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AAR Centennial Roundtable: A Marked Woman Re-marks: A Quandary, a Reverie, and a Few Poems

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jaarel/lfu038

1477-4585

Orna Moore,

Race, History, and American Society

A POET FRIEND e-mails me. She wonders whether there is a list of words that “sign” the poet as Black. “Dead giveaway words—Black touchstone words,” she calls them. She wants a list of one hundred. Some are obvious: Collard greens. (Any foods associated with American slavery, even if white folks eat them, e.g., black eye peas, hog maws, jowls, yams, fried chicken, watermelon, cornbread and clabber, etc.) Oreos. (Not the food—a black vernacular marker with time/date stamp). Hot comb. Kinks. (Any proprietary hair references: i.e., afro puffs, dreads, locks, cornrows—or, derogatory hair slanders, which won't be perpetuated in this piece!) Cadillacs (pink). Blues (as in “the blues” even if white folks have them). All blues artists, beginning with Ma Rainey, excluding “Blue suede shoes” (famously appropriated by Elvis Presley who was never black enough for Black folk). Ghetto (after 1945). Booty (see: the black female body—even if white women have them). Emphatic end rhymes (i.e., the hip hop poem). Malcolm, Martin, and Angela Davis. Charlie Parker (and all references to “the Bird”). Any Black jazz artist. Africa (non-derogatory). Doubledutch (one word). Shackles.