Read through the vexed history of the middle passage, Cullen’s dialogic imperative to “come and dance” simultaneously voices both a commanding interpellation of the black subject for Eurocentric commodification and an invitation to liberate the African body from Eurocentric repressions. On the one hand, the stripped black body repeats the molting of the poem’s “silver snakes that once a year / Doff the[ir] lovely coats.” Such doffing and stripping would shed the repressed, Occidental self in transformative liberation of an Afrocentric identity. On the other hand, the command, rather than the invitation, to “strip” brings into play the surveillance of black skin as spectacle, which reaches back to the middle passage where, at auction, black skin was literally read for signs of insubordination left from cat-o’-nine-tails scarring (Emery 101). Within the text of this “heritage,” the black body has come to signify what Frantz Fanon described as “a racial epidermal schema” (Fanon 112). This racial identity strictly linked to skin happens in the exchange between self and other as a third position of surveillance: a spectacle of corporeality that is underwritten by the deep “legends, stories, history, and above all historicity” of a troubled racial past (Fanon 112). Black corporeality in the visual field of the white other, as Fanon witnesses it in “The Fact of Blackness” is inherently unsettling, and before it became a vehicle of empowering agency for Josephine Baker, performing race as spectacle was particularly traumatic owing not just to her mixed racial ancestry, but equally important, to her encounter with the trauma of race’s social relation, triggered early on in her childhood by the St. Louis Riot of 1917.
One symptom of how formative this trauma was for Baker is revealed in the very first sentences of her autobiography’s opening chapter; sentences that recast the optimism of Jo Bouillon’s opening question about her early years. “My happiest childhood memory?” she muses. “I really don’t know, but I can tell you which was the worst. It marked me, first unconsciously and later all too consciously, for life. I think in ancient times they used to call it the power of destiny.” 1 Here Baker is acting out an insistent need to return to a formative trauma that, by her own account, leaves its imprint with the “power of destiny.” Trauma befalls Baker’s already difficult childhood poverty in 1917 in a literal awakening to the uncanny nightmare of racial violence. Torn from sleep by the oncoming riot, Baker is driven with her family out of her home. Following her fleeing mother and siblings, she enters the disaster. “What I saw before me as I stepped outside,” she testifies:
had been described at church that Sunday by the Reverend in dark, spine-chilling tones. This was the Apocalypse. Clouds, glowing from the incandescent light of huge flames leaping upward from the riverbank, raced across the sky … but not as quickly as the breathless figures that dashed in all directions. The entire black community appeared to be fleeing like ants from a scattered ant heap. “A white woman was raped,” someone shouted, and although I didn’t understand the meaning of his words, I knew that they described the ultimate catastrophe. The flames drew nearer. As the choking stench of ashes filled the air, I was overcome with panic. (Josephine Baker, quoted in Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 2)
- Josephine Baker, quoted in Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1.[↑]
