Early Indigenous Literatures

Process Essay for "Doll is More than a Name—"

          In Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, Tiya Miles reflects on the impasse that inevitably arises when writing into the fragmented archives of enslaved forebears. In the case of the Shoeboots family saga, she writes that, “to write about Doll, then, is to pay tribute to her life, a life that would otherwise be lost to history. But do not be lulled. To write about Doll is also a wholly inadequate exercise” (Miles 26). My undertaking of the momentous endeavor outlined by Miles here presented an ethical imperative, heightened by the mechanics of a persona poem, in which one writes not only about but through the historically informed and nonetheless imagined poetic persona of another. This poem is the experimental test of a hypothesis that I cannot claim to have proven, only assessed. I found it imperative to avoid reducing Doll to a completely flat historical figure whose only import on my page merely reproduces what her value or purpose would have been as a slave woman in the eyes of her enslavers. However, it was just as important not to commit the archival violence of producing a romanticized narrative that fails to relay the reality of her circumstance as a captive, rather than Shoe Boots’s autonomous, consenting lover. I was cautious about ventriloquizing her with a sense of agency beyond the realities of her slave status, the poem’s contained visual architecture a reflection of those very confines—sometimes upheld, sometimes broken in instances so subtle they can go unnoticed to a certain eye. The writing of this poem sparked a lot of thought about relations(hips) in such a context, fraught with the impossibility of love as I, a free individual in the twenty-first century, have come to know it, and thus the partial ambivalence of Doll’s lyric voice as rendered here reflects the ambiguity of the historical record. The aim of successfully writing a persona poem from the perspective of our enslaved predecessors can easily become a career-long endeavor, as such a lyric persona is one of the most complicated, ethically entangled enterprises of creative imagination.
          It was my intention that this poem formulate different terms of valuation by asking, how can Doll be differently valued, if not in her 19th century context as a slave woman, then in the space of this poem? This persona seeks to not only reposition Doll from syntactic objecthood by making her the poem’s agentive subject but also to formulate a framework that does not depend on the Black female body as a hollow vessel, to be used for labor, to harbor children, to become a blank slate for colonial ideologies. Like Miles, I reflect on Doll’s name, its origin, the connotations buried deep in the meaning such a moniker carries (Miles 27). In this poem, Doll’s name offers an entrypoint into further reflection about her sole moniker, who she was as the bearer of—and even in spite of bearing—such a name. From this poem’s outset, Doll’s persona belies the implications of her name through an act of refusing the age-old proverb about progress (“Blessed are those / who plant trees beneath whose shade they will / never sit”) as something she “once believed” but no longer holds true. This is largely the work of a piece like this, too, to clearly communicate its departure from a teleological narrative of Black progress and its avoidance of upholding an empathy as eviction of the other. In other words, framework wherein the figure of a 19th century woman enslaved to a Cherokee captain in Georgia is not allowed to exist but must become a stepping stone in a neoliberal, settler-aligned progress narrative. The logics of lyric association carry this poem forward into an alternate terrain.
          The work begins with a bleeding title that not only progresses into the first line of the poem’s body but specifically does so through the use of an em-dash, further indicative of continuance. Addressing these histories means contending with their afterlives, the way they remain unresolved and resonate long after their temporal moment. As with the end of “One Was Lately Lost,” the em-dash places emphasis on ongoingness rather than finality, serving to underscore the expansiveness of these lives beyond the space of what any one poem or collection or even an entire volume of books could capture. This en media res entrypoint conveys that the moment of speaking precedes the poem itself, and her voice goes on beyond the stretch of this brief lyric encounter, much like our exposure to Doll’s fragmented story in the historical record—so much more stretches beyond our frame of observation. As Miles writes, “a record of Doll’s interior life, her ruminations and fleeting thoughts, might reveal something of her world to us. But like millions of other slave women, Doll left nothing behind that attests to her character, her strategies and ideologies, the quality of her days and years” (Miles 26). Her enslaver’s petition, however, reveals a portrayal of Doll that (the extent of which represents Shoe Boots’s own internal beliefs remains uncertain) demands further attention. In the words of Doll’s poetic persona, Doll is “how he thinks / he keeps me,” a name that she does not disavow but rather attributes to Shoe Boots’s understanding of her (and general slave society's understanding of her) as a certain kind of property. The internal caesura created by the slash opens up a multiplicity of meaning, whereby his “keeping” of her is both a figment of his own mind’s creation and an isolated declaration unto itself: “he keeps me.” Here, “keep” echoes the captive nature of enslavement while also invoking the term’s alternative meaning of guarding from harm and taking care of another. The imagistic progression of details that illustrate the beaded eyes of dolls available at this time, perhaps a Doll that her mistress or daughters might have owned (Miles 65). 
          The poem allows moments of music to shine through amid those of pain. Similar to “One Was Lately Lost,” this lyric considers a moment of becoming, being (un)made and making oneself. Here, Doll’s poetic persona considers what it means to be valued for her potentiality, what she can become, rather than who she already is. The images of a hollow, a womb, of an onyx stone awaiting polish, and a puppet illustrate her mind at work through these logics. These seemingly disparate things converge on this similarity. In addition to associative momentum, sonic ties also move the poem forward, as “onyx” leads into “polish” and “vessel” into “blessed.” Here, precious stone is figured as a substance extracted for its raw value, as determined by its density, hardness, and rarity. Only upon polishing or otherwise undergoing superficial, manmade alterations is a precious stone’s value fully legible, especially onyx as a gem native to some parts of North America but found in much greater abundance in other world regions, including the Africa of Doll's origin. As discussed earlier, the refusal to accept the promise of being “blessed” for labors whose rewards one will not enjoy is not simply a closure of possibility; it provides an opening through which the antimetaphorical move of juxtaposing her children with trees and other plant life by negation becomes possible (“but my children / are not seeds sewn…”). At this juncture, I sought out strategies for grounding markers of race in the poem imagistically rather than one divorced from the poem’s material world. Despite their phenotypic appearance, the pitch pine and red oak are nonetheless encoded with color-based association, not unlike the way bodies retain part-biological, part-social markers of racial categorization/classification (i.e. “Black”) despite their individual appearance. The voice of the poem does not accept the metaphoric framing of her children being the trees planted for another tomorrow, which combats the notions of futurity and progress that often surround children, especially at a time when race mixture was seen as a tool of bettering the bloodline or one of setting back, “debasing” in Shoe Boots’s language (Miles 115). While this forward-looking framework is utilized by Shoe Boots in his petition’s invocation of “generations yet unborn,” the poem indicates an alternative that requires return to the conditions of the present (Miles 115). 
          “I am no planter,” the poem’s voice asserts, and thereby distinguishes her status from that of her master and other slavers. This declaration highlights the irony of such a name, granted to those who acquired human beings to carry out the work of planting among other labors. Instead, she takes on her identity as a mother, reasserting her personhood through the use of the word “someone,” emphatically ending the line at its break. Despite her appearance in the archive as a slave woman to Shoe Boots above all, how else could she have thought of herself, and what other relationships to children, friends, elders, or other kinship formations might have even been more defining to her than this one? With what language might she have done so? Avoiding the violence of assigning her a different name such as the “Lucy” or “Lilcy” that some historians have opted for, how else could Doll perhaps name herself (Miles 27)? These questions are posed with the understanding that the concept of mothering and motherhood, even womanhood are fraught in the context of slavery and not uncomplicated terms perfect for reclamation. But their presence towards the poem’s end helps solidify a turn, a shift towards what is true: she is “someone / who knows how to grow life from the emptiness / within” and “a woman become the Doll of a man / called Captain.” As a child’s toy, a doll offers a means through which the child learns how to express care and serves as a small companion with which to practice early sociality; the connotations surrounding a man’s doll are much less pleasant, suggesting unresolved childlike obsessions, calling to mind a sexual plaything. Here, the irony of these facts as well as his first name remaining Shoe undercuts his title as “Captain.” He is the one now “made to move,” made to take action as he appeals to the authority of those captaining his family’s fate. 
          In a final gesture, examining Shoe Boots’s name turns the mirror back to him. A shoe can be both an object of protection (as Shoe Boots intended his petition) and a shield for one’s bodily flesh, or metaphorically for one’s offspring, who are not  “grown free” but rather legally considered property by way of matrilineal inheritance. But a shoe can also be a tool of great harm if wielded in such manner, as could a petition which reinscribed Doll’s slave status by leaving her out of the futurity-free citizen formulation. The dual meanings of the word tread at the poem’s close suggest these opposing characteristics, as tread can be as gentle as a soft step or as strong and forceful as a trampling. It is that promise of shade seeded by the trees planted at present that he treads, in hopes of enjoying (as the proverb forecasts) respite from the Southern sun's harsh rays. Doll’s persona does not let him rightfully claim this shade in the space of the poem, whether the shade of trees or the “shade” of an enslaved race, rendered other to his own.

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