ABSTRACT
TRYING TO LOOK NONCHALANT, SHE SAT.” AT THE ANNUAL FOXY CATS Dawn Ball, a pregnant Maud Martha watches her husband Paul dance “with someone red-haired and curved, and white as a white…[h]er gold spangled bosom was pressed-was pressed against that maleness-.” As she silently observes her man with another woman, “white as a white,” Maud Martha “sat, trying not to show the inferiority she did not feel” (85). It is precisely the feeling of inferiority that the decisive footnote number 11 to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) made crucial to its new, integrationist account of “Negroness.” What Maud Martha feels-and how or whether she shows what she feels-is in this sense essential to the question of whether she is “black.” Indeed, this description of Maud Martha in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), could be read as both an endorsement and a critique of the Court’s identification of “Negroness” with feeling and with inferiority: the feeling is essential, the inferiority is denied. At the same time, however, some readers may find inferiority in Maud Martha’s compulsion to deny it. The other woman, defined here not as black but not exactly as white, makes Maud feel something. The woman is “white as a white.” It is as if the choice-Paul’s choice-is defined here as the choice between two forms of racial identity: a blackness (Maud Martha’s) that is identified by the primacy of psychology and a certain inferiority, and, not a whiteness, but an “imitation” whiteness, that is identified not with feelings but with looks: the woman’s red hair, her white skin, her bosom. Indeed, Paul’s choice is Maud’s problem-to be like the woman is to be not white, but inauthentically black; to be who she is, sitting on a bench by the wall, is to be black, but only by virtue of her battle with the feeling of inferiority. The problem, then, is how to imagine a racial identity that is neither inferior nor inauthentic. Maud Martha’s insistence on concealment-not on what she feels but on trying not to show that she feels-suggests what would become a new site of an interiorized racial distinction: the home. It is the pri vate, and above all, the gendered space of the home that will become for Maud Martha the new place of race and a new location for the literal domestication of racial difference.
