ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

I. Coming to a Head: Editorial Distaste in Frederick Douglass's Paper

From 1852 to 1854, a case was made in Frederick Douglass's Paper for rethinking who ought to be dignified with the appellation Heads of the Colored People. James McCune Smith provoked this discussion via a series of nine short literary sketches collected under that title, all of which focus on the lives and livelihoods of assorted free black laborers: bootblacks, washerwomen, news vendors, and grave diggers, to name just a few. Largely set in New York City, where the author was a black resident of considerable prestige,¹ Heads of the Colored People had a particular urgency in the years of its composition. McCune Smith wrote the series immediately following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, during a widespread depression among black laborers in New York City who were rapidly losing jobs to white European immigrants, and amidst the endemic racism of Northern U.S. culture.² In choosing these particular subjects for literary representation, McCune Smith lent an aura of dignity to the increasingly desperate economic, political, and cultural circumstances of the free black worker. The series forced a reconsideration of what types of people should be viewed as the "heads" of free black U.S. society. In addition, Heads of the Colored People pushed [End Page 291] readers to think about what freedom actually consisted of in the racist world of the antebellum North, where the most popular cultural discourse of black "heads" was the racialized pseudo-science of phrenology. John Stauffer, McCune Smith's contemporary biographer, rightly draws attention to the phrenological play that McCune Smith engages in by titling the series Heads of the Colored People. Through his title, McCune Smith takes the obsessively anatomized heads that populated works of phrenology--studies that were explicitly meant to justify hierarchies of racial inferiority--as his subject matter, but turns them on their ears (MCS, 188). That is, like the craniological studies put forth by leading lights of U.S. phrenology Josiah Nott, Samuel Morton, and Joseph Glidden, these Heads of the Colored People are placed upon public display, but for markedly different aims. McCune Smith's focus on heads positions these black laborers as essential to the struggle for black social uplift, not because they are leading political activists, but because their relationship to the objects of their labor makes them privy to reworked forms of knowledge about chattel slavery, object relations, and freedom in the antebellum United States.

Due to its focus on black manual laborers, Heads of the Colored People—although bent on undermining antebellum race-science—was met with reservations within McCune Smith's abolitionist milieu. The pieces were published in Frederick Douglass's Paper, and Douglass publicly expressed his editorial misgivings about McCune Smith's choice of subject. After the 1853 publication of the sixth sketch titled "The Editor," in which McCune Smith conveys the story of a black editor who must have his wife take dictation "because our editor cannot write; nay, if the whole truth must be told, he cannot read!...," Douglass penned a public response to McCune Smith.³ In it, Douglass chastises him for ignoring black citizens of "talents and real ability" (MCS, 213 & 245). Douglass, who spent much of his lifetime fashioning and re-fashioning himself as an American "Representative Man," closes the editorial by asking, "Why will not my able New York correspondent bring some of the real heads of the colored people before our readers?" Peppered throughout the piece are allusions to [End Page 292]

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Shine Sah? Circa 1899. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-120748.

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those who can rightfully claim, in Douglass's estimation, the title of "real heads" including: founders of literary societies, religious leaders, and black business owners who can unequivocally claim their businesses as "the property of a colored man." At this point in time, Frederick Douglass was an advocate of racial uplift via the cultivation of black, bourgeois sensibilities that would help to assimilate black workers into middle-class respectability and—eventually, hopefully—full membership in the nation's civic arena.

An earlier letter of Douglass's helps further clarify his stance on issues of black labor and the value of black laborers to the cause of social uplift. In an 1851 letter to Gerrit Smith—a mutual friend and radical abolitionist ally of both Douglass and McCune Smith—Douglass explicitly denigrates the sorts of labor that McCune Smith will take as his theme in the Heads sketches. Referring to his own recently published autobiography and continuing authorship, Douglass writes,

The fact that Negroes are turning Book makers may possibly serve to remove the popular impression that they are fit only for Bootblacking, and although they may not shine in the former profession as they have long done in the latter, I am not without hope that they will do themselves good by making the effort...I have often felt that what the colored people want most in this country is character. They want manly aspirations and a firm though modest self-reliance, and this we must have, or be like all the other worthless things swept away before the march of events.⁴

Douglass, in speaking for the importance of intellectual "head" work to black social uplift, simultaneously disavows any possible connections or connective possibilities between intellectual and manual labor. In this moment, the bootblack (later the title figure of one of McCune Smith's Heads... sketches) and the "shine" resulting from his labor take their places in a taxonomy of "worthless things" for which Douglass seemingly has little patience. He closes the letter by [End Page 294] expressing his concern about renewed zeal in the U.S. Senate for black colonization schemes, voicing his fear that certain sectors of the black population "necessary to the elevation of the colored people will leave us, while the degraded and worthless will remain to help bind us to our present debasement."⁵ "Worthless" crops up for the second time in this short letter to assert Douglass's conviction in both the relative non-value of black manual labor and the social stasis that these workers shadow forth for the U.S. black population. Bootblacks, ostensibly devoid of "character" and "manly aspirations" due to their profession, are paradigmatic figures of degraded labor. Their work moves nowhere, proceeds to nothing, and only "binds" an entire racial group to perpetual poverty. It is not difficult, then, to conceive of Douglass's distaste for McCune Smith's Heads of the Colored People with its focus on the valuable freedoms inhering within black communities of manual laborers.

The Heads sketches evince McCune Smith's commitment to what Xiomara Santamarina identifies as a strain of "politically heterodox" black activism that resisted promulgation of the message that capitalist accumulation and an attendant faith in upward mobility were the de facto means of attaining widespread racial uplift for black communities.⁶ As Santamarina points out, the dominant strain of black activist discourse often ended up castigating black manual labor, and especially the domestic labor of black women, because such labor was tinged with associations of servility and a lack of professionally honed skill. Within this dominant uplift discourse, menial labor was largely a mark of the stagnation of black minds and a corresponding lack of social ambition on the part of the laborers themselves. Santamarina explains that the recurring "description of occupationally produced dependence" put forth by activist leaders from David Walker⁷ down to Douglass actively "collaborates in the [wider] culture's demeaning of the value produced by these workers."⁸ In contrast to this denigrating impulse, Santamarina offers up a persuasive archive of antebellum autobiographies that insist on the value of antebellum black women's work and black manual labor in general. McCune Smith's [End Page 295] Heads... collection also has a place in this archive, for it is a composite class biography of Northern black manual laborers that delineates the counter-intuitive freedoms derived from their varied experiences of work.⁹ This essay focuses on one particular sketch about black women's work, titled "The Washerwoman." In it, McCune Smith reworks the linkage of black objectification with chattel slavery by way of an attention to objects. Published in Frederick Douglass's Paper on June 17, 1852, Douglass prefaces "The Washerwoman" with a note describing it as another one of McCune Smith's "faithful pictures of contented degradation." Douglass surmises that McCune Smith ought to expect "a rap or two over his head with a broom-stick, or a few drops of moderately hot 'suds' upon his neatly-attired person" upon publication of the story.¹⁰ He forecasts McCune Smith as likely to receive some abuse from the real-life washerwoman, because Douglass cannot seem to recognize McCune Smith's piece as anything other than a humiliating display of the washerwoman's "contented degradation."¹¹ The rest of this essay suggests that interpretations like Douglass's are misreadings of McCune Smith's project in Heads of the Colored People. In offering up his rendering of "the occupations and musings" of a washerwoman, McCune Smith actually seeks to counteract the degradation that Douglass and other black leaders at times directed towards black manual laborers. "The Washerwoman" protests the assumption that black manual laborers were necessarily dehumanized by their work and made into mere laboring objects. Suggestively, McCune Smith hints that objectification may not always be oppressive in the struggle for freedom.

Objects—both literary and literal—are the means by which "The Washerwoman" emphasizes the liberating potentials of so-called menial labor. In "The Washerwoman," a valuable sort of freedom inheres in the woman's interaction with the objects of labor. For McCune Smith, the washerwoman's labor provides her a sense of freedom that is not predicated upon narratives of economic mastery or fiercely individualist self-possession. Instead, the freedom that McCune Smith [End Page 296] depicts is inextricable from the vacillating subject-object relations of the washerwoman to the acts of her labor.

II. "Paint Me the Whitewash Brush": Literal Things and Literary Craft

McCune Smith's project in "The Washerwoman" and the series of which it is a part, is to somehow transmute black manual labor into a formal literary representation that retains a certain power of materiality, of "thingness," for things are indispensable components of the unorthodox political intent of the collection. Individual sketches have an intense focus on the objects that populate the field of black manual labor. There are moments when the text will linger, for example, on an animated parade of boots worked on by a bootblack, or on the washerwoman's smoothing iron because those objects are a crucial part of the labor experience and the political possibility enmeshed within it. By paying the same degree of attention to black laborers and the things that attend their labor, McCune Smith crafts an alternative mimesis in which literary works act with the same epistemological power that he accords to things in "The Washerwoman." In this sketch, both categories (text and tool) are treated with a theoretical seriousness that allows readers to think beside but also beyond the constraints of commodity fetishism in order to get a sense of how the things of manual labor are, for McCune Smith, a crucial component of black laborers' experiences of freedom. McCune Smith links literary practice and the tools of manual labor together to rethink human-object relations. The sketches insist that it is precisely these relationships between persons and things that generate distinct knowledges of freedom in black communities.

As the epigraph to Heads of the Colored People, McCune Smith appends a poem of his own composition that invokes the nature of the complex relationship he will explore between black "heads" and senses of freedom that emerge through their work with things. In the epigraph, he indicates that labor and freedom fuse in the actual tools of manual [End Page 297] labor. It reads, "Age Zographon ariste [Come, Best of Painters],/ Graphe Zographon ariste [Paint, Best of Painters],/ Best of Painters, come away,/ Paint me the whitewash brush, I pray" (MCS,190). This opening address to the "Best of Painters" alludes to the classical epic's appeal to the muses. Yet, it is strikingly different in that it does not request the gods' assistance during the act of composition, but instead asks that the Painter-god limn the contours of a specific tool—the whitewash brush—that the writer needs to perform his task. Wide, flat, and made for broad, monotonous strokes, the whitewash brush is not a particularly refined tool. And yet, the paradox of producing nuanced, social-psychological portraiture of black "heads" with the blunt whitewash brush makes sense in the context of these works, for the figure of the brush evokes both a resistance to a "whitewashed" racist society, and an unabashed affinity for the tools common to members of New York City's black laboring community. More, the curious character of this particular whitewash brush, which is itself "painted" into being for the author's subsequent use ("Paint me the whitewash brush, I pray"), plays on the possibilities for an articulation between literary-artistic form and the material practices of labor, including the activity of whitewashing but also that of artistic, and especially literary, production. This multi-faceted invocation of the whitewash brush indicates a cognizance of the laborer and her tools, and, most importantly, on both as bound up with literary representation. All are indispensable things in McCune Smith's project of rendering freedom in black communities.

Here, McCune Smith envisions some dynamic encounter between thought and action, writing and representation, "heads" and tools and labor, as the most concrete manifestation of "thingness" possible. By bringing the thing into the realm of the literary and coding it verbally, McCune Smith is revealing the sociality already inherent in the whitewasher's brush. McCune Smith's recasting of the whitewasher's brush in language is less an attempt at a facsimile representation, and more a clarification of already-existent relationships between a tool of labor and the labors of language. That [End Page 298] is, McCune Smith uses language as a sort of relationally-attuned magnifying glass that, when applied to the tools of common black laborers, reveals the sociality of the thing in its relation to the laborer. This derives not from its existence as a symbol of the laborer's work, but from its participation in that work and, for McCune Smith's purposes, its extended participation in the production of the literary work of which it is a part.

This reading of McCune Smith is indebted to recent critical work focused on the variegated and complicated field of "things" in 19^th-century literary studies. Elaine Freedgood urges recognition of a 19^th-century "thing culture," which she characterizes as "a more extravagant form of object relations than ours."¹² She reminds us that "the abstraction of the commodity into a money value, the spectacularization of the consumer good, [and] the alienation of things from their human and geographical origins...were not the only ways of imagining the things of that crowded world." Along with Freedgood, Bill Brown seeks to account for the crowded and multi-faceted world of object relations through literary form, making a case for the object-in-literature as "an effort...to imagine the work of art as a different mode of mimesis—not one that serves to represent a thing, but one that seeks to attain the status of a thing."¹³ In a similar vein, McCune Smith's sketches strive to represent "a different mode of mimesis" in which his prose acts with the same epistemological power that he accords to things in the sketches, especially the discrete material things that attend processes of black labor. In particular, "The Washerwoman" collapses the ontological separation between ideas and things, subjects and objects, laborers and tools of production to explore a liberative potential in these relationships. McCune's methodology in Heads... is tortuous, but its concentration on thinghood cracks open the traditional Marxian view of the labored upon object as the "mysterious" container of secreted social relations. Marx gives an account of commodity formation in volume one of Capital, stating that "the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves...Through [End Page 299] this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social."¹⁴ This definition lays out the basics of the commodity fetish as a falsely vivified object, and gestures toward the alienated labor processes that attend its emergence. Yet, a plausible reading of the passage I have italicized points to a more complex vision of things. "Sensuous things," "supra-sensible," and "social," ought to be read as simultaneously occurring but distinctly different modes of a thing's existence, rather than mere synonyms for one another. Taken with the crucial intermediary phrase, "at the same time," and the conjunction "or," these terms name modalities of object relations that can be (1) literally themselves, or "sensuous things" (2) in excess of themselves, or "supra-sensible" and (3) networked with the realm of the living, or "social."

Contemporary thing-theorists like Brown work in the vein of interrogating "commodity-fetishism-as-usual" by insisting that the "mutual constitution of human subject and inanimate object can hardly be reduced to those relations... our relation to things cannot be explained by the cultural logic of capitalism." While Brown admirably tracks the sprawling and variegated relationships between humans and things in during the U.S. Gilded Age, his insistence that "the metamorphosis of one into the other...[is] not a metamorphosis fully explained by the so-called reifying effects of a society permeated by the commodity form" obscures James McCune Smith's point that the intimate proximities of laborers and labor processes can, in fact, produce a vital sense of being-free.¹⁵ While labor under capitalism is undoubtedly rife with dead ends in terms of its liberating potentials, the Heads... sketches, and "The Washerwoman" in particular, insist on labor (both manual and literary) as that which joins humans and things in effecting a shift towards living in freedom. Sensuous things, the supra-sensible, and the social emerge in McCune Smith's "The Washerwoman" as the coordinates of a paradoxical literary schema in which there is some freedom in thinking through things, or even thinking like them. [End Page 300]

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African-American Woman Doing Laundry with a Scrub Board and Tub, African-American Girl Stirring Pot with 3 other Children on the Ground Watching, and a Woman in the Background Spreading Laundry. Circa 1900. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-51058.

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III. Over-Toil

"Dunk! dunk!," the sound of a hot iron being submerged into a pail of water, acts as a refrain throughout James McCune Smith's short story about a free black laborer, "The Washerwoman" (MCS, 201).¹⁶ In the first line, the washerwoman's exclamation that it is already "Saturday night!" followed immediately by the "Dunk!" of the smoothing-iron serves as the opening note of a text that repeatedly uses this sound as an aural marker of an epistemology of freedom. It is one born of and rooted in physical labor but it also, crucially, exceeds the boundaries of the labor system. The sound of the smoothing-iron hearkens to the continuity of the work—"Dunk! dunk! goes the iron, sadly wearily, but steadily..."—but through its exclamatory presence, the sound also marks a rupture in the washerwoman's labor process. McCune Smith invests the sound of the dunk with a double valence in this text. It indicates the performance of physical work, yet it also indicates an awareness that is simultaneously attached to and beyond that work. The sound itself acts as a means of parsing a new relationship of freedom between black antebellum laborers and the objects of their labor.

By the end of the first paragraph, labor seems to have effected a curious physiological change in the washerwoman's body: her brow is "seamed and blistered with deep furrows and great drops of sweat [are] wrung out by overtoil." McCune Smith's mention of the washerwoman's "seamed" brow veers close to equating her countenance with the object of her labor (the ironing of the shirts), thus rendering her nothing more than an automated product of that labor. However, the concept of "overtoil" that McCune Smith invokes at the end of this sentence is itself doubly occupied: by the former reading and by a reading that indicates the insufficiency of labor to mark the washerwoman as entirely its own. "Overtoil," while certainly implying that the [End Page 302] washerwoman must work too hard and too long, also hints at something that exists over-toil: above, outside of, apart from toil. The washerwoman's seamed and blistered brow points to the inability of the products of her labor to contain the full import of her labor. Instead, the signs of this excess, this thing that exists over toil, manifest themselves on the washerwoman's body and especially on her face. In this moment, McCune Smith invests the washerwoman's countenance with a relevancy that supersedes her line of work. However, that act of supersession co-exists, and can only exist, in the same moment with her labor. I contend that while the "something" that exists in palimpsest over toil cannot be contained by the washerwoman's labor, her interaction with the objects of labor plays a fundamentally constitutive role in the generation of her extra-laboring existence.

The necessity of labor to the washerwoman's mental uplift manifests itself in the next paragraph of the story when the dunking refrain of her work gains added intensity. McCune Smith builds this passage into a moment of crisis by punctuating the refrain, "Dunk! dunk!! dunk!!!," ever more insistently. The exclamatory moment disrupts and ruptures the current scene; the multiplied exclamation points change the motion and mode of the washerwoman's labor. The increasingly punctuated refrain invests the earlier described "weary" motion of the smoothing-iron with an almost preternatural speed as it now "shoots away and back" under the sudden appearance of a "smile" on the washerwoman's face. We shortly learn that the change of expression signals the washerwoman's mental exultation over her own sense of freedom, voiced in the text in the simple exclamatory phrase, "Oh, Freedom!" McCune Smith makes it impossible to disentangle the woman's mental work from her physical labor here, because the refrain of the dunk indicates that her interaction with the iron serves an accretive function that enables the washerwoman's exclamation of freedom.

As if to place extra emphasis on the physicality of the iron's sound in this moment of exaltation, the narrator clarifies that no "outward visible sign" of religious devotion is present to account for it. Rather, the text's recording of the [End Page 303] onomatopoeic "dunk!" is the "visible sign" of the thought of freedom. There is, the narrator informs us, "No Prie Dieu in reverential corner, no crucifix and lugubrious beads pendent from the sidewall," but instead only a feeling that "the great progressive impulse of humanity has touched her heart as with flame." This final metaphor of the passage, that of the washerwoman's heart being touched "as with flame," quite explicitly parallels the action of ironing: placing a hot surface on material to effect a change in that material. McCune Smith actively insists that the material components of the scene, the iron, the sounds of its use, and the movement of the washerwoman's body, perform routine labor and at the same moment bring that labor to a moment of exclamatory crisis in which the act of production itself cannot contain the knowledge of freedom the washerwoman realizes. The washerwoman's head, which had earlier taken on the appearance of a "seamed" shirt, now shows itself as a realm where excess energies of labor manifest and then effectively burst their "seams" to open into a knowledge of freedom. While the narrator's appeal to the "great progressive impulse of humanity" in this passage can be read as a liberal proxy for religion, the progressive impulse functioning as a mode of ideological mystification espousing the alarming claim that "work will set you free," the included sounds of the washerwoman's labor—the text's formal commitment to "Dunk!" as the backbone for its structure—insists on a reading that takes into account the aural irreducibility of the washerwoman's labor to language.

Fred Moten's In the Break (2003) elaborates this point in its effort to "establish procedures" to account for the importance of aurality to black radical texts, their modes of "incorporation or recording of a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music and speech."¹⁷ Moten informs my reading of "The Washerwoman," for McCune Smith, like Moten, crafts an argument that starts with the historical reality of commodities who spoke, of laborers who were: [End Page 304]

commodities before, as it were, the abstraction of labor power from their bodies and who continue to pass on this material heritage across the divide that separates slavery and "freedom." But I am interested, finally, in the implications of the breaking of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take the rich content of the object's/ commodity's aurality outside the confines of meaning precisely by way of this material trace...[in] the transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical form.¹⁸

An "elevating disruption of the verbal" is an eloquent summation of McCune Smith's project in "The Washerwoman." The sound of labor functions as both a "material trace" of labor and a mimetic literary representation that cannot be confined to either of those categories. Consequently, the recorded sound is part of the work but still "a radically exterior aurality" that demands attention from readers, and demands to be thought of as a thing engaging in a manner of unwieldy conjunctions with the other components of the text. Here, the refrain does not merely serve as a narrative shorthand of the washerwoman's experienced daily labor, what Roland Barthes might characterize as an instance of the "reality effect," in which a particular literary description contributes to the realist sense of a work but does not factor into its critical interpretation.¹⁹ Instead, the repeated disruption occasioned by the refrain alerts the reader to its prominence in "The Washerwoman's" labors of freedom, connected to but insistently apart from freedom as either religious salvation or the liberal progressive impulse. "Dunk! dunk!" serves as an irreducible interruption, an obstacle that makes the reader pause in her consideration of the washerwoman, for this rupturing element is not something that can be dealt with cleanly and [End Page 305] easily in the text as either musical notation, mere description, or clearly meaningful language. The phonic trace is the washerwoman's work process made available to readers in such a way that it demands they countenance the irruption of other realities because of its appearance. The iron, the shirts, and the refrain are not the only objects of importance in "The Washerwoman." In fact, every thing within the short text demands thorough attention and intellectual work on the part of its readers. McCune Smith devotes a large portion of the brief narrative to describing other objects sharing space with the washerwoman in the apartment. The washerwoman (and her son, as we will later learn) is a voracious reader, and a secondhand—but "newly varnished"—mahogany table bears copies of "Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Watts' Hymns, a Life of Christ, and a nice 'greasy novel' just in from the circulating library." Portraits of abolitionist figures like George Thompson/"old Pappy Thompson," Paul Cuffe/"Brother Paul," and Samuel Cornish/"Sammy Cornish" paper her walls (MCS, 201).²⁰ She possesses an "old bureau, the big drawer of which is the larder, containing sundry slices of cold meat, second-handed toast 'with butter on it,' and the carcass of a turkey." The food, the narrator notes, is the "return cargo of a basket of clothes sent downtown that morning," and other baskets and buckets are scattered liberally throughout the apartment, "some full of clothes soaking for next week's labor." To add the final touch to the already crowded scene, there are "many dozen shirts hung round the room on horses, chairs, lines and every other thing capable of being hanged on."

The preponderance of things in "The Washerwoman" signals the text's interest in objects and, more importantly, in complicated notions of ownership and possession. The high incidence of circulating objects in the washerwoman's apartment (library books; secondhand furniture; outgoing clean laundry; returned food scraps, along with more dirty laundry) situates the washerwoman within circuits of exchange that can be said to move around her, but that also move her to different modes of knowing. Even the pictures on her walls point to a shift in public consciousness wherein [End Page 306] portraits of successful black community members and white abolitionists are reproduced affordably for circulation because of a growing popular interest in the anti-slavery cause. Of course, the notion of circulation injects concepts of ownership and possession with a sense of ambivalence, for if almost everything that the washerwoman owns and interacts with circulates at some point, there seems little chance of her ever accumulating enough capital to escape her life of perpetual "overtoil." Even her "payment" for doing laundry sometimes comes in non-monetary forms, like the already-once circulated scraps of food that make their way home in her delivery basket. Yet, as Santamarina points out, capitalist accumulation was at times understood as the very antithesis of black working women's freedom. Analyzing Sojourner Truth's 1850 autobiography, Santamarina contends that the text "enacts a disseminating pedagogy" of itineracy "different from that underwriting the bourgeois model of [upward] mobility" and capital accumulation. This ethic of itineracy manifests as a "resistance to accumulation, even in the face of necessity, [which] suggests that for the former slave, value inheres in that which circulates...rather than what can be held as private property."²¹ "The Washerwoman" also partakes in the cyclical mode of locating value. McCune Smith does not imbue the washerwoman's perpetually circulatory existence with a sense of static hopelessness. Instead, the washerwoman's labor leads her to a sense of being free that is mediated by and imbricated with the constant motion of the things that surround her.

Revolving circuits of secondhand and un-owned things incite this revelation. It is, to quote Bill Brown, a certain "non-proprietary possession of objects," that best articulates the knowledge of freedom that seems to come to her through labor circuits. Brown proposes the theory of non-proprietary possession, to help him tell "the story of possessions and possession, which is a story of isolating and/or cherishing certain objects within an evaluative context that is not the market-as-usual—the story of a kind of possession that is irreducible to ownership" or "of value that is irreducible to mere exchange or use."²² Brown's notion of the [End Page 307] non-proprietary possession is, in a way, deeply applicable to this reading. However, McCune Smith's text supplements the notions of "isolating and/or cherishing certain objects" with the concomitant importance of laboring on and with things that are always, in some way, in process alongside the washerwoman. There are certainly elements of the isolated or cherished in her apartment, like the "greasy novel" just in from the library and the "newly varnished" secondhand table. The descriptors of grease and varnish connote care or even some small degree of luxury: the table has been polished to ensure its best presentation; the grease of the novel implies that it is oft-used for the decadent act of reading for pleasure. Crucially, however, these things are irreducible to isolated cherishing, because they are part of a matrix of social relations. The mahogany table needed polishing because it had presumably been knocking around for a while, and the novel is greasy from being passed, hand-to-hand, amongst the members of the "circulating library."

Things do powerfully affect the washerwoman, but they are always things in situation. The circulation of the objects in the washerwoman's apartment, and circulation's relation to her sense of self-possession, does not happen without relational engagement. Take the circulation of laundry, for another example. In describing the contours of the "mysterious character of the commodity-form," Marx explains that the capitalist production process involves the transubstantiation of human labor power into the objects produced; the resulting commodity "reflects the social characteristics of men's own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves."²³ On one level, the labor of doing laundry perfectly enacts this transfer of the "social characteristics" of human labor into the thing, making that labor appear as the "objective characteristic" of the thing. The washerwoman dedicates her labor to the process of making stains disappear, thus she expends her labor with the goal of making the signs of that labor invisible. The clean shirt evinces no sign of the "social characteristic" of her work, its cleanliness appearing as the natural and "objective characteristic" of the shirt itself. The washerwoman does not exactly produce a [End Page 308] new commodity but labors to reproduce, as closely as possible, the object (the shirt) in a pristine state before sending it back out into circulation. In doing so, the social characteristics of her labor are literally meant to disappear into the object of labor. Yet, this straightforward Marxian reading of the washerwoman's labor is complicated by the fact that, as commented upon earlier in the essay, the washerwoman's labor also marks her person with the characteristics of the ironed shirt ("the seamed and blistered" brow from which "great drops of sweat [are] wrung out"). While it may seem implausible to imbue the shirt with a subjectivity that acts upon the washerwoman, McCune Smith indicates that her consciousness of freedom arises out of her interaction with objects involved in her labor (both the smoothing-iron and the shirts). He therefore implies a certain sociality in play between subject and object. The concept of sociality, in its turn, implies a degree of sentience present in both parties in order for social interaction to take place. The narrative even gives the washerwoman's labor a "voice" in the dunking refrain that insistently calls the reader out of the dimension of the washerwoman's story by intruding into the narrative. McCune Smith grants agency to both the subjects and the objects of labor, and the exchange between subject and object results in both participants taking something of the other into themselves.

The sociality between the washerwoman, her smoothing-iron and the shirts they both work on is an instance of circulation in the text predicated upon the notion of a non-proprietary and belabored possession of objects. When the washerwoman's labor with objects, and the thought of freedom that this labor imparts, is thought in conjunction with the other instances of circulation that populate the washerwoman's apartment, McCune Smith clearly endorses a philosophy that holds that there is no sense of being-free that exists apart from objects. Her possession of them can only be temporary and non-proprietary, because this freedom comes about through a parallelism of humans with things—not a hierarchy in which the human unequivocally owns or masters a thing. [End Page 309]

Where I would venture to say that McCune Smith's "thing theory" bests Brown's is in Smith's willingness to grant not only power, but a decidedly liberative potential, to what Brown views as the mistaken myopia of commodity fetishism, which "grant[s] material objects a value and power, divorced from...human power."²⁴ McCune Smith, on the other hand, takes "object power" seriously, according things a voice and a presence of their own in "The Washerwoman." What the text evinces is the extent to which the object acts upon and moves the laborer at the same instant that the object incorporates human labor into itself. In "The Washerwoman," McCune Smith insists that things themselves are in fact vivified, but that that vivification results in an interactive exchange between humans and things that can open out onto a sense of freedom.

IV. Slavery and Object Logic

Because the primary character in "The Washerwoman" is a formerly enslaved black female laborer, the argument that she, as a subject, engages with things on a dialogic level is precarious. In one reading, the argument that the washerwoman possesses a subjectivity tantamount to, and capable of interacting with, a shirt veers into the dangerous territory of ranking the woman of color as chattel, as an inanimate thing who communicates with other things on the same base level. Yet, I contend that McCune Smith's text dares readers to make this linkage not to disparage or cast doubt upon the nature of the washerwoman's humanity, but to force readers to re-examine the relations between humans and things, and things and ideas, in the context of an antebellum culture that equated raced bodies with things and a contemporary culture that still largely conceptualizes things as inanimate entities capable of being completely possessed.

It was the belief in the possibility of possession, the confidence that one can completely own a thing, which informed the workings of the slave system. The documentary practices of slavery—bills of lading for slave ships, plantation [End Page 310] inventories that accounted for slave populations along with foodstuffs and tools, and bills of sale from the auction block—all perpetuated the logic that slaves were to be bought, sold, traded and circulated as non-sentient, or at least less than fully human, things.²⁵ McCune Smith, although he certainly was not a proponent of the logic of chattel slavery, nevertheless takes its practice of ontological leveling seriously in "The Washerwoman." Yet, he does so in order to take the knowledge systems informing chattel slavery to their limit. He then moves beyond that limit to indicate the liberatory epistemologies constituted by the sociality of subjects and objects in which both imbue the other with their respective characteristics.

The story's first explicit reference to slavery comes in the midst of the washerwoman's labor, when the narrator informs us that "her mind is 'far away' in the sunny South, with her sisters and their children who toil as hard but without any pay!" While one can read the wandering mind of the worker as a classic symptom of alienation from one's labor, the placement of the sentence between two repetitions of the "Dunk! dunk!!" refrain gestures towards a more constitutive affiliation between labor and thought. The significantly irreducible aural marker highlights the distinction drawn between the washerwoman's interaction with objects and her enslaved relatives' condition as enslaved objects. In fact, the temporal placement of the washerwoman's reflection—the thought of the unpaid labor of her enslaved relatives occurs in the midst of her washing—indicates that her contact with the articles of labor serves as a catalyst for the movement of her mind from North to South. The shift is, in fact, the result of an exchange between the washerwoman and the animated objects of labor. Instead of reading the washerwoman's wandering mind as evidence of her dissociation from her physical actions, McCune Smith urges readers to consider this as a moment of sociality between the washerwoman and the vivified objects of labor that in fact frees her from the object logic of chattel slavery.

While she is still thinking of her enslaved sisters, nieces, and nephews, the washerwoman makes an interesting [End Page 311] appeal to the power of objects in the underground circuits of exchange between free black Northerners and enslaved Southerners. The washerwoman "fancies the smiles which will gladden their faces, when receiving the things she sent for them in a box by the last Georgetown packet." The means that the washerwoman employs to contact her relatives are explicitly material in this passage. Importantly, however, the washerwoman deploys the material gifts to carry the message of a liberative engagement with things. The washerwoman maintains and deploys her knowledge of being free to her enslaved relatives through a use of objects. In what Annette Weiner referred to as "the paradox of keeping-while-giving," the washerwoman uses the care-package to sustain a social life with her family.²⁶ The washerwoman makes a commitment to keep some of the fruits of her labor out of market circulation and within the family circle, a simultaneous withholding and dispersal that demands some philosophical gymnastics for "keeping some things transcendent and out of circulation in the face of all the pressures to give them to others is a burden, a responsibility, and...a skillful achievement."²⁷

Of course, the washerwoman sends the gifts because she is unable to travel to her family or bring them to her, thus the things in the box can be read as extensions or representations of the washerwoman herself. However, this reading loses some strength when one places the passage in context. It is worth repeating that the washerwoman's thoughts about the package occur within a textual space enclosed by two occurrences of the dunking refrain. Because the refrain enfolds the entire passage, the things mentioned within the sentence are indexically related to the washerwoman's engagement with the tools of her labor. To think mathematically for a moment, in the same way that a pair of parentheses implies that all of the elements enclosed are subject to the same operation,²⁸ the refrain parenthetically includes the washerwoman's care-package within the realm of vivified objects that can spur people onto a sense of being free. Within the formal orchestration of McCune Smith's text, the washerwoman sends her family the knowledge of the emancipatory [End Page 312] potential that inheres in particular relationships with mobilized things.

The sentence immediately following the washerwoman's thoughts about her enslaved family is the previously mentioned apogee of the text: the mounting exclamatory insistence of the dunking leads to the washerwoman's smiling exclamation, "Oh Freedom!" The large number of things invoked at the moment of the exclamation—the sounds of dunking, the shirts, the irons, and the box of things sent to her family—links the notion of the circulating object into the self-conscious realization of freedom and therefore steers the objects away from a sole linkage with slavery. In the logic of chattel slavery, one person has the right to possess another because that other is conceived of as property. The objects in this passage refute the foundational principle of that logic by refusing designation as things in the restrictive, inanimate sense. On a broader cultural level, they engage with the washerwoman through labor, and in so doing, disrupt the easy designation of a thing as chattel property.

The text's second and most apparent confrontation with the logic of chattel slavery occurs when the narrator describes the washerwoman's former life as a slave. This glimpse into her past comes after the washerwoman's exclamation of freedom and proceeds from the workings of her "imagination" which is now "lighted up" and "ranging over the possibilities of [her family's] enfranchisement." The washerwoman's thoughts about her family's potential future of freedom are routed through her own personal experience of emancipation. After being brought north with a white family as a slave, and being the only one of her sisters to stay in the area,²⁹ the narrator recounts the moment of her emancipation:

each one of her three sisters had been brought North with the white family, and went back for their children's sake into bondage. She alone had remained North from her girlhood as a slave, until one day, when she had reached woman's years, her so-called master, with much bustle, whip in hand, [End Page 313] had called her upstairs for punishment. The scene was short and decisive; the tall, stout man had raised his arm to strike—"see here!" fiercely exclaimed the frail being before him, "if you dare touch me with that lash, I will tear you to pieces!" The whipper, whipped, dropt his uplifted arm and quietly slunk downstairs.

In one sense, this passage's emphasis on personal agency as the foundation of "enfranchisement," follows the contours of other moments of self-liberation recounted in antebellum slave narratives and African-American authored texts. In his 1855 autobiography, Frederick Douglass recounts his physical confrontation with the slavemaster Covey as the famous chiastic reversal, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."³⁰ Harriet E. Wilson's semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859), features a scene in which Frado makes a demand similar to that of the washerwoman, asserting herself against the abusive Mrs. B with the proclamation, "if you strike me again, I'll never work a mite more for you!"³¹ In line with these other texts, the washerwoman's threat performs the transformation of one considered an object into an agential subject. When the washerwoman voices her defiance to her "so-called master," she asserts her non-thingness in comparison to the inanimate lash with which he attempts to beat her.

However, in asserting her differentiation from the other "things" of slavery, McCune Smith's language hints that the washerwoman experiences a curious merge with the instrument of oppression. Her defiance of her master results in the "whipper" being effectively "whipped." The metaphor no doubt indicates the fact that the washerwoman has, in this moment, seized control over her own person and gained the ability to dominate her master. Crucially, though, the washerwoman trumps her master not by ejecting the object of oppression (the whip) from the scene, but by incorporating herself into the idea of the whip to subjugate the "so-called master." That is, the washerwoman's consciousness [End Page 314] of freedom emerges when she employs her knowledge of the idea in the thing to affect material consequences in her world.

This crucial passage in the text indicates the extent to which the washerwoman's sense of freedom inextricably entwines itself with the objects of material reality. The dialectical work between subject and object at work in this passage places all three participants in the scene—master, washerwoman, and whip—within an arena of thingness. McCune Smith presents the washerwoman's engagement with the idea of the whip not as a problematic association with the object, but as a liberative circuit of exchange in which the washerwoman negotiates a new relation with the whip, a tool of her subjection, in order to confine the master to her former status as chattel. McCune Smith takes pains to emphasize the advantages of conceiving of the self with a degree of objectivity and the object with a degree of subjectivity by denigrating the master to the lowest position in the taxonomy of thingness. The master occupies this place because he conceives of his relationship to things only in the sense of proprietary possession—he believes that he can unequivocally own a thing. By contrast, the washerwoman taps into the liberative potential that exists in a serious engagement with things.

V. Reproduction, Freedom, Necessity

Earlier in the essay, I described the washerwoman's material labor with objects as incapable of containing the excessive realm of thought "over-toil," that emerges simultaneously with the performance of physical work. I want to return to this point now in order to consider the washerwoman's conception of freedom in more detail and to insist that her extra-laboring knowledge moves beyond but also returns to the realm of material reality in an attempt to rectify social injustices.

In volume three of Capital, Marx asserts that human freedom comes into existence through labor, but only when labor ceases to be an action of necessity. He claims that, "the [End Page 315] realm of human freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production." Continuing on, Marx holds that "necessity" is a foundational component of human experience, and that its existence is apparent in the lives of 'non-civilized' humans and members of the modern capitalist system alike. He writes, "Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life," the same is true for "civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production." Marx contends that necessity, and therefore the "mundane consideration" of survival, is an inescapable feature of all human lives. He then reincorporates necessity into his claim about freedom by positioning necessity as the base of all human freedom, essential to its germination but insufficient as a conceptual space for its realization: "Beyond it ['the realm of necessity'] begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis."³²

The metaphor of the blossom that Marx uses in this passage performs a naturalization of the concept of labor in its relation to freedom. The appeal to the category of the natural is powerful here, because it insists on the inseparability of labor as "necessity" from the realization of freedom, which lies beyond necessity's domain. More compelling for my interests, though, is that the natural metaphor also places emphasis on process in the sense that the "blossom" of freedom needs the soil of necessity to grow. However, the metaphor is deceptively simple, for the process that Marx evokes here is not based solely in unbroken linear movement. The realm of human freedom actually "begins its development" only once it has outgrown, or moved "beyond" necessity. In this passage, attachment to a material basis and a simultaneous supersession of that basis in order for the process to begin are a distinct tension in Marx's conception of human freedom. McCune Smith's "The Washerwoman," on the other hand, more precisely articulates the relation between [End Page 316] necessary labor and freedom by showing a mode of knowing freedom that does, indeed, lie "beyond the sphere of actual material production." But McCune Smith's text indicates that necessary labor can itself be a realm in which "mundane consideration ceases" with the temporally strange career of human freedom is active all along.

"The Washerwoman" elaborates the spatial incoherency of Marx's model of human freedom—in which necessity forms the foundation of and is simultaneously point of departure for the commencement of freedom—in its iteration of the imbrication of freedom and labor. For the washerwoman, the material reality of labor can exist as a foundation and a space left behind because of her ontological flexibility regarding the way one relates to things. The rhythm of the smoothing-iron is a sound that keeps the washerwoman (and the reader) cognizant of her unceasing activity, a sound that ties her into her work, and a sound that lifts her out of her labor into the thoughts of freedom. The washerwoman's ontological flexibility, her ability to sustain this doubled thought relation to the objects of labor, indicates what Angela Davis terms as women's ability "to create and transform their own human nature" through labor, an act which is "always social."³³ Using Davis as a guide here, the washerwoman can simultaneously engage with and leave her labor behind. This double relation marks the work of washing as the non-foundational foundation of her freedom, because her sociality with the things of labor is effectively an exchange of knowledge that "transforms" her or pushes her into a realm beyond reified ontological splits between subject/object, or a more complex formulation: freedom as labor for itself/ unfreedom as necessary labor. The washerwoman's sociality with objects allows her to both inhabit space and transcend it, or, more precisely, to transcend spaces of menial labor by inhabiting them. "The Washerwoman," as a theoretical text about freedom thinks through the crucial role that things play in the realm of material "necessity," and insists that one can be free only where ontological flexibility exists, where engagements with things simultaneously restrict and elaborate upon what it means to be free. [End Page 317]

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Mr. Bryan's Washerwomen, Dry River. Circa 1808-1815. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Dvision. LC-USZ62-136785.

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Yet, McCune Smith also articulates a theory of freedom which positions material necessity as the basis of a freedom that does not value, as Marx seems to, "energy as an end in itself," but instead values energy that has the reproduction of freedom as its end. Through "The Washerwoman's" treatment of reproduction, McCune Smith insists that freedom cannot even be freedom without perpetuation. On the level of subject matter, issues of reproduction are apparent in the work of doing laundry—by washing out stains, the washerwoman effectively reproduces the shirt in its unsoiled, new state. Most importantly, however, the domestically reproductive act of doing laundry has its textual parallel in the figure of the washerwoman's son, who has in fact been present, though mostly unremarked upon, the whole time the reader has been privy to the washerwoman's labors. He is a character quietly embedded in the text, but towards whom the washerwoman unfailingly directs her energies.

Immediately after the passage describing the washerwoman's "whipping" of her master, the narrator calls our attention to the "silent witness" of that past scene, the washerwoman's son, "who, looking through a glass door, ready to stay the arm of his uncle, had felt a terrible fear and a terrible triumph" while watching his mother's defiance (MCS, 202). The washerwoman's theoretical use of the object of slavery (the whip) in order to destroy the master's authority simultaneously brings her son into visibility. The "terrible fear and terrible triumph" that he feels as he watches his mother relegate the "so-called master" to powerlessness solidify the boy's existence as something decisively removed from the use and exchange of raced and enslaved bodies. The washerwoman's action in that passage performs a disappearance of her son from the realm of slavery and a re-purposing of him for engagement with systems of knowledge other than those relating to the slave economy. Just as the labor of the washerwoman makes stains disappear along with her consciousness of freedom, the vanishing act that she performs over her master's sense of power brings her son into that consciousness of freedom. [End Page 319]

As if to emphasize the boy's re-materialization in a realm of freedom, the paragraph following the whipping passage takes note of his presence in the washerwoman's apartment for the first time. With a note of surprise, the narrator exclaims:

Yes! well, I had forgotten to say that alongside the ironing table was a good-for-nothing looking, quarter grown, bushy-headed boy, a shade or two lighter than his mother, so intent upon 'Aladdin; or The Wonderful Lamp' that he had to be called three or four times before he sprang to put fresh wood on the fire, or light another candle, or bring a pail of water.

The boy's almost total absorption in his library book indicates the new knowledge system into which his mother's acts initiated him. Instead of being a full participant in his mother's labor, the boy only reluctantly abandons his reading to render assistance. Even the narrator's apparently unflattering descriptions of the boy as "good-for-nothing" and "bushy-headed" carry positive connotations when thought in conjunction with the boy's display of literary interest. Born the child of an enslaved black woman, the boy was supposed to be useful to society as a slave. In this context, the "good-for-nothing" description rings with a note of ironic pride, as if emphasizing that the reading boy is permanently unfitted for the forced labor of slavery, or even the poorly paid work of his mother.

The energy that his mother exerts in doing laundry and simultaneously thinking freedom is not merely an end in itself, but her attempt to ensure freedom's continuity in the life of her son. For the washerwoman, the "end" of freedom merges with the notion of kinship as she strives to inculcate in him the sense that his conception and existence are purely the result of her own emancipated energy. The narrator explains that the washerwoman has crafted a creation story that claims the boy's existence as an act of purely maternal conception. He comments that "there was no evidence [End Page 320] around the room that he called any one father, nor had he, ever, except the unseen, universal 'our Father, which art in Heaven!'" While raising the boy on her own, the washerwoman took pains to empty out from the category of "father" any particularized, authoritative resonance. By making the "unseen, universal Father" the only father that the child acknowledges, the washerwoman ensures the disappearance of particular white male authority figures from the boy's life: the master that the boy knew only as "uncle" and the possibly related white man who fathered him.³⁴ The washerwoman's determination that the child will never acknowledge a white father—either literally or in the wider social context of white patriarchy—is meant to ensure that he will exist in a social situation "beyond" slavery and beyond the cultural aspersions directed toward a child of mixed race. The narrator acknowledges the common opinion of the time that the boy is, "a sort of social pariah, [who] had come into the world after the fashion which so stirs up pious Ethiop's honor,"³⁵ his biracial identity precluding him from full participation in either black or white communities. However, the narrator just as quickly asserts the boy's absolute ignorance of this social judgment. Instead of assuming a posture of inferiority, he is "remarkable" for his "healthy forgetfulness of priests and rituals" and the corresponding "'laughing devil' in his eye that seemed ready to 'face the devil.'" Although the boy carries the social burden of mixed blood, his consciousness is that of "healthy forgetfulness," of a thing set apart from the trivialities and nonsense—"priests and rituals"—that would make him aware of his proscribed social identity. Instead, her son knows only the position of defiance that will allow him to "face the devil" of a racist society, and, presumably, come out laughing.

The washerwoman's expenditures of reproductive energy are not merely ends in themselves. Her son is propelled by her labors of freedom. As an offshoot of the laundry business and his mother's metaphysical labors, McCune Smith shows that he has the ability to assert himself within the market as one who can make demands upon others. In the story's concluding paragraph, the washerwoman has finished work [End Page 321] and cleaned the apartment for the approaching Sabbath. The scene is another one of the washerwoman's miraculous vanishing acts, for there is "no sign of toil there; everything tidy, neat and clean; all the signs of the hard week's work stowed away in drawers or in the cellar." Just as the disappearance of the master's power in the whipping scene brings her son into a new sense of his freedom, the disappearance of the signs of labor correspond to her son's heightened visibility in the marketplace as a conspicuously non-useful black body in a slave economy. This point is made explicitly when the narrative then skips ahead to Sunday evening, where the washerwoman sits in her "Sunday best" with her son. He looks equally presentable "with his Sunday go-to-meetin's on, one of the pockets stuffed with sixpence worth of 'pieces' [of candy]." The candy itself is the result of the boy's having "made Stuart the Confectioner (father of the present millionaires) rouse up at day light to sell him as he came back from carrying home clothes that morning" (emphasis mine). The washerwoman's labor not only results in the boy having an allowance to buy candy with, but it also imbues him with a sense of power within his material reality; he is able to rouse up an established shopkeeper before operating hours and demand that the man satisfy his wants. Although the boy bought the candy while making deliveries of clean laundry for his mother, his purchasing power is an indication of the fact that the boy resides in a realm beyond or "over-toil" that his mother labors to wrench open for him.

McCune Smith abruptly closes the sketch with the account of the boy's transaction at the candy shop, indicating that "he must break off the sketch halfway, lest Ethiop should 'tire' wading through it."³⁶ However, the resonance of the final scene and the things in it—namely the boy's pocket stuffed with candy—indicates McCune Smith's dedication to reconceptualizing things and thingness as powerful theoretical allies in the struggle for racial justice. By embracing the logic of a U.S. culture largely accepting of chattel slavery and the corresponding view of black people as things, but at the same time imbuing thingness with metaphysical weight and granting objects a degree of interiority, McCune Smith [End Page 322] challenges the notion that increased social freedom is possible without a re-examination of the fundamental ontological splits between thing/idea and subject/object, that organize that culture.

McCune Smith's decision to speak of the need for this reexamination by way of a sketch about a formerly enslaved black female laborer underscores his cognizance of the limitations of a model of human freedom that, to take the Marxian example, holds it to be an expenditure of energy that is "an end in itself." For the washerwoman and others like her, that theory is not merely problematic but untenable because she already exists in a world full of oppressive things and structures that she must act to renovate, transcend, destroy— to change in some way. For example, the washerwoman—who perhaps had the act of reproduction forced upon her in the context of slavery—must act in retrospect to instill in the child a sense of her own power to shape his worldview. In a similar way, the labor of laundry is an act of reproduction in which the washerwoman puts her labor towards producing a shirt clean enough to look "like new." Both acts situate the black female laborer in a temporally regressive structure in which she must always work in relation with things already weighted with metaphysical pasts.

By providing an account of the freedom experienced by a formerly enslaved black female laborer, McCune Smith situates the project of human freedom in a more relational context than Marx. The energy she expends for her freedom is never merely an end in itself, because she is always also working through assemblages of the world to which she did not consent. Crucially, though, she is able to attain freedom by cultivating social relations with the world of things around her. Her initial non-consent to the structures of her world does not result in the washerwoman and her son being held in thrall to external conditions. Rather, her repeated engagements with the world function like the "Dunk! dunk!! " refrain that attends the woman throughout the sketch, marking the baseline rhythm of material circumstances but also gesturing towards the commencement of a freedom that can [End Page 323] be wrested from the world, worked upon, wrung out, made "like new."