Patricia J. Williams, legal scholar, former Nation magazine columnist, and frequent Island visitor, offers a genre-exploding journey. “The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law” (The New Press) is a new collection of essays beginning with religious art, then venturing through U.S. history, law, economics, political and civil rights, democracy, family, and memoir. As Angela Y. Davis, professor and author, notes, “With her always stunning analyses of seemingly ordinary stories and the surprising connections she draws, Patricia Williams urges us to understand deeply and differently how our histories continue to produce us, and how we might begin to dismantle ideas and structures so utterly dependent on our intellectual passivity.”
Williams commences with the painting on the book’s cover that haunted her for years — “The Miracle of the Black Leg.” For those unfamiliar with Williams, these first pages introduce her mind’s originality as she wanders through speculation about the painting’s context and meaning. That wandering includes the enduring relevance of Frederick Douglass’s framing slavery’s violence as a kind of violent amputation, and his escape as “stealing the property of his own body.” There’s the case of Wood v. Whisnant, resolving ownership of Wood’s amputated leg that was acquired by Whisnant through his purchase of storage-unit contents at auction, and more. Eventually, Williams abandons her speculation, turning to an art historian friend who provides context. The painting depicts third century twin saints, martyrs, and physicians Cosmas and Damian, who amputated a leg from a presumably dead Black man and attached it to a living white body that might be Emperor Justinian.
Her musings reveal two major threads weaving these essays into a tapestry of challenging thought. With the first thread, Williams considers the tension between constitutional law and contract law. Constitutional law — governing the realm of polity, civic life, civil rights — protects the inherency of civic worth, and confers legal personhood as an “unalienable right.” It protects the integrity of Wood’s body — his leg. In contrast, contract law concerns the leg as “object,” and Whisnant’s rights as the good-faith purchaser-for-value of the storage unit contents. Williams engages the existential question at the heart of legal differentiations between those interests that pertain to our humanity and collective flourishing (constitutional law) and those interests that pertain to fungible, tradable, insensate objects of property (contract law).
The second thread forming the tapestry is the complication that “history comes to us in pieces, perpetually unfinished, always in fragmentary form.” Williams’ musings demonstrate this conundrum. She notes, “There is a tension between trying to understand an unfamiliar text or piece of art by imagining it as a coherent whole … and conceding a lack of certainty and attempting only to identify a pattern, a likelihood, a suggestion.”
Within this framing, the essays consider matters that were the province of constitutional discourse now being “downsized and outsourced and pushed into the realm and discourse of private contract” — examples: private schooling, private prisons, public utilities and spaces. The examples show that we are changing the nature of both the thing being exchanged in contract as well as the “we” who are supposedly constitutionally autonomous agents. Think of Woods’ leg.
Williams guides the reader with more examples and reminders that contract law speaks to individual voluntary agreements, while constitutional law constructs a “porously interconnected citizen body with multiple systems of policy, sustenance, and obligation.” You will consider the existence of “medbeds”; the disposition of human embryos; opt-in fire departments; book banning; social media; Big Data and tech monopolies; the “rebranding” of critical race theory; the 2021 high school Snapchat group called Slave Trade, which in 2021 “sold” Black classmates for money. And she leaves us to ponder prostitution, surrogacy contracts, gene editing to produce designer babies, and kidney sales.
Williams shares the extraordinary work of Margaret Burnham, founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University and author of “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” excavating more than a thousand unresolved cases of racially motivated beatings, kidnappings, disappearances, and deaths between 1920 and 1960. I encourage readers to explore the digital archive resulting from this work at the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, crrj archive.org.
Williams comes full circle in the closing chapter, “Gathering the Ghosts.” Having commenced with the perplexing painting of Cosmas and Damian, she closes with her ruminations provoked by generations of family photos — many without explanatory context — that she donates to the archive of Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She remarks, “I have always thought of reality as a present tense. But in the archive, reality has leached all over the geography of time.”
Williams says, “I spend a lot of time thinking about photos without captions, without stories, without narrative or history.” One of the photographs is four family members — all Black doctors — eating slices of watermelon. What will people make of that photo without context and description? Williams leaves us with her heart’s desire. “I yearn to have future beings see me and my wonderful forefathers and -mothers. We were all here! I wish them to live in social imagination more fully than many of them were able to while on the planet.”
Barbara Y. Phillips is a social justice feminist who lives in Oxford, Miss., and Oak Bluffs.
“The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law” by Patricia J. Williams (The New Press). Available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes bookstore. Williams will be part of Islanders Write on August 19.
