It occurred to me that my neck could be at that minute under some man's heel, and this woman would stroll by and say, "Right on."
I burst into the loudest tears I've ever shed. And though I soon dried my face, I didn't stop crying inside for . . Maybe I haven't stopped yet. But that's okay; what I'm crying about is worth it.
But a really fascinating thing happened around my crying: many of the women blamed me for crying! I couldn't believe it. They came over to me, one or two at a time, and said:
"I understand what you are trying to say ..." (I wasn't trying, I muttered through clenched teeth, I said it; you just didn't listen.) "but don't let it get to you!"
Or: "Why would you let anyone make you cry?!"
Not one of them ever said a word about why young women of color were killing themselves. They could take the black woman as invincible, as she was portrayed to some extent in my speech (what they heard was the invincible part), but there was no sympathy for struggle that ended in defeat. Which meant there was no sympathy for struggle itself--only for "winning."
I was reminded of something that had puzzled me about the response of black people to Movement people in the South. During the seven years I lived in Mississippi, I never knew a Movement person (and I include myself) who wasn't damaged in some way from having to put her or his life, principles, children, on the line over long, stressful periods. And this is only natural. But there was a way in which the black community could not look at this. I remember a young boy who was shot through the neck by racist whites, and almost died. When he recovered, he was the same gentle, sweet boy he'd always been, but he hated white people, which at that time didn't fit in with black people's superior notion of themselves as people who could consistently turn the other cheek. Nobody ever really tried to incorporate the new reality of this boy's life. When they spoke of him it was as if his life stopped just before the shot.
I knew a young girl who "desegregated" the local white high school in her small town. No one, except her teachers, spoke to her for four years. There was one white guy--whom she spoke of with contempt--who left love notes in her locker. This girl suffered acute anxiety; so that when she dragged herself home from school every day, she went to bed, and stayed there until the next morning, when she walked off, ramrod straight, to school. Even her parents talked only about the bravery, never about the cost.
It was at the Radcliffe symposium that I saw that black women are more loyal to black men than they are to themselves, a dangerous state of affairs that has its logical end in self-destructive behavior.
But I also learned something else:
The same panelist who would not address the suicide rate of young women of color also took the opportunity to tell me what she thought my "problem" was. Since I spoke so much of my mother, she said my problem was that I was "trying to 'carry' my mother, and the weight is too heavy."
June, who was sitting beside me, and who was angry but not embarrassed by my tears, put her arms around me and said:
"But why shouldn't you carry your mother; she carried you, didn't she?"
That is perfection in a short response.
I had to giggle. And the giggle and the tears and the holding and the sanctioning of responsibility to those we love and those who have loved us is what I know will see us through.
1979
TO THE BLACK SCHOLAR
[I wrote the following memo to the editors of the Black Scholar in response to an article that appeared in the 1979 March/April issue written by Dr. Robert Staples and titled "The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists." The editors considered the memo both too "personal" and too "hysterical" to publish. They suggested change, and I withdrew it.]
IT WILL NOT DO any good--and is a waste of time--to attack Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace, since they are not, in fact, attacking you. They are affirming themselves and remarking on the general condition of black life as they know it, which they are entitled to do, middle-class black women or not. Whatever flaws exist in their vision or in their works (and there are some), there is also a sizable element of truth that black women and men all over the country recognize. (Not simply us "angry black feminists" who are in the women's movement anyway, according to Staples, not because we are intelligent, sensitive, and self-respecting, but because we have been called to the aid of white feminists to put black males "in their place." A sad and scurrilous insult to black women liberationists the world over, and one designed, in this essay, to produce more heat than light.) That element of truth is that, because of sexism (as much as racism, generally, and capitalism, yes) black women and men (who, despite all "isms," own their own souls, I hope) are at a crisis in their relationship with each other. There is hatred, dislike, distrust between us. Should this continue, we can say good-bye to the black peoplehood our myths and legends, struggles and triumphs have promised us.
Instead of arguing, at once, about whether there is or is not sexism in the black community (and how could our community possibly be different from every other in that one respect), look around you. Look at the black men and women that you know. Look at your family. Look at your brothers--and their wives. Look at your sisters--and their husbands. Look at all those relatives you admire who are not tied up this way. Look at the children. "Strong black women are not perceived as feminine in this culture." Are your daughters weak? Do your sons think the color black itself too "strong" to be feminine? What does this mean? Look at what we are told: We are told, for example, that many black women are in fact alone and unhappy. Yet Shange and Wallace are criticized for saying we should learn to enjoy it.
Look hard at yourself. Look hard at how you feel, really, about the people among whom fate so indifferently dropped you. Would you feel better as someone else? Look at what we actually do to each other. Look at what we actually say. Look about you as if there were no white people about, whom you have been wishing to impress. Know that if we fail to impress each other, we've lost something precious that we once had.
Now you are in good condition to see Ntozake Shange's play.* Excellent shape to hoist a beer (you always need something, watching relatives) and read Michele Wallace's book. Try not to think how successful they are. Try to blot out how much money Shange has made. Don't be pissed off at how beautifully she writes, or with what courage and vulnerability. Resist the temptation to blame her for all those audiences from Marin and Scarsdale. Remember if you can that she didn't know they were coming.
Think big.
We have been a People.
What are we now?
And for how long?
Having said this, and having, I hope, made it clear that I do not find the Staples article at all useful, except as a reminder of how far, still, we have to go (apparently the whole way), let me add to it.
One of my own great weaknesses, which I am beginning to recognize more clearly than ever around the Michele Wallace book, is a deep reluctance to criticize other black women. I am much more comfortable praising them. Surely there is no other group more praiseworthy, but on the other hand, no other group is more deserving of justice, and good criticism must be, I think, simple justice.
In Michele Wallace's book, there are many good things, things that (though not as original as she thinks) can be very helpful to us, if we will hear them. For example, it is really true that unless you are very old and fat, you risk being both insulted and assaulted in any black ghetto neighborhood in America. Black men speak to us like dogs: "Hey, Brown Coat!" "Come here, Black Jacket!" "Hey, girl! Cutie! Won't speak, huh?! What you need is a good fucking! Bitch." And these were all things addressed to me while attempting to get my shopping done in the past two days. Try respecting people who talk to you like that. Look at what we are laughing at on television: it is true, as Wallace points out, that black men made it painfully clear that, as Redd Foxx articulated it, they would rather have a Raquel Welch in the bedroom than a Shirley Chisholm in the White House. What could be more sexist and more pathetic? And look at
the ignorance of black men about black women. Though black women have religiously read every black male writer that came down the pike (usually presenting black females as witches and warlocks), few black men have thought it of any interest at all to read black women. As far as they're concerned, they have the whole picture. In this respect, Michele Wallace is also guilty. She points to male ignorance throughout the book, yet for her own research she chose mainly white and black male writers. And though this was pointed out to her before the book was published, she considered the male version of reality enough. Though she tossed in Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Nikki Giovanni at the end, it is a puzzle to the reader what we are to make of them, since the stereotypes she attempts to apply to each woman cannot possibly fit creative, moving, thoughtful, and evolving human beings, not to mention human beings who have the added possibilities that come from being black women.
The line in Wallace's book that has given black women more cases of apoplexy than any other is this one: "I think that the black woman thinks of her history and her condition as a wound which makes her different and therefore special and therefore exempt from human responsibility." Like the majority of black women in America, I am delighted when another black woman speaks her mind and offers her own opinion, but this one--even in context--is a stunner. In what way have we not been responsible? How have we been exempt? This statement seems criticism taken to such extreme that there is nothing one can think of to which it actually applies.
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
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
WE 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.