Being Property Once Myself

Blackness and the End of Man

Joshua Bennett

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780674271166, 9780674980303
• eBook ISBN: 9780674245464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize

"This trenchant work of literary criticism examines the complex ways…African American authors have written about animals. In Bennett's analysis, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and others subvert the racist comparisons that have 'been used against them as a tool of derision and denigration.'...An intense and illuminating reevaluation of black literature and Western thought."
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

"A gripping work…Bennett's lyrical lilt in his sharp analyses makes for a thorough yet accessible read."
—LSE Review of Books

"These absorbing, deeply moving pages bring to life a newly reclaimed ethics."
—Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog

"Tremendously illuminating…Refreshing and field-defining."
—Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery

1

Rat

The question is whether such likening of the “other human” ends only in similitude or whether it authorizes, operationalizes, and becomes an ethics toward such labeled humans. In short, what are the material consequences of relegation from human being to vermin being (a pest or nuisance that must be eliminated)? The term pesticide might be innovatively used to encompass not only the substances used to kill pests but also the theory and practice of killing them.… Vermin (the nonhuman) are not only pests to be controlled but also actors that coproduce and impact their would-be controllers.… Since Daniel Headrick’s Tools of Empire and Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, studies that follow the itineraries of Europeans and “things European”—technology, science, microbes, and so on—explain what Europeans did but not what these vermin beings “did back.”

—Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game”

I was on my way to a life of bagging tiny mountains,

selling poetry on the corners of North Philly,

a pest to mothers & Christians.

Hearing it too the cop behind me shoved me

aside for he was an entomologist

in a former lifetime & knew the many

song structures of cicadas, bush crickets &

fruit flies. He knew the complex courtship

of bark beetles, how the male excavates

a nuptial chamber & buries himself,

his back end sticking out till a female sang

a lyric of such intensity he squirmed like a Quaker

& gave himself over to the quiet history

of trees & ontology. All this he said while

patting me down, slapping first my ribs, then

sliding his palms along the sad, dark shell

of my body

—Major Jackson, “Pest”

Another federal lawsuit filed in 2003 by the Housing Rights Center and 19 tenants accused [former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald] Sterling of once stating his preference not to rent to Latinos because “Hispanics smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” The lawsuit also accused him of saying “black tenants smell and attract vermin.”

—“Clippers Owner Is No Stranger to Race-Related Lawsuits,” Los Angeles Times

Though Richard Wright’s singular focus on the sustained threat of violent death that permeates black presence in the public sphere—as well as what such an ongoing imposition makes of black interior life and the possibility of black sociality—is undertheorized within contemporary literary theory, what has received even less scholarly attention are the ways in which Wright’s commitment to thinking about black death is mediated through the appearance and activity of animals, most frequently and most germane to this study, the figure of the pest.¹ In the interest of precision, some clarification of terms is in order:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a pest as: “Any thing or person that is noxious, destructive or troublesome.” A variety of other definitions exist in the biological literature, as for example: “a living organism which causes damage or illness to Man or his possessions or is otherwise in some sense, ‘unwanted,’ ” … but most biological definitions include some consideration of the economic significance of the damage caused. Thus “A pest is an organism which harms Man or his property or is likely to do so. The harm must be significant, the damage of economic importance.” … This last distinction is I feel an important one: much time and effort has been devoted in the past to the control of animal populations whose activities, while doubtless of considerable nuisance value were perhaps, if the situation were viewed more objectively, of no real economic significance. In such situations costs of control quite frequently exceed the real costs of any damage caused.²

This selection from R. J. Putnam’s 1934 text Mammals as Pests is instructive for my own study in its engagement with the many resonances of the term “pest,” especially as they pertain to questions of value. As Putnam makes clear, part of what qualifies a pest as such is that it by definition carries along with its body the perceived threat of economic loss or damage. It is this very characteristic that makes the pest a source of its danger and its life altogether disposable, that is, the animal’s destructive orientation toward civil society and the structures, material and otherwise, that keep it intact. There is a fundamental conundrum built into this relationship, however, one that Putnam wastes little time in pointing out: more often than not, the very processes deployed in service of terminating pest animals come at a higher financial cost than the initial damage incurred or the overall damage projected. Put differently, the central problem that the pest poses is undoubtedly economic; it just has little to do with money. For Putnam, the wages of pestiferous life are the toll that pests take on the psychic economy of a given space, the cost to an inhabitant of letting live what does not belong, what invades or remains though it is unwanted. By virtue of its very presence, the pest puts immense pressure on the integrity of wherever it chooses to take up room, slowly sapping the sense of propriety or private ownership that a given owner might lay claim to. Such an interruption, through the screen door, cabinet, or kitchen sink, is also always already an irruption into the logic of private property, an untenable counter to anthropocentric conceptions of human domination and domesticity.

Pests destroy the myth of private property from the inside out, though it is not solely for this reason that they are so often made into objects of state violence and / or hailed as a threat to public health. Such reasoning often comes back instead to the threat that pests pose to the possibility of a self-contained human subjectivity, one that thrives on a certain distance from contact or contamination. A home without pests is a home in which one can ostensibly live without threat of sickness or stolen food, the sorts of everyday risks that are all too familiar to those who are made to live without sufficient shelter. In this sense, pests not only defamiliarize the logic of private property but also wage war on traditional ideas of inside and outside. In “Feeling Animal: Pet-Making and Mastery in the Slave’s Friend,” Spencer D. C. Keralis writes,

Pets largely do not provide a service in the household but rather fulfill aesthetic and emotional needs for their masters. (The benefit to the pet is arguable.) Cats and dogs that serve as mousers and ratters sometimes blur this distinction, but more often a household in which animals are kept for these purposes will also include house pets not used for labor. The services provided by mousers and ratters connect them in the minds of their nominal owners to the feral origin of their species, and the killing of vermin causes them to be perceived as unsanitary. They are excluded from the domestic sphere as “outside dogs” or “barn cats,” though sporting dogs used for hunting can be exceptions to this rule.³

According to Keralis, what is most contagious about pest animals is not any microscopic biological agent but their very nature, that which marks them as outsiders. The pest transmogrifies all that it touches—even those animals charged solely with its elimination or curtailment—into a filthy thing that has no place within the domestic sphere. In this way, the pest serves as a marker of alterity, its presence in a given space a trustworthy indicator of what goes on therein, what class or kind of person calls the room between such filthy walls home. I would like to argue that it is this central concern with the contagious alterity of the pest that accounts for much of the violence deployed in its direction, the prevalent notion that, beyond the level of disease and discomfort, pests carry with them a disrepute that is largely incurable.

Thus, it is the central fiction of pesticide, the hunting and killing of pests solely as a practice of maintenance, cleanliness, or fiscal thrift, that is of special concern here, how it is that such violence can be waged under the auspices of austerity while coming at such great financial and ethical cost. If we understand pestiferous life as that which is fundamentally disposable, as so repugnant that it must be destroyed even when such erasure garners a high price, then what happens when we expand the category to include human lives? What social and material conditions allow for such a gratuitous marring of the human person? What makes it so that the province of the human can be so easily split between those that are allowed to flourish and those whose lives are made legible only in contrast to something like public life or citizenship, those that must be wiped out for the comfort and care of those in power?

Richard Wright’s larger corpus can be cast in one light as an extended meditation on such questions, and the figure of the pest serves as an especially effective tool in his argument for a reading of black social life as that which is always already marked by a certain orientation toward danger. Indeed, Wright’s central metaphor for thinking black life after the Great Migration is no noble beast, neither the oxen nor the horse that we see in early black literature’s forays into the plantation, but the figure par excellence of disposable life and thus also of black domestic life in the urban context: the rat. Though an abundance of pest animals populate Wright’s work, it is the rat that animates the scenes in his poetry and fiction that most clearly articulate his relationship to black suffering as well as black persistence, its hunger and spirited refusal to be captured that best characterize the way he portrays the persons most central to the concerns of this study: Bigger Thomas and the anonymous speaker of his nature haiku.

It is my goal, then, through an extended reading of the opening scene of Wright’s most famous novel, Native Son, to interrogate the way he imagines black life through the figure of the pest instead of against it, crafting characters that are consistently under duress but also always in flight, always fugitive from forces seen and unseen that depend on their subjugation for life. For Wright, black persistence is not a site of celebration so much as an occasion for melancholy, a reminder that the world that he and his kin strain against is as tireless as it is resourceful. Working from such a vantage point, he provides his readers with characters that both encounter pest animals and live into a kind of pestiferous life themselves that is full of unfettered possibility. In Wright’s hands, the pest is not only that which is stalked by death but that which evades it, that which destabilizes life and death altogether, giving us something in its place akin to fugitive life, black life on the lam.

---

In an effort to better understand the opening scene of Native Son within the broader scope of its historical and material context, as well as to more imaginatively examine the ways in which Wright’s particular emphasis on the rat as a kind of pest animal par excellence travel throughout the African American literary canon—even into the contemporary moment—the following section of a poem by Tara Betts, “For Those Who Need a True Story” (here quoted at length), is invaluable:

The landlord told Raymond’s mother that twelve dollars

would be deducted from the rent for every rat killed.

She sends her son to the store for a loaf of Wonder Bread

and five pounds of ground beef. Young Raymond

returns with bread & meat that she tears & mixes inside

a metal bowl. Mama seasons the meatloaf with rat poison

pulled from the cabinet beneath the sink. Well done,

meat sits steaming in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Then the scratching scurries. The squeaking begins

and screeches toward the bowl.

Raymond describes the wave of rats like a tidal crash

covering the bow, leaping over each other’s bodies

then the dropping, the stutter kicks.

A chorus of rat screams ramble through Raymond’s ears.

Keening, furry bodies tense paws against churning guts

as they hit cracked linoleum until an hour passes.

Silence swept away the din in death’s footsteps.

The mother’s voice quivers in her next request.

Raymond, help me count them.⁴

What Betts’s poem brings to the fore—and it is important to note here that Betts, like Wright, spent much of her adult life in Chicago and sets a scene for us that could easily be imagined as something akin to the South Side kitchenette that serves as this chapter’s central focus—are alternative possibilities for thinking the relationship between blacks and pest animals in domestic space, one in which the symbolism of pestiferous life lies not in its likeness to black ontology but rather in the problem of its sheer abundance, an infestation of rats so severe that their very dying might be described as a “tidal crash” that lasts for so long that Raymond and his mother have to sit together, away from the chaos, “until an hour passes.”

The prevalence of rats in the apartment that Raymond and his mother share is not a reflection of the worth that they place on their own lives—indeed, the very planning of this elaborate killing by Raymond’s mother demonstrates a love and depth of care that should be central to any reading of this poem—but could be said to reflect the disposition of the landlord who makes the wager that serves as the poem’s first line and guiding conflict. It is the lack of value that an antiblack world places on Raymond’s and his mother’s lives that creates the conditions for this precarious living, these unwieldy experiments undertaken so that either of them might get through a night without being bitten. In the world that Betts constructs, rats are still representational in a sense, but in a very different way than they are for someone like Wright or any number of other black poets who have used the persona poem as a means of entering the body of the pest, taking up its struggle, and imagining their own experience as racialized subjects as akin to vermin being.⁵ What we get here instead is a set of scenes that are no less radical or daring, a work in which Betts dares to lay out the kind of violence that such predatory forms of capitalism inflict on black families living at the edge of the civil. In “For Those Who Need a True Story,” rats become the only way out of an otherwise impossible situation, a means through which Raymond and his mother might plot an escape from unlivable space:

They waded through these small deaths with rubber gloves,

listened to the hump of ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Horse
• 1. Rat
• 2. Cock
• 3. Mule
• 4. Dog
• 5. Shark
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index