Forked Tongues

This chapter traces the way whiteness weighs down on the figure of the brown mother. Centering the US South as its primary cartographic spatiality, this chapter considers whiteness as a crisis-identified intimacy which confronts the brown maternal, producing in her various modes of being incomplete, contradictory, and out of control. Exploring how whiteness was both metaphorically and literally intertwined in Charania's mother's every day and how it thus visceralized a collection of negativities, this chapter explicitly narrates the stakes in the distinctions and slippages between brownness, blackness, and whiteness.