In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (36 page)

We are sisters of the same mother, but we have been separated—though put to much the same use—by different fathers. In the novels of Frank Yerby, a wildly successful black writer, you see us: the whiter-skinned black woman placed above the blacker as the white man's mistress or the black man's “love.” The Blacker woman, when not preparing the whiter woman for sex, marriage, or romance, simply raped. Put to work in the fields. Stuck in the kitchen. Raising everybody's white and yellow and brown and black kids. Or knocking the overseer down, or cutting the master's throat. But never desired or romantically loved, because she does not care for “aesthetic” suffering. Sexual titillation is out, because when you rape her the bruises don't show so readily, and besides, she lets you know she hates your guts, goes for your balls with her knees, and calls you the slime-covered creep you are until you knock her out.

Perhaps one problem has been that so many of our leaders (and writers) have not been black-skinned themselves. Think of Brown, who could pass; Chesnutt, who could and did pass; Toomer, who passed with a vengeance; Hughes, who could pass (when young) as a Mexican; Booker T. Washington, John Hope, James Weldon Johnson, Douglass, Du Bois, Bontemps, Larsen, Wright, Himes, Yerby … all very different in appearance from, say, Wallace Thurman, who was drawn to write about a black black woman because he was so black himself, and blackness was a problem for him among other blacks lighter than he, as it was among whites. We can continue to respect and love many of these writers, and treasure what they wrote because we understand
America;
but we must be wary of their depictions of black women because we understand ourselves.

Suppose you have a daughter, and she is black-skinned, and she is enrolled in African-American studies at, for instance, Harvard. She is in an overwhelmingly white setting and required to try to see herself as half a dozen white-looking black women in the nineteenth century, and as at least two dozen white and yellow women in the early twentieth. There will be an occasional black- or brown-skinned woman in the texts, but she will be—well, in Brown's novel, for example, let us take a look. After pages and pages of the tribulations of white-looking Clotelle (and her mother and sister before her), on the last page we encounter a mulatta named (of course) Dinah.

Here is the exchange between Clotelle, the white-looking octoroon, who speaks clear, precise English, and Dinah, who is brown, cannot pass, and talks “black.”

“I see that your husband has lost one of his hands: did he lose it in the war?” asks Clotelle.

“Oh no, missus,” said Dinah. “When dey was taken all de men, black and white, to put in de army, dey cotched my ole man too, and took him long wid'em. So you see, he said he'd die afore he'd shoot at de Yanks. So you see, missus, Jimmy jes took and lay his left han' on a log, and chop it off wid de hatchet. Den, you see, dey let him go, an' he come home. You see, missus, my Jimmy is a free man: he was born free, an' he bought me, an' pay fifteen hundred dollars for me.”

[Brown continues:]

It was true that Jim had purchased his wife; nor had he forgotten the fact, as was shown a day or two after, while in conversation with her. The woman, like many of her sex [though obviously not like the “missus,” Clotelle], was an inveterate scold, and Jim had but one way to govern her tongue. “Shet your mouf, madam, an' hole your tongue,” said Jim, after his wife had scolded and sputtered away for some minutes. “Shet your mouf dis minit, I say: You shan't stan' dar, an' talk to me in dat way. I bought you, an' paid my money fer you, an' I ain't gwine ter let you sase me in dat way. Shet your mouf dis minit: ef you don't I'll sell you; fore God I will. Shet up, I say, or I'll sell you." This had the desired effect, and settled Dinah for the day.

Is it this same fear of being “sold” that keeps black women silent, one wonders, imagining—as apparently Brown could not—the horrifying impact of these words on a woman formerly sold only by whites. And yet, our silence has not saved us from being sold, as “Dinah” herself is “sold”—as a “scold” and object of ridicule
and sale
to the readers of Brown's day.

Clotelle, Iola LeRoy, and Megda are actually “sold” as pitilessly as Dinah, though their “sale”—into the structured colorism of the black middle class (which generations later Janie Crawford exposes and escapes)—is camouflaged by the promise of “upward” mobility, i.e., proximity to, imitation of, and eventual merger with (or, as Chesnutt wrote, “absorption into”) the white middle class.

No wonder “black” nineteenth-century heroines seem so weak and boring! They are prisoners of a fatal social vision. Their destination—total extinction as blacks within, at most, two generations—is preordained. One imagines their grandchildren saying—as the white grandchildren of American Indians do, while adding another feather to their cowboy hats—“I'm not prejudiced against those people, I'm one-twelfth (Indian) (black) myself.”

In his landmark essay “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War….” This is a true statement, but it is a man's vision. That is to say, it sees clearer across seas than across the table or the street. Particularly it omits what is happening within the family, “the race,” at home; a family also capable of
civil
war.

In paraphrase of this statement I would say that the problem of the twenty-first century will still be the problem of the color line, not only “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men
[sic]
in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” but the relations between the darker and the lighter people of the same races, and of the women who represent both dark and light within each race. It is our “familial” relations with each other in America that we need to scrutinize. And it is the whole family, rather than the dark or the light, that must be affirmed.

Light- and white-skinned black women will lose their only link to rebellion against white America if they cut themselves off from the black black woman. Their children will have no hip pockets in which to keep their weapons, no teeth with which to chew up racist laws. And black black women will lose the full meaning of their history in America (as well as the humor, love, and support of good sisters) if they see light and white black women only as extensions of white and black male oppression, while allowing themselves to be made ashamed of their own strength and fighting spirit: that fighting spirit that is our birthright, and, for some of us, our “rusty black” joy.

As black women, we have been poorly prepared to cherish what should matter most to us. Our models in literature and life have been, for the most part, devastating. Even when we wish it, we are not always able to save ourselves for future generations: not our spiritual selves, not our physical characteristics. (In the past, in our literature—and in life too—the birth of a “golden” child to a dark mother has been perceived as a cause for special celebration. But was it? So much of the mother was obliterated, so much changed, in the child, whose birth as often as not was by her unplanned.) But perhaps we
can
learn something, even from the discouraging models of earlier centuries and our own time. Perhaps black women who are writers in the twenty-first century will present a fuller picture of the multiplicity of oppression—and of struggle. Racism, sexism, classism, and colorism will be very much a part of their consciousness. They will have the wonderful novels of black African women to read—Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and others—as nineteenth-century black women did not. They will have a record of the struggles of our own times. They will not think of other women with envy, hatred, or adulation because they are “prizes.” They will not wish to be prizes themselves. How men want them to look, act, speak, dress, acquiesce in beatings and rape will mean nothing whatsoever to them. They will, in fact, spend a lot of time talking to each other, and smiling. Women of all colors will be able to turn their full energies on the restoration of the planet, as they can't now because they're tied up with all this other stuff: divisions, resentments, old hurts, charges and countercharges. And talk about the need for teeth and hip pockets then! Women who are writers in the twenty-first century will undoubtedly praise every one.

In any case, the duty of the writer is not to be tricked, seduced, or goaded into verifying by imitation or even rebuttal, other people's fantasies. In an oppressive society it may well be that
all
fantasies indulged in by the oppressor are destructive to the oppressed. To become involved in them in any way at all is, at the very least, to lose time defining yourself.

To isolate the fantasy we must cleave to reality, to what
we
know,
we
feel,
we
think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing both the dark self and the light.

*The recent discovery of Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel,
Our Nig,
which predates Brown's novel by several years, makes her our first known black novelist. Her story is also, interestingly, about the life of a woman of biracial parents: the mother white, the father black. However, possession of a lighter skin fails to exalt her condition as a black indentured servant in a hostile white, middle-class Northern household before the Civil War.

**For instance, a few years ago I was invited to address a conference in Atlanta called “The Southern Woman: From Myth to Modern Times.” When I received the brochure I felt sick: on the cover, yes indeed, there was a tiny black woman's head, sandwiched between a white woman's head (on top, of course) and an Asian woman's head (on the bottom). On page three or four, a larger picture of an exquisitely dressed black black woman appeared. In between, however, and completely overwhelming these two, was picture after picture of white women. How could I possibly address such a tokenist crowd? Once in Atlanta, I expressed my feeling to one of the black women on the committee that had invited me (a yellow-skinned, wonderfully funny woman who kept us both in giggles), and she dragged me around the floor of the Atlanta Historical Society, where I was scheduled to speak. Pointing to the same women's pictures on the walls that had been printed in the brochure, she said: “This one is black, and this one; that one, and all those over there.” “All those over there” referred to a photograph of the Atlanta Ladies' Auxiliary, circa 1912, all wives of Atlanta's leading black men. Only one of the dozen or so women could pass, in the photograph, for black, and she might have been white, with a tan. I could not resist commenting on the hundred years of struggle that went into “integrating” places like the Atlanta Historical Society, only to be unable, at struggle's end, to tell the difference.

1982

F
ROM THE TIME
I was two years old, until I was six, my best friend was a little girl exactly my age, whose name was Cassie Mae Terrell. Everyone called her “Sister.” Sister Terrell. We
looked
like sisters: with gleaming brown skin and bright dark eyes—with plenty of shining, springy hair, which our mothers decorated with large satin bows … Sister Terrell and I used to spend the night at each other's house, and we would giggle half the night away.

When I was six, Sister and her family moved to New Jersey, and I suffered my first separation trauma. I tried to encourage my father to move to New Jersey, but he wouldn't. For a long time I held him responsible, poor man, for my loss of Sister Terrell—whom I was not to see again for twenty years And whom I didn't forget for a single year.

Throughout grade school, high school, and college, I had close friends like Sister Terrell. I loved them deeply and loyally—and always with the fear that they'd be taken away. And in so many cases, they were. When next I saw Sister Terrell, for example, she had been married for years to a man who literally kept her from eating. So that when her family finally went to rescue her, she was so weak and malnourished they had to carry her off in their arms. She was in this condition when I saw her again. Gone the gleaming skin and bright dark eyes. Gone the spring from her plentiful hair—in fact, gone a good bit of the plentiful hair.

One reason I had loved her was that I love, simply
love,
to giggle, and love to
hear
giggling. And Sister Terrell, at five and six, was an incomparable giggler. Her giggle was one of the best sounds I ever heard in the world. How could anyone, for any reason, wish to stop it?

And yet—she giggled no more.

On my desk there is a picture of me when I was six—dauntless eyes, springy hair, optimistic satin bow and all—and I look at it often; I realize I am always trying to keep faith with the child I was. The child I was thought the women in our local church held together the world. Often kind beyond understanding, sometimes shrewish, stubborn, willfully obtuse, but always
there,
with their dimes and quarters, their spotless children and beloved husbands, building up the church, first, and the local school, second, for the benefit of the community. The child that I was rarely saw individualistic behavior, and when I did see it, for a long time I could understand it only as rejection of community, rather than the self-affirmation it very often was.

The men in my immediate community seemed to love and appreciate their wives; and if the wife had more initiative and energy than the husband, this was not held against her. My father loved my mother's spunk and her inability to lie when asked a direct question. He was himself innately easygoing and disinclined to waste any part of life in argument, and with a mind that easily turned any question asked of him into a “story.”