OREGON TRAIL : BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER THE OREGON TRAIL

ROSE JACKSON, THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN OF THE WEST

        INTENTION: 

• Reimagine the self-incarceration of a newly freed slave, and the spatial experience that constituted the entire journey on the Oregon Trail

In the compartment of a trunk, a box, with wooden sides, constructed holes for breathing was born the first Black woman in the West; or the last in the East. The creation of humanity for the Black woman emerged as reality of experience, at the moment that white eye’s turned Westward. 

• “Humanness was thrown into crisis by the seeable, ungodly, indigenous peoples and their lands.”

• McKittrick, Katherine, “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

From confinement in Missouri, the first Black woman (in the west) had come to know her life as it were, as it had been, and as it had been created. Her birthright, a place and a status of being in a temporality that had rationalized thinghood as a necessary condition to the production of space, and most of all, the progress of society. But so it was her birthright, but time-space, had developed conditions for her iteration. Man2 had nustled her ear so closely with its nose, had held her up as she passed into this material world, and had done its best to prepare her for the brutality that would make her life. 

• “Man2 reconfigured human- ness by ideologically re-presenting itself as “world” humanness. The in- digenous and black categories, conceptualized as an abnormal “enemy of Christ,” were understood according to a new biocentric logic that systematized “differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality” and distinguished “different populations, their religions, cultures, forms of life; in other words their modes of being human.”

• McKittrick, Katherine, “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

While time passed, preparing the first Black woman (in the west), Man2 began new definitions of places and people with expanded ideas of slave or non-slave, free-black, and other terms of the same thing, translated into the common language. But, what it could not do was cross the time-space that had created it. The exchange of justifying the alternatives to the Human, set forth by its originators in the First West, with new categorical definitions or subversions had been in theory, and played out with agency, or disempowerment, where possible. A new production of Man2 things coming closer and closer to a time-space that might allow the space to be a Human, to be a person… if that is what is desired. For the first Black woman (headed to the west), her birth captivity became her method out of Man2, and into some kind of other thing. 

• “The interrelated quest to map the unknown—the geographic unknown, the corporeal indigenous/black unknown—sets forth what Neil Smith calls “uneven development,” albeit from a very different analytical perspective: the systematic production of differential social hierarchies, which are in- scribed in space and give a coherence to disproportionate geographies.17 I suggest that the negotiation of social, corporeal, and spatial human con- figurations, initiated by encounters with the unknown, created new spaces, specifically Man’s geographies, which are overdetermined, normalized, and naturalized.”

• McKittrick, Katherine, “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

It was from her lips that she moved from chains to the box. From birthright, to the unknown. She reordered herself from the space of the plantation’s plumbed eye-level, the spatial instrument of time’s greatest labor productivity and eerily picturesque violence– almost that the same of the West, where she sought to head, to swathed in a wooden prison to freedom. Time-space emerged to her with a definitive self-choice to transfer captivities for a space known only to inhuman Man2, to a speculative unknown freedom of the other thing. Leaving the promise of emancipation in Missouri, for captive transport to Oregon, the first Black woman (headed to the west), made a promise to her birthright that she would hide peacefully so as to not upset her exclusion out West, possibly not as new of a time-space. The first Black woman (headed to the west) laid a broken, if ever whole, trust in the birthright that had kept her Man2, to release her from that status, into a whole new thing. But, what could possess such trust? The face of the alternative, in the current time-space, too fresh with the scourge of picturesque violence and not vast, uncharted, or unfettered like that our west. Ask who? She heard voices, and rumors, of a Man2 quite like herself. A thinghood of Man to quest violence apprehension, but much harder a space to withhold than the plantation. Yes, yes, a wholly different endeavor than that of her birthright. Yet, seemingly the same. 

• “In naming them ‘terra nullius/lands of no one’ and mapping them as ‘peopleless’ voids, the uninhabitable was abstracted by cartographic translations of where and who can constitute the terms of normal habitability.20 The spatial concerns of Man1 became wrapped up in an ideological perspective that dehumanized and disembodied subaltern populations by con- flating their beingness with terra nullius, places and bodies outside God’s grace: idolaters in the uninhabitable; uninhabitable idolaters.”

• McKittrick, Katherine, “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

But she knew God. God had known her since before her birthright. Since before her Man2. And most certainly, as she became this new thing. In the box that set forth her whole body from that stretched, porous, and accordion place in the field, to the darkness of a sun spotted carcass of imagined hope, The first Black woman (heading west) unfolded an imaginary of a sky so vast she had noticed it looked to the same as had in Missouri. Not much changed, but the duration of her captivity. The spurts enmeshed in the confines of her box, yes the one she chose, with movement in the fall of moonlit time-places, she found great solace in the leisure that had befallen a thing that had been a machine just before. The birthright Man that had just previously offered her emancipation, now became her chariot to the imagined hope, carrying her lifeful body, unmoved, across territory that had been moved. A territory that had been made by Man and lost by Man2. A hope of a west that had never been, but could never end. A new time-place that ripe full of new notions of classification, of the blind auspices of formal statehood, of a barbarity of violence so distinctly picturesque, what not just unseen, but it was constantly being sketched away (visible lines oscillating from promising shimmers, to erased memories). Shored up across the landscape was an unknowable similarity. A land force of time-place that had specifically enticed Man and Man2 with a promise already imagined, on a landscape already claimed, reclaimed, and inhabited. 

• “Those who occupy the spaces of Otherness are always already encountering space and therefore articulate how genres or modes of humanness are intimately connected to where we/they are ontologically as well as geographically… As mentioned in my introductory remarks, the place of black women is deemed unrecognizable because… their grounds are silent and their place is uninhabitable within the given frameworks of Man’s geographies.30 Placeless and silent black women, if legitimately posited in the world (placed, unsilenced), call into question our present geographic organization. The geographies of black womanhood, as demonic grounds, put forth a geographic grammar that locates the complex position and potentiality of black women’s sense of place.”

• McKittrick, Katherine, “Demonic Grounds: Sylvia Wynter” in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 

The first Black woman (heading west) made herself both placed and heard, she chose a fate contrary to her birthright, but seemingly located in great proximity, just in a different time-place. Coming to her voice, she heard Man’s conquest for the west, as the opportune to undo her own captivity from there’s. The place, or places that traveled her west in the box she chose to furnish her body, were not unknown to things like her. They were radically acquainted. The land, the picturesque violence, the erasing persons who maintained themselves in their home not the, territory. She moved place. She reoriented her time of emancipation from that of the rest of those Man2. But the new thing she became, free, and employed, and married, and settled in, did not. While in Oregon, her captivity was bound to the outer limits of the territory, this exclusion was never affectual. Whereas, her birthright had been unending. The confinement of the box, across land, and territory, and home (that rightful name to most), had been an act of self-making that reoriented her quest for freedom, as dislodged from a quest for control like it had become for those Man traveling West. No, instead, she had become the first Black Woman in the West.