Black women who stepped foot in Speigner State Prison or Wetumpka State Penitentiary or eventually Camp Ketona knew that hell surrounded them. 3 To be incarcerated in early twentieth-century Alabama was to be condemned to penal labor and the violence used to maintain it. Debilitation was not just a possible outcome, but the very condition of incarceration.

This is a history told through close reading. It opens onto the capacious ways that disabled, incarcerated Black women understood the inseparability of discourses about and the materiality of (dis)ability and carceral punishment. In early twentieth-century letters to officials and self-assessments of their disabilities, Black women strategically leveraged the specter of worthlessness—in terms of production—to circumvent prison labor, a central site of racial capitalism. 4 This narrativization and performance of uselessness were born of subterfuge, dissemblance, resistance, and real embodied experience. In numerous letters of protest, disabled and incarcerated Black women individually collated their experiences of carceral violence and testified to the limitations of their workability. The stakes of this strategy were high: as Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley have pointed out, "acknowledging a compromised relationship to labor and the ability to generate capital is often not a viable option for most Black people." 5 But some took this chance. To see what the state rendered invisible, we must, in feminist theorist Tiffany Lethabo King's words, "reroute lines of inquiry around humanist assumptions and aspirations that pull critique toward incorporation into categories like labor(er)." 6 In so doing, we may see how disabled, incarcerated Black women critiqued this pull toward labor by pushing away from it. 7

It is both mundane and worth noting that these gendered and raced histories of disability emerge from textual archives: the letters written by disabled, incarcerated Black women and the state's ledgers that described and condemned them. 8 What lies in front of us are descriptions and representations of bodyminds and violence. 9 Literary and visual studies of disability have demonstrated the epistemological weight of narrative; historical archives offer a complementary and needful addition to the materiality of representation. 10 I use narrative here intentionally: to delineate how the state and incarcerated Black women made connections, or disrupted connections, between chronologies and events. Each told stories about the meaning of race, gender, (dis)ability, and carceral regimes. The state's narratives created an alternative grammar of time: minutes, hours, days, months that were divorced from context and only legible in the language of punishment, violence, beatings, and deprivation. But Black women also wielded a kind of reduction and collapse, between disability and work, as a strategy of refusal and escape. 11 In the language of the state, which disabled and incarcerated Black women understood well, work was the time and its measurement. And thus, Black women attempted to contort the attrition of work into a marker of future possibility spilling out beyond prison walls.

This short history depends upon archival representation to articulate—admittedly through the prism of time, memory, and violence—the corporeal experiences of disability. But in so doing, the narratives that emerge from these archives compel us to view the representational and the literal in tandem. After all, this project conveys the textual into the material and then back into a textual form: a written history of disability and carcerality.

The question of how to transmit textual descriptions into analyses of the materiality of disability is one of methodology, but it also gestures toward the need to trouble the binary in disability studies between metaphor and materiality. 12 Black feminist disability studies scholar Sami Schalk powerfully argues that without considerations of disability as metaphor, "the mutual constitution of (dis)ability, race, and gender" and their material effects on Black life becomes invisible. 13 As this article demonstrates, the early twentieth-century southern carceral regime further illuminates how the conceptual slippage between metaphor, representation, and materiality were in fact tools of racialized regimes and must be central to our understanding of state violence and disability. The state enacted discursive and material violence, creating a carceral enclosure where Black women's disability was simultaneously the cause and effect of punishment.

Disability was both an embodied experience that incarcerated Black women described in their letters and a metaphor that the state deployed for Blackness. 14 Black feminist histories of incarceration reveal how power was disseminated through descriptions of the bodymind that represented and produced violence: white prison officials routinely (mis)gendered Black women through corporeal invocations of ugliness, deformity, and "imbecilic" intelligence. 15 Indeed, whether disabled or not, incarcerated Black women were already always described in terms of disability and deviance. 16

Within carceral regimes, these metaphors were powerful precisely because they were consequential: a tool rebirthed in slavery's carceral afterlives. 17 In Alabama, white prison officials raised the specter of racialized inability to justify the use of torture; as a metonym for untrustworthiness, unfreedom, and unfitness. And yet, this violence was also literally disabling. Hortense Spillers named this slippage as a central feature of the enduring violence of the transatlantic slave trade: "the captive body," she writes, "brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless." 18 Through the (de)valuation of Black women's bodyminds, the literal and the figurative slipped into each other because they were mutually constitutive and created meaning about (dis)ability, race, and gender. 19 Reading through the pages of disabled, incarcerated Black women's carefully crafted letters, it becomes clear that the figuration of disability was not an elision of the literal but rather a representation, a consequence, and an enactment of it. In other words, to understand Black women's powerful interludes amidst structures of ableist racial capitalism, we must contend with the textual representations and metaphors of (dis)ability: the terrain upon which we encounter these histories and upon which they were partially fought.

In much the same way that metaphor and material entwined in the prison, incarcerated Black women's experience of labor, whether disabled or not, cannot be disentangled from the prison as a site of disabling violence. 20 Throughout the early twentieth century, wardens, physicians, and guards systematically tortured Black women. Prison officials enacted violence that disabled Black women while also obscuring the physical and psychological effects of this torment to avoid these women's subsequent statements of disability. For this reason, even though some women may have entered prison disabled, many also left prison disabled from back-breaking work and corporal punishment.

Labor and forced medical care fomented a matrix of disability and medical discourses about (dis)ability. State doctors, sometimes called physician inspectors, played a central role in Black women's torture, dismissing their claims to disability, and exiling them to carceral psychiatric institutions. More often than not, state physicians and prison officials routinely dismissed Black women's protests of the disabling violence of incarceration and appeals for early release or parole because of their disabilities. Moreover, physicians were at the forefront of defining mental and physical disability narrowly, and often only in relation to workability. These discursive and physical modalities were mutually constitutive so that disability, discourse about racialized inability, and violent punishment formed an entwining helix under carceral regimes. 21 In other words, the state purposefully ignored how Black women experienced disability, contorted those ontologies into racialized and gendered inability, and then punished them for purported deviance.

State officials achieved this by recruiting doctors to provide medical evaluations of incarcerated Black women's bodyminds that invented racialized, gendered categories of inability that called for violent punishment: deviant, rebel, illiterate, "low intelligence," "mentally unbalanced," "dementia simplex," "considerable trouble," "stubborn," or "ignorant." 22 I cohere these terms under a category that I call medicalized non-compliance, which describes how officials cast corporal punishment for Black women as necessary, inevitable, and medically justifiable. 23 Black women had long experienced physician intervention as non-consensual, violent processes that were co-constitutive with slavery. In the antebellum South and Caribbean, doctors and slaveowners deployed medical terminology to prescribe violent treatments for "slave ailments," like running away (drapetomania), being obstinate (rascality), or eating dirt (cachexia africana). 24 Likewise, in twentieth-century prisons, medicalized non-compliance was a way in which wardens and physicians cast Black women's resistance as an illness that could be treated with violence. 25

By the early twentieth century, prison management was increasingly controlled by metrics, timetables, and procedural rules that did not lessen violence but cohered it under a set of state guidelines. In this way, violence was a medical treatment that prison administrators depended upon even as they elided it. 26 Prison bureaucrats deployed physicians in the service of denying incarcerated Black women's testimony of whippings, beatings, and starvation so that they could continue to forcibly work them under the guise of medical (expert) oversight. Indeed, the presence of a medical professional sustained the illusion that prison guards and wardens never enacted violence "in excess," as if the very act of beating was not always an excess in and of itself. 27 This narrativization of carceral violence, as simultaneously present and absent, was born out in bureaucratic correspondence, taking on a rhetorical life in much the same way that Dylan Rodríguez has argued that the contemporary proliferation of the term "police brutality" obscures the fact that "the state sanctions the violence" and "the police are [not] exceeding alleged constrictions on their power but actually fulfilling it … and pushing it further." 28 Medical oversight enlarged the power of the carceral state to manage and produce debilitation.

Time and again, prison officials asserted what Jasbir Puar calls a "right to maim" incarcerated Black women. 29 Incarceration was not meant to kill Black women, although it most certainly did, as much as it was to "'treat them as refuse.'" 30 Refuse was a category rooted in slavery even as it evolved beyond it—to be labeled "refuse" as an enslaved person was to survive the Middle Passage only to be deemed unprofitable and disposable because of sickness or fatal illness. The notion of disposability was rooted in an individual's body, in their perceived and actual capacity for reproductive and productive labor. 31 As Emancipation reconfigured the juridical categories of person and property, and in anticipation of late-twentieth-century prisons as responses to the crisis of surplus, refuse-ness also became about place. 32 When Black women entered prison, they became a form of profitable refuse—as opposed to its denotation of unprofitability during slavery. They were subject to violence, torture, hard labor, and institutional surveillance. And they were deemed disposable in terms of the state's willingness to reproduce the category of abject, criminalized state subjecthood and provide endless penal laborers. 33

The deprivation of access to communal care in the aftermath of incarcerated women's torture was also an essential part of the carceral "right to maim." Prison physicians administered state-sanctioned care, which was violent, intrusive, and served disciplinary interests. 34 Carceral medical attention evacuated Black women's autonomy and furthered the pain that they experienced during their incarcerations. It was this twinned "attrition of life support systems" that withheld real care from Black women in the process of being maimed. 35 Real care was difficult to define singularly for the many people who entered prison, except perhaps by what it was not: the care forced upon Black women in prison, often to return them to work. 36

Incarcerated Black women sutured their dissidence to the language of the early twentieth-century carceral state by proclaiming that they were unable to work and, thus, worthless to the state as laborers. Writing about (dis)ability in southern custodial prisons places Black women at the center of questions about state assessment of disabilities that were principally wrought through police, jails, and prisons. 37 It also delineates the instability of the categories of (dis)ability as a result of and response to racial capitalism. 38 As Jina B. Kim writes, evoking Nirmala Erevelles, "disability operates less as a static category of identity—a descriptor of what someone is—and more as a process, an unfolding, an ongoing event that captures the 'materiality of racialized violence' under the demands of capital." 39 It is through incarcerated Black women's chorus of anti-capitalist critique that these processes unspool in front of us.

And yet. The assemblage of disabled Black women's radical epistolary tradition that follows demonstrates that reading disability in carceral studies can neither be swallowed up by nor disentangled from debilitation. 40 How might we avoid, in Liat Ben-Moshe's words, "discussing disability solely on the level of biopolitics of debilitation"? 41 The answer is embedded within Ben-Moshe's call for a methodology that does not ignore the violence of incarceration but articulates the outgrowth of life amidst sequestration. In the stories that follow, I attend to this outgrowth of life but also point to the many loci that Black women identified within the prison as sites of debilitation.

To better understand the radical potential and stakes of uselessness as a critique of carceral capitalism, this article begins with the rhetorical grounds upon which prison administrators fomented debilitating violence and punished dissident disabled Black women. 42 It then traces the state's ambidextrous response to Black women who were, or were perceived to be, mentally disabled and tried to abscond from prison work. 43 These narratives—both as textual archives and what I have reproduced here in writing—delineate the extent to which Black women keenly understood the slippage between the metaphorical and the material in order to then negotiate with the state for their release from specific sites of penal labor. Black women's experience of disability was always already rhetorical and corporeal. Their production of anti-work politics, of uselessness, emerged in textual representation as a way to transport their bodyminds.

Punishing Will and Testimony

Following the state ban on convict leasing, which took full effect by the end of the 1920s, Alabama's Board of Administration reconfigured and centralized penal labor. 44 Under the purview of the state, incarcerated people in Alabama labored at mills, in factories, in coal mines, on state farms, on highways, in laundries, in the prison's tuberculosis hospital, and in guards' and wardens' private homes. While Black women were forced to do farm and domestic work during their incarcerations, after the re-opening of Wetumpka as a women's prison, they were also increasingly assigned to factory work. 45 The factory was at the heart of the state's fiscal austerity in the aftermath of the ban on convict leasing and created a legal loophole: rather than leasing incarcerated people to work for private companies, the state leased out physical space within the prison to produce garments for companies and sell materials themselves. 46

The names that officials called Black women, particularly in response to their testimony of unrelenting violence, served to cast doubt on both their experiences and their pain. Violence was endemic to penal work. Guards and wardens beat, kicked, whipped, and put incarcerated people in solitary confinement daily. Black women experienced these forms of punishment and discipline constantly, and the state was equally invested in reproducing these harms discursively and materially. State officials used incarcerated Black women's very testimony of violence against them, as evidence of insubordination and their incapacity to tell the truth. The matrix of carceral violence was cyclical. Officials ordered punishment for Black women whom they considered insubordinate. Any testimony of that violent punishment after the fact—which was always a critique of prison administration—was offered as evidence of the validity of the state's punitive diagnoses: whether that was being a troublemaker, of low intelligence, or mentally unbalanced. These terms were diagnostic tools for state prison administrators to continue to punish Black women for non-compliance. In this way, their testimony often became a pretense for further corporeal and psychological torture.

To be named "trouble" or "malingerer" or "insane" was to carry a prefix to violence, a grammar of unfreedom. It was to be diagnosed under the terms of medicalized non-compliance, which precipitated, enumerated, and documented beatings, whippings, and solitary confinement. 47 Naming was a powerful weapon of control within prisons. 48 It encouraged and justified physical violence. It gutted an already inaccessible system of oversight, which indemnified the violence of officials and guards. Naming extended fault, instead of relief, to victims of wardens' ire and guards' impatience. It allowed the State Board of Administration to overlook the most galling testimony from incarcerated people. Naming was a baptism by fire; through a "locus of confounded identities," the state conspired to cast out any lingering hope of mercy in a system where there was none to be had. 49 Black women endured this discursive violence, which suborned physical torture in prison.

At the summer solstice in 1922, for example, Willie Young was condemned by a new name, one that the state often imposed on unruly Black women: "considerable trouble," a prison official noted. 50 Young, a twenty-five-year-old Black woman, had written to and implored William Feagin, the State Warden General, to come and investigate what the guards had done to her. 51 After guards discovered her with a Black man, they tortured her. Young's detailed description recounted the guards' violence—a trauma in and of itself—to make a record of what they had done to her:

They have beat me nearly to death I can't sit down and can hardly walk. I am down all in my back and I got to go and try to walk any way. They give me twenty one licks on my necked [sic]. I haven't cut no one. I got caught with a colored man. Mr. Britt [a guard] knocked me down and choked me and Mr. Goran slaped [sic] me and got my teeth all loose I ain't sleep a bit all night long I just cryed [sic] and grone [sic] all night Mr Feagin they haven't whip no body here for drawing Blood as bad as they whip me […] they kicked me choked me and did me worse than a dog. 52

Young tried to resist the violence, to ease the unbearable pain of corporal punishment. She had strategically worn extra clothing to shield her back from the whip, but they made her strip "necked." 53 Both Young's testament to physical abuse and her attempts to protect herself from the instruments of punishment resulted in further scrutiny of her person rather than of the officials who had tortured her. In response, the investigator wrote to one of the state bureaucrats that she had caused trouble at the prison, as a way in which to cast further doubt on her testimony and justify the whipping. While the surveillance of her behavior was infused with sexual and gendered overtones, so too was the violence. Not only was she cast out of any normative protections of womanhood—a strained and narrow category altogether—but she felt that they had transmogrified her body into something altogether non-human: "they kicked me choked me and did me worse than a dog." 54

A month after Young penned her letter, F.E. Prickett, a physician inspector sent by the state to investigate her claims, blamed Young for the guards' ire by remarking that she had tried to fight them off when they told her that she would be whipped. The more resistant to violence she was, the more punishable. In the end, the word of one prison employee, Mr. Tinsley, who was not present at Young's beating, carried more weight than Young herself. He assured the inspector that no one choked her. 55

Notably, as was often the case, the physician on staff, Dr. Boswell, also attended the whipping. 56 Boswell's presence was symbolic of how reform in Alabama's prisons inured corporal punishment from further scrutiny. The "purported humanitarianism" of physicians provided cover for whipping, choking, punching, and extracting teeth. 57 Not only did doctors witness (and perhaps participate) in corporal punishment, but they also evaluated whether Black women had any preexisting health conditions that would render punishment fatal. They rarely concluded that anyone was undeserving or incapable of being beaten, whipped, and left in solitary confinement. 58 Thus, physicians were the ultimate embodiment of prison reform: they served as a reminder of the state's biopolitical power even as they offered the illusion of care. 59 Yet, incarcerated Black women understood too well what state care really meant.

In his investigation into Young, the physician inspector articulated a central goal of carceral discipline: to punish Black willfulness and demand performances of acquiescence. Wardens and other prison employees carried out this goal by crafting narrative scaffolding for debilitating violence. State officials attempted to cultivate submissiveness by extirpating resistance through maiming, and in so doing, they created a carceral lexicon of racialized inability. 60

(In)capacity and Mental Disability

The role of physicians mattered not just in the ecology of corporal punishment, but also in the medical surveillance that mentally disabled Black women encountered. In some cases, non-able-mindedness was used as evidence that Black women did not intend to rebel or run away. It was an epistemological and ontological tool that guards, wardens, and physicians deployed to detract from willful dissent. 61 But when resistance was public or unable to be quelled, non-able-mindedness was transformed into something more threatening. 62 Prison officials punished dissident Black women who were mentally disabled, or perceived to be, through whippings, solitary confinement, and eventually exile to psychiatric carceral sites.

Yet, in the privacy of the "domestic carceral sphere"—whether in prison employees' homes on penitentiary grounds or in white homes outside of them—non-able-mindedness was offered as evidence of ignorant compliance in the face of Black rebelliousness. 63 On the morning of December 30, 1924, for example, thirty-one-year-old Pearl Finley picked up and left. The only cause that the warden could imagine for Finley to walk off in broad daylight from her prison assignment, cooking for Mr. Carlton, was that "she was temporary[sic] insane." 64 The warden reported the escape, as he always did, to the State Board of Administration, the governing body that oversaw prisons in Alabama. Normally, he would have requested permission to enact punishment. But in a rare turn of events, he hedged. The warden wanted to believe, or at least convince officials, that it was not Finley's desire to escape, but this temporary insanity that "caused her to leave." In his explanation, in which he tried to exonerate himself of any fault that state officials might find with him, he called Finley "very weak minded." When they brought her back to the prison, he recorded her as being present, but absent: like she did not "have any mind at all." Perhaps she did not respond to their questions or refused to meet their eyes. 65

Despite the warden's assurances, however, the physician inspector was not so sure. At the bottom of the warden's letter, the physician scribbled a note: "I will have to see this woman before I can pass my opinion." And in that moment of contention between the warden and the physician, Finley was perceived as at once incapable of choice and full of deceit. 66

Of course, it could have both been true that Finley was cognitively disabled and tried to escape. Or it might have been that Finley feigned ignorance or absent-mindedness in an effort to avoid punishment. 67 But while the warden questioned the intentionality of Finley's escape in 1924, the local sheriff did nothing of the sort when she broke out of the Choctaw County Jail in 1920 during her trial. 68 One April night before daybreak, she and an incarcerated white man tore out a "window sash and lights" and escaped through a hole in a room that was regularly locked. The escape baffled the sheriff: Finley had managed to get through the locked door that the sheriff's keys could not open. In the middle of the night, however, Finley stole the keys from the guards' room, somehow forced open the door, and "tied blankets together," climbing all the way down. She stayed out four and half months before the sheriff recaptured her. 69

But nearly five years later, the warden, unlike the sheriff, reported that he was unsure whether Pearl Finley even meant to escape when she walked off from cooking for Mr. Carlton. It was his perception of Finley as cognitively disabled that evinced unintentionality. He believed that by suggesting her mind was absent that the State Board of Administration would agree that she neither had the capacity nor the will to walk away from incarceration. Jasbir Puar writes that "bodies understood"—and represented—"as disabled, in particular cognitively disabled, have often been cast as inert passive objects rather than human subjects through a projection of 'degraded objecthood' elevated over 'qualified personhood.'" The production of Finley as an "inert passive object," through her race, gender, and (dis)ability, was a way to turn her will to leave into a moment of confusion that then bled into submissiveness. 70 Who could have seen Finley, beyond the guards and the warden who went looking for her when she left a prison employees' home for a nearby field? It was an escape that began and ended in the light of day, but bore few witnesses.

In the language of the state, Blackness and madness, as Therí Alyce Pickens has so eloquently delineated, did not always "announce themselves at the same time and both exert pressure in constant fashion." 71 Indeed, state categorization and representation of Black women's bodyminds were unstable, because carceral violence, discipline, and surveillance were elastic discourses that deployed descriptions of passivity, obstinance, madness, and ignorance variously. The extent to which a moment was seen or unseen, for example, mattered to officials when they decided whether to (mis)interpret disabled Black women's rebelliousness as submissive ignorance or a disordered threat to carceral order.

Some spaces outside of the prison afforded officials, and white families who contracted with the state for incarcerated workers, the ability to narrate Black women's dissidence as evidence of compliance. In the first half of the twentieth century, Alabama officials often used temporary paroles: a system by which incarcerated people were sent either to their own homes or to work in white people's homes, and then required to return to the prison at a certain date. Temporary parole reduced operational costs and simultaneously extended surveillance. It was in this context that forty-one-year-old Josephine Coats was sent to work for Walter P. Gewin. In 1938, the State Board of Administration received a letter about Coats who had not returned to Wetumpka on her scheduled date. When Gewin realized that she had missed the day, he frantically wrote to the recording secretary at the State Capitol. Gewin noted that they were sending Coats back and begged them not to "allow this incident to affect her standing." Gewin believed that she could not have understood the instructions, and despite the fact that she chose not to return to prison, he assured state officials that she was "an ignorant negro, perfectly submissive and intends to do the right thing." 72

In escaping the penitentiary, Coats did not leave but stayed put where she was. No one saw her beyond the white family for whom she worked; there was no one to witness and pass on Coats' refusal as refusal rather than racialized, gendered ignorance. Correspondence between a prison official and a deputized custodian spun this well-contained rebellion into a neat state narrative in which Coats' desire to not return to prison was contorted into a willfulness to serve the state, and a white family, as an incarcerated worker.

The representations of Black women as mentally disabled metaphorized Blackness as disability in a way that did not synonymize Blackness and disability but rather scaffolded each as symbolic of the other. This symbolism morphed in different contexts. Blackness and disability were deployed as concomitant explanations for (un)autonomous dissent and justifications for punishment. And in this way, many incarcerated Black women who experienced, were perceived as, or dissembled through disability were punished for their public disregard for prison order even as officials described Pearl Finley and Josephine Coats as incapable of volition. 73

This was particularly true as incarcerated Black women encountered a burgeoning psychiatric carceral state. In 1900, Alabama established Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane, a segregated counterpart to the Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, which forcibly administered psychiatric treatment. 74 This trend toward public, state-run institutions for those with mental or physical disabilities reflected both a nascent anxiety about unproductive laborers in an increasingly mechanized economy and a longer history of racialized medicine. 75 The State Board of Administration did not consider Mount Vernon, later named Searcy Hospital, as part of their web of prisons. However, even though Alabama managed psychiatric hospitals as different kinds of institutions, both state prisons and asylums incarcerated people and imposed medical care, often without consent. Furthermore, the cooperation between prison and psychiatric officials foreshadowed what late-twentieth-century Black feminist organizations characterized as the lack of "clear lines between who can become labeled a 'criminal' and who can become labeled a 'crazy.'" 76

As state bureaucracy cohered around both prisons and psychiatric hospitals, so too did the process by which physicians evaluated incarcerated people. In 1923, Alabama codified mechanisms of removal from custodial prisons to carceral asylums, conferring upon prison physicians the authority to report to the governor, evaluate incarcerated people, and initiate transfers to the asylum. This psychiatric surveillance focused on the potentiality of insanity in the prison: "In case any person, sentenced to or imprisoned in the penitentiary, or sentenced to or confined at hard labor for a county anywhere in the state," the code read, "becomes insane [emphasis added]." This process, or the ever-present future possibility of sequestration in an asylum, allowed for a constant metamorphosis of diagnosis by the carceral state. 77

Whether or not transfers occurred, prison wardens often subjected Black women to extensive medical evaluations when they appeared uncooperative or acted aggrieved. Savannah Gindrat, a nineteen-year-old from Montgomery, was due to be released on April 21, 1926, a date that had already been pushed back from her original minimum time. 78 However, just days before, P.C. Herbert, the warden of Wetumpka, "penalized [Gindrat] for misconduct," and denied her release. "Since that time," Herbert reported to the State Board of Administration, "she [had] become demented." 79 At the end of May, reports of her so-called disruptive behavior were sent to Governor Brandon: "[she] is giving considerable trouble and believed to be practically insane." The description of Gindrat as "demented" and "practically insane" were metaphors carried through race and invocations of mental disability. 80 Both exacerbated the violence that followed.

The following month, the five men appointed by Governor Brandon went to the prison and "studied her case thoroughly." Did the committee follow Gindrat as she moved across the yard? Did they subject her to endless interviews, hanging on every word she said and those she did not? Did she look over her shoulder at the factory, only to see all the doctors huddled around, pointing at her? Afterward, they diagnosed her with an inflammation of the kidneys. The kind of examinations they may have subjected her to in order to draw this conclusion are beyond the imagination. Their violence is deposited into each brief, "dispassionate" word in the final report. 81 Yet, at the conclusion of the examination, the committee opted to send her to live with relatives. They no longer wanted to pay for her as a ward of the state, and transferring her to the asylum may not have been an option with her kidney issues. Perhaps it was everything Gindrat had hoped for—not care from the state, but release to be cared for by her community. 82

And yet few were sent home. Such was the case with thirty-five-year-old Mary Thomas in November 1927. After five years in prison, Thomas was imprisoned at the Searcy Hospital at Mount Vernon. The process of being institutionalized was to be "read and labeled as disabled in a different way than [one] is actually disabled." 83 Thomas' relegation to Mount Vernon was not a turn of justice nor a recognition of her disability, if she indeed had one. Rather, it was a step toward disposing of her as a Black woman whom the state distrusted for her perceived deviance and deficiency—not in the way she may have actually experienced disability, but in the way that inability was constantly constructed in relation to racial, carceral capitalism. 84

Physicians' evaluations first cast Thomas' mental disability as a condition of obstinance and rebelliousness, a condition of racial deviance. Thomas repeatedly refused to sew in the prison's factory. The warden transferred her to different positions, but she refused to do anything. He brought the doctor to examine her—because her unwillingness to work was evidence of a disorder—but the only conclusion the physician came to was that Thomas was "playing Crazy" to avoid working. This diagnosis suborned violence. Carlton ordered her whipped ten times for "refusing to obey orders from the Guard and failing to get [to] task," because she did not produce the number of garments required of her in a single day. 85 To officials, she was deviant, stubborn, and insubordinate. She was at once able-bodied enough to work and mentally deficient, but not "Crazy." Maybe Thomas sewed as quickly as she could. Perhaps she did not hear the orders from the guards or did not yet know how to meet the garment requirement. The violent penal order, and its goal of production, meant that it did not matter whether Thomas intended to do anything at all: if Carlton believed she could work more productively, she would, and if not, he would beat her.

Yet, when the beatings did not inhibit Thomas' resistance, prison officials adapted their diagnosis from one of insubordination to one of uncontrollable mental disability. One year after Thomas first arrived at Wetumpka, she was punished again for scalding another incarcerated person and sent to solitary confinement for a physical altercation with the yard sergeant. 86 In March 1931, Thomas cursed at the matron. A year later, prison officials reversed their original position on her, conveniently around the time that she was due to be released. When prison officials decided they could not root out her resistance through maiming, they concluded that she was insane and eligible for transfer to the asylum. On April 21, 1932, the State Board of Administration, likely in cooperation with the governor's office, sent her to Searcy Hospital at Mount Vernon. "Playing Crazy" or not, the state had worked her to the bone for seven years, and now the disabling violence of the prison left her in the hands of a psychiatric institute where she would die without a known cause in 1943. She never returned home. 87

Much was decided and created in the eaves of paper bureaucracy. Correspondence between physician, warden, and state official demonstrated the material power of the state's representation of disability as a figment of a beaten woman's imagination; a naturalized racial ignorance that precluded rebellion; and a mirage of racial deviance that became an obstacle to workability. However, even amidst the state's tectonic power to deny and define disability, incarcerated Black women critiqued carceral capitalism through narrativization of their disabilities. And in this way, they disrupted the discourses that arose from state correspondence with their own.

"No Use Whatsoever to the State"

Whether or not petitions for release from penal work were born of dissemblance and subterfuge, or veritable embodied experiences, Black women attempted to circumvent the violence of penal, racial capitalism by leveraging the specter of uselessness. 88 Recognition of disability was directly connected to the state's valuation of Black women's labor. Through careful invocations of inability, incarcerated Black women attempted to find ways out of the prison through the fault lines in the state's (un)recognition of disability.

We might imagine that letters were not the only way that Black women negotiated with the state about their disabilities and inability to work, but words put down to paper documented conversations that occurred in and around prison walls. When writing to state officials, women often cited conversations recently had with the letter's recipient or other prison authorities, making a record of passing words. The epistolary was transporting: it was a way for incarcerated Black women to bring themselves and their embodied experiences back in front of those with the power to release them. Even so, written correspondence was a precarious form of self-advocacy. As Sarah Haley has argued, "[incarcerated Black] women who did submit letters were very careful. They wore the mask, dissembled, and contorted themselves into the servile subjects idealized in the white imagination." 89 This tactic was particularly important because prison administration routinely surveilled mail, which could result in further scrutiny, punishment, or unwanted medical intervention. Secondly, state officials placed restrictions on the number of letters. 90 Some would have had to smuggle mail out of the prison, which was itself punishable. Others were forced to make decisions between sending letters to loved ones and state officials, who did not always respond, and when they did, rarely did so favorably.

Of the letters that survived in state records, several Black women used their scarce mail allowance to petition the governor's office. In 1923, thirty-two-year-old Mary Alexander wrote to Governor William W. Brandon about an illness that had plagued her and rendered her disabled. 91 She went to great lengths to describe her condition, asking for a temporary parole in order to "gain [her] health" at home, surrounded by those who cared for her. Alexander had been sick the past three years, having begun her incarceration at Wetumpka nine years and two months earlier. She was immobile, confined to a bed most if not all of the time. She had "Bowels and Rectom[sic] trouble," leaving her without the ability to eat anything but "milk and eggs and very little at that." She emphasized her record of behavior at the prison—how she had "always done the best [she] could do" in her work. 92 She closed the letter with, "Your Servant." The governor's office denied her parole request. 93

In a second letter sent two months later, Alexander shifted her strategy. She understood that successful petitions to the state required evidence of her past productivity and her current inability to work. She began by recounting a surgery she had undergone eight weeks prior, between her first and second letter, and then instead of describing being confined to bed, Alexander discussed her labor: "I am not able to work any at all … I have been sick for 2 years and 10 months. first up and down. and now I am down and can't do anything [emphasis added]." She spoke directly to the state's crude valuation of her labor by reminding the governor that she had no punishment for work-related infractions according to prison rules. 94 Two months later, Alexander received a temporary parole. 95 Through temporary parole the state continued surveillance in the outside world, but incarcerated Black women also leveraged these periods of thirty, sixty, or ninety days to cleave their bodyminds from the compulsions of prison labor, even if temporarily.

And yet, negotiating with the state, as Alexander would learn, was not just a matter of workability within prison because carceral scrutiny extended outside of the penitentiary walls. Indeed, officials continued to evaluate the veracity of Black women's claims of inability to work even after their release. The State Board of Administration extended Mary Alexander's temporary parole sixty more days at the end of February 1924. But a month later, the warden at Flat Top Mines Prison Camp called Roy Nolen in Montgomery about information he had on Alexander. In a follow-up letter, the warden argued that Alexander had not complied with the terms of parole: "I am reliably informed that [Alexander] is stepping with a bunch of negros at Palos who run a blind-tiger. 96 I was also advised that the Camp Officer of Palos was going to raid the place that Mary is topping at to-day or to-morrow." In the eyes of the state, Alexander's presence in an illegal drinking salon cast doubt on her disability and, thus, workability. 97

Even though the so-called illegality may have reneged the terms of parole, her return to prison would have been understood equally as a compulsion, and thus capacity, to labor. Officials imagined that if Black women were indeed useless as penal laborers, then their disability would confine them to beds and alienate them from spaces of pleasure and leisure. Alexander may have continued to experience disability in the way she had in prison, but outside of prison she may have had access to community support, care, and social spaces made accessible to her needs. But in the eyes of the State Board of Administration, Alexander's ability to move around pleasurably or leisurely—particularly adjacent to or within underground economies—revoked her assertion that she could not work for the state. 98 In response, the warden recommended that the state recall Alexander's parole; the very same day that Nolen received the warden's letter, the prison called her back. 99

Because of the ways that surveillance stalked Black women after their release, if they did indeed secure one, they understood the importance of their petitions offering evidence that permanently separated their bodies from the state's compulsion for incarcerated labor. In so doing, they attempted to subvert the idea—and its violent practicums—that Black women were always a productive, and exploitable, asset to the state. Instead, incarcerated and disabled Black women argued that they had and would have nothing for the state to exploit.

In 1933, twenty-nine-year-old Vera Nall did just that. In October, just a few months after beginning her incarceration, she wrote to Governor B.M. Miller asking for reprieve. Nall had been unable to afford the fines associated with her charge of vagrancy: a cascading category of arrest accelerated by the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression. 100 As a county-based conviction, judges issued sentences with a baseline time to serve, plus additional weeks or months if people could not afford the associated fines of the charge. 101 In her letter, Nall summarized her condition in one sentence: "I have only one leg an incurable disease and [am] no use whatsoever to the State as [I] have been in the Hospital ever since coming to prison [emphasis added]." She hoped that her record of hospitalization, and absence from work, would convince the governor that instead of paying her fine through coerced labor, it would be the state paying for her medical care in perpetuity. 102

Nall's argument that she was of "no use whatsoever to the State" was a remarkably brief but incisive theorization about the centrality of Black women's penal labor to carceral punishment and the terms through which the state recognized disability. 103 Rendering herself useless to the state was her best chance of negotiating an early release because she did not work due to, or perhaps under the cover of, a visibly recognizable difference in her body: the missing leg. 104 Although she did not say what job she had been assigned to in the prison, she invoked the permanence of her inability by alluding to an illness that was "incurable." No amount of treatment, she argued, would affect her ability to work. And, yet, even this appeal, which so aptly capitalized on the relationship between incarcerated people and state production, did not succeed. Two days after Nall sent her letter, John H. Peach, the legal advisor to Governor Miller, responded: "The Governor is not willing to give you a parole at this time." 105 Nall remained in prison until February 1934, unable to pay her fines. 106

When disabled, incarcerated Black women argued that they were not productive laborers, they masqueraded behind the state's crude valuation of their labor. 107 While these petitions deployed the language of economic worthlessness, they did so to reclaim value outside the literal and metaphorical caged walls of racial capitalism: corporeal freedom. These attempts to circumvent penal work were not Black women capitulating to how prison officials valued them. Instead, these carefully crafted appeals were an informed manipulation of a system designed to work Black women beyond when they could no longer. 108 When thirty-six-year-old Mary Hobdy, for example, wrote to one state official in 1922, she argued that she should be transferred from the River Falls Lumber Camp because she was "sick & unable to do his heavy work down here." She suggested she "could cook for a small family" but could not work for Mr. Moore. Hobdy did not ask for release from prison but instead relief from the materially specific conditions of her imprisonment. "I am disable[sic]," she wrote, drawing a clear rhetorical line between her bodymind and "[Moore's] heavy work." 109 These appeals to uselessness were, in Alison Kafer's words, a manifestation of "crip time," which "bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." 110

Twenty-four-year-old Mabel Williams from Mobile County often tried to bend the prison clock to meet the needs of her bodymind. In December 1933, Williams felt sick day after day. Sometime before her incarceration, she had been hospitalized for a uterine abscess. She was ill again—maybe it was related, perhaps it was something new—and she hated the night shift that required her to knit in the factory. The women around her often completed their requisite ninety-six pairs of socks, but she could not. She wanted to be "taken off night work," and for three nights in a row, she told the night guard that she was too sick to work. Each time, the doctor came to examine her. And every time, he concluded that there was nothing wrong with her. Williams told the other women nearby that she would not knit until she was allowed to rest, rather than work, at night. 111 The warden, with the physician's report, concluded that her diagnosis was not the sickness that she spoke of but "feigning illness" and being "stubborn." The warden then put her in solitary confinement for fourteen days with just bread and water in the dead of winter. The doctor examined her twice a day to confirm she was alive.

Upon her release from the long dark seclusion, which did not offer rest so much as it punished her through deprivation and cold, Williams tried to keep up with her task. But she was sick every day and could not manage it. The doctor came and went, insisting nothing was wrong. On January 17, the warden sent notice that she would return to solitary confinement. When physician inspectors, sent by the state, came to investigate days later, they found what seemed to have eluded the prison's doctor: Williams had hypothyroidism and suffered from extremely stiff and swollen joints. It was only then that she was "removed from the knitting machine." 112 In lieu of a petition to state officials—perhaps one that would have been too painful to write given the soreness in her fingers—Williams tried to render herself useless by failing to meet production quotas and convincing the night guard to let her return to her cell.

Incarcerated Black women's negotiations, whether with the governor, the warden, the doctor, or the guards, took place against the backdrop of gendered and racialized medical surveillance. 113 When twenty-seven-year-old Liller White and her mother, forty-seven-year-old Ann Ellen Crawford, began their sentences in May 1940, both women learned how fickle physicians' evaluations could be, even though they had the same disease. Both White and Crawford suffered from syphilis with varying manifestations of the illness. White had extensive scarring and bowed legs, but her mother bore neither of those symptoms. The doctor, calling White "a mass of scars," suggested she be transferred from Camp Ketona, where incarcerated Black women worked as laundresses for the nearby Jefferson County Home, to Wetumpka State Penitentiary. However, he did so reluctantly. It was White herself, not the doctor, who repeatedly insisted that she was "entirely unable to do the work demanded of her at the laundry." 114 White's mother, Ann Ella Crawford, faced a different outcome. Like her daughter, Crawford refused to wash the clothes. The doctor noted that she had had extensive anti-syphilitic treatment and was "on a period of rest" from the illness. He concluded that "for all practical purposes she is entirely useless up here." 115 Despite his petition to transfer Crawford, the prison medical superintendent refused to allow Crawford to go to Wetumpka alongside her daughter. Citing that Crawford apparently did not require any treatment at that time, Clark instructed Smith to "have the warden get as much work out of her as possible." 116 While state medical officials could imagine White's body as verifiably useless, given the visibility of her physical impairment, they believed her mother was, like Mabel Williams, simply stubborn.

If we return to the physician's letter, we see a familiar discourse that lurks: entirely useless. Indeed, even though he made note of Crawford's uselessness, her release was denied because he believed her to be acting useless rather than embodying uselessness. The significance of this nuance, and how Black women navigated it, cut across correspondence and action. In the Camp Ketona's laundry rooms, Crawford created pockets of futility: "this girl," the doctor wrote scathingly, "either cannot, or will not do the work prescribed." 117 Incarcerated Black women like Williams, White, and Crawford did not want to do the labor demanded of them, but they also faced real physical limitations in knitting and washing clothes for long and unforgiving hours. Others like Marie Thomas, who suffered from chronic valvular heart disease and terrible swelling, evaded work but were kept in prison through transfers. When the same physician that evaluated Crawford in 1940 sent a report to state bureaucrats about Thomas, he argued that she was "entirely useless so far as work in the laundry is concerned" and it was "necessary to keep her off her feet nearly all the time." 118 These reports indemnified the power of evaluations and representations.

Prison bureaucrats occluded and punished disabled dissidence while using transfers to defang disabled Black women's attempts to leave prison. But even as this was accomplished through correspondence, Black women leveraged textual representation of their bodyminds as a profound critique of carceral capitalism. When these women claimed that they were of "no use whatsoever to the State," through both word and action, they denied any potential within racial capitalism's imperatives toward productive, worthy state subjecthood. These radical epistemologies anticipated and enacted challenges to humanism and the human: a "critique toward incorporation into categories like labor(er)." 119 Indeed, disabled, incarcerated Black women's appeals in the language of the state were a rejection of its violent economic valuation of Black womanhood, and Blackness more broadly.

Carceral figurations of disability were contrapuntal: disabled Black women's articulation of uselessness and state conceptions of racialized inability informed one another. But so often in carceral archives, it is the state's narratives and reproductions that endure. The bureaucracy overwhelms. But in the overgrowth of Alabama's carceral state, it haphazardly preserved remnants of disabled, incarcerated Black women's epistemes.

What must grab our attention then is that disabled Black women's letters levied and redefined the categories of stagnancy and unproductivity against medicalized non-compliance and carceral capitalism. In this way, Black women creatively represented the materiality of disability through capitalism's notion of worthlessness. These radical expressions of uselessness revealed that metaphorizing disability was not only a tool at the disposal of racial regimes but also a method formulated in captivity that aimed to sabotage the imperatives of carceral capitalism, even if it could not destroy them. 120

In the prison, subjection—as both being made into a particular state subject and its process of subjugation—sits within every crevice of its documentation. We might read Black women's responsive strategies in line with what Fred Moten, in evocation of Judith Butler and Saidiya Hartman, has called the inescapability of state subjection and subjugation, such that "appeals for redress or protection to the state…are always already embedded in the structures they would escape." 121 In many ways, Moten's erudite analysis can be read as a point of conclusion: even after flight, the structure ensnared. A marker of the subsequent, the latter, the aftermath. But these epistolary remnants provoke us to consider how incarcerated Black women took this as their strategic starting point. A position of a priori from which they exerted a "dispossessive force." 122 For many, their very corporeal experience of disability was embedded and inseparable from the disabling structures of prison. They adapted and weaved the grammar of these structures into their appeals, understanding the precarity of escape as an act, a discourse, and an ontology that was taking shape within and against the carceral.

It is their words we linger on—"no use whatsoever to the state"—that provoke us to consider, in Black feminist, disability, and carceral studies, what it meant and continues to mean for disabled Black women to espouse an anti-work politics that simultaneously refuses the historical casting "as inert passive objects rather than human subjects" and yet locates radical potential in an autonomous inert-ness. 123