In death, she was peculiarly appraised. The obituary dwelled on the vast shift in value she experienced in her life — from a “washerwoman making only $1.50 a day” to a Madame who spent “$10,000 every year for the education of young negro men and women,” “$5000 on the National Conference on Lynching,” whose “fortune had run up to $1,000,000.”  

13. “By now the Negress has come to mean many things. She is perceived less as a mind than as an emotional being. In the popular imagination, she lives one or several cliché-ridden narratives...What the Negress has always been: a symbol of America’s by now forgotten strain of puritanical selflessness.”

14. Thinking on his mother’s and his own adaptive behaviors in his first book of essays The Women, critic Hilton Als concludes that in America the negress is a symbol. In the world, however, The Negress is also a posture. Black women may slip into negressity, this manner of holding the body up against the twin warping systems of patriarchy and capitalism, through practice of extreme, if ludicrous, dignity. It may become a source of confidence.

Whether the pose is natural is made irrelevant by its ubiquity, in images and in life. We’ve known that systems are chronic, and so black women’s erect posture is chronic. Longitudinal surveys have documented the cumulative effects of hard labor and poor environmental conditions on black bodies, finding that as the years add to each other, backs stoop, shoulders slump, and hair falls. We’ve found this through private observations, too. In mirrors, one notices that the structuring logic of oppression and its accompanying labors is disfiguring.

15. She was a woman, experiencing hair loss, beauty loss. She began mixing shampoos and pomades at home, bent over her bathtub. She left the laundressing gig. “Then I was promoted to the kitchen,” she said.