Radical intimacy under Jim Crow "fascism": the queer visions of Angelo Herndon and Carson McCullers.

Steeby, Elizabeth A.

Jim Crow's Heterotopias of Deviance

CARSON MCCULLERS'S NOVELLA, THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE.; ENDS with a scene of a chain gang that labors from daybreak to sunset under the watchful eye of a guard, pacing their work with song.

   It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to
   grow cold with ecstasy and fright....

      And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just
   twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys
   from this county. Just twelve mortal men who are together. (70-71)

Men, differentiated by race but laboring side by side, were part of a penal technology that was both "free" Southern society's frightening Other and its foundation. The proximity of these African American and white men, who would otherwise be segregated from one another by the racial caste system of Jim Crow, was the source of anxiety and contention for those who found themselves part of the chain gang, as well as for those who heard their song. Segregation was predicated upon and supported by fears of racial contact, yet the social and economic structure also depended upon everyday interracial contact such as that of chain gang laborers. How then might we understand the rather queer "ecstasy" their intimacy and their music conjured for those who heard the prisoners' songs and perhaps for even the prisoners themselves? (1)

If we consider what Siobhan Somerville terms "The Queer Career of Jim Crow" (39), segregation appears as much a structured intimacy *as, a structured separation. As a legally enforced social hierarchy predicated upon racial "knowledge," Jim Crow was a system that both precluded and produced intimacies--some realized through contact, others cultivated and lived solely in the realm of fantasy. Jim Crow manufactured a sexual reality and a sexual politics that required a constant and vigilant denial and disavowal of desire, affection, violation, and familial relation. Only a very particular set of relationships would be condoned (with legitimacy reserved for heterosexual interactions between gender normative white men and women), while a vast array of behaviors and points of contact were designated as abnormal, unacceptable, and punishable perhaps to the point of death. In its obsessions with race and heteropatriarchal power, the early twentieth-century South in effect created an expansive queer geography. (2) Within that geography, as so many have attested, eye contact, tone of voice, a stray whistle, or a slight gesture might at any moment acquire the weight of sexual taboo. In this racialized sexual terrain, heterosexuality and homosociality afforded no guaranteed protection for those accused of traversing racial boundaries. Those who challenged the boundaries of race, gender, class, or sexuality might be assigned non-normative or "queer" status for any presumed infraction of the social order, and their queer behavior might at any point be deemed criminal by legal or extra-legal forces, such as the white lynch mob.

To many resistant Southerners, this homegrown authoritarian use of legal and extralegal power in the service of state homogenization sounded a lot like what was occurring in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. The white supremacist South was refracted back to them through the lens of European fascist empires on the rise. (3) Among other factors, the Jim Crow state lead by a figure such as Theodore Bilbo or James K. Vardaman was distinct, however, from Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy in its strategic local adaptations of plantation slavery's racialized discourses of sexuality for a modern regulatory state project. Segregationist ideology trod a well-worn path from the slave trade to the state penitentiary, meeting up with twentieth-century fascism in the construction of what Michel Foucault calls "heterotopias," or othered spaces: "counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" ("Of Other Spaces" 24). In particular, the heterotopic space of the Southern prison was an abject space in which criminals, or social deviants, became the subjects of a neoslavery project of discipline and punishment at the hands of a white supremacist state. (4)

Angelo Herndon's 1937 Marxist prison memoir, Let Me Live, and Carson McCullers's very queer 1940 novel, The Heart Ls a Lonely Hunter, are radical, visionary texts whose narratives are informed by states of unjust confinement and a regional experience of global fascism. Through the lens of Jim Crow Georgia, they ask us to think about how we live in a world of cages--mobile and immobile, material and imagined--that implicate all, from those most vulnerable to those most privileged. And they compel us to feel the textures of that confinement and to begin to navigate a way out.

For these two politicized writers, confinement was a feeling that was hard, if not impossible, to shake, even beyond the walls of prison. In Herndon's words, freedom from a Georgia jail is "a terrifying but beautiful feeling!" (282), for beauty free of fear is impossible to come by when "lynch justice" prevails (331). In a moment to himself, McCullers's ostensibly "free" character, white cafe owner Biff Brannon, feels a "shaft of terror" simply for silently considering humanity as a "fluid passage" that labors and loves (McCullers 359). For the subjects of these texts, freedom is fleeting and elusive. There is no lasting or absolute sanctuary for those who challenge pervasive norms. In what follows, I explore their meditations on resistant subjectivity and embodiment within a heterotopic carceral world. Our protagonists' struggles reveal the limits and possibilities of intimacy within a constantly regulated social system.

The focus of Herndon's memoir, the criminal case that lands him in prison, is to many a "symbol of the clash between Democracy and Fascism" (Herndon 317); similarly, McCullers deemed her novel "an ironic parable of fascism" (Gilmore 225). By the time of the publication of McCullers's novel, mainstream US political and media discourse commonly rendered fascism as a major foreign threat (often interchangeable with the threat of communism) to capitalist democracy (similar to the historical referent of "Jim Crow" today). Therefore, these writers calling out the US South as "fascist" carried material and symbolic weight. However, I am not interested in proving the historic material and qualitative similarities between the genocidal racist and nationalist practices of European fascism and the Jim Crow South. Through a comparative reading, I am interested in how these two authors, and corresponding protest movements, differently employ the discourses of (anti-)fascism and queerness toward a more complex meditation on discipline, punishment, and intimacy.

In Foucault's formulation, "heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing" and are typically entered into by force or by completing a series of prescribed rituals, not by one's own will ("Of Other Spaces" 26). As such, the typical walled and/or gated prison fits this definition. However, the localized Jim Crow-era prison system included the infamous mobile prison--rolling barracks that moved around the region housing convicts on chain gangs who built the region's infrastructure of roads and railroads and who labored in fields and forests to produce raw materials. What kind of modified heterotopic space is this? In his seminal work on the development of the modern prison as a network of regulation extending far beyond the gates of the prison (and into far more banal and everyday interactions than we might be aware), Foucault states that "the carceral network linked, through innumerable relations, the two long, multiple series of the punitive and the abnormal" (Discipline and Punish 300). "The judges of normality," he goes on to say, "are present everywhere" (Discipline and Punish 304). The modern era of the everyday person as judge echoes C. Van Woodward's argument that Jim Crow segregation granted the average citizen the power to police others' race/class status in the most commonplace interactions. (5) In fact, Jim Crow required citizens to act as police in order to prevail. The lynch mob was much closer to the rule than it was the exception. If segregation conscripted all to police the intimacy of those around them (as well as their own bodies and desires), this meant that the carceral was omnipresent. Like fascist Europe, the prison and its chain gangs, as mobile "heterotopias of deviation" (Foucault 25), reflected back to Southerners a world of confinement--abject, and all too familiar. Central to any critique of state oppression then was a confrontation with heterotopic space.

Herndon's and McCullers's texts represent the prison as a heterotopia of deviance that adapts technologies of slavery for a new era of Jim Crow segregation in which the category of "criminal" expands to discipline all those who might challenge the codes of intimacy. The carceral and the queer become intrinsically linked. Incarceration brings together black and white laborers; queer behaviors proliferate. These fictional and nonfictional indictments of the Southern penal system reaffirm the white supremacist, capitalist exploitation that criminalizes working-class African American men and places them under constant threat of being reduced to what Georgio Agamben calls "bare life" status (182). Both authors represent the reality of the jail as ever-present for those who deviate from Jim Crow's cultural norms. However, I argue that Herndon distances himself from a queer prisoner subjectivity, while McCullers can never fully "other" the heterotopic space of the prison in its various incarnations, and that together they provide key insights into how the repressive social order might be undone--the radical potential of those who are criminalized to sing together in "ecstasy" as well as in fear. Drawing on the methodology of queer of color critique and critical prison studies, we might understand the production of criminality beyond the familiar race/class axis to account for the role that gender and sexuality play in the maintenance of carceral states of governance and being. Finally, I briefly consider how these texts suggest the power of carceral memory, which, in a larger genealogy of race-based slavery, centers around an ongoing history of the confined body in pain who is nevertheless in "anticipation of its liberty," as Saidiya Hartman asserts (,Scenes of Subjection 74).

Opposition to the Jim Crow State and the Injured Body of the Prisoner

To begin sketching out how the carceral regimes of Jim Crow deployed intersecting modes of bodily regulation, I first turn to a case of state torture. In 1935, Woodrow Wilson Shropshire and Robert Barnes, two twenty-year-old African American men, were sentenced to work at a prison camp in North Carolina as punishment for drunk driving. Once in the camp, prison guards strung the two men up by their feet and chained them to a wall in a cold room for an entire day. This kind of punishment was standard fare in the Jim Crow system. Their infractions: working too slowly and warming their feet by a fire. In these torturous positions, the two men's feet became infected and, after eventually receiving inadequate treatment by the prison doctor (for athlete's foot), were amputated. When the state failed to convict the prison officials and doctors of wrongdoing, they offered artificial limbs and jobs to Shropshire and Barnes as consolation. When even those paltry promises of compensation did not materialize, the Southern Committee for People's Rights (SCPR) "refused to let the case die, demanding compensation for the victims and lobbying against the southern chain gang system" (Gilmore 225). The experiences of Shropshire and Barnes were seen as representative of those who found themselves captive of the Southern "gulag" and of the fascistic power that the carceral state wielded in the service of capital. Their pain would become a key cultural memory in the fight against state oppression.

The Southern Committee for People's Rights is just one example of the anti-racist, free speech, pro-labor groups that were organizing in the region throughout the 1930s. Organizers like Olive Stone and Paul Green (both affiliated with the SCPR) became increasingly attentive to the treatment of all prisoners, even those who were perhaps guilty of the crimes for which they were initially incarcerated. They asserted that all "deserved equality before the law and their rights upheld, even in confinement" (Gilmore 226). For many organizers, this was a key development in the formulation of a more totalizing critique of the Jim Crow state. While establishing the innocence of those wrongfully targeted by the state and by its extralegal arm (the white lynch mob) was still a major tactic, cultural workers increasingly represented the state as an untrustworthy adjudicator of innocence or guilt at every level. What right did a white supremacist, capitalist state have to determine criminality at all, they reasoned, when the state itself was the criminal? The most radical of these critiques did not hold that the South was a corrupt example of modern democracy but rather an inevitable permutation under the corruption of modern capitalism. From many viewpoints, the injured body of the prisoner became a metonym of state-inflicted violence. In essence, they were condemning the jurisdiction of the white supremacist state as well was its veridiction--its right to determine deviancy at all, its power to mete out just punishment. As in Foucault's formulation, the heterotopia--the othered space of the prison--acts as a mirror reflecting back the contradictions of the "normal" or "free" world ("Of Other Spaces" 24).

What does the torture of prisoners for resistance to white prison authority have to do with queerness? This, I argue, might be one of the many vital questions implicitly asked and answered by McCullers's seminal novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The novel tells the Depression-era story of life in a small, segregated Georgia mill town, which brings together a seemingly unlikely cast of characters--Mick Kelly, a genderqueer white "tomboy"; Jake Blount, a white Marxist carnival worker; Dr. Benedict Copeland, a Spinoza-quoting African American doctor; and Biff Brannon, a cross-dressing white cafe owner--through their mutual connection to a white hearing- and speech-impaired "mute" man, John Singer. A second character galvanizes the motley crew in the novel as well--an African American prisoner and amputee, Willie Copeland. The historical basis for this character's traumatic life was none other than Shropshire and Barnes, the two convicts whose torture at the hands of the North Carolina prison had been taken up by the SCPR. This egregious act of state violence is fictionalized and compounded by the direct and indirect state violence done to the other central characters in the novel.

We first learn of Willie's injury through Portia, his sister and Dr. Copeland's daughter, who tells their father of how white chain guards orchestrated the punishment and torture of her brother and two of his friends. The details that follow--the description of their bodies strung up in the cold, with gangrene eventually setting in--closely mirror those of the punishment of Shropshire and Barnes. In the end, "They sawed off both our Willie's feets. Buster Johnson lost one foot and the other boy got well. But our Willie--he crippled for life now" (McCullers 255). In turn, each of the central characters is horrified upon hearing Willie's story and desires to mourn or protest.

While most criticism of McCullers's novel has understandably treated John Singer as the figure in whom all the central characters' "thoughts seemed to converge ... as the spokes of a wheel lead to the center hub" (211), Willie and his injury provoke some of the most overt emotional outbursts and political debates between characters who remain otherwise estranged. In focusing my analysis on Willie, and the omnipresent Jim Crow heterotopic prison, I situate this novel in relation to a black radical prison writing tradition. Thus, to understand how Willie fits into McCullers's often-discussed cast of "freaks," I turn to Herndon who, as he puts it, became a spectacle for whites as "that freak monster, a Negro Red" (100).

Angelo Herndon: The Revolutionary Condemns Jim Crow and Perverse Prison Sexuality

Herndon's memoir, Let Me Live, documents his firsthand experience as a political prisoner in the "Death House" of the Atlanta, Georgia, penitentiary (251). As the memoir illustrates, Herndon's arrest, incarceration, trial, and treatment served as a rallying cry for national and international activists who were fighting against racism, fascism, and labor exploitation, and for the right to free speech. (6) Like Shropshire and Barnes, and McCullers's fictional Willie Copeland, Herndon barely lives through his experience to tell of the tortures he experienced in prison. However, we risk oversimplifying Herndon's place in the history of Jim Crow resistance if we focus solely on his role as a bridge between anti-racist organizers and leftist labor movements. His memoir also reveals how sexual norms and practices came to bear on his own experience as a political prisoner.

Like the organizers in SCPR and the characters in McCullers's novel, Herndon's memoir flipped the script of innocence/guilt by representing the criminality of a fascistic Jim Crow state in its treatment of African American prisoners. A veteran communist organizer by his late teens, Herndon had been imprisoned for organizing poor black and white workers in Atlanta for food justice. In his memoir, he approaches the Southern prison from a radical ideological position that sees it as a means to physically and psychologically debilitate the body of the revolutionary. Because his sentence was based on early nineteenth-century laws meant to criminalize slave insurrection, he indicts the prison system as a continuation of slavery. The law that attempted to shut down Herndon's (until then) successful organizing efforts was one that had been revised in 1871 to indict all insurrectionists, regardless of the race of the offender, who made "any attempt, by persuasion or otherwise, to induce others to join in any combined resistance to the lawful authority of the State." Conviction resulted in "possible death or not less than five years confinement in the penitentiary" (Herndon 204). This allowed courts and/or judges to apply widely varying sentences to those convicted. Because he was both "Negro" and "Red," Herndon faced the harshest sentencing. Before he is ever granted a trial, Herndon finds himself in the Death House of the Atlanta penitentiary.

It is worth noting that at this point in his young life, Herndon has already agitated for change in ways that McCullers's dogmatic, white, Marxist Jake Blount in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would perhaps appreciate and envy. Where Herndon has risked his life many times to work with others to build interracial coalitions, Blount has only one failed attempt at organizing for "Action," or the "razing of capitalism" (McCullers 156), and now, ironically, supports his alcohol addiction by maintaining order at the Sunny Dixie Show. A traveling show run by the rich, fat, and white Mr. Clark Patterson, the carnival is another incarnation of Jim Crow heterotopia, presumably one at odds with Blount's ideological stance. The only person (besides the adolescent, Jewish, anti-fascist Harry Minowitz, perhaps) who takes Blount's critique of American capitalism seriously is the other student of Karl Marx, Dr. Copeland. Willie's injury at the hands of the prison state spurs Jake to speak (drunkenly) with Copeland about how they might use his son to advance the anti-capitalist cause, but their potential coalition disintegrates into racialized name-calling (305). Jake's "vulgar" Marxism cannot account for the specificities of white supremacist capitalism Copeland insists upon, and ultimately the two men differ in their activist methods as well. Herndon's narrative, on the other hand, provides evidence of how, previous to his incarceration, he successfully converts a man he calls "white Jim" (and others like him) from fascist "racketeer" to "class-conscious worker." Herndon sees how the American Fascisti prey on starving whites and circulate "racial dry rot" to recruit members. Unlike McCullers's fictitious Marxist, Herndon understands that anti-rascism is a central component of any organizing effort (172-73).

From Herndon's perspective, both the law and its application, and the modern Southern prison, historically guaranteed race and class hierarchy. His experience in prison teaches him that the prison's technologies of torture, discipline, and murder are specific to this heterotopic space, yet long-lasting in their effects: "Their cruelty was raw. It hurt like an open wound." Under these circumstances, in an unlit cage measuring eight by twelve feet, he realizes, "I had never understood before what it meant to be buried alive. Now I knew" (Herndon 251). As a prisoner of neoslavery, he lives the social death Orlando Patterson ascribes to slaves as powerlessness in exchange for a "conditional commutation," in which the prospect of death is not erased, but deferred (Herndon 5). Forced to surrender his own claim on his life to the state in exchange for the status of a social nonperson, Herndon by his own account refuses to be broken by maintaining hope for liberation. Though the physical and psychological violations are nearly totalizing, he credits his survival to the relationships he builds with other inmates and with the support of his comrades on the outside. He has more difficulty characterizing bonds between fellow prisoners on the inside, however; the reasons for that may lie in part with the accusations of deviant intimacy inserted into his own trial.

When Herndon is finally brought to trial, the prosecution primarily focuses on his possession of communist literature as proof of his intent to mount an insurrection against the state. An Emory professor testifies for the defense that possession of this literature is commonplace, and not a fair basis, in and of itself, for accusing someone of overthrowing the government. Herndon's prosecutors then switch tactics and ask the professor, "Do you understand that the Communist position on the Negro question to mean the right of a colored boy to marry your daughter, if you have one?" (Herndon 233). Herndon wonders,

   What did the hypothetical question of a white woman marrying a
   Negro ... have to do with my attempt to incite insurrection in
   the incomparable State of Georgia? Was I mad or were they mad? It
   was all gibberish to me. I could not make head or tail of it. Nor
   could anybody else, for that matter. (234)

What he labels "mad" here was certainly a familiar logic to Herndon, who had, after all, organized against the farcical charges of rape levied on the Scottsboro Nine. This was perhaps the most familiar line of Jim Crow reasoning--when racialized, especially male, subjects called for political change it was merely a cover for so-called "social equality."

Like many organizers before and after him, Herndon's response was to resist the sexualization of himself and his politics. In fact, throughout his memoir, he does not mention any aspect of his own life or others' that might be deemed sexual or even romantic in nature. His only discussion of sexual identities and practices occurs when he is describing the deviant heterotopic space of the prison. Like many prison writers before and after him, Herndon attributes prisoner deviance to that very circumstance of monotonous time:

   What were the men to do with themselves in their state of perpetual
   idleness? They were not given any work.... It was but natural that
   under such unhealthy circumstances the prisoners' sexual instincts
   and practices should have become diseased.... It is noteworthy at
   this point to remark that these relatively harmless pastimes were
   indulged in mostly by the better elements among the prisoners. The
   others, hardened in crime and degenerated in their tastes and
   habits, looked for a more concrete outlet for their sexual
   appetites. They preyed upon all the young boys, some of whom were
   mere children! (209-10)

He creates a hierarchy of acceptable sexual behaviors here--presumably distinguishing between masturbation and sexual intercourse, and especially non-consensual sexual encounters between younger and older convicts. According to his own logic, he equates criminalization (those "hardened in crime") with the accumulation of deviant sexual desires and practices. He goes on to imply that the repetition of those deviant practices creates homosexuals. Herndon's assessment implies the mutually constitutive nature of sexuality and incarceration. (7)

Herndon depicts sex between prisoners as a public spectacle that attracts a collective voyeurism, which he resists. In the following passage, a scene of temporary liberation becomes the means for state-orchestrated sexual violence:

   Every day at nine o'clock the cells were opened by the turnkeys,
   and the men circulated freely in the entire prison block for the
   rest of the day. They had access to all the cells and thus could
   come in close contact with one another. This made it possible for
   the prisoners with homosexual inclinations to go prowling around
   for their private pleasures.... "Love making" was carried on in
   full sight of everybody. (Frequently I had to turn my eyes away in
   disgust and pity.) (210)

Herndon postures here as a disgusted non-participant, yet inevitably serves as a witness to the "orgiastic" social world in the prison. He implicates the guards by saying that "they were old hands at it. They behaved in a callous manner. These incidents afforded them endless amusement" (211). Though he surprisingly never portrays the guards as sexual aggressors, he suggests their spectatorship as both complicity and as a mode of participation. Their "amusement" is yet another means to signal their power. Watching inmates subordinate/violate one another through sexual violence is a technique of heterotopic control, but it also mirrors the real-life surveillance of intimacy and proximity intrinsic to everyday life under Jim Crow.

While aware of how handily prosecutors might apply charges of sexual deviance to him, Herndon is careful to disidentify with those he deems truly deviant, especially young boy inmates gendered as "Old Ladies," who are "hunted" like big game by older prisoners (Herndon 210). He sets those relationships apart based on the violence involved, the practice of gender "inversions," and the associations with sex work. "Gal-boys" or "Old Ladies" learned to wear girls' underwear and to "behave like the lowest streetwalker" (211). His judgments reveal a conjunction of gender and sexual norms reinforced in Marxist ideology and in the "respectability politics" of bourgeois culture. In the view of either, the homosexual, gender-variant black sex worker in prison is the most defiled product of a capitalist society, the emasculated result of exploitation. (8) The anti-capitalist, anti-racist revolutionary project that Herndon so bravely fought for often reinforced the sexual politics of the very apparatus he and others sought to dismantle. Herndon's voice of protest relies on a self-construction that establishes him as safely in the realm of normativity.

He dwells fondly on his own close friendships with other young inmates (reminiscent of McCullers's singing chain gang workers), though carefully and in nonsexual terms. And in the few moments when he does address his own views of intimacy, he emphasizes how the body is made beastly; the degradation of humanity is the impossibility of elevated emotional states: "An indefinable air of something slimy, monstrous and unnatural hangs over the entire prison. There is no room in it for any fine feelings, for love of men or of nature" (Herndon 209). Here, in the formulation of his critique, he constructs the prison as a quintessential heterotopia of deviance, other to the "free world," which denies subjects complex affective bonds. In his talk of "fine feelings" between men, however, he reveals, perhaps unconsciously, the power of consensual "queer" intimacy to challenge the violence of Jim Crow normativity. His own longing for deep emotional intimacy between men reveals the potential of homosocial (if not sexual) bonds, not unlike those he effectively built between black and white workers across the South. In rendering so many forms of intimate contact as abnormal, unacceptable, and deviant, however, Jim Crow heteropatriarchy effectively controlled the terms of exchange between subjects such that even the most revolutionary activists were complicit in its logic.

While McCullers's dogmatic Marxist Jake Blount could certainly benefit from Herndon's intersectional analysis of race and class, what might come of a conversation between Herndon and McCullers's character Biff Brannon, a man who "sometimes wished he was a mother," who believes that "By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means" (132-33)? Taken together, how might these texts forge a radical intimacy? (9)

The Chain Gang and the Queered Mill Town

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; McCullers consistently presents a sympathetic portrayal of a varied cast of deviants, including among several others a "boy-gal," or "tomboy," a cross-dressing man, and a cohabitating hearing- and speech-impaired male couple who share a queer kind of intimacy. These characters exist in the "free world," but their experiences connect them to the injured body of Willie Copeland, who, like the real-life Shropshire and Barnes, is crippled forever by the torture of the chain gang. Viewed in relation to Herndon's memoir, then, this text represents the revolutionary project as inherently incomplete and insufficient if it fails to include a feminist and queer sexual and gender politics. In fact, the novel reveals heteropatriarchal ideology as reinforcing the very structures the anti-racist and Marxist characters seek to dismantle. As such, I see McCullers's fiction as an important cultural corollary to Herndon's narrative, and vice versa.

In McCullers's fictional Georgia mill town, the sex workers know your name (so do the fascists), the carnival threatens to erupt in a race riot between a "hunchback" and a thief (282), and corner preachers defame drunken Marxists as "child[ren] of Sodom" (341). Richard Wright noted that the novel had about it a "sheen of weird tenderness" and determined it might best be thought of as a "projected mood" (195). Indeed, there are many "queer things" (McCullers 147) in this novel and the pervasive mood might be summed up in a song that the tomboy Mick begins to write but does not finish: "This Thing I Want, I Know Not What" (McCullers 240). Considered in relation to McCullers's description of the novel as an "ironic parable of fascism," I read the unrealized song as that which might thoroughly dismantle the Jim Crow carceral state. The central irony in this "parable of fascism" is that characters have moments of deep identification across their differences, but this never gives way to a lasting coalitional politics. Each has what might be called "fascist" impulses to police the behavior of others, just as Herndon does with the behavior of his fellow inmates. At the end of the novel, the reader is left longing for a totalizing change, one that does not liberate portions of the community at the expense of those who remain "deviant" others. (Biff Brannon, the cross-dressing cafe owner, comes closest to articulating this potential in the final scene of the novel.)

First, the central cast of characters--Dr. Copeland, Jake Blount, Biff Brannon, and Mick Kelly--separately befriend John Singer, the "mute" whom each comes to rely on as a confidante and sounding board for his ideas and concerns. When Dr. Copeland's son Willie returns from the chain gang permanently disabled, this group of characters has reason to interact directly, rather than to connect loosely through their mutual friendship with Singer. Their collective identification with Willie occasions McCullers's queered community to confront and to attempt to resist the carceral continuum of violence based on race, class, gender, and sexuality. Willie's body and the extreme conditions by which he is disempowered become a focal point for addressing a conjuncture of collective injuries.

The identification with Willie on the part of the white genderqueer and proto-feminist character, Mick, most explicitly supplements the heterotopic view of deviance provided by Herndon's prison memoir. As an androgynous teenager, Mick struggles to create spaces in which she feels comfortable and subjectivities with which she might identify. When she is alone, she scrawls "EDISON," "DICKTRACY," "MUSSOLINI," her initials--"M.K."--and finally, "PUSSY" on the walls of an under-construction house (McCullers 37). In this graffiti, Mick engages in symbolic resistance to heterotopic confinement via five different incarnations--masculine inventive "genius," heterosexual masculine noir studliness, heteropatriarchal fascism, and a deviant sexualized female body. For a white tomboy to want to embody any of these ideals would be considered deviant in the Jim Crow South, a region policing fictional white racial purity through the idealization of white femininity as chaste, submissive, and "loyal to the race" (as much as it concentrates on blackness as the other to these qualities). For a tomboy to scrawl these words on the walls of an unfinished house is a symbolic act of protest against carceral constraints.

Through Mick, we see how a white queer and a heterosexual African American prisoner might be potential allies. As she consistently fails to perform as a "normal" girl, as an object of heterosexual desire, her anxiety builds to a crisis point and coincides with the torture of Willie on the chain gang. The memory of his punishment collides with her own feelings of confinement. She is unable to sleep and has nightmares:

Nearly a month had gone by since Portia had told about what they had done to him--but still she couldn't forget it. Twice in the night she had these bad dreams and woke up on the floor. A bump came out on her forehead.... She felt queer waking up in the living room. She didn't like it. (McCullers 264)

Her identification with Willie is signified by the "queer" sensation of waking up in a room that is not her own. Like Doctor Copeland, Mick only learns of Willie's fate through Portia's narrative; it continues to live on in her nightmares and in her memory, the vision of his pain made manifest in a lump on her head. His trauma lives on, then, not only in his body, but in hers as a violent spectacle of the Jim Crow carceral state. When she meets Doctor Copeland for the first time, she asks what punishment the prison guards will receive. When Portia responds, "I just don't know," Mick says, "I wish I could round up some people and kill those men myself " (257). Mick's frustration reflects her inability to help Willie or to enact her own desires, to confront the reality that all too often "a boy has a better advantage like that than a girl" (246). (10)

Ultimately, Mick is swallowed up by Jim Crow's queer, criminalized geography and she attempts conformity, resigning herself to the role of "PUSSY" in this world of highly scripted intimacy. Mick's haunted vision of Willie prefigures her first experience with heterosexual sex. As she and her childhood friend Harry (who is Jewish and anti-fascist) spend a day together, their relationship becomes loaded with the pressure to transform platonic intimacy into sexual intimacy. It culminates when Harry insists that, instead of returning to town, they lie down together:

They both turned at the same time. They were close against each other. She felt him trembling and her fists were tight enough to crack. "Oh, God," he kept saying over and over. It was like her head was broke off from her body and thrown away. And her eyes looked straight into the blinding sun while she counted something in her mind. And then this was the way. This was how it was. (McCullers 274)

Desire, reciprocity, and erotic fulfillment are absent and only a sense of violent decapitation, trauma, and unrealized resistance remain. None of Herndon's "fine feelings" are present in this scene, either. Read in relation to Herndon's critique of sex between male bodies in prison, we see all intimacy under the constraints of Jim Crow as embedded in violent systems of white, heteropatriarchal state control.

Harry panics afterward, worrying that his mother will be able to "see" what he has done, to recognize him as an adulterer. Mick can only think, "His face was whiter than any face she could remember.... Things would be better if only he would just quit talking" (275-76). By performing the role of the male-bodied sexual aggressor, Harry, though Jewish and therefore ethnically marked in the Southern racial economy, becomes "white" through heterosexual masculinity. In response, Mick turns away for a moment to locate herself: "Her eyes looked slowly around her--at the streaked red-and-white clay of the ditch, at a broken whiskey bottle, at a pine tree across from them with a sign advertising for a man for county sheriff. She wanted to sit quiet for a long time and not think and not say a word" (McCullers 275-76). In this moment, Mick's painful recognition of Harry's power converges with symbols of heteropatriarchal state power, signified by the sheriff s campaign sign. Her experience of sexual violence has taken place in the jurisdiction of the ubiquitous Jim Crow police state, much like the "love making" that occurs under the sadistic and voyeuristic gaze of the prison guards in Herndon's memoir.

At first unwilling to succumb to Harry's moral panic and to think of herself as an "adulteress," Mick eventually worries that their transgression will be visible on her body. She arrives home and says to Portia, "Look at me. Do you notice anything different?" Portia notices her sunburn, leading to the conclusion that "It was almost worse, this way. Maybe she would feel better if they could look at her and tell. If they knew" (McCullers 278). That visibility would leave her subject to opprobrium, but would paradoxically situate her as a "normal" heterosexual girl. Instead, left alone with a conflicted sense of what has happened, she must discipline herself, mete out the requisite guilt and shame, and contain it within her own body. That Portia notices her sunburn calls attention to the fact that Jim Crow relies heavily on a visual economy of race, often reduced even today to "skin color." While sexual behavior does not necessarily mark the body in such immediate and visible ways, narratives of sexual deviance (such as rape, adultery, or incest) are deployed to mark subjects. Mick does not get pregnant and so presumably her deviance remains secret. However, she does not emerge unscathed from the trauma. "This is how it was" encapsulates the sexual experience with Henry and suggests a kind of heteropatriarchal logic she must accept. Like the rape narrative seamlessly integrated into Herndon's trial, this too is an overdetermined sexual script. By the end of the novel, Mick has become a counter girl at Woolworth's wearing dresses and (torn) nylons. In contrast to Willie, the severing of her body is only psychological, but she does shed her "tomboy" gender presentation, abandon her hope of becoming a symphony conductor, and lose the "inner room" sanctuary that once afforded her some protection from the carceral exterior world.

Willie, unlike Mick, had once pursued sex passionately and publicly. The fight that landed him on the chain gang was over a woman, Love Jones, whom Portia disapproved of, but who had captivated him. Willie and his best friend, High Boy, were known for playing music in the street, for pursuing pleasure, unconcerned about being labeled deviant. Though Portia judged him for his sexual proclivities, she, like Mick and Dr. Copeland, resists the punishment he receives from the Jim Crow state. In the end, Willie's status as innocent or guilty does not matter to the other characters. His punishment is unjust, the Jim Crow state's veridiction and jurisdiction deemed invalid. Though Willie never gets to articulate himself in the same complex ways as Mick or Herndon, he emerges in the novel as a character whose plight implicates all in the technologies of punishment that might be applied to anyone labeled as deviant by the state. Willie's expression of enduring trauma in the form of phantom limb syndrome is the most extensive dialogue he gets in the novel: "I feel like my feets is still hurting.... It is a hard thing to understand. My feets hurt me so bad all the time and I don't know where they is. They never given them back to me. They s-somewhere more than a hundred m-miles from here" (McCullers 289). (11) Willie's story starts out as a cautionary tale of what happens when you get mixed up with women from "Madame Reba's Palace of Sweet Pleasure" and ends with a profound meditation on the irretrievable personal and collective loss that his body signifies (137). Willie serves as a mirror whose experience in the heterotopic space of the chain gang prison reflects back on the oppressive carceral regime that circumscribes all the characters. We are left with alienation and trauma as the products of unrealized intersectional coalitions.

Of Those Who Labor and of Those Who--One Word--Love

In her cultural analysis of slavery and the unrecoverability of a slave past, Saidiya Hartman extends the possibility of redress for the ruptures and violence of slavery in the "traces of memory" that suggest experiences of loss and affiliation. Those traces of memory function "in a manner akin to a phantom limb, in that what is felt is no longer there, ft is a sentient recollection of connectedness experienced at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts a mode of testimony and memory." The recognition of loss

   entails a remembering of the pained body, not by way of a simulated
   wholeness but precisely through the recognition of the amputated
   body in its amputatedness, in the insistent recognition of the
   violated body as human flesh, in the cognition of its needs, and in
   the anticipation of its liberty. (73-74)

Carson McCullers treats this metaphor of loss as both symbolic and material, with the phantom feet of the chain gang laborer haunting his community. McCullers's and Herndon's narratives return to the injured captive body to call for redress. Though the history of the early twentieth-century prison must be distinguished from the temporal, spatial, and cultural ruptures of the slave trade, the Middle Passage, and centuries of legalized slavery, its millions of forgotten men and women, buried without markers in prison graveyards, with the occasional fragmented stories left to linger in songs and pictures, represent the continuation of that history. The difficulty of assembling the stories of those outcasts--the unruly women, the gal-boys, the prison queers, the rioters, those who attempted to escape and failed--is that much more difficult when dealing with the state's systematic warehousing of human life. (12) The Jim Crow prison emerged as an incredibly adaptive and mobile institution producing divergent discourses of criminality and excess.

Given that development, what is the role of the "queer"--as a contentious force, as an embodied state, as a interventionist set of desiring practices--in understanding the cultural work necessary to create ongoing geographies of liberation in a region that, like the nation, continues to regulate and police intimacy in the service of normative, perhaps even fascistic, forms of bodily expression and kinship? In particular, how do we interpret the ongoing legacies of state violence embedded in everyday banal and profound intimacies? Read together, Herndon's memoir and McCullers's fiction remind those of us interested in queer liberation that we must be attentive to and critical of the (now often privatized) carceral regimes that continue to proliferate at an alarming rate, particularly in the US South. In the twenty-first century, these regimes still disproportionately affect impoverished communities of color and the gender-variant who often intersect with groups and practices deemed sexually deviant or criminal. (13) In under a decade--by 1941 and the US entrance into WWII--both Herndon and McCullers achieved international reputations as exceptional and outspoken voices of resistance to the Jim Crow "lynch mob justice" that ruled Georgia and the other Southern states. In looking closely at authors such as Herndon and McCullers, we might understand the particulars of how the carceral state has been maintained and adapted (and privatized) to fit our current moment. (14)

In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; McCullers deftly represents the power of segregation to prevent alliances between black and white laborers who are differently positioned along a carceral continuum. Prohibitions on intimacy ensure gender norms, class division, racial segregation, and, ultimately, alienation. While she does not offer up a utopie vision of revolutionary solidarity, she represents intimate identifications between those at the heterotopic margins. In McCullers's fiction, the "listener" who hears those voices on the chain gang singing together, or the watcher who sees the disaffected townspeople come and go, is often someone who is abundantly aware of occupying deviant or potentially deviant social status. The heterotopias of deviance are not abject spaces removed at a safe distance.

In the final scene of the novel, town watcher and cross-dresser Biff Brannon is anxiously alone in his cafe. He has just thought of giving a bottle of whiskey to Willie, of Mick's transformation into a Woolworth's girl, and of the Hitler's rise in Germany. Then he is interrupted by a revelation during which

   in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human
   struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity
   through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who--one
   word--love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he
   felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was
   suspended.... And he was suspended between radiance and
   darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.
   (358-59)

While we may no longer be living in the Jim Crow era per se, many of the technologies and ideologies of that time have been so normalized and internalized that we may hardly be aware of the extent to which discipline, punishment, and intimacy continue to go hand in hand. Those who labor also, as Biff reminds us, love. We must on some level re-center around heterotopias of deviance and be willing to suspend ourselves in a very queer space between multiple "free" and "unfree" worlds. As Jose Munoz suggests in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, "Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house" (1). A queer critique of the carceral network must not "turn away" or be afraid of suspension "between radiance and darkness." Instead, coalitional identification with the queer "gal-boys" and their lovers, with injured prisoners and disabled neighbors, with striking workers and racialized others, is a necessary step toward imagining a future beyond the prison house.

ELIZABETH A. STEEBY

University of New Orleans

Works Cited

Adams, Rachel. '"A Mixture of Delicious and Freak': The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers." American Literature 71.3 (1999): 551-83.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Lncarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009.

Davis, Angela Y. "Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition." Angela Y. Davis Reader. Ed. Joy James. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 96-107.

Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1977. New York: Vintage, 1995.

--. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, eds. African American Lives. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: Norton, 2009.

Gleeson-White, Sarah. Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003.

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

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. 1937. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

Kunzel, Regina. Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.

Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.

McCullers, Carson. Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories. 1951. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

--.The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. 1940. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Munoz, Jose. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Smith, Nat, and Eric Stanley, eds. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Oakland: AK Press, 2011.

Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Cambridge, MA: South End P, 2011.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

Whitt, Margaret. "From Eros to Agape: Reconsidering the Chain Gang's Song in McCullers's 'Ballad of the Sad Cafe.'" Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (1996): 119-23.

Wright, Richard. "Inner Landscapes." New Republic 103 (1940): 195.

(1) Margaret Whitt asserts, "Simply stated, there is no joy in this kind of enduring--for the convict, for the reader" (121). I agree with her larger argument that these chain gang work songs belong in the genealogy of slave songs and should not have been heard as evidence of "joy" or contentment with oppressive conditions. However, I consider the listener's paradoxical reception of these songs as "ecstatic fear" as a queer reception and as evidence of the larger social erotics of Jim Crow segregation.

(2) Rather than referencing a "homosexual" identity or set of sexual practices, I am using the term "queer" to characterize intimacies that were outside the boundaries of what was sanctioned or considered normal/acceptable by the standards of the era. I understand those standards to have generally promoted a white, heterosexual, and patriarchal set of ideals.

(3) See Brinkmeyer.

(4) Angela Davis and Joy James, among others, have argued that Foucault's genealogy of the prison lacks a consideration of the enslavement of Africans. In her formulation of "neoslavery," Davis argues for the continuity between the "prison of slavery" and the "slavery of prison" (96).

(5) Woodward asserts,

The Jim Crow laws put the authority of the state or city in the voice of the street-car conductor, the railway brakeman, the bus driver, the theater usher, and also into the voice of the hoodlum of the public parks and playgrounds. They gave free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted, or deflected. (107)

(6) See Gilmore and Robin D. G. Kelley.

(7) Regina Kunzel argues that sex and prison are inseparable constructs in modern life.

(8) In his critique of Marx and historical materialism, Roderick Ferguson argues that Marx took the prostitute to be the "obvious and transparent site of capital," as here Herndon takes the prison "gal-boy" sex worker to be the transparent site of the white supremacist capitalist state's penitentiary. Like Marx, Herndon equates "the hegemonic discourse about the prostitute, a discourse that cast ['her'] as the site of immorality, vice, and corruption, with the reality of a burgeoning capitalist economy" (Ferguson 10). The result, according to Ferguson, is that both liberal and revolutionary projects were invested in the heteronormative and the heteropatriarchal as the goal.

(9) Like Sarah Gleeson-White and Rachel Adams, I am interested in the "transforming power" of what Gleeson-White refers to as the queer "grotesque" of McCullers (4). Along with Adams, I am convinced that "While resistance often remains at the level of imagined potential for her characters, the reader open to queer suggestions of McCullers's fiction is left to consider the possibilities of a world free from the tyranny of the normal" (553).

(10) Soon afterward, Dr. Copeland experiences his own inability to confront the state with his grievances about Willie, finding himself insulted, beaten, and arrested by white police upon seeking just to speak with a judge at the courthouse about Willie's dismemberment (McCullers 261-62). While Mick entertains revenge fantasies, Copeland tries to seek nonviolent retribution but loses, further reinforcing his absolute lack of rights, even as an African American man of relative stature in his community.

(11) In his work on "necropolitics," Achille Mbembe argues that amputations have been a key feature of mass violence such as the case of the Rwandan genocide: "Their function is to keep before the eyes of the victim--and of the people around him or her--the morbid spectacle of severing" (35).

(12) Herndon himself disappeared from political life by the mid-1940s and refused even to grant interviews about his past (Gates and Higgenbotham 398).

(13) Much recent important scholarship has addressed this issue. See Nat Smith and Eric Stanley; see also Dean Spade.

(14) Recent galvanizing texts such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness argue that the proliferation of prisons, the rise of modern mass incarceration, and ongoing racial disparities in the application of the criminal (in)justice system are in effect a "new Jim Crow." As such, incarceration is a method of sustaining a racialized class of non-citizens who may be deprived of the right to vote, the right to be paid for their labor, to protest their living conditions, and many other rights we often consider fundamental. "Jim Crow," as a historical signifier of inhumane, unjust practices, is, of course, key to the force of Alexander's indictment of today's Prison Industrial Complex. In looking back at Herndon's and McCullers's Jim Crow-era critiques of the Southern carceral geography, we can examine the very material roots of our current mass incarceration moment and learn from those who testified to and theorized its complex relation to power at the height of segregation. In other words, I propose a historical materialist return to Jim Crow incarceration. Invoking "Jim Crow" as a powerful symbol of past injustices, it acts as a kind of floating signifier of the racially discriminatory wrongs of the past. But how might we go further than simply analogizing our current moment and the Segregation Era? How might we narrate the material legacies and processes by which Jim Crow has been adapted over the years, bringing us to this present moment of mass incarceration?