TOPIC: MEANINGS OF IMAGERY in The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Title: Alchemy and Identity: Williams Finds A Solution

What can prepare the reader for the excursion waiting inside the cover of Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights? A glance at the short subtitle speaks of legalistic musings, impacting events and intimate commentary; it is a diary of a law professor. Just above this Harvard University Press publication is a dark photo of a dark lady, presumably the author to whom this diary belongs. I look closely at the picture - this is the woman I am about to get to know. As I cleave open the book, I wonder if I will be thrust into the uncomfortable position of the tyrannical slavemaster, forced to face and despise the guilt of my two-centuries-deceased race. Accordingly, I assume the subject position of the college student reader...

Alchemy is both American and autobiography, a self-written account of a life, in the context of American law and history. The title suggests that some sort of resolution, some final transmogrified product, can come of this weaving together of race and rights. However, the choice word "alchemy" speaks for itself: an ancient science which never succeeded in transforming base elements into gold, but contributed greatly to the knowledge foundation of modern chemistry. Here is the warning that no polished, gleaming nugget of resolution will crystallize in our minds, but instead we may be left with a mess of unfixed identities, new historicism, and fragments of cultural materialism.1 To ignore this signifier is to invite disappointment.

The most obvious and intriguing dilemma of Alchemy is the frequent explosion and implosion of Williams' identity. She shows herself capable of belonging to a collective or reducing herself to a simple subject position, and she can be pleased or horrified by either of these situations. An explorative journey into the specific instances of these alternate selves of Patricia Williams in Alchemy is the only path to understanding her conscious evolution self-knowledge.

In the case of imploding, or allowing one aspect of identification to temporarily take on the meaning of the whole, Williams offers up many of what she calls "floating signifiers" in her discourse: her great-great-grandmother, sausage, the law, her own written words as a separate entity, students, and mysterious images of polar bears. These signifiers are readily adaptable into a consciousness of their own, extracted from the whole of the text like the individual ingredients of Williams' "sausage case" and acknowledged as teddy-bears or rodents instead of "sawdust and tiny claws."2 Each of these signifiers is a partition of Williams' writing identity, each subtly persuading us to see her as a precarious sum of multiplex, irreconcilable parts, which she eventually welcomes as schizophrenia (207).

Chapter six details the case of what is legally acceptable as sausage, in which Williams delivers an extraordinary speech about the singular devoured by the whole. All unique factors that once defined the now-integrated singular are obliterated, their previous existence denied. Williams claims to "substitute 'constitution' or 'equality' or 'black' or 'freedom of speech' instead of 'sausage'" (109). The zeal which this speech embraces is not about sausage, but about Williams herself. She is the rebellious, unwanted ingredient within the sausage, labeled and voiceless.

In her exploration for meaning within the seemingly irreconcilable world of black and white, the polar bear becomes representative of both sides, a metaphor for Williams' own vision of herself. She is a black woman empowered with white law, the polar bear is white furred with black skin - both wrapped in whiteness so as to survive the snow, or the world of the white man. In the world of whiteness, all that we can see of the polar bear are its instruments of destruction - its black claws and jaws. Beyond chapter eleven, we begin to see more and more polar bears; Williams has adapted them as a secondary identity, that of the white within the black persona. The identifying "I" no longer stands for the complete author, for she has accomplished the complete split, but with a significant twist - the bears are white, but they are also uncivilized wilderness. Within this dual identity, the black woman is now the law and the teacher, the civilized side. Instead of the voiceless sausage, Williams as black female lawyer is the voice and the polar bears are the listeners, "the bears give me back my listening . . . I speak to them of the law" (208).

Individual identity explodes in Williams' broad labels she constantly uses to define herself - she is black, female, a lawyer, and a professor. These words draw long lists of associations behind them, the former two rarely intersecting with the latter pair. She employs the general in order to redefine it, for what she can convey to us as black, female, law professor personality can then become integrated into readers' memories when those vague words are recalled.

Alchemy begins with Williams' description of her own subject position. "Since subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know..." (3). Throughout the book, she continues to supply us with her subject positions in nearly every account of personal experience, and she assumes these roles in her attempt to find meaning in her history and the present. One of the most common subject positions in which Williams describes herself is that of the powerless black woman. This occurs in social settings, and ironically in her area of expertise, the place of commerce. The importance of recounting the experiences at the Benetton's store (the topic of chapter three, pp. 44-51), of C.'s sour milk (56-7), and the Au Coton store (126-9) are essential to Williams' subversion of the invisibility factor within black consumerism, "the subject for a war over the invisible" (58). By taking hold of the black female identity and displaying the abuse of it simply for its outward appearance, she demonstrates to us that racism can happen to anyone, regardless of their intellect or buying power.

The law pervades Alchemy. Every experience within filters through its language, its logic, and its precedents, laying open fundamental questions of humanism and correct procedure. The heart of Williams' oxymoronic nature is her role as a black female (the subject position described above) intertwined with the supposedly color-blind power of the law. Williams' voice as author combines with the authority of the law as she delivers judgments and criticisms about race and rights, always calling to our attention the color of her own skin. In this manner, she is commanding the power of the legal writer 's subject position, using it to bolster the strength and professionalism of the black race.

In the realm of the autobiography, the function of identity is crucial. It is the core of existence, cultivated from external experiences and internal musings. The Alchemy of Race and Rights may not achieve the wondrous fusion of race and rights, nor may it clarify anything other than the troubles internal to our legal and social systems, but it certainly succeeds in compelling awareness. Williams hopes "that the gaps in my own writing will be self-consciously filled by the reader, as an act of forced mirroring of meaning-invention" (8). Tracing the fluctuations of her identity is one way of doing so, for we must create our own understandings of her sausage ingredients and polar bears. Alchemy is not only a public book, but a private examination of the author's conscious self. Williams wrestles with a great deal of anger and turns it inside out in her need for relief. She finds a solution for the warring identities within her; she claims her blackness, confidence, and authority for her own, and pushes aside the need for invisibility among the white snowflakes. Williams has finally achieved her peace within social consciousness, and the book ends. It is up to us to find our own peace in the mirror.

FOOTNOTES:
1 The terms "new historicism" and "cultural materialism" as defined in M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (USA: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993), pp. 248-255.
2 Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 108. Subsequent references to this text will appear as parenthetical notes.
Copyright Kaye Anfield, 1996.