"She's a brick house" or "Ain't I a Woman?"

Originally posed here way back in September:



I've been reading A LOT of Milestone Comics this week and the character whose initial appearance has struck me the most is the lady above, a frequent character in the title Blood Syndicate, who following the song, is named Brickhouse.

By Blood Syndicate #2 or thereabouts, you learn that she's Puerto Rican not Black, but she's just too juicy for me to not talk about and I don't think we'll stray too far from our area of study. Take a peak at her, she's a big, tough dark-skinned lady with nappy hear and thick lips. Maybe this is just because I'm an African Studies concentrator and she may be Puerto Rican, but the first signifier that popped into my mind was the blackface minstrelsy character Mammy. Bill Foster describes the qualities of the Mammy archetype:

"The 'Mammy' archetype [is] the large, unattractive and non-sexual character. . .In her orignial manifestation she is a bossy, washer woman type who has her hands full trying to keep her lazy, good-for-nothing husband line. She is presented in direct opposition to white woman characters, which are blond, thin, and sexually desirable." (p. 14)

Brickhouse's first appearance is narrated by a skinny white middle class reporter woman who the members of Blood Syndicate have invited to the ghetto to write about their gang and the brutality of the police. To further bring home the point, the leader of the Blood Syndicate, Tech-9, clearly has feelings for the reporter. Juxtapose this with Brickhouse's treatment by her fellow member of Blood Syndicate, Wise Son:


Unlike the classical Mammy archetype, Brickhouse does not allow herself to become defeminized and dehumanized. In her proclamation of "I'm a lady," she echoes Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech. Though Brickhouse is a rock monster who has signifiers that code her as a Mammy, and who as we shall see in coming posts has more than her fair share of emotional problems, unlike the Mammies of blackface minstrelsy, she affirms her own personhood by standing up to sexist attacks.

What a woman.