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“Safe in the Eye of the Storm”  

A 20th-Century Adaptation of Safe Slave Spaces in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist 
     Madilyn Abbe, Brigham Young University ’23  

 
Abstract: This paper analyzes the elusiveness of safety for Black women in Colson Whitehead’s 
The Intuitionist. Through the lived experience of the protagonist Lila Mae, the novel challenges 
the notion of universal security by demonstrating that safety in America hinges upon gendered 
and racial qualifiers. To underscore the continued precarity for Black women, Whitehead adapts 
from the antebellum trend of safe slave spaces. The text associates antebellum buildings with 
modern bodies and modern buildings with antebellum bodies. Although the novel proposes the 
black box will solve the city’s social issues, such a solution seems tragically ironic as the black 
box’s promised resolution relies on the destruction of the body. Ultimately, this paper argues that 
The Intuitionist functions as a crucial critique of the lack of safety afforded Black female bodies 
in 20th-century urban space.   
 
Content Warning: This article contains sensitive content, including a discussion of sexual 
harassment and discriminatory behavior towards women and racial minorities.  
      
      
      
      
 
 
 
 



In his debut novel The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead intertwines the body with the city. 
The inciting incident of the story, an unexplained elevator crash, marks the Fanny Briggs 
building as the central edifice of the dystopian story. Whitehead constructs an alternate version 
of New York City where elevators are at the forefront of technological advancement. Women 
and Black people face widespread exclusion from positions of power, including the most coveted 
city job: elevator safety inspector. Lila Mae Watson, recently appointed the first Black female 
elevator safety inspector, faces accusations of responsibility for the Fanny Briggs elevator 
accident, as she was the last person to sign off on its safety. As Lila Mae sets out to clear her 
name, she uncovers a larger political conspiracy and becomes involved in the race to find the 
blueprints of the black box—an elevator promised to revolutionize the industry created by her 
inspiration, the engineer James Fulton, who readers later learn was a Black man passing as white. 
Connecting architecture to corporality, Whitehead (1999) notes the reminiscence of the Fanny 
Briggs building to the body of its namesake, the real Fanny Briggs, a slave who taught herself 
how to read: “Those looking for a correlative to Fanny Briggs’s powerful, lumpy body and the 
shape of the building dedicated to her will have to bear in mind the will to squat that roosts in the 
soul of every city architect” (p. 16). The mention of “a correlative” between the building and the 
body of the real Fanny Briggs demonstrates that, rather than being neutral, space possesses clear 
human characteristics that are racialized and gendered. Additionally, because the elevator 
accident connects Lila Mae to the edifice, the Fanny Briggs building links together an 
antebellum Black female body (Fanny Briggs the person) and a present Black female body (Lila 
Mae). Whitehead’s attentiveness to the relationship between building and body demands a 
reconsideration of urban space and the Black female body. By associating Lila Mae with two 
subjects that clearly lack safety—a building with structural failure and a fugitive slave in the 
antebellum era—Whitehead asserts that even the bodies of contemporary Black women are in 
jeopardy. Through the intersections of the Fanny Briggs building, Fanny Briggs (a female slave), 
and Lila Mae (“a modern city girl”), The Intuitionist recognizes the evasiveness of safety for 
Black female bodies in contemporary urban space (Whitehead, 1999, p. 189).  

The academic discourse surrounding The Intuitionist recognizes the ample extent to 
which the concept of the body shapes the novel. Reading the text as an internet allegory, Martin 
Japtok (2021) identifies the rejection of the biological body as a consequence of favoring 
technology. Linda Selzer (2009) similarly observes how the enticement of uplift causes Lila Mae 
to become “progressively alienated from her own body” (p. 682). Noting a bodily connection to 
infrastructure, Spencer Morrison (2017) recognizes “bodily sensation” as a pathway toward more 
inclusive political formations (p. 102). Yet in all these appraisals of bodies, scholars avoid 
detailed inquiry into how the compounded effects of race and gender threaten the body. This 
omission in Intuitionist scholarship suggests the need for more concentrated attention on how the 
race-based and gender-based discrimination particularly affects the Black female body within the 
text. Building on the intersectional movement stemming from the 1980s, recent social criticism 
has reinforced the disproportionate extent to which the Black female body is unsafe. Studies 
have found that the rate of homicide for Black women is higher than any other race (Petrosky et 



al. 2017) and that BIPOC women “are less likely considered ‘true’ victims and thus less 
deserving of the protections more frequently available to white, straight, wealthier women” 
(Belknap & Grant, 2021). Identifying the crux of such inequality, Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (2022) 
contends that “African American women are impacted by the dangerous intersections of sexism, 
racism and other interlocking oppressions that result in higher incident rates of gender-based 
violence as well as less support from courts, police, governments, social services, and other 
institutions.” These existing inequalities indicate that safety is already an elusive commodity for 
the Black female body.   
 In addition to engagement with bodies, scholars recognize Whitehead’s experimentation 
with and adaptation of historical African American literary genres. Michael Bérubé (2004) calls 
The Intuitionist a “meditation on the Great Northern Migration” and “an idiosyncratic version of 
the African-American ‘passing’ narrative” (p. 163). Peter Sloane (2017) supports this notion with 
specific literary influences, mentioning that The Intuitionist is “informed by seminal African-
American texts such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 
(1952), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)” (p. 222). On the whole, scholars recognize The 
Intuitionist as a variation of postbellum African American texts. While Sloane’s brief mention of 
Beloved lays the groundwork for connecting antebellum influence, as of yet no scholar has 
deeply engaged with the text’s antebellum motifs. 

The Intuitionist identifies the antebellum period as the origin of patterned unsafety for the 
Black female body. While elevator safety ads and safety inspectors at the beginning of the novel 
promise safety, Lila Mae’s lived experience undermines their assertion, instead indicating that 
universal security is not a reality. Rather, safety is only guaranteed to those who fulfill gendered 
and racial qualifiers. To underscore safety’s continued elusiveness for contemporary Black 
women, Whitehead pulls antebellum elements into his narrative—associating the Fanny Briggs 
building with a fugitive slave, naming a character after the slave trading city Natchez, and 
modeling the only safe space in the novel, a dumbwaiter, after historically safe slave spaces. 
Even the novel’s proposed resolution, the long-awaited black box, cynically offers grim 
prospects when it comes to safety for Black women; its safety ultimately relies on the body’s 
elimination. Although The Intuitionist does allude to the characteristics necessary for creating a 
safe environment, as a whole, the novel functions as a damning critique of the lack of safety 
afforded Black bodies in 20th-century urban space.  
 
Assumption of Equal Safety 

To contrast the later reoccurring bigotry, Whitehead orients his novel with an early 
assertion of safety for every urbanite. Within the first pages of the novel, Lila Mae notices a 
billboard from the city’s elevator company boldly declaring, “ALL SAFE” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 
14). In typical usage, the expression “all safe” functions as a pronouncement of the existence of 
safety in an environment: “the space is safe.” Although the advertisement only promises safety in 
elevators, the strategic placement of the billboard along a well-used road seems to guarantee 
safety for the public. In addition to ascribing safety to the locale, alternatively interpreting the 



significance of “ALL” modulates the meaning of the phrase. Taking “ALL” to mean the masses, 
the phrase shifts from a pronouncement of safety in a space to a statement about the scope of the 
safety on offer: “everybody is safe.” With this interpretation, the encompassing term “ALL” 
invites the inclusion of all races and genders. Yet, later variations of this phrase reveal the 
original slogan’s brittleness.  

Contrasting the advertisement, public interactions in Whitehead’s city reveal gendered 
dimensions of safety. In Whitehead’s parallel reality, Elijah Otis’s 1853 elevator safety 
demonstration at the New York Crystal Palace lays the foundation for the prestigious elevator 
safety inspectors of the present day. After demonstrating how his invention prohibits elevator 
freefall, Elijah Otis announces, “All safe, gentlemen, all safe” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 82). Not only 
does the patriarchal hailing “gentlemen” set up men as the primary societal protectors, but Otis’s 
direct address also presupposes safety to be solely a male responsibility. Per his assumption, it is 
men who possess the requisite knowledge and authority to determine whether something is safe 
or not. Additionally, although public space seems neutral given the presence of both “ladies and 
gentlemen” in the crowd, the choice to directly address the men clearly identifies the space as 
male (Whitehead, 1999, p. 81). With the utterance “gentleman,” the identity of the collective 
group is clarified, and women are alienated entirely. Daphne Spain (1993) labels the dominance 
of a certain gender in any given place as “gendered space” (p. 137). Spain (1993) determines the 
gender of homes, schools, and workplaces primarily by the separation of men and women, yet 
Otis’s remark indicates that “gendered space” can be recognized by more than just the physical 
segregation of genders. Men and women mingling together in the public space eradicates the 
possibility of identifying the space’s gender on physical separation alone. However, verbally 
privileging the male gender as the norm marks public space as definitively male. Thus, safety is 
characterized as a gendered concept—something arbitrated by and guaranteed to men but not 
necessarily to women.  

Unfortunately, even female space fails to provide all female bodies with anticipated 
safety due to a lack of what Virginia Woolf recognizes as indispensable: spatial privacy. 
Following from Wendy Gan (2009), I read Woolf’s novel, A Room of One’s Own, as an indicator 
of the importance of spatial privacy for women. Protesting that women aren’t granted the luxury 
of spatial privacy, Woolf (1929/2014) not only advocates for the spatial autonomy of an 
individual haven but a room with clear protection for the female inhabitant—what she calls “a 
room with a lock on the door” (p. 76). While a lock may be satisfactory protection for white 
women, the lock on Lila Mae’s apartment doesn’t offer a similar safeguard. Lila Mae’s locked 
apartment is ransacked by two white men, Jim and John, looking for clues about Fulton’s 
blueprints. Immediately, Lila Mae recognizes the home invasion as something that impinges on 
her safety, calling it a “trespass into her home, her one safe place” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 39). The 
event signals Lila Mae’s inability to maintain ownership of her space considering that the 
trespassers access her space without permission or knowledge. Not only is this break-in a 
destruction of black space by white individuals, but the event also exemplifies an invasion of 
female space by men. A bodily violation presents itself in the adjective Whitehead (1999) 



employs to describe the apartment: “raped” (p. 166). With this personification, Lila Mae’s 
apartment takes the form of a female body and accentuates the act’s dangerous implications. 
Rather than simply affecting the privacy of external space, Jim and John’s intrusion suggests 
violence on the female body and clear disregard for female autonomy. In this case and as a 
universal principle, unsafety accompanies female space because men assume unchecked 
authority for the maintenance of safety. Like Otis’s appeal to gentlemen, Jim and John imply 
safety is a male affair. Acting as if their break-in was benevolent, Jim and John call themselves 
“watchdogs” (Whitehead, 1999, 39). A witness also seems to reinforce Jim and John’s authority 
over Lila Mae’s space by addressing the trespassers as “gentlemen” (Whitehead, 1999, 39). 
Juxtaposing Woolf’s hope for women’s spatial privacy with Lila Mae’s lived experience, safety 
remains painfully elusive for Black women—threatening not only their physical environment but 
also their bodies.   

The exclusivity of safety is further exacerbated when considering the ways in which 
racial identity qualifies the level of bodily privacy women are granted. The Funicular Follies—
the elevator safety department’s annual gathering—starkly illustrates the gender disparity: a 
repetition of “All Safe, Gentlemen. All Safe” and a cabaret group ironically called the “Safety 
Girls” who are frequently subjected to unsolicited groping (Whitehead, 1999, p. 150). One of the 
main entertainment acts of the night, a minstrel show, makes it especially clear how elusive 
safety is for Black women. One man in blackface recounts the story about a presumably Black 
man and woman in an elevator: 

Dey dis man in an elevator all by himself, Hambone. De car stop and in step dis beautiful 
lady wit de long hair and de nice eyes. Two floes later she reach over an push de Stop 
button. She takes off al her clothes and say to de man what was in dere, ‘MAKE ME 
FEEL LAK A WOMAN!’ So de man, he take off all a his clothes, throw dem on top of 
de woman’s clothes and say, ‘Okay, do the laundry!’ (Whitehead, 1999, p. 156) 

While the couple is not explicitly labeled as black or white, the reactions of the female Black 
waitstaff to the joke—“so beaten they cannot speak of the incident”—as well as the embedded 
allusion to Aretha Franklin suggest the woman is black (Whitehead, 1999, p. 157). Although the 
bodies of the white women at the Funicular Follies are scantily clad, they are covered by some 
semblance of clothing, albeit tight and revealing. Like these white women, the body of the Black 
woman in the story is similarly used for the purpose of entertainment; yet, this Black female 
body is completely nude, permitted even less spatial privacy than the white women. The joke 
hinges not just on the sexual exploitation of the Black female body but that the Black female 
body’s attempt at recognition is ignored. The push and pull between sexualized and subjugated 
indicates that the Black female body is constantly endangered because the body is forced to 
choose between two extremes: hypervisibility or invisibility. 
 
The Historico-Traumatic Moment 

To offer Black women a reprieve from gendered, racial pressure, The Intuitionist adopts 
the historical and literary trope of safe slave spaces. In her own analysis, Lauren Berlant (2008) 



combines affect and trauma theory to categorize The Intuitionist’s inciting event in the Fanny 
Briggs building as a “historico-traumatic [moment]” (p. 848). While Berlant (2008) recognizes 
the plot’s layout as an “ongoing historical present,” the critical conversation stops short of the 
specificities of what ongoing historical present is taking place (p. 848). Yet, considering Fanny 
Briggs’s history as a slave and the Fanny Briggs’s designation as a memorial building situates 
slavery as a central issue at hand, the historico-traumatic moment that continues to inform the 
ongoing historical present. Similar to the initiating catastrophic event that beings the issues in the 
novel, slavery functions as an initiating catastrophic event of American history that has since led 
to discrimination towards and the stymieing of Black populations.  
 Barry Jenkins (2021) identifies slavery as The Intuitionist’s historico-traumatic event in 
his television adaptation of Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) by including Fanny 
Briggs as a participating character. In the Amazon Prime miniseries, instead of being alone in 
North Carolina (as she is in the novel), the protagonist Cora meets a younger runaway slave 
named Grace. Later on, the audience learns Grace is an alias; Grace’s real name is Fanny Briggs. 
In addition to functioning as an entertaining easter egg for those familiar with Whitehead’s work, 
this textual expansion directly connects the urban contemporary of The Intuitionist to the 
antebellum era in terms of a concern for spatial safety. Jenkins (2021) places Fanny Briggs with 
Cora in a small attic crawlspace so cramped that the two girls can barely sit up. Fanny Briggs 
teaches Cora how to avoid the creaky floorboards and use a peephole to glimpse outside. While 
the two girls enjoy companionship and safety in hostile territory, the confining nature of the 
space damages their bodies, causing limb atrophy and sickness.  

The simultaneous prison and haven-like crawlspace are representative of the greater 
historical and literary pattern of safe slave spaces. Attics, floorboards, cupboards, barns, boxes, 
or hidden compartments in wagons often concealed Black bodies. While safe slave spaces 
permitted fugitives to exist in unsafe spaces, the restrictive nature of such spaces on the body and 
mind meant oscillating levels of safety and danger for the inhabitant. For fugitives, safe slave 
spaces were a tool to acquire bodily autonomy. Yet paradoxically, safe slave spaces, the means 
to receive body autonomy, actually stripped fugitive slaves of their bodily autonomy; the 
unyielding requirement for the Black body to conform to spatial dictation forced dependence. By 
situating Fanny Briggs in a safe slave space, Jenkins (2021) supports Whitehead’s assertion that 
the spatial complexity of contemporary cities is similar to that of the antebellum period.    

Even more exhibitive than Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad miniseries, the text of 
The Intuitionist also recognizes slavery as the historico-traumatic moment that continues to affect 
the present. Just as the Fanny Briggs building connects a present edifice to an antebellum body, 
Natchez (a Black man who befriends Lila Mae) connects a modern body to antebellum buildings. 
When asked about his name, Natchez tells Lila Mae he is named after his mother’s hometown: 
“She didn’t like it enough to stay there, but she liked it enough to name me after it. She still 
wants to hear people say it” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 78). Readers unfamiliar with the history of 
Natchez the city may miss this subtle symbol of slavery and white male dominance. Natchez, 
Mississippi is primarily known for its role as a major slave trading city and its lavish antebellum 



architecture. A place that memorializes the white economic prosperity that resulted from slavery, 
Natchez the city possesses inherent danger for Black bodies. Scholars like William Gleason 
(2011) recognize the antebellum estate as a carefully crafted emblem of power: “For in the 
antebellum South the approach to a plantation was as significant an expression of power and 
standing as the big house itself” (p. 95). The looming, expansive architecture of the antebellum 
mansion intentionally exhibits an aura of white dominance. Moreover, another bodily component 
is attached to Natchez the city beyond Natchez the character; Fulton’s father was “a white man in 
Natchez. Gran’ma Alice used to clean their houses” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 138). While it is 
unclear whether the exchange between the white man in Natchez and Gran’ma Alice (a Black 
woman) was consensual or not, there is a clearly unequal power dynamic. Considering the 
negative connotations Natchez, the city, carries for Black people, especially Black women, why 
would Natchez’s mother want to hear people repeat the name? The purpose of repetition is not to 
celebrate but to warn. Although slavery is past, the presence of the character Natchez in modern 
times serves as a reminder of the danger experienced by Black women in cities. This relived 
presence makes such historical danger something perpetual and thus emphasizes the continued 
need for contemporary safe slave spaces.  
 
Contemporary Safe Spaces 

The Intuitionist features one successful contemporary safe space, a dumbwaiter, that 
outlines the scope of protection for the Black body. Marie Claire, Fulton’s housekeeper, manages 
to hide what everybody has been looking for—the blueprints of the black box. Despite white 
men’s attempts to infiltrate and tear the house apart, Fulton’s writings with Lila Mae’s name 
scrawled in the margin are kept protected and unseen by “a dumbwaiter in the kitchen” 
(Whitehead, 1999, p. 242). The dumbwaiter, like many other safe slave spaces, is what Miranda 
Green-Barteet (2013) calls an “interstitial space” (p. 54). For Green-Barteet (2013), interstitial 
spaces function much like “border space, one that exists betwixt and between other more clearly 
defined spaces” (p. 54). This in-between component of the space transfers onto its inhabitant, 
marking the hiding fugitive as “neither free nor enslaved” (Green-Barteet, 2013, p. 54). 
Interstitiality characterizes the function of a dumbwaiter. The contents inside the dumbwaiter are 
typically situated in-between floors, in-between rooms, not quite above and not quite below. 
Additionally, the dumbwaiter creates a border space between the antebellum and the 
contemporary. The dumbwaiter was first invented by Thomas Jefferson to keep slaves out of the 
dining room and exclude them from overhearing and participating in dinner table conversation, 
thus banishing their bodies from certain spaces while still utilizing their slave labor. The 
presence of the dumbwaiter in The Intuitionist creates a space historically tied to the antebellum 
yet, through Marie Claire’s appropriation, divorced from its initial objective and rooted in 
modern times. An even clearer indicator of the dumbwaiter’s interstitiality is its concealed 
contents. Inside the modernized safe space is not a whole Black individual but separated, 
individual parts of a Black person. Fulton’s mind is present via his writing, and Lila Mae’s body 
is present figuratively via her name, the label intended to represent her physical body. Even more 



than this mind/body separation, race and gender are muddled. Fulton’s writings render the 
dumbwaiter’s contents not fully Black considering Fulton was a man who was Black but also a 
man who passed as white. The presence of both Fulton and Lila Mae renders the contents neither 
entirely male nor entirely female. Because the parts inside the dumbwaiter are individual parts of 
a Black individual rather than an entirety, The Intuitionist asserts that modernized safe spaces 
only offer partial safety. 

With the safety offered by modernized safe spaces incomplete, the shape of the Fanny 
Brigg’s building pinpoints the underlying weakness of all safe slave spaces: inhibited mobility. 
In the first description of the building’s appearance, Whitehead (1999) comments, “Those 
looking for a correlative to Fanny Briggs’s powerful, lumpy body in the shape of the building 
dedicated to her will have to bear in mind the will to squat that roosts in the soul of every city 
architect” (p. 17). The crouched position of squatting visualizes the physical restriction required 
by antebellum safe spaces. The text indicates that the will of the architect causing the Fanny 
Briggs building to squat is contrary to Fanny Briggs’s nature; it is a characteristic that is not a 
corollary to her body. During Harriet Jacobs’s seven-year stay in the garret, she reminiscences, 
“It was impossible for me to move in an erect position” (1861, p. 117). Instead of moving about 
freely, she was forced to “sit or lie in a cramped position day after day” (Jacobs, 1861, p. 117). 
Jacobs’s experience was comparable to the experience of many other fugitive slaves; bodily 
contortions and long periods of inactivity were required to reside in an unsuspecting place. 
Physical restriction ultimately enabled the space to retain safeness; no one expected a body to fit 
in such tight or uninhabitable spaces. Yet, as recorded by Jacobs (1861), this bodily restriction in 
exchange for safety often came at a great cost: “my body still suffers from the effects of that long 
imprisonment” (p. 153). The Fanny Briggs building, a representative of modern safe spaces, is 
likewise suffering bodily. A sense of atrophy plagues the inside of the Fanny Briggs building. 
When visiting the Fanny Briggs building after the accident, Lila Mae notices “blighted panels” 
have been replaced because the building’s “sensitive skin” has reacted poorly to the citywide 
cleaning agent Scrubbo, suggesting eerie associations to “disease” and “human illness” 
(Whitehead, 1999, p. 225).  

Safe spaces ultimately fail as a sustainable refuge. The Fanny Briggs building imitates the 
limitation of safe slave spaces in that it fails to provide lasting safety. When appraising the scene 
of the disaster, Lila Mae verbalizes the defect responsible for the freefall accident: “The elevator 
pretended to be what it was not. Number Eleven passed for longevous” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 
229). With the word “longevous,” Whitehead diagnoses the foundational flaw of all safe slave 
spaces: temporariness. A safe slave space ultimately pretends to be what it is not; its promised 
safety is in reality a bad check. Either inhospitable conditions or the difficulty of retaining long-
term covertness mandates the temporariness of asylum. Safe spaces aren’t the solution but 
instead a temporary fix on the way to ultimate security.  

In response to the failure of the Fanny Briggs building, The Intuitionist offers a modern 
alternative to address the failings of antebellum safe space: the black box. Although the specifics 
of the black box are shrouded in mystery, this new technology will alter the city. The black box 



is what “will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks . . . it’s the future” 
(Whitehead, 1999, p. 61). When characters speak of the black box, their hushed incredulity 
emanates a second-coming sort of feeling, the sense that chaos and destruction advent a reversal 
of social strata. Although most people recognize the destruction that accompanies the black box, 
“everyone’s working on black boxes” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 61). Although most people may not 
understand the ramifications of the black box perfectly, it is acknowledged as something 
beneficial for the city, a progressive innovation worth the upending. But the true purpose of the 
black box becomes clearer with the discovery that its inventor, Fulton, was a Black man passing 
for white. Lila Mae is the only one to fully grasp the implications of the black box—its purpose 
is to upend racial prejudice and enable the uplift of the Black race: “When he [Fulton] gives 
lectures to his flock, years later, they are not aware of what he’s speaking. The elevator world 
will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 241).    

On closer consideration, the reader discovers the black box’s bodily cost functions as an 
extreme critique of 20th-century urban space. Like the garret and the attic crawlspace in The 
Underground Railroad, the Black female body experiences a similar level of decomposition 
while in the black box. Yet, the extent of decomposition in the black box is exponentially 
greater. As Fulton’s blueprints detail, “At ninety, everything is air and the difference between 
you and the medium of your passage is disintegration with every increment of the ascension. . . . 
Even the darkness of the shaft is gone because there is no disagreement between you and the 
shaft. How can you breathe when you no longer have lungs?” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 222). In the 
progressive ascent, the body merges with the black box, thereby eradicating the body. The 
dissolution of the body revolutionizes the future and resolves all social issues because external 
factors that often cause divisiveness, such as race and gender, no longer exist. Such bodily 
merging recalls the conjure tales by Charles W. Chesnutt. These series of tales “abound with 
black characters—mostly slaves—that are magically transformed into inhuman objects and 
animals” (Lam, 2018, p. 369). In addition to turning into frogs, birds, wolves, and mules, 
Chesnutt’s characters transform into inanimate objects; one character, who had been eating clay 
to prevent starvation, turns into clay as he is smashed into pieces, and another character turns 
into a tree who is then cut into lumber to build his master’s kitchen. As Joshua Lam (2018) 
points out, “Taken together, the tales dramatize the dehumanizing process of objectification that 
turns human beings into commodities or non-human ‘things’” (p. 369). In addition to the 
deterioration of the Black body into inanimate materiality, the connection between The 
Intuitionist and conjure tales is further strengthened considering the black box and Intuitionism 
are associated with “voodoo” (Whitehead, 1999, p. 7). Rather than freeing, the black box 
dehumanizes the individual by stripping away their body. Safety is provided at the expense of the 
body and all bodily-related identity markers cannot truly be called safety.  

Although Lila Mae accepts the ramifications of the second elevation, the black box 
solution feels more apocalyptic than plausible. The cost exacted on the body is too high. Just as 
Baby Suggs affirms in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the Black body is central to the Black 
experience: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet 



in grass. Love it. Yonder they do not love your flesh. . . . You got to love it. This is flesh I’m 
talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved” (1987, p. 103-104). Because the Black body is 
to be valued, a solution to racial problems cannot come by eroding the body. Through the 
dissatisfaction of the proposed solution, Whitehead argues that the trajectory of society is not 
progressive but instead continues to jeopardize the Black female body; 20th-century urban space 
doesn’t offer anything more than antebellum space offered. There is no lasting safe space for 
Black bodies in urban space, whether in the past, present, or future. Despite the lengths society 
may claim to have made since slavery, the female Black body still is objectified, deteriorated 
into a mechanization.  
 
Conclusion 

Despite Whitehead’s ironic solution, The Intuitionist subtly delineates the needed 
characteristics to constitute a safe space. When chased by Jim and John who are threatening 
physical violence, Lila Mae finds safety at the Dime-A-Dance. This kind of establishment, more 
commonly known as a taxi-dance hall, gained popularity in cities during the 1920s and 1930s. In 
these halls, male patrons paid women to dance with them. Although the taxi-dance hall wasn’t 
always a safe space for women considering the possibility of unwanted sexual advances, the taxi-
dance hall offered an unconventional amount of female power for its time. While observing the 
taxi-dance halls of Chicago, urban sociologist Paul Cressey (1932/2008) remarked, “The most 
direct control remains with the group of girls who dominate the life of the establishment and who 
have evolved certain codes and techniques of control” (p. 38). Cressey (1932/2008) also clarifies 
that these women “set the immediate standards of conduct for both taxi-dancers and patrons” (p. 
38). In other words, in the taxi-dance hall, women hold jurisdiction over the space, governing the 
safety of both women and men. Like the many female taxi-dancers who reveled in the freedom 
offered by their position, Lila Mae’s experience in the taxi-dance hall reflects women’s 
heightened authority. Initiating the encounter, Lila Mae asks a Black man to dance with her and 
refuses offered payment. Though accepting money could be seen as female economic 
empowerment, in this case, Lila Mae’s rejection reinforces herself as an agential being, 
especially when compared to other instances in the novel where decisions made solely by men 
leave her powerless. Her resolution to go against custom shifts the power dynamic as she 
maintains autonomy in setting the parameters for the interaction. Twice, Whitehead (1999) 
highlights Lila Mae’s retained sovereignty: “she has taken the lead and now guides her partner’s 
steps” and “she leads” (p. 217). Instead of the antipathy of the body exhibited by the black box, 
dancing allows Lila Mae to connect with her body as she intentionally moves about the space. 
Thus, the taxi-dance hall represents the necessary conditions for a safe space for women—
unencumbered social authority that facilitates bodily autonomy.  

The diversity of the taxi-dance halls also conceptualizes an urban safe space for racially 
marginalized women. In his writings, Cressey (2008) frequently emphasizes the unprecedented 
racial mixing for its time in US history: “Chinese and Sicilians, Hawaiians and Scandinavians, 
Mexicans and Russian, Filipinos and Romanians, Jews and Poles, Greek and American Indians, 



Hindus, and Anglo-Saxon Nordics all mingle together” (p. 109). Although elsewhere ostracized, 
minority groups comprised both patrons and dancers at the taxi-dance hall. As a result, racial 
groups often mixed and danced together, leading many sociologists to condemn the taxi-dance 
hall for facilitating mixed-race intimate relations. Yet while the taxi-dance hall allowed mixed-
race, Cressey (2008) clarifies, “The American Negro remains the only racial type excluded from 
the taxi-dance hall” (p. 9). Whitehead recrafts this historical narrative, placing Lila Mae and her 
black partner as participating members of the taxi-dance hall. While they dance, surrounded by 
white couples, Whitehead (1999) comments, “It is safe here in the eye of the storm” and another, 
“It is safe” (p. 217). Similar to the taxi-dance hall being what Lucy Burns (2008) recognizes as a 
means by “which a racialized immigrant community negotiated its presence in a dynamic public 
social space,” the undisturbed presence of this black couple offers the possibility of racial space 
negotiation where black bodies face no hostility (p. 26). Lila Mae’s presence in the space without 
racial antagonism marks this characteristic as a necessary qualification for lasting safety for 
black women. The panacea is not the black box where the body is dissolved but a space 
characterized by the free movement of the black female body. 

  
 
      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

      
 
      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 
 

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