on being idle in a modern world

"Ole Miss Maybell" illustration appeared in my first book.

Last night, I had a chance to walk down memory lane. Several drawings from my first book, Cuttin' the Rug Under the Moonlit Sky: Stories and Drawings About a Bunch of Women Named Mae (Doubleday, 1997) were presented at a Black History Month exhibit in the University of Alabama's Ferguson Art Gallery. The event was cosponsored by UA's Crossroads.

The exhibit also included the unveiling of a collage made up of images donated by members of the UA community and created by UA microbiology graduate student Steven Scaglione (and vinyl record covers telling the story of black music as curated by Dr. John Beeler of the Department of History).

One of the Maes presented is offered here. When I wrote this book 20 years ago, I did not yet know how to historicize how one might see a homeless woman of color on an urban street. Last night, I read the poem accompanying this drawing with Dr. Trudier Harris of the English Department. The idea was to invite others to acknowledge that people under casual surveillance have their own interior narrative about those around them. In other words, restoring some humanity to them requires us to acknowledge this reality. This effort poses tensions with this week's readings in my Gender, Race and Urban Space course and Antebellum America undergraduate course. In both classes, we encounter the work of Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman who published a book in 1832 on the "domestic manners" of Americans. Trollope spent a great deal of time belittling the landscape and the people in a still young nation. Indeed, in even noticing the industry in Cincinnati, the so-called Queen City of the West, she did as much in the context of noticing there were few beggars on the street. How strange to see no one  not working. Those Americans! Work, work, work.

I mentioned to a colleague that I had not yet realized as much earlier, but Trollope's observations gives us reason to pause to wonder about why she didn't even see African American beggars even though many free people of color were out of work. There was job competition with white "natives" who passed "Black Laws" as early as 1804 to limit black settlement. Newly arriving Irish immigrants were also threatened by black residents and sought to limit their access to jobs in Cincinnati and other urban areas.

I am aware that people of African descent in antebellum Cincinnati often policed their own - or attempted to police their own community -  in their efforts to be accepted  in this racially hostile northern city, which sat on the border of the "South."  More black and mixed Cincinnatians belonged to temperance groups than white Cincinnatians. That said, I doubt there were no black beggars. I'd have to give it some more thought, but without question Trollope saw much, but was likely picky about what she chose to divulge. Indeed, while she seemed critical of the growing market economy in America and Americans' desire for money (and lack of refinement no matter how much money they had), she does not easily interrogate her own wish to make a profit in this country. Indeed, she came here to open a bazaar, or a department store, in the Queen City. She failed. This book was one response to her desire to not be penniless.

But back to Ole Miss Maybell, I offer below poem that accompanies the illustration titled "Ole Miss Maybell." The words and drawing (which were among many in my journal and initially not intended to be shared) are inspired by an actual woman who lived in Detroit when I resided in the area in the late 1990s:

Hey y'all
look here.
Here come Ole Miss Maybell,
pushing that dumb cart down the street.
"I know what they sayin',
what they sayin' 'bout me.
Figure I don't know how to do nuthin'
but push this ole cart down the street.
Been 'round many a day,
been to the river and seen many a thing.
Some figure I might as well be dead,
since all I do is push this ole cart down the street.
Don't know nuthin' 'bout where I been,
don't know nuthin' 'bout me.
All they see is these ribbons in my hair
and me pushin' this ole cart down the street."
What-ch'all figure Miss Maybell got in that ole cart?
I be trying to look, but cain't never see.
She always got that pretty purple blanket thrown 'cross it so,
tryin' to make like she got something to see.

"And she does," I say, quoting Dr. Harris.

If only we'd really see the Miss Maybells of the world, individuals who don't fit into our expectations about idleness (I now think of James Scott's Weapons of the Weak and Amy Dru Stanley's book on contracts). People are expected to work and carry their weight in society - especially in an increasingly capitalistic world. I look forward to having conversations with my students about this issue and others this week and the remainder of the semester.