wealth. Her position as “other” subverts racial,
gender, and genre stereotypes in ways that suggest
the positive power of life in the margin as theo-
rized by critics like BELL HOOKS, Patricia Hill Col-
lins, and Molefi Assante.
Much of Blanche’s unique epistemic approach
arises from her status as outsider and her defiance of
expectations. When the reader first meets Blanche
she is presented as a large, dark, middle-aged black
domestic worker fleeing a courtroom following her
conviction for passing bad checks (Blanchy on the
Lam 5–6). She hardly fits the stereotypical aristo-
cratic or genteel detective heroes of Arthur Conan
Doyle or Agatha Christie, nor does she, or her rural
North Carolina background, suggest the misogy-
nistic, booze-soaked, gritty urban “noir” of Dashi-
ell Hammett’s, Rex Stout’s, or Mickey Spillane’s
tough guys. Instead, “Blanche defies the dominant
culture’s expectations for women of color and do-
mestic workers both” (Mar, 2). Within the genre,
then, Blanche arrives as an outsider protagonist.
This outsider position is one of many that force
Blanche to employ a distinctively African-Ameri-
can epistemology to solve crimes.
One of the clearest expressions of Blanche’s
sleuthing life on the margin comes from her abil-
ity to play with and against stereotypes. As a large,
black woman working as a domestic in white
households, Blanche physically conjures the ste-
reotypical MAMMY character of the antebellum
South, a fact of which she seems well aware. At the
beginning of the second novel, Blanche slips into
a pair of size 16 shorts and wonders at her fool-
ishness as a young woman in believing that “she
needed to be a woman-in-a-boy’s-body to be at-
tractive, even though big butts were never out of
style in her world” (Talented Tenth, 1). Her size and
color also lead whites in the text to read her as a
Mammy. Early in the first novel, Grace, her wealthy
white employer for the moment, bursts into tears
and glances up at Blanche with “Mammy-save-me
eyes” (Lam, 39). Blanche follows this display with
a wearied surprise at how many white people still
“longed for Aunt Jemima” and how often it led
black people to contract “Darkies Disease” (39–40,
48). To Blanche, this tendency of some blacks to
defend whites for or with whom they work leads
those blacks into foolishly believing that “their”
whites return the affection. To believe such non-
sense requires that “you had to pretend that obvi-
ous facts—facts that were like fences around your
relationship—were not true” (48–49). In such
lines Blanche reveals an astute awareness of white
privilege and black powerlessness that denies any
mammy-like consciousness.
Blanche also disrupts gender and class scripts.
She refuses to marry or let a man dominate her
life and put her in a position in which he and their
children will assume that “her labor was their due”
(Talented Tenth, 11). Her affection is reserved for
her mother, Miz Cora; her best friend Ardell; and
her dead sister’s children, Malik and Taifa, children
she was at first reluctant to raise but comes to love
completely. In place of the nuclear family, Blanche
relies on a complex network of women, a com-
munity of “bloodmothers and other-mothers” to
provide a sense of family and to help her create
a space as mother that suits her (179). This com-
munity of women, including her female ancestors,
helps her nurture the children and herself (Lam
9–10; Talented Tenth, 2–3, 8). In Blanche among
the Talented Tenth, Blanche directly confronts at-
titudes of racial and class deference by agreeing
to join the children and their friends at the tony
all-black Maine Resort of Amber Cove. She is
not there merely to luxuriate; she is there to fight
Taifa’s desire to straighten her hair and the girls’
“dumb ideas about a lawyer or a doctor being a
better person than someone who hauls garbage”
(Talented Tenth, 7–8, 99, 150–152). Her relation to
the extended community of women highlights the
folk orientation of the novels and suggests her own
subversive epistemic approach.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailey, Frankie Y. “Blanche on the Lam, or the Invisi-
ble Woman Speaks.” In Diversity and Detective Fic-
tion, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, 186–204.
Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1999.
Mar, M. Elaine. “Guilty Pleasures: Barbara Neely,
Blanche on the Lam, Blanche among the Talented
Tenth, and Blanche Cleans Up.” Peacework. July/
August 2000. Available online. URL: http://www.390 Neely, Barbara