You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (6 page)

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

He looks at her with resentment, because she is reading this passage over again, silently, absorbedly, to herself, holding the pictures of the phony lesbians (a favorite, though unexamined, turn-on) absent-mindedly on her lap. He realizes he can never have her again sexually the way he has had her since their second year of marriage, as though her body belonged to someone else. He sees, down the road, the dissolution of the marriage, a constant search for more perfect bodies, or dumber wives. He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels somehow as if her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights.

Now she is busy pasting Audre Lorde’s words on the cabinet over the kitchen sink.

When they make love she tries to look him in the eye, but he refuses to return her gaze.

For the first time he acknowledges the awareness that the pleasure of coming without her is bitter and lonely. He thinks of eating stolen candy alone, behind the barn. And yet, he thinks greedily, it is better than nothing, which he considers her struggle’s benefit to him.

The next day, she is reading another essay when he comes home from work. It is called “A Quiet Subversion,” and is by Luisah Teish. “Another dyke?” he asks.

“Another one of your sisters,” she replies, and begins to read, even before he’s had dinner:

During the “Black Power Movement” much cultural education was focused on the black physique. One of the accomplishments of that period was the popularization of African hairstyles and the Natural. Along with this new hair-do came a new self-image and way of relating. Then the movie industry put out “Superfly,” and the Lord Jesus Look, the Konked head, and an accompanying attitude, ran rampant in the black community. Films like “Shaft” and “Lady Sings the Blues” portray black “heroes” as cocaine-snorting, fast-life fools. In these movies a black woman is always caught in a web of violence.…

A popular Berkeley theatre featured a porno movie titled “Slaves of Love.” Its advertisement portrayed two black women, naked, in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip! How such racist pornographic material escaped the eye of black activists presents a problem.…

Typically, he doesn’t even hear the statement about the women. “What does the bitch know about the Black Power Movement?” he fumes. He is angry at his wife for knowing him so long and so well. She knows, for instance, that because of the Black Power Movement (and really because of the Civil Rights movement before it), and not because he was at all active in it, he holds the bourgeois job he has. She remembers when his own hair was afroed. Now it is loosely curled. It occurs to him that, because she knows him as he was, he cannot make love to her as she is. Cannot, in fact,
love
her as she is. There is a way in which, in some firmly repressed corner of his mind, he considers his wife to be
still
black, whereas he feels himself to have moved to some other plane.

(This insight, a glimmer of which occurs to him, frightens him so much that he will resist it for several years. Should he accept it at once, however unsettling, it would help him understand the illogic of his acceptance of pornography used against black women: that he has detached himself from his own blackness in attempting to identify black women only by their sex.)

The wife has never considered herself a feminist—though she is, of course, a “womanist.”
^*
A womanist is a feminist, only more common. (The author of this piece is a womanist.) So she is surprised when her husband attacks her as a “women’s libber,” a “white women’s lackey,” a “pawn” in the hands of Gloria Steinem, an incipient bra-burner! What possible connection could there be, he wants to know, between her and white women—those overprivileged hags now (he’s recently read in
Newsweek
) marching and preaching their puritanical horseshit up and down Times Square!

(He remembers only the freedom he felt there, not her long standing before the window of the plastic doll shop.) And if she is going to make a lot of new connections with dykes and whites, where will that leave him, the black man, the most brutalized and oppressed human being on the face of the earth? (
Is it because he can now ogle white
w
omen in freedom and she has no similar outlet of expression that he thinks of her as still black and himself as something else?
This thought underlines what he is actually saying, and his wife is unaware of it.) Didn’t she know it is over these very same white bodies he has been lynched in the past, and is lynched still, by the police and the U.S. prison system, dozens of times a year
even now!?

The wife has cunningly saved Tracey A. Gardner’s essay for just this moment. Because Tracey A. Gardner has thought about it
all,
not just presently, but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is cold—she is furious. The wife, given more to depression and self-abnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardner’s high-spirited anger. She begins to read:

Because from my point of view, racism is everywhere, including in the women’s movement, and the only time I really need to say anything about it is when I do not see it…and the first time that happens, I will tell you about it.

The husband, surprised, thinks this very funny, not to say pertinent. He slaps his knee and sits up. He is dying to make some sort of positive dyke comment, but nothing comes to mind.

American slavery relied on the denial of the humanity of Black folks, and the undermining of our sense of nationhood and family, on the stripping away of the Black man’s role as protector and provider, and on the structuring of Black women into the American system of white male domination.…

“In other words,” she says, “white men think they have to be on top. Other men have been known to savor life from other positions.”

The end of the Civil War brought the end of a certain “form” of slavery for Black folks. It also brought the end of any “job security” and the loss of the protection of their white enslaver. Blacks were now free game, and the terrorization and humiliation of Black people, especially Black men, began anew. Now the Black man could have his family and prove his worth, but he had no way to support or protect them, or himself.…

As she reads, he feels ashamed and senses his wife’s wounded embarrassment, for him and for herself. For their history together. But doggedly, she continues to read:

After the Civil War, popular justice, which meant there usually was no trial and no proof needed, began its reign in the form of the castration, burning at the stake, beheading, and lynching of Black men. As many as 5,000 white people would turn out to witness these events, as though going to a celebration. [She pauses, sighs: beheading?] Over 2,000 Black men were lynched in a 10 year period from 1889–99. There were also a number of Black women lynched. [She reads this sentence quickly and forgets it.] Over 50% of the lynched Black males were charged with rape or attempted rape.

He cannot imagine a woman being lynched. He has never even considered the possibility. Perhaps this is why the image of a black woman chained and bruised excites rather than horrifies him? It is the fact that the lynching of her body has never stopped that forces the wife, for the time being, to blot out the historical record. She is not prepared to connect her own husband with the continuation of that past. She reads:

If a Black man had sex with a consenting white woman, it was rape.
[Why am I always reading about, thinking about, worrying about, my man having sex with white women? she thinks, despairingly, underneath the reading.]
If he insulted a white woman by looking at her, it was attempted rape.

“Yes,” he says softly, as if in support of her dogged reading, “I’ve read Ida B.—what’s her last name?”

“By their lynchings, the white man was showing that he hated the Black man carnally, biologically; he hated his color, his features, his genitals. Thus he attacked the Black man’s body, and like a lover gone mad, maimed his flesh, violated him in the most intimate, pornographic fashion.…” I believe that this obscene, inhuman treatment of Black men by white men, has a direct correlation to white men’s increasingly obscene and inhuman treatment of women, particularly white women, in pornography and real life. White women, working towards their own strength and identity, their own sexuality, have in a sense become uppity niggers. As the Black man threatens the white man’s masculinity and power, so now do women.

“That girl’s on to something,” says the husband, but thinks, for the first time in his life, that when he is not thinking of fucking white women—fantasizing over
Jiveboy
or clucking at them on the street—he is very often thinking of ways to humiliate them. Then he thinks that, given his history as a black man in America, it is not surprising that he has himself confused fucking them
with
humiliating them. But what does that say about how he sees himself? This thought smothers his inward applause for Gardner, and instead he casts a bewildered, disconcerted look at his wife. He knows that to make love to his wife as she really is, as who she really is—indeed, to make love to any other human being as they really are—will require a soul-rending look into himself, and the thought of this virtually straightens his hair.

His wife continues:

Some Black men, full of the white man’s perspective and values, see the white woman or Blond Goddess as part of the American winning image. Sometimes when he is with the Black woman, he is ashamed of how she has been treated and how he has been powerless, and that they have always had to work together and protect each other.
[Yes, she thinks, we were always all we had, until now. He thinks: We are all we have still, only now we can live without permitting ourselves to know this.]
Frantz Fanon said about white women, “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. I marry the culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.”
[She cannot believe he meant to write “white dignity.”]

She pauses, looks at her husband: “So how does a black woman feel when her black man leaves
Playboy
on the coffee table?”

For the first time he understands fully a line his wife read the day before: “The pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is
qualitatively
different from that of the white woman,” because she is holding the cover of
Jivers
out to him and asking: “What does this woman look like?”

What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at least as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as shit.

He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything…even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock.

Still, he does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. Those movies and magazines (whose characters’ pursuits are irrelevant or antithetical to his concerns) that have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body, her entire corporeal reality is alien to him. Even to clutch her in lust is automatically to shut his eyes. Shut his eyes, and…he chuckles bitterly…dream of England.

For years he has been fucking himself.

At first, reading Lorde together, they reject celibacy. Then they discover they need time apart to clear their heads, to search out damage, to heal. In any case, she is unable to fake response; he is unwilling for her to do so. She goes away for a while. Left alone, he soon falls hungrily on the magazines he had thrown out. Strokes himself raw over the beautiful women, spread like so much melon (he begins to see how stereotypes transmute) before him. But he cannot refuse what he knows—or what he knows his wife knows, walking along a beach in some black country where all the women are bleached and straightened and the men never look at themselves; and are ugly, in any case, in their imitation of white men.

Long before she returns he is reading her books and thinking of her—and of her struggles alone and his fear of sharing them—and when she returns, it is sixty percent
her
body that he moves against in the sun, her own black skin affirmed in the brightness of his eyes.

^*
“Womanist” approximates “black feminist.”

Fame

“I
N ORDER TO
SEE
anything, and therefore to create,” Andrea Clement White was saying to the young woman seated across from her and listening very attentively, “one must not be famous.”

“But
you
are famous,” said the young woman, in mock perplexity, for the television cameras.

“Am I?” asked Andrea Clement White, and then added, “I suppose I am. But not
really
famous, you know, like…like…” But she could not bring herself to utter a rival’s name, because this would increase the rival’s fame, she felt, while diminishing her own.