Friday Feature: Samantha Lamont Adams

Samantha Lamont Adams is a Black Milwaukeean, freshwater enthusiast, and Doctoral Candidate in English and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, currently completing a dissertation about literary and historical relationships between Black Americans and bodies of water beyond the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century. She previously studied Creative Writing and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is ever interested in the material and figurative qualities of water and the generative collisions between the sacred and profane. 

candy’s cameo [new york, 1975]

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here I would have to be invented [...] In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.

—Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). 

You are fantastical.

—Candy Love (an actress of the Golden Age of Pornography), as Leona in The Erotic Dr. Jekyll  (1975)

Yes,       yes, 

every photograph of you was already taken before

you stepped on set. despite this leaden american grammar

in all its suffocating layers, you are coming. or so I hope.

i cannot be vain and call this a project of recovery, for you

have always been here, making love and rent 

and kissing the beautiful face of your husband and

laughing in a fake french accent, committing to the bit and crooning

oh monsieur, fuck me please

you have always been here on flickering film,

frosted aquamarine eyeshadow, offwhite lace of the maid’s bonnet sliding down jetblack hair 

your throat a tower gleaming in front of the gaffer

your hand tugging at his hair guiding his tongue

the stunning gap    between your teeth your

hips rolling like water over his face

you have always been here

or perhaps you just arrived, walking onto set

writhing atop low-pile pools of crimson and beige

spilling just out of frame

inventing yourself anew

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