In a different chord: interpreting the relations among black female sexuality, agency, and the blues

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Nghana tamu Lewis

   Nobody's seen her shed a tear
   Nor seen her hang her head.
   Ain't even heard her murmur,
   Lord, I wish I was dead!
   No! The hussy's telling everybody--
   Just as though it was no sin--
   That if she had a chance
   She'd do it agin'!

"The Ballad of the Fortune Teller" (1932) narrates the story of "Madam," the omniscient village soothsayer who, according to the townsfolk, imprudently takes Dave, a shiftless, profligate rake, into her home. Dave beds, assaults, robs, and abandons Madam, leaving her to wander around, seemingly aimlessly, in search of him. The details of the text deserve liberal quoting:

   A fellow came one day.
   Madam took him in.
   She treated him like
   He was her kin.
   Gave him money to gamble.
   She gave him bread,
   And let him sleep in her
   Walnut bed.
   Friends tried to tell her
   Dave meant her no good.
   Looks like she could've knowed it
   If she only would.

   He mistreated her terrible,
   Beat her up bad.
   Then went off and left her.
   Stole all she had.
   She tried to find out
   What road he took.
   There wasn't a trace
   No way she looked.
   That woman who could foresee
   What your future meant,
   Couldn't tell, to save her,
   Where Dave went.

We should not dismiss the severity of representations of isolated acts of physical and emotional violence against women in these works. Nevertheless, we can broaden their heuristic value by highlighting their commonality with blues lyrics composed by Hughes's contemporary, Billie Holiday.

In the following excerpt from Lady Sings the Blues (1956), Holiday discusses her perception of individualism as it relates to blues singers specifically and people in general:

   I don't know of anybody who actually
   influenced my singing.... Young kids
   always ask what my style is derived
   from and how it evolved and all that.
   What can I tell them ...? Everybody's
   got to be different. You can't copy anybody
   and end up with anything. If you
   copy, it means you're working without
   any real feeling. And without feeling,
   whatever you do amounts to nothing.
   No two people on earth are alike, and
   it's got to be that way in music, or it
   isn't music. (39, 48)

This passage provides the necessary backdrop for a discussion of two seemingly paradoxical pieces written by Holiday and a correlative analysis of Holiday's songs and Hughes's poetry.

"Billie's Blues" (1936) and "Don't Explain" (1945) cast apparent doppelgangers through polarized constructions of independent and apologetic blues singers. "I love my man," asserts the diva in "Billie's Blues," "I'm a lie if I say I don't. / But I'll quit my man," she maintains, "I'm a lie if I say I won't." The affirmation serves as a prelude to the speaker's cataloguing of the domestic abuses she has suffered. "My man wouldn't give me no breakfast, / Wouldn't give me no dinner. / Squawked 'bout my supper / Then he put me outdoors. / Had the nerve to leave / A matchbox on my clothes. / I didn't have so many; / but I had a long, long ways to go." Psychologically and physically fortified by her liberation from an unhealthy situation, the speaker is undaunted by a lack of material possessions after her lover puts her out of their home and burns her clothes. As the final line intimates, the lightest load will best serve her traveling interests.