Saturday smelled like bergamot and yeast.
Its nights like liquor and dusting powder.
Like women forever manipulating some
pleasure pot—a bowl of dough, tub of
Blue Magic, hips. I learned offerings carry
their own scent. Sunday mornings, it was
stale sleep and sweat and some fried version
of pork seasoning the air. Women preparing
themselves in slips and girdles, perfume and
lipstick. Brass plates lined in velvet collected
their cash in the parade around the sanctuary.
They ladled whatever the week provided onto
plates piled with their labor. I spread the table
cloth, arranged the good dishes. After supper,
mixed a cap of bleach with the dish water.
As if it could transform their labor into some
Worthy thing.

This poem is called “Women and the Girls Who Become Them” and it’s part of a manuscript in which I explore Black women’s pleasure practices—particularly how they navigate and experience desire. Based on the historic construction of their personhood—a context that’s critical to any conversation about Black people—choosing pleasure is radical and necessary.

*A note: When I refer to Black people from here on out, I am referring to African-descended people who became part of the American project through the Atlantic slave trade. While I expect there are similarities in the experiences of African-descended people throughout diaspora, that scope of knowledge is beyond my own research and importantly, though often conflated as such there’s not a master narrative of Blackness. And when I refer to Black female people, I am referring to a range of Black female experience that includes Black girlhood and Black womanhood on a cis-gendered heterosexual binary. Again, I acknowledge the limits of my research and emphasize that this is not the full range of Black female expression.

The closing line of the recited poem references pleasure as a “worthy thing” and that is how I view Black folks’ pleasure practices. In the poem this pleasure is articulated in a few forms: the preparation and consumption of food, preparation and consumption of their bodies—in the slips and girdles and hair dressing which are preparation for how they are to be perceived or consumed!  Pleasure, the evocation of joy or satisfaction, is necessary for survival. Even our brains reward with pleasure the practices that keep us alive—eating, drinking, reproducing, mutuality.

I assert that these practices—pleasure practices—are necessary because they assert personhood which is not just a worthy endeavor but necessary to their survival in a system that only sees them as a piece and producer of capital.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Black personhood is constructed by the partus sequitur ventrem legal doctrine. It’s passed in the Virginia colony in 1662, so before the American project is even fully realized it deems it necessary to establish the status of Black people as pieces of—and producers of—capital which is to strip them of humanity or personhood. It literally means “the offspring follows the womb.” So, the status of offspring follows the status of their enslaved mothers thus serving to justify and even require their sexual and reproductive exploitation. Any pleasure Black female people get from conception and reproduction is therefore pathologized. So, it’s from here that tropes of Black female personhood emerge—the hypersexual Jezebel and asexual Mammy and the indifferent mother who evolves in contemporary times into the Crack Whore or Welfare Queen.  But one thing that construction fails to acknowledge is the souls of Black folk. My reference to the soul is based on African indigenous spiritual thought which recognizes corporeal personhood as only one facet of humanity. For example, death represents a transition between those states of being—from corporeal to spirit. A person is a spirit first and a corporeal body second.

What Black people do to feel good is a practice of humanization and subversion of their erasure that this doctrine facilitates. So, you will notice in the subtitle: The Pleasure Practices of Black Folk a not so subtle and certainly not passing nod to W.E.B. DuBois’s seminal interpretation of Black life: The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois says Black folk have a double consciousness—how they perceive themselves and how Whiteness constructs and interprets them and I say their pleasure practices necessarily mirror this consciousness with liberatory affect. DuBois attends to the difficulties of progress; specifically the challenge of asserting selfhood under “the problem of the color line;” that is, the weight of Jim Crow. But even he admits “the rough world was softened by laughter and song”—pleasure practices. And I present that this softening is where progress and liberation happen.

In a society in which Black people have no public worth, only economic value as what Cornel West calls “laboring metabolisms,” West writes that these expressions are assertions of “somebodiness.” In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson explains that the body kept alive only to serve as a laboring metabolism is effectively dead. So while their identity construction denies them the fullness of humanity, their pleasure practices reveal their ability to see, express, and thus experience liberated lives.

FOODWAYS
Despite being delegitimized and pathologized as primarily refuse; and as unhealthy, the composition, preparation, and consumption of what is known as soul food announce Blackness and its cultural and practical value.  In terms of its composition, many foods that make up the soul food plate are ancestral. Yams, okra, rice are staples of West African diets and arrived on the shores of the American project with our kidnapped ancestors. In terms of its preparation, cooking techniques like deep frying and slow cooking arrive with those ancestors too and so announce Blackness. Consumption which is often communal and sustainable is Blackness.  We pickle and salt; boil shrimp shells and repurpose pork by-products; forage for dandelion and mustard greens, save their nutrient dense pot liquor and we eat together—all sustainable; all Black. In the Black Church tradition the communal table is set as after service meals; it’s formalized through mutual aid like the Black Panther feeding program and informally—there seems always to be provision for guests in a Black home. These practices are utilitarian but also connect us to a larger identity than the one assigned in 1662.  Through our foodways, we assert a lineage; that we are not self-born; that we are somebody’s somebody and therefore somebody.

PLAY
Most anywhere Black children gather, one can find them engaged in similarly affirmative play. There is a traditional hand game called the jig-a-low. It goes:

Jig-a-lo; jig, jig-a-lo!
Jig-a-lo; jig-jig-a-lo!
Hey darlene

What?

Hey darlene

What?

Are you ready?

For what?

Are you ready?

For what?

To jig-a-lo!

Well-l-l-l, I got my hands up high; my feet down low and this the way I jig a-lo!

It is at this point that the player is called upon to announce themself with a unique self-affirming dance: “This the way I jig-a-lo.” It is in this choreography that each player is permitted—indeed expected—to make an aesthetic choice about how they want to portray themself through a corporeal presentation. They are further affirmed through the use of African American vernacular: “This the way.” The grammatical construction is called null copula wherein the to be verb is eliminated. That construction is a feature of West African language.  

Through their choices, players assert their identity as individuals and moreover as individuals within community demonstrating that they understand what ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt calls “rules of Black social identity.” She explains the shared practice is how Black children, namely Black girls, learn the rules and the games exemplify the practices that they use to subvert them. The rules require diminishment in the broad social order; their jig-a-lo invites them to do otherwise. These corporeal presentations of somebodiness can be recognized in other games too, like the stylization of double dutch. Black children’s pleasure practices are how they subvert and survive erasure.

INTIMACY
Finally, Black intimacy is a liberatory pleasure practice and arguably one of the most radical and yet quotidian acts of resistance to erasure for people who are codified as non-human and thus not expected to experience enjoyment or gratification from it.  

To be free is the agency to be a fully realized self which is where romantic intimacy happens and therefore makes it a liberatory context. In the essay “Searching For Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom” Treva B. Lindsay and Jessica Jones write that intimacy becomes a way for Black people, specifically female people, to re-embody themselves by finding pleasure instead of violence in their bodies. They write that “finding moments of sexual pleasure with oneself, a partner, or partners meant rejecting the dehumanizing status designation of property.” And they continue, that it is “a tool of survival and an affective act of asserting one’s humanity…and provide[s] corporeal and embodied resistance to dehumanization.”

In almost all iterations of the American project, Black people have little agency over their bodies much less their relationships, so choosing relationships is an act of resistance. In antebellum America Black family units are weaponized with the explicit goal of managing order: families are sometimes constructed by slaveowners; when families are chosen, the partnerships are only permitted in order to pacify enslaved people; and forced family separation is used or threatened to maintain order. Forced separation is as often an economic decision as it is one to sever affection and bonds. And the disruption continues in the modern welfare state.

When Saidiya Hartman travels the route of her ancestors in her travel narrative Lose Your Mother she demonstrates how to be severed from family—especially mothers and their offspring—is to be separated from identity. In the afterlives of slavery, the disruption is still felt, no doubt, but Black family relationships necessarily perform as resistance. In the immediate afterlife of slavery, Black people place advertisements and petition the Freedman’s Bureau to locate lost family members. They attempt to formalize family through marriage and create homes as refuge from the hostilities outside the door. The value placed on relationships can even be seen in their large family sizes and the practice of the family reunion a tradition borne of the psychic and physical severance. In these ways intimacy marks presence; says “I am here” where erasure has been the goal.

CONCLUSION
Pleasure is a worthy thing. And a necessary one for Black survival of the American project. By reconstructing identity, pleasure subverts the intentional erasure of our humanity and perhaps most importantly in a system in which we are not supposed to, it makes us feel good.

References
DuBois, W.E.B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Norton.

Gaunt, K. (2006). The Games Black Girls Play. Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York UP.

Hartman, S. (2008). Lose Your Mother. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lindsey, T.B. and Johnson, J.M. (2014). Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom. Meridians 12(2), 169-195. http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.2979/meridians.12.2.169

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP.
West, C. (1989). Black Culture and Post-Modernism. In B. Kruger & P. Mariani (Eds.), Remaking History. Seattle Bay Press