In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (10 page)

With time, the rift was healed. Rebecca Jackson received instruction from her inner lead that she might accept orders and instruction from the Shaker elders and eldresses. After this submission she was given a Shaker blessing to minister to black people in a black Shaker settlement, which she established in Philadelphia in the 1870s. With this blessing came the authority of being a recognized religious group, as well as a Shaker promise to render aid to the new settlement in time of trouble. There is no record that Jackson either requested or received such aid.

A core group of sisters lived together in a single large house, supporting themselves by daywork, as seamstresses or laundresses in the city … [Shaker records tell us]. White Shakers, visiting from Watervliet and New Lebanon in 1872, described the residence of the family in slightly awestruck terms, as “almost palatial” with its modern plumbing, central heating, “a large drawing room, sufficient for twenty souls to sit down,” a carpeted meeting room with “marble” mantels .. . “very nice, almost extravagantly so.” Their description of the services that took place that evening … is also thoroughly admiring.

In 1878 eight black women, three black children, and three white women (one of them Jewish) lived in the Shaker commune, members of Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot's spiritual family.

The little band of Shaker sisters survived after Rebecca Jackson's death, in 1871, at least until 1908, when the last reports of the group were recorded.

Gifts of Power
is an extraordinary document. It tells us much about the spirituality of human beings, especially of the interior spiritual resources of our mothers, and, because of this, makes an invaluable contribution to what we know of ourselves. A simple review could not begin to do it justice, for it is a contribution of many facets, some readily comprehended, some not. What, for instance, are we to make of Rebecca Jackson's obviously gnostic beliefs (that the “resurrection” occurs in life, not after death; that the spirit of “Christ” is manifested through the “mind” in visions and dreams and not through the bureaucracy of the church) a hundred years before the Nag Hammadi “Gnostic Gospels, the Secret Teachings of Christ” was found? What are we to make of her discovery that she had not only a divine Father but also a divine Mother—which is consistent with pre-Western Indian and African religious belief? What are we to make of the reasons that suggest why so many black women (Rebecca Jackson only one of them*) abandoned the early black churches to find religious audiences of their own? (The established churches insisted on “civilized” worship, everyone singing at the same time out of the same book; whereas the women wanted the passion and glory of spontaneous
inspired
worship and song, behavior the male leaders of the churches called “heathenish.” What the male leaders termed “progress” in the black church, i.e., subdued, calm, rather Presbyterian behavior, the women called “letting the devil into the church.”) What are we to make of Jackson's ability to “manufacture” spiritually a “father” she had never had? And what are we to make of the remarkable general power of Rebecca Jackson herself—a woman whose inner spirit directed her to live her own life, creating it from scratch, leaving husband, home, family, and friends, to do so?

Jean McMahon Humez has done a magnificent job in editing
Gifts of Power.
There is only one point at which I stopped, while reading her splendid and thorough introduction, to question her obviously deep knowledge of her material. It is when she discusses the relationship between Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot (known among the Shakers as “the two Rebeccas”). Unlike other black women who were spiritual leaders and were single and traveled alone, Rebecca, Humez writes, “after breaking with her husband and brother … lived and traveled throughout the rest of her life in close relationship with a single cherished, intimate woman friend who shared her religious ideas.
Perhaps, had she been born in the modern age, she would have been an open lesbian”
(my italics).

Though women ministers who worshiped and lived with other women were perceived by the male leaders of the early churches as “closeted lesbians,” because they followed their own inner voices rather than the “fathers” of the church, there is nothing in these writings that seems to make Jackson one. It would be wonderful if she were, of course. But it would be just as wonderful if she were not. One wonders why, since Jackson mentions more than once her “deadness” to sexuality or “lust,” Humez implies she was a lesbian? The example she gives of “erotic” activity on Jackson's part is a dream Jackson relates which involves Rebecca Perot's long hair. In the dream another woman combs all her hair out, and Rebecca Jackson is upset because she had worked so hard on Perot's hair and “had got it so long.”

Considering that our culture has always treasured long hair nearly as much as reading, and frequently
as
much, I submit that this does not qualify as an erotic dream. A more telling dream, in my opinion, is one related by Rebecca
Perot,
in which she saw herself as queen and Rebecca Jackson as king of Africa.

What I am questioning is a nonblack scholar's attempt to label something lesbian that the black woman in question has not. Even if Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot
were
erotically bound, what was their own word for it? (What would be the name that must have been as black and positive as “bull-dagger”—in more modern times—is black and negative?) Did they see it as a rejection of men? Did it (whatever they did alone together) infringe on their notion of celibacy? Was the “lesbianism” the simple fact that Jackson and Perot lived together? And would this mean that any two women who lived together are lesbians? Is the “lesbianism” the fact that Jackson and Perot lived with other women and founded a religious settlement comprised entirely of women (and their children)? If the “lesbianism” is any of these things, then the charge that the women were “closeted lesbians” was well founded. But the women did not accept this label when it was made, and I think we should at least wonder whether they would accept it now, particularly since the name they
did
accept,
and embrace,
which caused them so much suffering and abuse, was
celibate
Of course celibates, like lesbians, have a hard time proving they exist. My own guess is that, like Virginia Woolf, whom many claim as a lesbian but who described herself as a “eunuch,” the two Rebeccas became spiritual sisters partly
because
they cared little for sex, which Jackson repeatedly states.

The word “lesbian” may not, in any case, be suitable (or comfortable) for black women, who surely would have begun their woman-bonding earlier than Sappho's residency on the Isle of Lesbos. Indeed, I can imagine black women who love women (sexually or not) hardly thinking of what Greeks were doing; but, instead, referring to themselves as “whole” women, from “wholly” or “holy.” Or as “round” women—women who love other women, yes, but women who also have concern, in a culture that oppresses all black people (and this would go back very far), for their fathers, brothers, and sons, no matter how they feel about them as males. My own term for such women would be “womanist.” At any rate, the word they chose would have to be both spiritual and concrete and it would have to be organic, characteristic, not simply applied. A word that said more than that they choose women over men. More than that they choose to live separate from men. In fact, to be consistent with black cultural values (which, whatever their shortcomings, still have considerable worth) it would have to be a word that affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world, rather than separation,
regardless
of who worked and slept with whom. All things considered, the main problem with Lesbos as a point of common reference for women who love women is not, as I had once thought, that it was inhabited by Greek women whose servants, like their culture, were probably stolen from Egypt, but that it is an island. The symbolism of this, for a black person, is far from positive.

But this is a small complaint and perhaps an esoteric one. I simply feel that naming our own experience after our own fashion (as well as rejecting whatever does not seem to suit) is the least we can do—and in this society may well be our only tangible sign of personal freedom. It was her grasp of the importance of this that caused Rebecca Jackson to write down her spiritual “travels” that all might witness her individual path. This, that makes her an original. This, that makes us thankful to receive her as a gift of power in herself.

*Others included Sojourner Truth, Amanda Berry Smith, and Jarena Lee.

1981

I
BECAME AWARE
of my need of Zora Neale Hurston's work some time before I knew her work existed. In late 1970 I was writing a story that required accurate material on voodoo practices among rural Southern blacks of the thirties; there seemed none available I could trust. A number of white, racist anthropologists and folklorists of the period had, not surprisingly, disappointed and insulted me. They thought blacks inferior, peculiar, and comic, and for me this undermined, no,
destroyed,
the relevance of their books. Fortunately, it was then that I discovered
Mules and Men,
Zora's book on folklore, collecting, herself, and her small, all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Because she immersed herself in her own culture even as she recorded its “big old lies,” i.e., folk tales, it was possible to see how she and it (even after she had attended Barnard College and become a respected writer and apprentice anthropologist) fit together. The authenticity of her material was verified by her familiarity with its context, and I was soothed by her assurance that she was exposing not simply an adequate culture but a superior one. That black people can be on occasion peculiar and comic was knowledge she enjoyed. That they could be racially or culturally inferior to whites never seems to have crossed her mind.

The first time I heard Zora's
name,
I was auditing a black-literature class taught by the great poet Margaret Walker, at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. The reason this fact later slipped my mind was that Zora's name and accomplishments came and went so fast. The class was studying the usual “giants” of black literature: Chesnutt, Toomer, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, with the hope of reaching LeRoi Jones very soon. Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall (unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly), and Zora Neale Hurston were names appended, like verbal footnotes, to the illustrious all-male list that paralleled them. As far as I recall, none of their work was studied in the course. Much of it was out of print, in any case, and remains so. (Perhaps Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker herself were exceptions to this list, both poets of such obvious necessity it would be impossible to overlook them. And their work—owing to the political and cultural nationalism of the sixties—was everywhere available.)

When I read
Mules and Men
I was delighted. Here was this perfect book! The “perfection” of which I immediately tested on my relatives, who are such typical black Americans they are useful for every sort of political, cultural, or economic survey. Very regular people from the South, rapidly forgetting their Southern cultural inheritance in the suburbs and ghettos of Boston and New York, they sat around reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, listening to each other read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. For what Zora's book did was this: it gave them back all the stories they had forgotten or of which they had grown ashamed (told to us years ago by our parents and grandparents—not one of whom could
not
tell a story to make you weep, or laugh) and showed how marvelous, and, indeed, priceless, they are. This is not exaggerated. No matter how they read the stories Zora had collected, no matter how much distance they tried to maintain between themselves, as new sophisticates, and the lives their parents and grandparents lived, no matter how they tried to remain cool toward all Zora revealed, in the end they could not hold back the smiles, the laughter, the joy over who she was showing them to be: descendants of an inventive, joyous, courageous, and outrageous people; loving drama, appreciating wit, and, most of all, relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and
bodacious
company.

This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex,
undiminished
human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature. (In my opinion, only Du Bois showed an equally consistent delight in the beauty and spirit of black people, which is interesting when one considers that the angle of his vision was completely the opposite of Zora's.) Zora's pride in black people was so pronounced in the ersatz black twenties that it made other blacks suspicious and perhaps uncomfortable (after all,
they
were still infatuated with things European). Zora was interested in Africa, Haiti, Jamaica, and—for a little racial diversity (Indians)—Honduras. She also had a confidence in herself as an individual that few people (anyone?), black or white, understood. This was because Zora grew up in a community of black people who had enormous respect for themselves and for their ability to govern themselves. Her own father had written the Eatonville town laws. This community affirmed her right to exist, and loved her as an extension of its self. For how many other black Americans is this true? It certainly isn't true for any that I know. In her easy self-acceptance, Zora was more like an uncolonized African than she was like her contemporary American blacks, most of whom believed, at least during their formative years, that their blackness was something wrong with them.