From a white woman’s kitchen into a black woman’s living room: a reconfiguration of the servant/served paradigm in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby

Abstract

From colonial times, through the Jim Crow era, and up until the Civil Rights movement the domestic kitchen was a battleground in the American South. White women attempted to wield their power over first their black slaves and then domestic servants, while black women reciprocated with covert acts of resistance against white domination in the domestic spaces connected with food production and consumption. Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You Baby (1989) offers an interesting perspective on the reconfiguration of the servant/ served paradigm. The recalibration of the said relationship takes on a spatial dimension in Douglas’s novel – it is visible in the meeting grounds of Cornelia O’Kelly and her black maid, Julia “Tweet” Carrier. The trajectory of Cornelia and Julia’s racial reconciliation spans the whole novel, beginning in a white woman’s kitchen and ending in a black woman’s living room.