I read both with and against Chase-Riboud's romantic figurations of ambivalent scenes of sexual agency and her representations of Hemings's sexual desire to forefront how restrictive choice, coercive power, and threat of punishment frame idyllic notions of "romance," and how prescribed dominative economies wield and achieve power precisely by producing expressions in the captive subject that can be read paradoxically as "free" agency (romance) unmediated by force.

Chopin might have had 3 2 1 floating around in his mind (perhaps subconsciously) and then devised melodic figurations that would express that basic progression in a beautiful and particular way.

Her fuzzy figurations and obscured landscapes survey the places in between emotional and spiritual rapture in these ill-defined communities: arms flail, faces yearn, hopeful, reaching, and vaguely ritualistic.