When the Word Falls Apart: On Racial Capitalism and the Theopoetics of Black Silence

At the heart of this essay lies a critique of the economy of salvation through the three-time sale and re-sale of a six-year-old Black enslaved girl in mid-1800s Tennessee. While her bill of sale conflates “sound” with her capacity to possess the mental and physical faculties needed to produce capital, each slave sales her in the discovery of her refusal to speak. This refusal unsettles the presumed transparency between Black flesh and its assigned economic and social value, revealing the limits of biological legibility under racial capitalism. The line of inquiry proceeding the conclusion that “she was absolutely an idiot and of no value” questions the function of speculative value and how the act of exchange, confirmed by ocular-centric fantasy, qualifies the public conversion of unsound flesh into speech. By further investigating why the forced translation of the commodity is salvific, this paper engages Black exchangeability as a ritual of perception that deifies gender as biologically sovereign. Finally, out of a concern with whether Black women’s relationship to both divine paternity and ‘womanhood’ requires re-sale, I offer silence as a theological intervention in what it means to be saved. Moreover, in a direct engagement with what happens when the Word falls apart, I define silence as a theopoetic reality shaped by an abundance of auctioned bodies in motion, names absent from the archive, a vertiginous history unhinged from filial stability, and an after-life sedimented by flesh uncoordinated by the Word.