SOURCE: “(Further) Figures of Violence: The Street in the U.S. Landscape,” in Blackness And Value: Seeing Double, Lindon Barrett, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 94–128.

In this chapter from his full-length, deconstructive study of the concept of “value” as it applies to racial blackness, Barrett explores the symbolic value of Lutie's singing voice in The Street, as it responds to the values of the dominant white culture.

The enduring paradox of the concomitantly valueless and valuable status of African Americans in the dominant cultural imagination of the United States is well presented in the opening pages of The Wages of Whiteness by the historian David R. Roediger, who describes the efficacy and ubiquity of African American communities as present absences. Even as African Americans are taken as exemplary signs of the absence of a variety of human attributes and social proprieties (not to mention being enforced as physically absent...