“Where’s the Dummy?”

Abstract

Delores Phillips’s novel The Darkest Child (2004), which features one of the few representations of deafness in African American literature, has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Phillips’s depiction of Martha Jean challenges a long-standing tradition of deaf characters and deaf-related imagery as negative. Yet, Martha Jean is not a marginal character, nor merely a symbol or metaphor. Rather, as I show, Martha Jean constitutes a character of complex embodiment who complicates preconceived notions of Black and deaf people as “burdens” on society. Trapped under a system of capitalism which values labor, ability, and profit, Martha Jean’s mother, Rozelle, considers her a burden, forcing her into a sort of indentured servitude in the domestic sphere—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the babies that Rozelle continues to have. However, the article maintains that Martha Jean uses her position in the domestic sphere in order to reorder and redefine those terms. Ultimately, the suggestion is that by centering deafness and a deaf experience, Phillips exposes complex aspects of the novel which might otherwise be obscured. Through complicating issues surrounding literacy and education, and larger systems of racism, sexism, capitalism, and ableism, Phillips imagines a multiplicity of Black experiences in the Jim Crow South.