where bloodlines and national boundaries, though clearly delineated and incredibly present, cannot dictate alliances made across such borders (much like the plot of Trumpet).12 Kay’s claiming of Smith as icon, hero, and signifier crosses desire with location, blackness with sexual subjectivity, national belonging with transhistorical imaginative traveling. In other words, Kay instead constructs an imaginative exchange sought out precisely because of the challenges of physical space. The black feminist subject “could not think like that”—within the limits of national-racial borders—because she would erase her own contingent subjectivity.13
That complex subject formation is sometimes lost in the reinstituted split of the “day” and “night” work of intellectual practice and aesthetic culture. Kay reimagines Smith and other cultural performers into the same space as political leaders, public figures unquestionably linked to the politics of blackness, and vice versa; she posits public politics as aesthetic culture by including political figures in the company of artistic icons:
I force myself to imagine her real death. . . . It is a peculiar way of getting even closer to her. It is a strange thing to do. Somehow the death of the famous activates the popular imagination. The deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley are all epic, grand scale deaths. . . . The life of every true hero is bent on ending in tragedy. Heroes can’t help themselves. (1997, 140)
Kay’s romantic strain pulls her to a conceptual space not unlike Harlem, a space where day and night workers mingle in “the popular imagination,” or what Kay herself calls “fantasy relationships” (Jaggi and Dyer 1999, 55). Rescaling Holiday, Marley, and Smith as icons in the political company of King and Malcolm X also reshapes the scope of how we read black culture as a (celebrity) system. The “epic” and classical frame that Kay places on Smith et al. is in “Shakespearean dimensions,” the space worthy of not just political attention but critical and analytic seriousness, a scale of black cultural production worthy of the most sustained study and significance (ibid., 54).
In a representative sense, black political heroes famous enough to circulate for Kay were men—Mandela, Malcolm X, King. Kay’s effect in upsetting distinctions between imported entertainment icons and political leaders is not just to integrate the two kinds of discourse associated with blackness—aesthetic and political—but to make visible a transatlantic subjectivity centered on questions of gender and sexuality. Bringing Smith or even Holiday into the fold “adds” women to the genealogy of the black political by shifting the criteria of what constitutes the political as an intellectual category and through reckoning with the power and complexity of iconographic identification through differential history and geography. Black music coming to Kay cannot follow a public or racially communal pattern of receiving; there are no dancehalls or radio stations to transmit or render coherent Kay’s queer desires in listening to Smith. Kay’s claiming Smith as “hero” maintains an alignment between her and someone like Nelson Mandela, breaking down the opposition between public and private, day and night work, and between identifications with race and those with gender and sexuality.
Aligning Smith as a “hero”—national or Pan-African—also displaces an even split between public and private spheres of influence. Rather than being publicly and collectively experienced, the blues and recognizably “black” culture privately circulate to Kay through her white home:
My best friend, Gillian Innes, loved Bessie Smith. We spent many hours in Gillian’s bedroom, imitating Bessie Smith and Pearl Bailey. Various objects served as microphones from hairbrushes to wooden spoons. At the age of twelve singing . . . was a way of expressing our wild emotions for each other. . . . I could barely breathe. The air in her box bedroom was thick with secrets. The door firmly shut. Our own private performance. (1997, 79)
Here, the objects of daily life (a hairbrush, wooden spoons) need to be imaginatively transformed in order to express “wild emotions” or to connect body and desire to everyday life. Such is the importance of the Smith record as everyday object in Kay’s narrative, repeatable and accessible even as it opens up the possibilities of nonlocal discourses of race and sexuality.14 In Kay’s configuration, the private is neither metaphor for nor escape from the public and political but something that is constitutive of the public and the political itself. For Kay, these surprising correspondences, rather than so expansive as to empty out the specificity of “diaspora,” play out in an incredibly contained space that performs the difficulty of constraining black identity through identification with urban centers of (im)migration. Mimicry, here, also becomes a way of accessing and narrating a desire outside of recognizable or popularly circulated black culture.15 But Kay reimagines outsiderness as literally and conceptually inside, again making gender and sexuality the constitutive core of the Black Atlantic.
Returning here to Kay’s opening poem “The Red Graveyard,” I argue that Bessie Smith subverts privileged diasporic routes through a private genealogy of being “passed down” rather than the public reception of black cultural production, with Kay asking rhetorically of her white parents, “Did they play anyone else ever?” (1997, 7). Neither the pubic nor the private can be assumed to be homogeneous racial spaces for Kay’s diaspora. It is this private reception, a reception that happens via a familial “passing down,” that Kay identifies as racially—and sexually—meaningful. Her project attempts a queer genealogy beginning with Ma Rainey, who “was also a lesbian” (36), according to the bold-voiced narrator, as well as imagines a network of black queer women—including Rainey, Smith, Ethel Waters, and a host of chorus girls and dancers at the center of twenties and thirties black diaspora cultural production.16 This queer family tree for black culture, and the Harlem Renaissance period in particular, becomes difficult to fit squarely into legible racial and political discourse. Reconstructed through the text as a site of pleasurable exchange, Bessie Smith reorders the genealogy of black culture and black reception and redesigns a “passing down” that could include the trauma of black diasporic history as well as the silenced desires of black feminist/queer culture and public discourse. Kay’s choice to maintain the ideological and aesthetic quandaries of black diaspora identification in their messy interconnectedness reframes our own intellectual practices, as well as models of social, aesthetic, and intellectual engagement drawn from the practice of classic blueswomen singers such as Smith.
Accessing “home” as a site of disruptions within continuity, the foreign within the familiar, Kay’s work represents an impulse to bring discussions of the exterior “world” and the interiority of black subject formation together through black cultural and aesthetic productions.17 With only partial access to documented history, Kay’s text also imagines a certain portability, like the “jar of Harlem night air,” to imaginative, interior space, the kind of transnational “flow” usually accorded only to cultural products and political ideas themselves.18 In other words, I read Kay not as attempting to find the biographical and historical “truth” behind or beyond the icon Smith but as finding in the icon itself a depth of meanings and identifications—an interior but still nonessentialist “life” of queer, black intellectual purpose. Kay does not just mark her desire to “be” Bessie but to watch her, to want her, to claim her into her “home”:
I remember taking the album off him [Kay’s father] and pouring over it, examining it for every detail. Her image on the cover captivated me. She looked so familiar. She looked like somebody I already knew in my heart of hearts. I stared at the image of her, trying to recall who it was she reminded me of . . . . I put her down and I picked her up. I stroked her proud, defiant cheeks. I ran my fingers across her angry eyebrows. I soothed her. Sometimes I felt shy staring at her, as if she was somehow able to see me looking. . . . I would never forget her. (1997, 9–10)
The romantic, earnest identification with Smith and her blackness is persistently undergirded by the frame of uneasy reception—complications of desire, of race, of historical time, of capital product, and of national allegiance for a young girl who is the only black person in her entire town. Containing both a feeling of knowing “familiar[ity]”
