Sensing the Black femme: Spit's obsessions and pleasures in <i>Aunt Dicy Tales</i>

How should we read the Black femme body? What practices must we take on to explore the desires and survival written on, and expelled from, her body? To approach with renewed attention the sensory regimes, perhaps in a Wynterian sense, in which the Black femme body is situated? These questions inform how this article thinks within Black feminisms’ interest in sensation as knowing wrapped in flesh. I turn to the U.S. South and how it makes racialization ordinary, clarifying where and how Black femme sensation intervenes. Using African American folklorist J. Mason Brewer's 1956 text, the Aunt Dicy Tales as a case study, folklore is revealed as a racial project where history becomes fiction and fiction history. Folklore shapes what emerges as a mode of Black social thought in Texas, but in the erasure and absence of Black femmes, it remained a tool for state and Black male folklorists to create the Black femme body. By turning to Aunt Dicy's obsession with spitting, I argue that what Brewer intends as an exemplar of Black femme humiliation and masculinization in the immediate afterlives of enslavement, instead, exposes the fissures of Black Texan folklore and the modes of survival Black femme bodies sensate toward.