One piece of evidence for the above. At the rehearsal yesterday J---- was on the fourth floor shouting to someone. H---- yelled up to her, "J----, don't shout!" J---- replied, defending herself, and H---- interrupted her by saying sharply, "J----!" as if he were reprimanding a child or a dog. I was sick. This is the essence. He will try to make her into his slave, his child, in short, his wife.
The only people Smith feels drawn to at the wedding are the servants catering the affair.
Directly after her own wedding some years earlier, Smith burned all the journals she had written, "partly because I felt I had no safe place for them away from my husband and partly because one of my duties in that marriage was to forget who I was before it." For four years she kept unpublished her notes on J---'s wedding, a crucial piece of black women's experience, until the support of other black feminists and lesbians permitted her to deal with it.
Reading Smith's biting, often arch account of the wedding ("Did I mention that this is frightfully badly organized? Everything in chaos. But I have no doubt it will come off. Unfortunately.") I think of another New England dyke (who may have fainted at the word, for all I know), Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958), who, sadly, according to Gloria Hull's moving essay "Under the Days: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke," was never able publicly to affirm her love of women, not even, often, to the women themselves. And who, though considered a good "minor" poet by male critics who were as patronizing then as they are now, published very little, and what she did publish was mutilated by her attempts to camouflage the truth.
The question ... is: What did it mean to be a Black lesbian/poet in America at the beginning of the Twentieth century? First, it meant that you wrote (or half wrote)--in isolation--a lot which you did not show and knew you could not publish. It meant that when you did write to be printed, you did so in shackles--chained between the real experience you wanted to say and the conventions that would not give you voice. It meant that you fashioned a few race and nature poems, transliterated lyrics, and double-tongued verses which--sometimes (racism being what it is)--got published. It meant, finally, that you stopped writing altogether, dying, no doubt, with your real gifts stifled within--and leaving behind (in a precious few cases) the little to survive of your true self in fugitive pieces.
And for what?
So that, fifty years later, a young black man can say, with much of the black community echoing his hostility to the priceless expressions of a black woman's life: "This bullshit should not be encouraged."
Grimke wrote:
The days fall upon me;
...
They cover me They crush, They smother.
Who will ever find me
Under the days?
Grimke's life was indeed a buried one. She was smothered by "the days" that did not encourage her, and "had no spirit left to leave us." Unlike her contemporary Alice Dunbar-Nelson, poet and journalist, wife of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and lover of women and men, who managed to affirm her complete self in unpublished material she contrived to leave behind, Grimke was defeated. Flattened Crushed. "She is a lesson," says Hull, "whose meaning each person will interpret as they see fit and are able. What she means to me, is that we must work, write, live so that who and what she was never has to mean the same."
In Shockley's essay on the absence of black lesbians in American literature, she quotes Muhammed Ali's response to a female reporter for the Amsterdam News who asked him to comment on the ERA and the equalizing of economic opportunities. Ali replied: "... some professions shouldn't be open to women because they can't handle certain jobs, like construction work. Lesbians, maybe, but not women."
A black woman, perhaps (let us say) our daughter, needs to work. Has to work. Wants to work. Wants to work at construction. She reads Ali's words and knows all her community will respect and believe what he says. Our daughter's spirit is torn. If she takes the job her head is bent, her shoulders hunched against the assaults of ignorance. If she does not take the job, she starves, goes on welfare, or is easily defeated by a world that prefers broken black spirits anyway.
In this one comment Ali undermines our daughter's belief in the wholeness of her maternal ancestors (were not our slave great-grandmothers, to whom modern-day construction work would doubtless seem easy, women?), threatens her present existence, and narrows her future. As surely as if he clamped a chain on her body, he has clamped a chain on her spirit. And by our silence, our fear of being labeled lesbian, we help hold it there. And this is inexcusable. Because we know, whatever else we don't know and are afraid to guess, black lesbians are black women. It is in our power to say that the days of intimidating black women with impunity are over.
I was once criticized because I wrote that Zora Neale Hurston's critics said she "must have been" bisexual, she had such tremendous drive. "I've never seen that in print," the person criticizing said. I replied that our oral tradition, which works as well as ever, kills successful black women off at house parties. For black women, malicious gossip (elevated to the status of "news" in the sad examples of Hurston and Nella Larsen) is the criticism that damages our lives and our work, which, because we are women, is rarely considered on its own terms.
During the sixties my own work was often dismissed by black reviewers "because of my life style," a euphemism for my interracial marriage. At black literature conferences it would be examined fleetingly, if at all, in light of this "traitorous" union, by critics who were themselves frequently interracially married and who, moreover, hung on every word from Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, John A. Williams, and LeRoi Jones (to name a few), all of whom were at some time in their lives interracially connected, either legally or in more than casual ways. Clearly it was not interracialism itself that bothered the critics, but that I, a black woman, had dared to exercise the same prerogative as they. While it is fine for black men to embrace other black men, black women, white women and white men in intimate relationships, the black woman, to be accepted as a black woman, must prefer being alone to the risk of enjoying "the wrong choice." Now that I am no longer married, the value of my work is questioned because of my "politics." This means, I think, what the first dismissal meant: that I am a black woman. Something is always wrong with us. To those who feel this, "lesbianism" is simply another, perhaps more extreme, version of "something wrong with us." After all, it is passe to say we're too black, or too loud, or that our kinky hair clashes with pastel interiors. And to say we're too bourgeois or work too closely with whitefolks raises eyebrows if it comes from black professors at Harvard or Yale. The charge of "emotionalism" occasionally bandied in our direction today merely replaces an earlier charge of unemotionalism, hard-heartedness, and frigid bitchiness.
Luckily, we have a fighting tradition. Ida B. Wells wrote many years ago that "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home," which the murdered black women in Boston should have known. But in any case, if we are writers, we have our typewriters, and if we are not writers, we have our tongues. Like black men and women who refused to be the exceptional "pet" Negro for whites, and who instead said they were "niggers" too (the original "crime" of "niggers" and lesbians is that they prefer themselves), perhaps black women writers and nonwriters should say, simply, whenever black lesbians are being put down, held up, messed over, and generally told their lives should not be encouraged, We are all lesbians. For surely it is better to be thought a lesbian, and to say and write your life exactly as you experience it, than to be a token "pet" black woman for those whose contempt for our autonomous existence makes them a menace to human life.
Conditions: Five represents a continuation of the struggle for self-definition and affirmation that is the essence of what "African-American" means in this country. It is because black lesbians are black women out of this tradition that the chain will never be accepted as a natural garment.
1980
IF THE PRESENT LOOKS LIKE THE PAST, WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK
LIKE?
DEAR----,
After our talk of all the things hoped gone forever but now "back with the wind"--the KKK, obscene national "leadership," "good hair"--I thought somewhat uneasily of something I had said in reply to your question about Color. You may recall that we were speaking of the hostility many black black women feel toward light-skinned black women, and you said, "Well, I'm light. It's not my fault. And I'm not going to apologize for it." I said apology for one's color is not what anyone is asking. What black black women would be interested in, I think, is a consciously heightened awareness on the part of light black women that they are capable, often quite unconsciously, of inflicting pain upon them; and that unless the question of Colorism--in my definition, prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color--is addressed in our communities and definitely in our black "sisterhoods" we cannot, as a people, progress. For colorism, like colonialism, sexism, and racism, impedes us.
What bothers me is my statement that I myself, halfway between light and dark--a definite brown--must align myself with black black women; that not to do so is to spit in our black mother's face. Meaning the primordial, the Edenic, the Goddess, Mother Africa. For now I recall meeting your actual mother, who looks white, as did your grandmother, whose picture you once showed me, and whose beautiful old clothes you sometimes wear. For you, the idea of alignment with black black women solely on the basis of color must seem ridiculous and colorist, and I have come to agree with you.
Still, I think there is probably as much difference between the life of a black black woman and a "high yellow" black woman as between a "high yellow" woman and a white woman. And I am worried, constantly, about the hatred the black black woman encounters within black society. To me, the black black woman is our essential mother--the blacker she is the more us she is--and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.
Ironically, much of what I've learned about color I've learned because I have a mixed-race child. Because she is lighter-skinned, straighter-haired than I, her life--in this racist, colorist society--is infinitely easier. And so I understand the subtle programming I, my mother, and my grandmother before me fell victim to. Escape the pain, the ridicule, escape the jokes, the lack of attention, respect, dates, even a job, any way you can. And if you can't escape, help your children to escape. Don't let them suffer as you have done. And yet, what have we been escaping to? Freedom used to be the only answer to that question. But for some of our parents it is as if freedom and whiteness were the same destination, and that presents a problem for any person of color who does not wish to disappear. Thinking about color, thinking about you, me, my daughter and mother, I thought of a story that illustrates some of what I've just said. It begins in the South, when I was in my late teens, and ends in a coffee shop in New Mexico some twelve years later
Doreena, who figures prominantly in the story, haunts me, even today, and I find myself worried about her, and wondering how she is. She was, when I knew her, a brilliant, elegant, and very very black girl. To look at Doreena was as Mari Evans says in one of her poems "to be restored." For she was "pure." Genes untampered with. Totally "unimproved" by infusions of white or Indian blood. She was beautiful. However, the word "beautiful" itself was never used to describe black women in those days. They might be called "handsome" in a pinch. "Her skin is black but she is sure nuff pretty," someone might have thought, but not sung. Stevie Wonder's lyrics, though in our time backward in this one instance ("but" rather than "and"), would have been considered revolutionary in the fifties and early sixties. "Beautiful" was for white women and black women who look like you. Medium browns like me might evoke "good-looking" or "fine." A necessary act of liberation within myself was to acknowledge the beauty of black black women, but I was always aware I was swimming against the tide.
In any case, Doreena was rejected by a very light-skinned young man whom she had been dating for some time, with an eye toward marriage. His parents said she was too dark and would not look right in their cream-colored family. And she did what many black black women do when rejected because of their color, she flung herself into the purest, blackest arms she could find. Those of a West Indian. (She might, instead, have gone the other "traditional" way: into the arms of a "real" white person, thumbing her nose at the "fakes.")
Well, there went our sister Doreena. Off into a sexist, patriarchial, provincial culture she didn't understand, one felt fairly sure.
And what of the young man? Let us call him Hypolytus. Hypolytus married a Finn. (Memo to his parents.) And, at a coffee shop in New Mexico where he and I spent an hour over lunch, he told me the following tale: He and his Finnish wife had divorced rather soon. For one thing, she insisted on living in Finland; a move he had definitely not expected, since he was of the "Whither thou goest .. ." school, but ascribing this commitment only to women, of course; and he had recently visited her and their daughter there. While there, he took the daughter shopping. And it was the various shopkeepers of Helsinki--used to American tourists--who translated for him and the child, because she did not speak English and his scant knowledge of Finnish had lapsed.
I think it was hearing this story, and feeling so deeply that our brother Hypolytus had been tricked by society and his parents that caused me to examine color oppression in my own experience and my own life. I remembered ----, who was asked by the light-skinned girls who shared one end of our college dormitory to move somewhere else, because she was so dark; the men who came to call on them found her blackness "inharmonious." I remembered being literally pushed off the sidewalk outside the Dom in New York, by young black men who wanted to speak to the white women I was with. Perhaps it is no accident that my best friend during this period was a black black woman from Africa who was never approached by black men for dates. She dated instead a white seminary student from Texas, while my fiance was an Irish Jew from New England.
This essay is for you. You are younger than I, so I think of you as a younger sister who will take all that your older sisters have learned even further. A sister I do not wish to lose to the entreaties of parents or grandparents standing behind you whispering "lighten up" or "darken up" the race. Nor do I, a dark woman, intend to give you up. When we walk down a street together and those who hate their black mothers admire only you (really your skin color and hair) we will not let this divide us, but will think instead with pity of their ignorance and sure end in self-eradication. For no one can hate their source and survive, as has been said.
The woman whose statement precedes the essay was my teacher in high school. A woman of courage, great love of us, and soul. It can only be good for us as a people to attempt to deal with the pain and alienation she reveals to us here.
In Sisterhood,
Alice
A Consciousness Raising Paper for Black Black Women and Whiter Black Women Who Wish to Struggle Together Over the "Dirty Little'Secret'" of Color in African-American Life
Equally important, however [to "What it is, brother?"], is "What it is, sister?" No one dares to utter the plight of her reality, not even my black sisters themselves. But what it is, is the great cannon of cruel racism directed toward the black black woman by the black middle class. The black middle class has for generations excluded the black black woman from the mainstream of black middle-class society, and it has, by its discrimination against her, induced in itself a divisive cancer that has chopped the black race in this country into polarized sections; consequently the black middle class has devoured its own soul and is doomed, a large number of black working class people believe, to extinction.
What it is, is an insanity that has helped whites turn blacks on themselves and that has caused the black middle class to claw itself into a form of psychic annihilation.
Thus the black working class is beginning to ask itself the questions: "What is a people that props itself up on the color of its skin? And what is a people that excludes the wom
b-source of its own genetic heritage?" For certainly every Afro-American is descended from a black black woman. What then can be the destiny of a people that pampers and cherishes the blood of the white slaveholder who maimed and degraded their female ancestor? What can be the future of a class of descendants of slaves that implicitly gives slaveholders greater honor than the African women they enslaved? What can be the end of a class that pretends to honor blackness while secretly despising working class blackskinned women whose faces reveal no trace of white blood?
--Trellie Jeffers, "The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class," The Black Scholar
For many years I pondered Jeffers's statement, then turned to black literature, because it is so very instructive, to see whether it had support. I began with three nineteenth-century novels by black women, as background, and this is what I found.
In the first novel one character says to another: "But if you'd seed them putty white hands of hern you'd never think she kept her own house, let 'lone anybody else's.
"My! but she's putty. Beautiful long hair comes way down her back: putty blue eyes, an' jez ez white as anybody in dis place... ."
In the second novel, it goes like this:
"Meg Randal opened wide a pair of lovely dark eyes and raised two small, white hands in surprise.
"Ethel sat down and took one of Meg's perfect little hands in her own. Meg's hand was her one source of pride, and it would almost seem as if she were justified in this pride. Such a delicate, white, slender, dimpled hand it was!"