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A streetcar conductor in a 1945 cartoon in the Chicago Defender points to a sign declaring "FROM HERE BACK FOR nEGROES." Beneath the sign, a Caucasian featured woman protests: ". . . But I'm not! I got this tan out at the beach" (see Fig. 1). Playing with case and color, the cartoon shifts attention from the laws of race to their malleable surfaces. By pairing and mocking the arbitrariness of racial signifiers, graphic and somatic, the cartoon suggests that they both can be resignified, that there is some room for play.
I begin with this unorthodox perspective to propose that critical interest in representations of segregation should be complemented by attention to segregation as a representation that was consequently subject, as person-to-person interactions were not, to various strategies of back talk.1 This proposal goes against the grain in several ways. By attending to the letter of segregation's texts, I hope to challenge the assumption that segregation signs were merely transparent tools of a disciplinary technology that impressed racial distinctions on silent bodies. The cartoon offers a twist on a classic trope of African American letters, in which the inaugural encounter with a segregation sign is a defining moment of social inscription, a painful rite of passage that spells the fall into race. To learn to read the "colored" sign, in a scene whose variations are so frequent they have become, in James Forman's words, a "cliché of the black experience," is to learn that one has already been read by a law that writes its terms on a body forever after "branded and tagged and set apart from the rest of mankind upon the public highways, like an unclean thing." (Forman 20; Chesnutt 57). By shifting focus from the invisible and inaccessible source of the signs' authority to their visible and vulnerable bodies, composed like human bodies of multiple and mutable signifiers that do not cohere in a single definition, I hope (in the spirit of the cartoon) to rethink this foundational scenario in terms that allow greater space for agency.
Whereas narrative accounts of encounters with segregation signs have inclined with good reason toward allegory, post-civil rights reconstructions of those moments, also with compelling albeit different reasons, have produced another formulaic structure that...