My friend Jemima tweets a screenshot of a series of text messages with her eleven-year-old son. He wants a bulletproof shirt. She asks him if he is okay. He says no. She says she is sad that he thinks he needs one; she wonders if something immediate has happened to him. He replies that he is sorry that he needs one. She promises him that they will protect him, that they will keep him safe. She does this knowing, before, and as, and after, she writes this, that there is a limit to what she can do to protect him; that there is no safe space and... still, like Denver in Beloved, he has to “know it, and go on out the yard. Go on” (Morrison 1987, 244). In the afterlives of partus sequitur ventrem what does, what can, mothering mean for Black women, for Black people? What kind of mother/ing is it if one must always be prepared with knowledge of the possibility of the violent and quotidian death of one’s child? Is it mothering if one knows that one’s child might be killed at any time in the hold, in the wake by the state no matter who wields the gun? (Spillers’s every relationship invaded by the state.) Swallowed whole by the state, purged by the police, stopped and frisked, back broken, humiliated, interned in “camps” for women and children. My friend and her son are held by the state and mother and child... fall apart.
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We see in many visual and other representations in public life, certainly in the United States, but as the quotation from the man from Afula, Israel, that began this section indicates, not only in the United States, Black people ejected from the state become the national symbols for the less-than-human being condemned to death; become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment (an internal, the internal terroristic threat) and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments but the ground of terror’s possibility. There is an extensive representational repertoire (photographic and discursive) of the conflation of blackness and death and multiple “commonsense” representations of Black maternity—and therefore the impossibility of Black childhood—as condemning one to a life of violence. We trace this history back to chattel slavery and the law of partus sequitur ventrem (again, “that which is brought forth follows the womb”), which dictated that the children of a slave woman inherited the mother’s non/status. Black women and children continue to be cast as less-than-human victims and agents of “natural” disasters, whether in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, a boat sinking during a perilous journey, or Hurricane Katrina. On October 29, 2012, on Staten Island, New York, Glenda Moore looked for and was refused shelter during Hurricane Sandy. That particular refusal resulted in the drowning deaths of her sons Connor and Brendan, aged two and four, and her condemnation by many as an unfit mother. What, they demand, was she doing out in that storm? What kind of mother was she? Not only that, but when the white man who denied her shelter was asked why he didn’t open the door to that distraught Black woman who repeatedly pounded on it for help, he said that he did not see a Black woman at all but a BIG Black man and that he was forced, therefore, to spend the night with his back against the door to prevent entry and thereby his own violation. “in the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men” (Morrison 1987, 211).
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