Palatable poison 297

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spirituals were well received” (215). It would appear that Hall and
Troubridge decided to celebrate Hall’s success by arranging an evening of
folk-based songs, exhibiting not only an African American tradition but
also the Celtic traditions of those nearer geographical locales under English
colonial domination. Only from Gordon’s account do we have a sense of
the African Americans as consumers as well as producers of ethnic or
national cultural commodities.
Hall, already a year into the composition of The Well of Loneliness, drew
upon the details of this party in order to dramatize a scene that, at first
glance, might be discounted as inconsequential to the advancement of the
plot, the development of the characters, or even the elaboration of the
novel’s sexual politics. In an attempt to make life less lonely for Mary,
Stephen introduces her, through Valérie Seymour, to the circle of sexual
exiles who inhabit Paris and who find community with each other. For
these “men and women who must carry God’s mark on their foreheads,”
Valérie Seymour creates an “atmosphere of courage.” It would seem that, in
spite of their rejection by English high society, Mary and Stephen have been
welcomed into the expatriate community of Paris, a group of people linked
by the marks of abnormality that set them apart from the normal world.
Once this emergent exilic community has been established in the novel,
the scene that most concerns us is introduced. Jamie, who has been studying at the conservatory, announces that she has met a pair of “Negro brothers” there and plans to bring them home to perform spirituals for a gathering of Valérie Seymour’s coterie of sexual exiles.6 The two short chapters
that dramatize this event are clearly a fictionalization of the evening of spirituals hosted by Hall and Troubridge in the summer of 1927, with significant displacements and embellishments. A close reading of these chapters,
considered in relation to the actual musical evening in Hall’s home, will
help to understand how Hall sought to portray the “voice” of Negro suffrage in order to find a “voice” that could make the case for sexual suffrage.

The Negro Brethren Come to Sing
The Negro brothers are invited to Jamie’s apartment primarily as representatives of a folkloric musical tradition, one rooted in an historical struggle

for freedom. As we shall see, however, they are also invited as specimens of