and Eva use their bodies as the site of resistance to violence. They insist that their violated bodies are not only texts that speak to the injury of slavery, racism, and patriarchy, but also texts that can exploit the hegemonic gaze for control of their own bodies. Their choice of gesture and action, and silence notwithstanding, makes sense, given that their bodies are watched, controlled, and consumed. Apparently silent, Sukie and Eva nonetheless speak a language of the body to resist being reduced to sexualized and violated flesh. They resist using the very vocabulary of power that attempts to transform sentient, thinking persons into what Frederick Douglass describes as brutes, "closed in" by "the dark night of slavery" with "natural elasticity crushed,... intellect languished, the disposition to read departed" (58).

In Sukie's case, any articulation of agency dramatically breaches the fundamental tenet of slavery--that property has no will of its own and is subject to the master's/mistress's desire in all things. Unable to handle the crisis of Sukie's insubordination, Sukie's master sells her immediately. His actions imply his failure to reconcile the ostensible oppositions of a Sukie who, on the one hand, actively declares her desire not to have sexual relations with him and who, on the other, as a slave lacks any agency of her own. As Hartman states concerning Sukie's desire, the only possibility of slave subjectivity ironically emerges in the act that breaches the law, in the position of criminality. Thus "the fashioning of the subject must necessarily take place in violation of the law, and consequently, will, criminality, and punishment are inextricably linked" (Hartman 41). Criminality becomes the only form of agency that slave law recognizes. Legal recognition of slave agency was necessarily accompanied by the slaveocracy's need to punish the slave for that criminalized agency. Thus, Sukie's master sells her to the slave trader. He punishes her for the criminal (and thus punishable) expression of her will by reminding her that, as property, she has no will and thus can easily be sold if she does not fulfill his desires.

Sukie's punishment lay not only in the effect of being sold but also in the humiliating performance of being sold. The slave mart and auction block with their parodic reenactments of relations of domination and subjugation formed a behavioral vortex of money, property, consumption, and the flesh. The auction block constituted a theatrical performance, according to Joseph Roach, where the forces of consumption and exchange triumphed over an alternate understanding of the horror of persons violently put up for sale. The depths of degradation performed on the auction block resulted in Sukie's assertion of her criminalized and punishable will for the second time. The sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of the traders reiterated the abuse from her master, and resulted in her lifting up her dress and threatening with castration those potential buyers, titillated by the coerced display of her body. (4) She momentarily wrenched away the politics of embodiment from a mechanism of subjugation towards a politics of resistance; "the vaginal dentata and the threat of castrating genitals transpose the captive body in its dominated and ravaged condition into a vehicle to be used against the would-be slave owner rather in the service of his interests, wants, and desires" (Hartman 41). In a performance of consumption where it is implicitly understood that everything is for sale, Sukie's assertion of her will, punishable as it may be, speaks a cogent protest. Though Fannie Berry's story of Sukie does not include the consequences of such defiance on the auction block, this second display of will where none was supposed to exist presumably resulted in severe punishment. Sukie's threat of castration could only be recognized as a criminal rejection of the category of property, and therefore, it could be recognized only as an act in need of punishment.

Once Sukie's status shifts from property to criminal, she is situated to offer "the angle of vision from the auction block" (Roediger 3). Citing Langston Hughes's The Ways of White Folks, David Roediger identifies the slaveocracy's need not to leave the slave on the auction block as sexualized spectacle but rather to see the slave as looking back. Sukie's actions belie her role as passive victim, however; she studies the gaze of the potential buyers, and exposes the threat of sexualized violence in an arena where bodies are available for consumption. She refuses to leave unnamed the history of abuse that characterizes not only the spectacle of the auction block but slavery itself. Indeed, her refusal to perform sexual docility can be read as her attempt to punish her "owner." Through flagrant indocility, Sukie immediately alerts potential buyers that she represents a "difficult" slave, thereby reducing the price she may fetch and thus her "master's" profit. Slaves sometimes "acted out" on the auction block so as to bring a lesser profit to their former master (Johnson 182-88). In this way, they resisted bondage by subverting the market value of their own commodified bodies.

While the Thirteenth Amendment did legislate the end of chattel slavery, it did not usher in an era of freedom for black peoples. Instead, the freed slave found herself constrained by blackness and by the contractual obligations and responsibilities that supposedly signaled the transformation of property to person and the entrance of this person into society. Thus, Advice to Freemen declared:

   With the enjoyment of a freedman's
   privileges, come also a freedman's
   duties. These are weighty. You cannot
   get rid of them. They must be met.
   And unless you are prepared to meet
   them with a proper spirit, and patiently
   and cheerfully fulfill these obligations,
   you are not worthy of being a
   freedman. You may well tremble in
   view of these duties and responsibilities.
   But you need not fear. Put your
   trust in God, and bend your back joyfully
   and hopefully to the burden. (qtd. in
   Hartman 135)

These contractual social obligations insisted that a freed slave was only a citizen if she displayed the self-discipline and work ethic requisite for entrance into civil society. The newly freed slave, instead of being able to articulate her newly acknowledged agency in ways limited only by her imagination, found instead that her body was constrained, imprisoned by the sexist and racist societal forces of capital. These forces, anchored in identitarian regimes, allowed for a black subjectivity severely constrained by capitalism's demand for a racialized labor force that could work without the violent mechanisms of slavery, ensuring a certain amount of productivity. If the freed slave was not fettered by this social contract (self-disciplined productive laborer and consumer), she was criminal. Thus, "the exercise of free will, quite literally, was inextricable from guilty infractions, criminal misdeeds, punishable transgressions, and an elaborate micropenality of everyday life" (Hartman 125).

In other words, the freed slave struggled to articulate her previously bound agency and will. She was yet tethered and controlled, not now by the shackle and the leg iron, but rather by the discursive structures of conscientious and disciplined productive black bodies that conformed to societal expectations of race and gender. As Roach argues, "This is not to negate the very different degrees of agency involved in the sale [and control] of flesh then and now, but it is to link them in a genealogy of surrogations, a line of descent from the past into the future" (232). Thus, Jones's Eva, a descendant of slaves, inherits the structures of power whereby criminality is one of the most recognizable forms of agency for the black body. Any deviance from, any deviation in the role of productive racialized and gendered citizen is punished and contained.

Eva's Man features a woman already suspect because of her refusal of capitalist motivations of accumulation and consumption via productive labor. Eva begins her story with details of her refusal to stay in one place. She talks about being on the road after her marriage to Davis went wrong: "I was in Upstate New York then. I've lived in Kentucky. I've lived in New York City. I been in West Virginia, New Orleans. I just came from out in New Mexico. I just up and went down to New Mexico after I got laid off in Wheeling. They've got tobacco farms in Connecticut. I been there too.... It's easier being a woman and alone in different places than it is in the same place" (5). In many senses, Eva's movement for the sake of movement resonates with that of newly emancipated slaves: the practice of migration signified their freedom in important ways. To move about according to the dictates of one's own desire constitutes a practice of liberation, a "pedestrian speech act," according to de Certeau, that remaps and reshapes space in accordance to "the emphases and contradictions of its special memory" (Roach 13). This stealing away from the disciplinary constraints of coercive labor systems to practice an alternate notion of agency rooted in mobility obviously diverted from the kinds of southern work regimes established to supplant slavery. For example, sharecropper contracts called for slaves to remain on the land and with severely limited mobility. Exodusters (1879-ca.1900) were met with violent resistance from whites for moving to places where they didn't "belong," and during the Great Migration southern officials feverishly apprehended would-be black travelers.

Eva attempts to escape what she sees as imprisonment by societal constraints, hence her identification with the gypsy Medina who sits in Eva's great-grandmother's kitchen and asks the great-grandmother to kiss the inside of her hand, a gesture that Eva later repeats with Davis. As her great-grandfather discusses the tricks that the itinerant gypsy plays on her grandmother with the baby in the wagon who turns out not to be a baby, Eva "asked him if that's where the word to gyp somebody came from" (48). Immediately we see the notion of cheating, of criminality being associated with a peripatetic lifestyle. While Eva is attracted to freedom of movement, she also associates a non-sedentary lifestyle with criminality, with "gypping" folks of their accumulated possessions. Eva, too, becomes itinerant to escape her marriage. Like former slaves who moved about for years, like gypsies, she juxtaposes the domestic constraints of marriage with the freedom of the road, a traditionally male space. She reclaims this space as the best space for a single woman in an ironic reiteration of precisely the type of criminalized agency assigned to women who refuse domesticity, traditional notions of family and the pressures of capitalist accumulation and consumption as a result of disciplined labor relations. Thus, she embraces the notion of her criminalized agency in its resistance to traditional roles of black women in the (big) house.

Both Eva and Sukie negotiate the constrained spaces that they occupy within a society overdetermined by the structures of slavery and its legacy where the black body is always already criminal and in need of punishment via constraint. The incidents between Eva and Alfonso and Eva and Moses Tripp parallels the threat that Sukie makes to her future owner. Eva goes to a bar with her cousin Alfonso several times, to decipher why he viciously beats his wife, Jean. Alfonso repeatedly makes sexual overtures towards Eva and is frustrated by her negative response. He points to another woman in the bar, and insists that she would do anything for him, even give him five bucks or pay his rent. Later that night, Alfonso attempts to suck Eva's breasts in the back alley.

   Though initially surprised, Eva quickly
   recovers by taking her knife out and
   saying "naw." Alfonso responds,
   "What's that? Where'd you get that?"
   He stood away from me. I put the knife
   back in my pocket. He stood there saying
   nothing for a long time, and then he
   started laughing. "Shit, a tiddy ain't
   shit," he said when we were walking
   back. (94)

The next time Eva goes out with Alfonso, he retaliates by deserting her at the restaurant; he leaves her alone presumably so that she would learn to appreciate his "protective" presence. A woman alone in this restaurant is obviously vulnerable to men, who interpret her aloneness as a sign of sexual availability. Moses Tripp comes to the table and asks Eva if she is "free." Tripp then offers to buy sexual favors from Eva for five dollars, an ironic repetition of the dollar amount that the woman in the bar would theoretically give Alfonso. Alone in a restaurant, Eva, despite her desire not to be sexually commodified, ends up with her body on display for (sexual) consumption. The absence of one master, in a patriarchal economy, indicates Eva's need for another. Eva attempts to leave the restaurant after Tripp's proposition. Tripp follows her out and decides to take what Eva won't give in exchange for his five dollars. "He reached for me down between my legs, then he screamed and pulled his hand back. He called me a bitch" (98). Eva uses her knife and stabs him in retaliation. Like Sukie, she shows the man that her "no," though unheeded when merely spoken, should be acknowledged when accompanied by action that threatens the male body. Eva knifes Tripp in a threat of castration, which Jones further signals metonymically by Tripp's missing thumb. In multiple ways, Eva's action warns all other men who would abuse her, warns them about her teeth down there, about the potential of her body to protect itself against injury rather than merely to suffer injury. This warning results in Eva's first arrest and incarceration. It is the first action she takes that is recognized by the Law, and it is important that her agency is immediately recast as criminal, deviant, and therefore in need of punishment.

Here let me underscore that I am not conflating the sexual commodification of the black female body that occurred during slavery with the sexual commodification of black women by black men in Eva's Man. However, I read Jones as representing a landscape where contemporary racialized and gendered dynamics that characterize sexual relationships are inherited from the violent ownership and consumption of slavery. The dynamics of sexual coercion and possession haunt not only contemporary heterosexual and interracial relations, but they also crosshatch intraracial and homosexual relations in disturbing ways. (5) Eva's sexual relationships bear the burden of slavery as do the relations of her foremothers and other members of her community.

When the police arrive, Tripp says that all he was trying to do was buy Eva a beer. Eva tells her fellow inmate Elvira that that wasn't all he was trying to buy, but Elvira responds by telling Eva "not to tell it to her, there wasn't anything she could do for me. She told me to tell it to them" (98). Another inmate, Elvira has little agency herself; she knows that the ability to recognize and negotiate criminal agency lies with "them," officers of the law. The police are inseparable from the judiciary, the process of incarceration, and criminal psychiatry, all of which work hand in hand to re-narrate Eva's story, to replicate black agency as configured during slavery. The policemen share their suspicion of her with James Hunn (Hawk), whom Eva eventually marries. They warn Hawk about Eva, repeatedly telling him that she stabbed a man, so he should be careful. They pathologize and depoliticize her actions, reducing her self-protection to an overreaction to a sexual encounter. They look on in disgust when Hawk ignores them and tenderly approaches Eva: "'I know what you told me.... I want to hear what she tell me.... You scared of me, ain't you, honey?'" (105) Hawk resists the detectives' formulaic and simplistic explanations of criminality. He also seems genuinely concerned that Eva is afraid of him, and works to reassure her instead of using that fear to manipulate her as many of the other men in the novel do. Eva spends three months in reformatory and then three months in jail, and Hawk visits her during this time. Later in the narrative, Alfonso reveals that Hawk spent seven years in prison for killing a man over a woman. That he, like her, has experienced incarceration and understands how easily black volition is recast as inherently criminal and bestial, as lacking in political import, is one of the numerous connections that Eva makes with James.

However, like all of the characters in the novel, Hawk is unable to escape from the legacy of slavery that determines that relationships revolve around notions of possession and control. Hawk's time in prison not only connects him to Eva; it also illuminates the patriarchal fissure that runs down the middle of their relationship. Alfonso tells Eva that Hawk got into a fight with another man over an unnamed woman who "wasn't even a good lookin woman, just a woman," and ended up killing the man while the woman disappeared (109). Eva responds that Hawk is a good man, one who values a woman whom Alfonso reduces to "just a woman," enough to kill for her. She initially reads in Hawk's actions a man committed to his relationship.

Trouble starts between Eva and Hawk after her release from prison, after they marry and move to Frankfort, Kentucky. Eva reflects, "I didn't know that anything was wrong with him until we moved in this house and there was a telephone there and he said he was going to take the telephone out. I said I wanted a telephone. But he said Naw, I couldn't have one" (110). Despite the tenderness between them, what Eva has seen as Hawk's esteem for women in his murder of the man who approached his previous girlfriend proves his desire to possess women. Hawk refuses to have a telephone in their home because he fears Eva will arrange meetings with lovers, despite Eva's insistence that she has no lovers. From being one of the few men ever to listen to Eva, Hawk becomes a man who completely disregards and distrusts her. Hawk argues that in marrying Eva, he has gained absolute ownership over her, a reading that Eva resists by leaving after two years. She goes to P. Lorillard to work, fully expecting Hawk to come after her.

Thus, Eva keeps moving from one tobacco factory to another, both to ensure that Hawk cannot find her and to work the seasons of tobacco labor. The story of Eva and Hawk echoes that of a fugitive slave's flight from a "benevolent" master. Eva's insistence that Hawk never lost his temper with her speaks to the mechanism of power where the threat of violence is used to manipulate and control. Like a slave constantly threatened with slavery's violations and injuries, Eva is kept confined to school and home with its "four rooms and a bathroom" (Jones 111). The specter of Hawk's ability to inflict injury, even to kill, haunts their relationship and provides an edge of violence to their relationship that revolves around his insistence on patriarchal possession. Indeed, Hawk's behavior inspires our re-reading of Alfonso's description of Hawk's temper and his fight for possession over the unnamed woman that ends in murder. Our initial understanding of the murder he committed as a seriously limited form of agency must be placed alongside an interpretation of (the) murder as a means to limit and control another's agency. The woman's disappearance adumbrates Eva's flight to freedom and follows the theft of slaves who "stole away" from slavery's violence.

Jones details numerous shortcomings of the criminal justice system. Eva refuses to give a definitive narrative concerning her crimes, due both to the epistemic dangers of confession and to the cliched responses that Eva's actions elicit from the police. Confession is crucial to the judicial process that demands that the accused produce the "truth" about herself for consumption. In a History of Sexuality Foucault states: "The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession" (qtd. in Wilcox 8-9). The process of confession produces a consumable truth and a body consumed by a system of coerced labor. It further renders the confessor into a "known object." The judicial system, thus, in its insistence on a criminal confession, wrests agency away from the confessor through a ritual that ultimately reinforces its own authority and objectifies the "criminal." Rather, Eva asserts agency: she uses the telephone to call the police after her murder and castration of Davis, but she remains silent about her motives, for to confess would strip her of the limited agency that she accesses through her actions.

Part and parcel of Eva's refusal to explain herself to the police are the cliched explanatory responses that her actions would elicit, no matter what Eva might say about them. In other words, even if Eva were to speak, she would not be heard. The interpretation for her crime by the criminal justice system would diminish the complexity of her actions as a black woman, always already infantilized, sexualized, and criminalized. Jones creates such responses to Moses Tripp and Davis. At the beginning of the novel, Eva reveals that people said that she killed Davis because she found out about his wife: "That's what they tried to say at the trial because that was the easiest answer they could get" (4, italics added). As Basu argues, the "cliche and the 'easy' answer, the familiar, ordered, and the rational assure a continuity between the public and the private" (200). The law reduces Eva's action to familiar ideas that circulate in popular culture, thereby domesticating the inherent subversiveness in her actions. Even as her agency is only legally recognized in its criminality, this criminality is recast to defuse its potential subversiveness. Eva is not seen as making a cogent commentary on domination and subjugation as well as on the difficulty of asserting black female agency. Rather, Eva is regarded as either a passive victim, a role that she paradoxically refuses by keeping silent about her own sexual past and about abuse suffered by the women in her family, or she is regarded as an irrational black woman. Thus the actions of this extreme woman, already excessive by nature of her deviant black sexuality, make no sense to a police force convinced that black behavior is insane because atavistic.

The criminal's progressive degeneration into greater criminality constitutes the judicial narrative of inherent criminality. In other words, it is believed that the offender begins with small acts of deviant behavior, and as she gains practice and/or confidence, she progresses to more serious illegal offenses. This model of criminal degeneration underpins acts such as the 1994 "Three Strikes and You're Out" ballot initiative stipulating that people convicted of three felonies could end up facing life in prison. The judicial system in Eva's Man reads Eva's eventual murder of Davis as the continuing degeneration of a criminal who, in a trial run of her murder, stabs Moses Tripp. Such a reading reinforces the notion of Eva's inherent criminality by virtue of her blackness. Moreover, it robs her acts of their context. Perhaps to counter such a mischaracterization, Jones narrates the murder of Davis before the reader learns about the stabbing of Moses Tripp. In other words, because the story is told in reverse chronological order, readers cannot experience Eva's actions as a progression of criminal degeneration. Rather, readers are forced to read the disparate contexts of the murder and the stabbing, not, as the legal system reads them, as progressive echoes of one another. What links these two crimes is not Eva's inherent criminality but rather the frightening temporal, geographical, and social continuation of patriarchal and racialized violence.

In Sander Gilman's discussion of an 1890's study that tracked the "stigmata of criminal degeneration" in Russian prostitutes, he notes an emphasis on "black, thick hair; a strong jaw; a hard, spent glance" (96). He argues that the 19th-century perception of prostitutes overlapped with the perception of the black female body as primitive, hypersexualized, and uncontrolled. Throughout Jones's novel, the police stare at Eva--"The way they look at me" (3)--and describe her in ways that repeat the stigmata of criminal degeneration with descriptions of uncontrolled, thick hair and a hard stare. In the case of Moses Tripp, before the police realize that she is a juvenile, Eva is held for questioning in the Detective Bureau Office. The detectives immediately assume that there is something wrong with her. "One of the detectives sat at the desk, watching me, and the other one leaned against the filing cabinets. They looked like they were waiting for something" (104). During the Carter case, she sits waiting in the Detective Bureau Office, as two detectives dehumanize her with jokes about the severed penis. Jones depicts them as disgusted by Eva's physicality, her uncombed hair, and her black femaleness. They are disgusted and frightened by the implications of her stigmata of criminal degeneration: unbridled, primitive behavior in need of civilization via containment--"He kept looking at me.... Then he was looking like he was half afraid of me" (69).

Jones deliberately depicts the police as enacting a disciplinary gaze. Their reading of Eva's body suggests Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a highly centralized system of observation and surveillance, applied to the penal system wherein bodies are rendered hypervisible, "exactly legible" (Gordon 154). The Panopticon architecturally inscribes control over bodies. The manned central tower surrounded by a ring of walls replaces the rule of a single authority with an apparatus of control, as Bentham states: "'It is necessary ... for the inmate to be ceaselessly under the eyes of the inspector; this is to lose the power and even almost the idea of wrong-doing'" (qtd. in Gordon 154). Under the gaze of the inspector, the self is stripped naked, then penetrated and disciplined. So sexualized, Foucault argues, a person "unable and unwilling" becomes her or "his own overseer" (qtd. in Gordon 154-55). This notion of "unwillingness" is ascribed onto the black body as a body lacking any type of will except criminal will. To undo will is to recreate the figure that haunts the contemporary American landscape--the slave. Absent the official reign of slavery, the gaze of the police attempts to recreate the disciplined black body capable of productive labor. The idea of the gaze becomes doubly important when one considers the importance of the look in creating the scopic regimes of race. Frantz Fanon describes his body exploding and then being put together in another way by the gaze of a little white boy. "'Look! A Negro!... Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!'" (112). Thus, visual cues function as indices of interiority. As Stuart Hall elaborates,

   Even in racist discourses, where the
   evidence of racial difference appears to
   be figured so obviously on the surface
   of the body, so plain for all to see ... they
   are capable of carrying their negative
   connotations only because they
   function, in fact, as the signifiers of a
   deeper code--the genetic--which cannot
   be seen but which, it is believed, has
   the power of science to fix and stabilise
   racial difference.... [Racist discourses]
   can only carry meaning because they
   signify, through a process of displacement,
   further along the chain of equivalencies--metonymically
   (black skin--big
   penis--small brain--poor and
   backward--it's all in the genes--end
   the poverty programme...). (23-24)

The gaze of the policemen disciplines Eva's body, subjects it to surveillance and erasure, and also "epidermalizes" it, to reinscribe the hegemony of race where the surface functions metonymically for the inside. In this way, Eva becomes absolutely transparent. Reading the surface of her body becomes inextricable from giving meaning to her actions. However, Eva refuses all readings of her body, and thus all readings of her interior motivations and emotions.

Basu suggests that "public discourses are guided by certain underlying assumptions. One such assumption is that if we can collect enough 'data,' we can render the unknown as surface, reduce the strange to the familiar, make the intractable manageable. We can then move from the opacity of the text to posit a transcendent essence..." (203). I would argue that this essence has been equated with the inherent criminal deviance of black subjectivity. Jones plays with the tensions between surface and interior throughout the novel. On the one hand, she demonstrates those hegemonic acts of reading that reduce the person to the body, the complex to the simplistic metonymic relations of body and identity. Yet she also shows Eva actively resisting these acts of reading. Refusing to speak and act in prescribed ways, Eva deflects the apparent transparency of black female bodies. The text repeatedly describes not Eva's transparency but her opacity, her hardness. Characters like Davis, Alfonso, Elvira, and the psychiatrist call Eva "hard" and "serene," words applicable to an unyielding and mute surface. Jones's characters and perhaps also her readers find Eva impossible to penetrate or to explain, as Eva desires. For Eva, penetration by others who wish to "understand" her threatens her with imprisonment within monolithic meaning. All of the explanations for her actions offered by the state are painfully unitary, individualized, gendered, and racialized. For Eva, the attempt to look beneath her surface is tantamount to the forced penetration of sexual violation. That her reduction to an object of knowledge functions as a form of power whereby she is manipulated and sequestered--both epistemically and materially as a black female body--is not lost on Eva, and she actively resists. Thus, even as her race and her gender ostensibly render her body an accessible legible text, Eva's silence and resistance to the meaning assigned to her foreclose her body's legibility. If she cannot escape the transparent criminality of black femaleness (and thus incarceration), she can resist the dominant conflation of surface/body with interiority.

Jones further resists the conflation of surface and interiority through her use of scars on the body. The captain asks, "'She got any marks on her?'" (69) Marks on the body would testify to Eva's abuse and thereby explain (if not justify) her murder of Davis. However, the captain's attempt to read Eva's motivations on the surface of her body fails, as there are no physical signs of abuse. The absence of legible signifiers of abuse, instead of forcing the captain to rethink the relation between surface and interior, lead him erroneously to conclude that Eva was not abused.

The absence of physical signs of abuse on women's bodies recurs throughout Jones's text, not just to show that bodies are not as legible as they have been created in authoritative discourse, but also to challenge notions of "proof" and documentation within judicial proceedings. Almost immediately after the police fail to find marks of abuse on Eva's body, Alfonso and Eva are back at the restaurant where he left her. Jones begins their interaction with Alfonso's reference to the scene in the alley where Eva draws her knife: "You scratched me down there.... I still got the scar" (71). Jones interrogates the desire for physical "evidence" to document sexual abuse by demonstrating the inability of subjugated people to access physical proof that often validates only those in power. In spite of all that Eva has physically suffered, it is the men in the novel who control the physical evidence of her suffering. Alfonso, Davis, and Moses Tripp have embodied evidence attesting to Eva's criminality while Eva has little but her silence to attest to her lifelong torment.

Furthermore, even if the black (and) subaltern body does bear scars, those in power show a marked inability to read those scars in terms that validate the agency of the black body. Consider the case of scarred slaves on the auction block. Scars bearing testimony to violence against the enslaved body were as likely as not to be read as signifiers of a slave's intractability and criminal will, of a body in need of punishment then. The so-called criminality of the "difficult" slave replaced the culpability of the white planter class with its regimes of sexualized violence. Scars on the body of the slave led as well to the diminished economic value of the slave, for scars bespoke the inability of a slave to be mere chattel. Thus, the body as evidence of violence proves unreliable. Scars can speak in ways that further the types of epistemic and physical violence enacted upon the black body. Metaphorically, Eva's unmarked body extends her verbal silence: she refuses to speak in any language, including the speech of evidentiary scars for the historical ways that blacks' scars have been used to invalidate black injury.

Apart from markings on the body, physical evidence within judiciary proceedings also lies in documentation. Police reports and other official retellings create an official narrative. An event becomes recorded for posterity in ways that elide black women's agency and recast them as criminal. Stamp Paid in Morrison's Beloved attempts to communicate to Paul D the seriousness of Sethe's murder of her child via a newspaper article that documents the court case. Here Morrison reinforces the notion that the (free or former) slave only appears within authoritative discourse when she has committed an unlawful act.

   Because there was no way in hell a
   black face could appear in a newspaper
   if the story was about something
   anybody wanted to hear. A whip of
   fear broke through the heart chambers
   as soon as you saw a Negro's face in a
   paper, since the face was not there
   because the person had a healthy baby,
   or outran a street mob. Nor was it
   there because the person had been
   killed, or maimed or caught or burned
   or jailed or whipped or evicted or
   stomped or raped or cheated, since
   that could hardly qualify as news in a
   newspaper. It would have to be something
   out of the ordinary--something
   white people would find interesting,
   truly different, worth a few minutes of
   teeth sucking if not gasps. And it must
   have been hard to find news about
   Negroes worth the breath catch of a
   white citizen of Cincinnati. (Morrison
   155-56)

Jones depicts Eva's illegality in much the same way. (6) She draws a direct parallel between the failure to recognize slave agency except when unlawful and the failure to recognize Eva's will except when she breaks the law. It is no accident that the novel begins with the police's finding arsenic in the glass: they "even wrote an article about it in one of the police magazines. That's the way they do, though" (3). Jones begins with the official recognition of Eva's will in the police magazine, something worth the "breath catch" of (white) readers. She then goes on to show the distance between the official narration of the crime and the event itself.

Jones shows how official documentation with its supposed recognition of criminal agency further silences Eva and reduces her to object status. First of all, Eva does not have access to the article until Elvira smuggles it into their jail cell in her underwear. Eva refuses to look at the article, though she does hear and respond negatively to Elvira's narration of the "crime." In this movement from written authoritative text to an oral story between two black women, Eva subverts the article's power. In her refusal to gaze at it, Eva does not consume the official representation of her story. She wants the newspaper article to hold her responsible, for in holding her responsible, her will (even though criminalized) has to be acknowledged. Yet her agency is continually undercut in the interpretation of her crime. The article contains a picture of Davis, for example, and it "bothered me at first when I found out they'd used his picture in there, one showing what I did. It didn't bother me so much having mine in there" (3). Even in the representation of Eva's criminal agency, a man gets center-stage. When Eva is pictured, she is shown with her hair uncombed, looking like a "wild woman." The image evokes a stereotype from the era of slavery: black woman as untamed animal, savage. Her violent act loses its political dimension as a response to patriarchal abuse by men. She killed him not because she chose to but because she couldn't control herself.

Even though the non-linear structure of the novel and the reader's limited access to Eva's consciousness resists any single reading of Eva's murder of Davis, readers cannot fail to see Davis's murder and castration as symptomatic of society's crimes against the black female body. Eva's murder of Davis points to the profound ambiguities in the meanings of law and lawlessness within American society. Jones makes clear that law and justice are not equivalent on a landscape where the enslavement and disenfranchisement of a people were and remain legally sanctioned. Without underestimating the differences between chattel slavery and freedom, I support Jones's contention that we cannot overlook the continuities of racial and patriarchal oppression that result in the pained constitution and violent repression of blackness. The black body, from slavery to the present, continues to be the site onto which the state displaces its own violent crimes, externalizing its culpability and binding the black body.

Indeed, in spite of every attempt at flight, Eva exemplifies the impossibility of escape for the black female body. She reiterates the difficulty that she and other women in the novel such as Elvira and Jean find in distinguishing between a society where the black female body is fundamentally "unfree," always subject to patriarchal control with its ubiquity of violence and/or the penal system. Indeed, the prison industrial complex actually exposes the various mechanisms of societal control and shows them to be largely similar. Thus, while one can argue for the prison as an exemplary site of surveillance and violent control, Eva shows the prison to be no different from the "private" societal spaces such as the hotel room or apartment where the powerful control and violate the female body. For the women of Jones's novel, there are no safe, read "free," spaces. For them, marriage and the home have inherited the familial and sexual violence of slavery. A terrified Eva describes the rape of her mother by her father: "Then it was like I could hear her clothes ripping ... now he was tearing that blouse off and those underthings. I didn't hear nothing from her the whole time. I didn't hear a thing from her. 'Act like a whore, I'm gonna fuck you like a whore.'... He kept saying that over and over. I was so scared. I kept feeling that after he tore all her clothes off, and there wasn't any more to tear, he'd start tearing her flesh" (37). The father's rape of the mother dominates the mother's behavior and also the daughter's. Marriage comes to stand in for (sexual) possession and castigation; any deviance on the part of the property, the woman, is punishable. Eva's marriage to Hawk repeats the same motifs of possession and (punitive) violence. Her apartment home becomes a prison for Eva, and her connections to the "outside" are carefully monitored and controlled.

Jones depicts the difference between the prison cell and the larger society outside of it as based in the institutionalization of authority. Outside prison, black men attempt to seize control over black women, but they are depicted as ultimately subject to the same mechanisms of control that resulted in the criminalization of the black body, regardless of gender, sequestered and enslaved. An example of this racialized hierarchy can be seen in the control that the white foreman (a metonymic stand-in for racialized capitalist interests) exerts over black workers-male and female--through a subversion of workers' solidarity. The location of authority within larger US society as well as within prison cannot be seen as lying with the individual (black) men, guards, foremen, and overseers, for that site is "the place of the person which is determining" (Foucault 158). Power functions as an apparatus of surveillance and domination with replaceable human parts. That it is not black men per se who are ultimately responsible for the patriarchal and racialized violence against Eva is further illustrated by the relationship between Elvira and Eva. While Francoise Lionnet argues that Elvira and Eva's relationship suggests "an alternate space, a parallel world with utopian possibilities despite the restriction of movement that prison imposes" (104), the presence of Elvira shows how power exceeds the individual actor. The complex networks of power that are primarily vested in the male characters of the novel are also utilized by female characters. Eva repeatedly "knocks" Elvira out of her bed; she treats Elvira's sexual advances in much the same way as men have traditionally treated her. The struggle for power between the two women and Eva's eventual "triumph" over Elvira as she squeezes her head between her thighs signals a depressing victory for a non-reciprocal patriarchal exploitation of female sexuality. The novel depicts a bleak world with no alternate spaces outside of the violent authority of a racialized patriarchy directly inherited from chattel slavery.

Some critics--like the feminist activist, writer, and Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur, exiled in Cuba--demonstrate not only the informal continuation of slavery as a mechanism of control, but also that the prison system legally sanctions and supports slavery. In her autobiography, Shakur responds angrily to a guard who asks her to snap a big bushel of string beans, "'How much are you gonna pay me?... I don't work for nothing. I ain't gonna be no slave for nobody. Don't you know that slavery was outlawed'" (64). The guards response, that slavery is legal in prisons, results in Shakur re-reading the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (qtd. in Shakur 64). The implicit legal imposition of slavery as a punishment for crime speaks volumes about the prison industrial complex and its ever-increasing exploitation of prison labor. Angela Davis reveals that, under the Joint Venture Program in California, as of June 1994, work being performed by prisoners includes "computerized telephone messaging, dental apparatus assembly, computer data entry, plastic parts fabrication, electronic component manufacturing at the Central California Women's facility at Chowchilla, security glass manufacturing, swine production, oak furniture production, and the production of stainless steel tanks and equipment" (273). Brochures issued by the California Corrections Department speak glowingly of the benefits of inmate labor, among them that no benefit packages need to be paid to the large, "consistent" pool of "on-call" laborers. The acceptability of this convict labor force is based, not only on the nexus of racist incarceration practices, but also on the historical confluence of the black body as mechanism of labor and as chattel property.

Caryl Phillips's Higher Ground explores the parallels between the contemporary prison and the slavery-era plantation. The novel juxtaposes three stories of the effects of state violence on marginalized bodies across the African diaspora. In "Cargo Rap," a series of letters from a black convict, Rudy details life in an American prison cell in the 1960s for his family and attorneys. Rudy's letters chronicle his attempts to understand his condition both as a black man in the United States and as a prison inmate, incarcerated for "stealing forty dollars." (7) Using startlingly evocative images drawn from slavery, Rudy depicts his imprisonment and his US citizenship as parallel states of captivity. For instance, in describing his release from solitary confinement into the main prison population, he says, "Restrictions still apply, but to me they are as welcome and as liberal as the emancipation proclamation that we have yet to hear" (Phillips 147). Rudy's stint in prison results in his gradual physical and mental deterioration until his final letter. In this letter, the distinctions between prison and slavery in Rudy's mind have totally collapsed, and through his insanity, we obtain a chilling portrayal of the similarity of imprisonment to enslavement: "The overseer has a horse named 'Ginger.' ... The days are hard and long. We toil from 'can't see' in the morning to 'can't see' at night. The master is cruel, but nobody 'knows' him better than his slaves.... Thirty feet above me a man sits on a watchtower with a rifle.... Time stumbles" (172). In the movement of injustice, one sees time collapsing as overseer and prison guard, plantation and prison yard, slavery and incarceration become one.

Phillips's writing constitutes a chilling reminder, like the writing of Gayl Jones, of the specter of slavery that continues to reappear in contemporary forms, ensuring that the black body is never "free." As Patricia Williams so eloquently states about her enslaved great-great grandmother and her lawyer/slave master great-great grandfather who raped his slave repeatedly: "I see her shape and his hand in the vast networking of our society, and in the evils and oversights that plague our lives and laws. The control he had over her body. The force he was in her life, in the shape of my life today. The power he exercised in the choice to breed her or not.... In his attempt to own what no man can own, the habit of his power and the absence of her choice. I look for her shape and his hand" (19).

Eva's Man details the separation of the possibility of real justice from the law, a fissure that began during slavery when US law sanctioned the commodification of black bodies. The novel reads like a nightmare--a disturbing repetition of sexual, mental, and physical domination and the impossibility of escape from it. (8) However, Lionnet suggests that the murder as a "narrative catalyst ... can serve to reorganize our cultural experiences and to blur cultural distinctions between arbitrary or relativistic norms of conduct and a truly ethical or ... moral code" (107). Jones's novel very briefly gestures towards real justice in a few instances. The nightmare of black bodies whose will can only be recognized when criminalized is used to counterpoint those rare moments when readers are asked to consider a vision of justice that exceeds the judicial system. One such moment occurs when Eva learns that Davis is married. Her response after asking why he hadn't told her before is striking in a novel with few other allusions to religion: "Big rusty nails sticking out of my palms" (95). Eva uses the language of Christianity and the image of the crucified Christ to gesture towards another vocabulary of justice, another vision of a world where those who are oppressed will eventually be free. She uses a vocabulary long mobilized by black peoples in bondage to articulate her violent oppression and her desire for what Phillips would call "higher ground." The search for "higher ground," often imaged and invoked in black vernacular texts, is an effort to desert the oppression too long denied by the profound contradictions of a judicial system, and a promise to the continued pursuit of freedom. Thus, embedded in the bleak world of criminalization, incarceration, murder, and violence, is the promise of another world where true justice prevails.

Works Cited

Basu, Biman. "Public and Private Discourses and the Black Female Subject: Gayl Jones's 'Eva's Man'." Callaloo 19.1 (Winter 1996): 193-208.

Davis, Angela Y. "Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry." The House that Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Vintage, 1998. 264-79.

Dixon, Melvin. "Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones." Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Marl Evans. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library Classics of America, 1994. 1-102.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove P, 1967.

Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology. Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Gordon, Colin, ed. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, by Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 392-403.

Harrison, Paige M., and Allen J. Beck. "Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2001 ." Washington, DC: US Department of Justice (July 2002): 12.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Human Rights Watch. "World Report 2000." New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Eds. Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster. New York: Norton, 2001.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Jones, Gayl. Eva's Man. Boston: Beacon P, 1976.

Lionnet, Francoise. Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988.

Phillips, Caryl. Higher Ground. 1989. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Roediger, David R. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken, 1998.

Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987.

Tate, Claudia, ed. "Gayl Jones." Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum P, 1986. 89-99.

Wilcox, Janelle. "Resistant Silence, Resistant Subject: (Re)reading Gayl Jones's Eva's Man." Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance. Eds. Thomas Foster, Carole Siegal, and Ellen E. Berry. New York: New York P, 1996.72-96.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Mad Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Notes

(1.) Gilman shows how black female sexuality was constructed as deviant in 19th-century biological sciences by paying close attention to South African Sarah Baartman, also known as the Venus Hottentot, an icon of black female sexual aberrance and primitivism. See Gilman.

(2.) Cf. Dixon: "Eva remains imprisoned literally and figuratively by her silence that simply increases her passivity and her acceptance of the words and definitions of others" (246).

(3.) By "will," I mean to suggest more than the ability to determine one's actions; I mean also to identify that quality that most substantively distinguishes the "free" liberal subject from the enslaved and imprisoned.

(4.) Roach traces the erotics of the black woman on the auction block in his discussion of the development of legally sanctioned prostitution in New Orleans during the 1890s: "New Orleans brothel performances have roots deep in representations and behaviors spawned in the slave culture of the antebellum period--and in the reconstructed memories and restored behaviors consciously evoking that period" (227). What Roach suggests by his discussion of the "circuses" in Storyville's brothels, is the continuation of the erotics of (black) bodies displayed for sale. He quotes Emma Johnson, who describes her "sale" in 1915 or 1916 on the auction block where a man bid $750 dollars for both her and her friend for a night of sexual intercourse or sexual "possession."

(5.) Jones develops this theme fully in her novel Corregidora, published a year earlier.

(6.) Notably, Morrison was Jones's editor at Random House for Eva's Man in the late 1970s.

(7.) This stolen 40 dollars/40 pieces of silver puns on the never actualized Reconstruction promise of 40 acres and a mule. Rudy thus claims to have taken only that which belongs to him by right.

(8.) In an interview with Tate, Jones says, "I generally think of Eva's Man as a kind of dream or nightmare (94).

Hershini Bhana Young is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where she teaches African American literature and theory.