In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (38 page)

The one statement in Wallace's book that I made an effort to suppress (beyond writing notes to the author herself: all ignored, as far as I can see in the book) is this one:

From the intricate web of mythology which surrounds the black woman, a fundamental image emerges. It is of a woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but believes herself to be and is, in fact, stronger emotionally than most men. Less of a woman in that she is less “feminine” and helpless, she is really
more
of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserves. In other words, she is a superwoman.

Through the years this image has remained basically intact, unquestioned even by the occasional black woman writer or politician
[my italics].

Her editor requested an endorsement of the book. I agreed but only if this paragraph was removed. “It is a lie,” I said. “I can't speak for politicians but I can certainly speak for myself. I've been hacking away at that stereotype for years, and so have a good many other black women writers.” I thought, not simply of Meridian, but of Janie Crawford, of Pecola, Sula, and Nell, of Edith Jackson, even of Iola LeRoy and Megda, for God's sake. (Characters by black women writers Ms. Wallace is unacquainted with; an ignorance that is acceptable only in someone not writing a book about black women.) “Fifty thousand black women will call you on this one,” I ranted further.

I was too late. Nor was there any apparent attention paid to anything I'd said. My earlier “advice” had in no way been made use of. And perhaps the editor and Wallace were correct not to be swayed. Fifty thousand black women have so far not even managed to write letters of protest to
Ms.
(where an excerpt of the book appeared) with their objections, though I have received both letters and phone calls, as if it is my responsibility to make the bad parts of
Black Macho
go away.**

No one can do that now. Nor can we carp continually about the bad parts without facing the many truths of the good parts. And there
are
good parts. It is a book that, while not sound or visionary or even honest enough to “shape the eighties,” can still help us shape our thinking. It is, in short, an expression of one black woman's reality. And I persist in believing all such expressions (preferably stopping short of self-contempt and contempt for others) are valuable and will, in the long run, do us more good than harm.

*
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf

**Presumably because I was an editor at Ms. at the time and held responsible for every black piece published, though I was not the editor for Wallace's piece.

1979

W
E LIVED ON
a farm in the South in the fifties, and my brothers, the four of them I knew (the fifth had left home when I was three years old), were allowed to watch animals being mated. This was not unusual; nor was it considered unusual that my older sister and I were frowned upon if we even asked, innocently, what was going on. One of my brothers explained the mating one day, using words my father had given him: “The bull is getting a little something on his stick,” he said. And he laughed. “What stick?” I wanted to know. “Where did he get it? How did he pick it up? Where did he put it?” All my brothers laughed.

I believe my mother's theory about raising a large family of five boys and three girls was that the father should teach the boys and the mother teach the girls the facts, as one says, of life. So my father went around talking about bulls getting something on their sticks and she went around saying girls did not need to know about such things. They were “womanish” (a very bad way to be in those days) if they asked.

The thing was, watching the matings filled my brothers with an aimless sort of lust, as dangerous as it was unintentional. They knew enough to know that cows, months after mating, produced calves, but they were not bright enough to make the same connection between women and their offspring.

Sometimes, when I think of my childhood, it seems to me a particularly hard one. But in reality, everything awful that happened to me didn't seem to happen to
me
at all, but to my older sister. Through some incredible power to negate my presence around people I did not like, which produced invisibility (as well as an ability to appear mentally vacant when I was nothing of the kind), I was spared the humiliation she was subjected to, though at the same time, I felt every bit of it. It was as if she suffered for my benefit, and I vowed early in my life that none of the things that made existence so miserable for her would happen to me.

The fact that she was not allowed at official matings did not mean she never saw any. While my brothers followed my father to the mating pens on the other side of the road near the barn, she stationed herself near the pigpen, or followed our many dogs until they were in a mating mood, or, failing to witness something there, she watched the chickens. On a farm it is impossible
not
to be conscious of sex, to wonder about it, to dream … but to whom was she to speak of her feelings? Not to my father, who thought all young women perverse. Not to my mother, who pretended all her children grew out of stumps she magically found in the forest. Not to me, who never found anything wrong with this lie.

When my sister menstruated she wore a thick packet of clean rags between her legs. It stuck out in front like a penis. The boys laughed at her as she served them at the table. Not knowing any better, and because our parents did not dream of actually
discussing
what was going on, she would giggle nervously at herself. I hated her for giggling, and it was at those times I would think of her as dim-witted. She never complained, but she began to have strange fainting fits whenever she had her period. Her head felt as if it were splitting, she said, and everything she ate came up again. And her cramps were so severe she could not stand. She was forced to spend several days of each month in bed.

My father expected all of his sons to have sex with women. “Like bulls,” he said, “a man
needs
to get a little something on his stick.” And so, on Saturday nights, into town they went, chasing the girls. My sister was rarely allowed into town alone, and if the dress she wore fit too snugly at the waist, or if her cleavage dipped too far below her collarbone, she was made to stay home.

“But why can't I go too,” she would cry, her face screwed up with the effort not to wail.

“They're boys, your brothers,
that's
why they can go.”

Naturally, when she got the chance, she responded eagerly to boys. But when this was discovered she was whipped and locked up in her room.

I would go in to visit her.

“Straight Pine,”* she would say, “you don't know what it
feels
like to want to be loved by a man.”

“And if this is what you get for feeling like it I never will,” I said, with—I hoped—the right combination of sympathy and disgust.

“Men smell so good,” she would whisper ecstatically. “And when they look into your eyes, you just melt.”

Since they were so hard to catch, naturally she thought almost any of them terrific.

“Oh, that Alfred!” she would moon over some mediocre, square-headed boy, “he's so
sweet!
” And she would take his ugly picture out of her bosom and kiss it.

My father was always warning her not to come home if she ever found herself pregnant. My mother constantly reminded her that abortion was a sin. Later, although she never became pregnant, her period would not come for months at a time. The painful symptoms, however, never varied or ceased. She fell for the first man who loved her enough to beat her for looking at someone else, and when I was still in high school, she married him.

My fifth brother, the one I never knew, was said to be different from the rest. He had not liked matings. He would not watch them. He thought the cows should be given a choice. My father had disliked him because he was soft. My mother took up for him. “Jason is just tender-hearted,” she would say in a way that made me know he was her favorite; “he takes after me.” It was true that my mother cried about almost anything.

Who was this oldest brother? I wondered.

“Well,” said my mother, “he was someone who always loved you. Of course he was a great big boy when you were born and out working on his own. He worked on a road gang building roads. Every morning before he left he would come in the room where you were and pick you up and give you the biggest kisses. He used to look at you and just smile. It's a pity you don't remember him.”

I agreed.

At my father's funeral I finally “met” my oldest brother. He is tall and black with thick gray hair above a young-looking face. I watched my sister cry over my father until she blacked out from grief. I saw my brothers sobbing, reminding each other of what a great father he had been. My oldest brother and I did not shed a tear between us. When I left my father's grave he came up and introduced himself. “You don't ever have to walk alone,” he said, and put his arms around me.

One out of five ain't
too
bad, I thought, snuggling up.

But I didn't discover until recently his true uniqueness: He is the only one of my brothers who assumes responsibility for all his children. The other four all fathered children during those Saturday-night chases of twenty years ago. Children—my nieces and nephews whom I will probably never know—they neither acknowledge as their own, provide for, or even see.

It was not until I became a student of women's liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father. I needed an ideology that would define his behavior in context. The black movement had given me an ideology that helped explain his colorism (he
did
fall in love with my mother partly because she was so light; he never denied it). Feminism helped explain his sexism. I was relieved to know his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but, rather, an imitation of the behavior of the society around us.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience. “The more things the better,” as O'Connor and Welty both have said, speaking, one of marriage, the other of Catholicism.

I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men (for example; being particularly handy in this sort of comparison)—whether in films or in person—offered man as dominator, as killer, and always as hypocrite.

My father failed because he copied the hypocrisy. And my brothers—except for one—never understood they must represent half the world to me, as I must represent the other half to them.**

*A pseudonym.

**Since this essay was written, my brothers have offered their name, acknowledgment, and some support to all their children.

1975

J
UST EAST OF
the central African great jungle belt lies an open Savanna believed to have been the home of the first human beings—hunters and gatherers set apart from the great apes in part by their ability to walk upright, which enabled them to fashion tools. Now, studies being carried on… propose that the first implements crafted by these people were not designed by men to hunt animals, as has long been assumed, but by women, to gather plants for eating.

—“New Anthropological Finds: The Swords Started Out as Ploughshares,”
MS
. Gazette, August 1979

IT IS TRUE—

I've always loved

the daring

ones

Like the black young

man

Who tried

to crash

All barriers

at once,

wanted to

swim

At a white

beach (in Alabama)

Nude.

Of all the poems I wrote during the period of most intense struggle for Civil Rights* (the early sixties), this one (from
Once)
remains my favorite. I like it because it reveals a moment in which I recognized something important about myself, and my own motivations for joining a historic, profoundly revolutionary movement for human change. It also reveals why the term “Civil Rights” could never adequately express black people's revolutionary goals, because it could never adequately describe our longings and our dreams, or those of the non-black people who stood among us. And because, as a term, it is totally lacking in color.

In short, although I value the Civil Rights Movement
deeply,
I have never liked the term itself. It has no music, it has no poetry. It makes one think of bureaucrats rather than of sweaty faces, eyes bright and big for
Freedom!,
marching feet. No; one thinks instead of metal filing cabinets and boring paperwork.

This is because “Civil Rights” is a term that did not evolve out of black culture, but, rather, out of American law As such, it is a term of limitation. It speaks only to physical possibilities—necessary and treasured, of course—but not of the spirit. Even as it promises assurance of greater freedoms it narrows the area in which people might expect to find them No wonder “Black Power,” “Black Panther Party,” even “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” and “Umoja” always sounded so much better and
sui generis,
if in the end they accomplished (perhaps) less.

When one reads the poems, especially, of the period, this becomes very clear. The poems, like the songs of that time, reveal an entirely different
quality of imagination and spirit
than the term “Civil Rights” describes. The poems are full of protest and “civil disobedience,” yes, but they are also full of playfulness and whimsicality, an attraction to world families and the cosmic sea—full of a lot of naked people longing to swim free.