40 Matthews

certain identity categories like race, gender, and class is key to Evans's Black
aesthetic and politics; yet, this ability does not erase difference within the
Black community, nor does it erase individuals' choices about what and
how they express themselves; instead it proposes a "We" that shares and
encompasses all. It recognizes the importance of Blackness, it is not as an
absolute or an endpoint, but as a starting point for identity and ideology.
However, trespassing lines that demark us/ them complicates easy for-
mulations of alliance, as illustrated by Lee's back-handed compliment to
Evans in The Black Aesthetic. Lee praises her characterization of a Black
womanhood because, he argues, she seemingly does not practice gender
politics: "the woman herein recreated is not fragmented, hysterical, doesn't
have sexual problems with her mate, doesn't feel caught up in 'liberated
womanhood' complex/bag- which is to say she is not out to define herself"
(241). Lee praises Evans's discussion of "Black womanhood" when he
believes it does not dwell on the condition of the latter term. Yet, Lee miss-
es the collection's gendered dimension, for poems like "In the Wake of My
Departed" and "The Friday Ladies of the Pay Envelope" do identify the
oppressive systems that have violently shaped black women's world- sex-
ism, capitalism, racism, abuse, war- and work to render them visible. For
example, "In the Wake of My Departed" overlaps Middle Passage viola-
tions with contemporary abuses, suggesting that for black women, loss is as
American as apple pie. Her heart, like a slave ship, "rocks gently / in the
wake of my departed." The speaker likens her absent lover to other losses-
whether they be the loss of a slave's lover or the loss that occurs when "alien
/ mouths" and "sinew[y]" arms hold her down and violate her sexually (an
act central to the perpetuation of America's slavocracy). The "hot and for-
eign / brinedrops" could either be her tears mourning abandonment, or the
salt water of the ocean that smattered slaves for thousands of miles ("In the
Wake" 30). The poem collapses time and space to voice a narrative of loss
that undergirds an experience of Black womanhood in America.
"The Friday Ladies of the Pay Envelope" speaks to contemporary sys-
tems that perpetuate loss and violation of black women. Here capitalism
breaks down black women- a depiction which reinforces Toni Cade
Bambara's assertion that America's socioeconomic conditioning of the
Black man and woman has caused folk to turn on each other: "in other
words, we are still abusing each other, aborting each other's nature- in the
teeth of experiences both personal and historical that should alert us to the
horror of a situation in which we profess to be about liberation but behave
in a constructing manner" (103).13 The women's "station" or place is "bro-
ken" and "flaking," and the women themselves are "limpworn": wearing
"limp worn / sweaters," holding out "limpworn hands," and bearing
"limpworn souls" ("Friday Ladies" 49). Like the slum tenements that house
them, these women are worn down and barely standing. The are also bare-
ly alive, as intimated by the in-between color "gray" that "clings" to and