Spillers 65-68

Reading Guide:
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” – Hortense Spillers (1987)
pp. 65-68
1. The title of Hortense Spillers’ essay alludes to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965
commissioned report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. More
specifically, the title speaks to a spurious yet influential chapter in that report, “The
Tangle of Pathology,” in which Moynihan put forward the ahistorical claim that Black
families faced all manner of social ills (pathologies) because they were matriarchal and
not patriarchal. More pointedly, Moynihan focused his study on Black father-absence and
its deleterious impact on Black boys.
The title also quietly alludes to the 1662 law of Partus Sequitur Ventrem.
2. Title:
o Consider the use of American
o Define the word “Grammar “in multiple ways
o Research what a grammar book is and does
3. The opening paragraph begins with Spillers documenting the ways in which Black
women have, historically, been called out their name, if you will, by white supremacy or
its adherents. Spillers begins by presenting to us the grammar of Black womanhood as
conceived by white supremacist ideologies and systems. Remember: You do not need to
be white to advance the aims of white supremacy:
Research and/or consider the following historical tropes attached to Black women that
mark what Moya Bailey terms, misogynoir. How do these tropes misname (misrepresent)
Black women?
“Peaches” “Sapphire” “Aunty” “Holy Fool”

“Brown Sugar” “Earth Mother” “Granny” “Miss Ebony First”
“Black Woman at the Podium”
4. Critically, Spillers ends the first paragraph with a telling observation: “My country needs
me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” What does this mean?
5. In paragraph two, Spillers explains this American grammar on Black womanhoods by

noting that the language surrounding Black women are signs (semiotics) or markers “so
loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried
beneath them to come clean…the names which [the Black woman] is called in the public
place render an example of signifying property plus.”
The tropes attached to Black women are such powerful “signs”– so influential in
disfiguring who Black women are – that they function as signifiers plus. Spillers tells us
that in order to represent herself truthfully, she has to strip the layers of meaning that the
1
grammar of misogynoir and white supremacist systems have created. In this essay,
Spillers will attempt to do just that – strip down the American grammar book on Black
womanhoods and Black peoplehoods.
In order to reveal to us how these “signs” were created, Spillers will take us to what she
believes is a critical moment in their creation – the oceanic context (the Middle Passage).
6. The first act of stripping away at the American grammar book on Black womanhoods
specifically, but Black personhood writ large, is by looking at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s
1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
Why?
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action introduced into policy and into the U.S.
imaginary the myth of the dominating Black woman (the Black matriarch) who, because
she functioned as a surrogate man, displaced the Black man from his “proper” role as
patriarch (66). In doing so, the mythical Black matriarch imperiled the Black family, and
by extension, Black communities – bringing about a host of social pathologies.
Moynihan’s report put forward the idea that poor, urban, Black communities were
pathological because of the ungendering of Black men and women. In other words, poor,
urban Black communities were suffering because Black men and women were not
behaving as “men” and “women” (as in, subscribing to heteronormative binary gender
roles).
7. Is Spillers committed to or interested in observing cisgendered roles? No (66). What she

is interested in is tracing how white supremacist systems and ideologies shapeshift Black
folks’ gender “under the rule of dominance” (66):
White supremacist systems and ideologies shapeshift the bodies, the embodiment, of
Black people at will.
How could Black boys and men, for example, be hypermasculine brutes (the monstrified
rapists imagined to support lynching ideology) AND be emasculated beings at the
selfsame time (Moynihan)?
How can Black girls and women be asexual, maternal figures (Aunt, Mammy) AND be
hypersexual seductresses (Venus) at the selfsame time?
8. THIS IS WHERE THEORY BEGINS:
Spillers begins, on page 67, to provide us with new grammar – with new theoretical
models – to understand how the historical American grammar book on Black
womanhoods and personhood came to be and what it came to engender:
2
AS YOU READ, WRITE DOWN SPILLERS’ EXPLANATION OF EACH OF THE
THEORETICAL CONCEPTS BELOW AND THEN CONSIDER WHAT SHE
MEANS.
The rest of Spillers’ article will materialize each of these ideas through, mostly,
literary examples (autobiographies) but through other documents as well.
a) theft of the body

b) the captive body
c) divided flesh (body versus flesh)
d) hieroglyphics of the flesh
e) ungendering
f) atomizing of the captive body
9. A later theory of the “oceanic” emerges. Take notes when you encounter it. We will, of
course, cover it together.
Remember that our course focuses on Blackness and water. We will consider how
Spillers presents the oceanic as an originary site of ungendering.

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Reading Guide:

“Peaches” “Sapphire” “Aunty” “Holy Fool”

5. In paragraph two, Spillers explains this American grammar on Black womanhoods by

7. Is Spillers committed to or interested in observing cisgendered roles? No (66). What she

8. THIS IS WHERE THEORY BEGINS:

a) theft of the body

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