Mayagüez and the Mother Tongue: Race and Language in Yes, Mrs. Williams

Abstract

This article rereads William Carlos Williams’s Yes, Mrs. Williams (1959) through the racial histories embedded in his maternal relation to Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Building on Kerry Driscoll’s account of the text’s psychic and stylistic fusion of mother and son, this article argues that its fragmented, interpolative form also preserves and reshapes racial knowledge across generations. Williams’s mother, Elena Hoheb, appears in the memoir through recollected speech, anecdotes, proverbs, and family stories that link Caribbean intimacy to plantation memory, domestic hierarchy, and anti-Black fantasy. Rather than treating these fragments as incidental background, this article analysizes them as the medium through which Williams inherits and refashions a racialized way of seeing. The article follows this inheritance from Mayagüez through scenes of Black festivity, paternal discipline, cannibalistic rumor, and the figure of Georgie, a Black domestic worker from Williams’s childhood household. Although Williams presents Caribbean “mingling” as an ethical alternative to racial purity, the memoir’s intimate scenes show how that ideal depends on displacing the histories of slavery and anti-Black subjection that structure it. The “mother tongue” of Williams’s American idiom is therefore not only bilingual, but it is shaped by colonial memory and racial hierarchy.