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288 jean walton part of the question is also part of the song, but here it is posed without quotation marks, “Yes, but how long, O Lord, how long?” To leave off the quotation marks is to indicate that the song’s lyrics have been internalized by the consciousness of the narrator of the novel and redeployed in order to express the plight not just of the African Americans but also of their invert audience This is the point at which the novel appropriates the spirituals, borrows them to “speak” on behalf of its white protagonists Indeed, once introduced via this racialized origin, the phrase “How long [O Lord]” will be reprised later in the novel to explicitly address the question of sexual oppression: How long was this persecution to continue? How long would God sit still and endure this insult offered to His creations How long tolerate the preposterous statement that inversion was not a part of nature? (404–405) This appropriation is necessary because the inverts apparently not yet have a music, a voice, an expressive vehicle, for proclaiming their oppression They not yet, like Henry and Lincoln, share with each other the status of “brethren.” Indeed, throughout the novel, we have seen Stephen struggle to find just such a form, though in earlier scenes, before she has been introduced into the community of inverts, and before these inverts have had their identificatory moment with the Negro brothers, this struggle for form has been perceived by Stephen as an individual matter When Stephen feels frustrated about the progress of her second novel, for instance, she attributes her sense that there is “something wrong with it” to the fact that she has never experienced sexual fulfillment: “Why have I been afflicted with a body that must never be indulged, that must always be repressed until it grows stronger much than my spirit because of this unnatural repression? I shall never be a great writer because of my maimed and insufferable body” (217) Even when Stephen has finally found sexual fulfillment (through Mary), there remains the imperative to link her singular body to a collective body that would constititute her “people.” While Paris has by this historical moment become a geographical space for the congregation of these bodies (the space for sexual expatriates), there is not yet an artistic or rhetorical space of shared inhabitation I would suggest that Hall presents the Negro spiritual as a kind of model for this shared psychic space, a space that is also an indigenous form for the expression of