Some of Us Can Never Leave The Game Board
Some of Us Can Never Leave The Game Board
By Chenoa Baker
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Enticing colors arrest the viewer—saturated yellow, red, purple, black, and pink take over. Often, advertisements have such seductive hues, but Barkley Hendricks employs these colors to bring attention to the multilayered plight of Black women in his Sacrifice of the Watermelon Virgin or Shirt off Her Back (1987). The composition of the lithograph is similar to a cropped photo; evocative of how Hendricks talked about spending more time in Yale’s photo studio than with the painters. It cultivates this snapshot-like perspective. In this snapshot, he provides many context clues to the overall meaning of the work yet obscures the full body and other components of the scene.
The purple vignette provides an oculus, positioning the viewer as a decontextualized voyeur, to a surreal scene: a pair of ankles and feet are revealed donning lacey nylon socks and watermelon, open-toed, slingback platforms. There is something both minstrel and Carmen Miranda-esque (evocative of ‘the other,’ sexualized, and performative) about the watermelon shoes. Upon closer inspection, the shoes are chained together, and pawn chess pieces balance on or are a fashionable shoe clip amidst a pink and black checkerboard. In the background, there’s tropical foliage, likely inspired by his many trips to the Caribbean starting in 1980, of palms and anthurium (a symbol of desire and passion yet one of chaste purity). But most alluring and unsetting is a cropped mouth with fangs, a long tongue, and a hairy creature angled towards the person’s feet. There is something predatory about this unknown-opened, animalistic jaw. It looks ready to pounce. The pattern of the fangs is repeated in the jagged-edged shoes cut like watermelon slices which are a vagina denta shape.
Coincidentally, the same year Hendricks made this work, Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” debuted and Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions only a year prior. The multilayered symbolism supports a Black Feminist/Womanist reading and a Critical Race Theory reading. Spillers talks of the ‘inventiveness’ of the captive, Black, female (femme) body as a site of oppression and hypersexuality. On the other hand, Riggs talks about the minstrel trope like mammy, a fictionally desexualized and subservient figure who makes wisecracks and has proverbial and colloquial catchphrases, or sapphire, the Black femme sexual deviant seen as ‘fast,’ ‘loose,’ or ‘too grown.’ All of these constructions, as we know, do not amplify how people are inherently multilayered and these fictions only serve the mythologizing of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
“My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented,” Spillers writes, connecting to the imagery of pawns. Pawns are on the frontlines, often sacrificed compared to other game pieces, and have the opportunity to resurrect if they make it to the end of the game board. The checkerboard imagery further reminds us of how playing a role, maintains American mythology (while it is a game, it is very real for its players). Black women have never been able to leave the ‘gameboard’ because our positionality upholds the American capitalist system.
Circling back to the title with more context to the many layers of symbolism, Sacrifice of the Watermelon Virgin or Shirt off Her Back delves into a narrative of Black women as saviors, through the factitious ‘workhorses’ instead of emotional and intelligent human beings denoted in the word “sacrifice” and the phrase “shirt off her back.” This plays into the John Henryism that many of us face. Sacrifice also brings to the fore all of these white presuppositions that the racialized other would engage in human sacrifice and other rituals of consumption. But then, the word “virgin” ascribes sexual value to the subject (whom we only see a fragment of her body). Whether the term, which is a construct, is true or untrue, we don’t know. This form of erasure covered up the centuries of rape of the Black female body. Instead, it is how she is labeled (with or without her consent) which is often seen as desirable in a patriarchal world.
Almost 37 years later, Zora J. Murff created a collage called The Delectable Negro, likely named after the book about human consumption and homoeroticism in US slave culture. It depicts similar bright and saturated reds and yellows (containing the logo of McDonald’s, a cut-out of Mickey Mouse, whose signature m-forehead echoes the golden arches, an advertisement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from a Black magazine by Mickey D’s, and a mugshot of Jeffery Damher). Seeing this composite image brings further context to Hendricks’ work despite the distance of time. Both artists allude to the literal and metaphoric consumption of the Black body. Specifically, in this case, Hendricks addresses the Black female body.
While Hendricks employs this scene as a social critique, it shows his masterful approach to compositions, too. The sheen of the black skin matches the luminosity of the pink nail polish and pawns. These subtleties showcase unity within an image crowded with patterns and symbolism. Even the angle of the left foot suggests movement toward the mouth as well as the directional lines of the flora and fauna giving the work rhythm.
This work is unique to the vision that most have of Hendricks’ practice: the epitome of cool Black men and women in stylish 70s and 80s attire; practically, documenting blaxploitation-inspired sartorialism. His iconic portraits have that feel but his works on paper have a similar symbology to this work. According to the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks, his works on paper are ‘newly discovered’ variations on the still life genre of iconography. It goes on to categorize his works on paper as “each of which is cohesive and dynamic enough to stand alone as a body of work and look fresh in a contemporary show today. Some incorporate x-rays, an apt metaphor for what these newly discovered works offer us: a look into the inner mechanics of Hendricks’ mind and process—insight into his tendencies, his unique concerns.”
In Linda (1974), he pairs an x-ray of the cranium with an upside-down striped Go-Go dancer’s heel and in 1979, he made an untitled watercolor of a halved watermelon with the flesh cleaned out of it and a remaining scattering of seeds inside the rind. Both works showcase an ongoing exploration of heels and watermelons in his works on paper.
He even photographed many shoes: discarded high-top sneakers, pumps, platforms, and stilettos that are static or in motion. He referred to his camera as “a ‘mechanical sketchbook’ and took it with him whenever he left home. On one occasion, he said, “So I started to take my camera to various venues. And from that point on, on each concert or club date, I would go photograph. And I didn’t like using the flash, so it would be ambient light because, you know, using flash now it could sort of interrupt people.”
However, his printmaking, a limited print edition of 80, has inherent political power in repetition, possibilities of distribution, and its charged history of grassroots, community-affirming circulation. Therefore, that fact gives an Agitprop (agitation propaganda) feel leaving the viewer with questions: How can we counteract the consumption of our race and culture and these lascivious stereotypes and mythologies? Is the purpose of this work purely awareness because it’s political, in nature, prompting these discussions, but does not challenge the status quo? What other stories and theoretical readings emerge from this work? Also, since Hendricks is most known for his portraiture but all the while created a robust portfolio of photographs and works on paper, are mainstream museums collecting these works because they are more digestible? This work deserves the amount of dialogue and criticality that a museum would employ rather than only existing in the private sphere.
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Watch more about Barkley Hendricks.
