Spurred on by Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), which is set in Tallahassee, FL, during the 1950s and 1960s, this essay presents a close-up look at James Baldwin’s visit to Tallahassee in May 1960. Moving between Baldwin’s writings about the South, especially “They Can’t Turn Back,” published by Mademoiselle magazine in August 1960, and subsequent writing about the movement in Tallahassee, and checking off against Whitehead’s fictional treatment, we find a lattice of silences obscuring the names and contributions of Black women. Most importantly, we find that the historic case of the rape of Betty Jean Owens in May 1959, and the subsequent trial that summer, appears neither in Baldwin’s nor Whitehead’s writing about Tallahassee at the time. This essay establishes the missing names of Black women in the places marked and unmarked by Baldwin in his work at the time, and puts the case of Betty Jean Owens on the historical map where it belongs. In so doing, we figure issues of race, gender, sex, and violence for the ways they twist together, ways suppressed in historical (and even some contemporary) writing, ways crucial to our deepening consideration of Baldwin’s work and the history which he drew upon and to which he contributed so profoundly.
nothing 11 In addition to the classic work by John Pilling, C. J. Ackerley, Mary Bryden and James Knowlson, see Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui: Notes diverse holo (special issue on the Trinity College Dublin manuscripts), eds Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell, 16 (2006); Daniela Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Dirk Van Hulle (ed.), Beckett the European (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005) and Manuscript Genetics: Joyce’s Knowhow, Beckett
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Beckett and nothing Ibid., pp. 4, 5, 89, 190. Ibid., pp. 12, 40. Ibid., p. 161. See John Pilling, A Companion to ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’ (Tallahassee, FL: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004), p. 274. John Pilling (ed.), Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), entry 919. Ibid., entry 125. Beckett, Dream, p. 185. Pilling (ed.), Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, entry 1067. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2
Disturbances (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1948), p. 22. 34 Woodworth, Contemporary Schools, pp. 92–3. 35 Trinity College Dublin 10971/7/10. 36 Goldstein, Language, p. 5. 37 ibid., p. 5. 38 ibid., p. 5. 39 See, in particular, C. J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004), p. 37. 40 Trinity College Dublin MS 10971/7/12. 41 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Picador, 1973), p. 31. 42 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 42. 43 ibid., p. 43. 44 Beckett, Disjecta, pp. 171