Words of Fire (100 page)

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,”
American Quarterly
18 (Summer 1966), 151.

Today, in the rural sections of the South, especially on the remnants of the old plantations, one finds households where old grandmothers rule their daughters, sons, and grand-children with a matriarchal authority.

Salpingectomy: Through an abdominal incision, the surgeon cuts both fallopian tubes and ties off the separated ends, after which act there is no way for the egg to pass from the ovary to the womb.

I would like to give particular acknowledgment to the Combahee River Collective's “A Black Feminist Statement.” Because this document espouses “struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression,” it has become a manifesto of radical feminist thought, action, and practice.

One such example is the Port Royal Experiment (1862), the precursor of the Freedmen's Bureau. Port Royal was a program of relief for “freed men and women” in the South Carolina Sea Islands, organized under the auspices of the Boston Education Commission and the Freedmen's Relief Assoc. in New York and the Port Royal Relief Assoc. in Philadelphia, and sanctioned by the Union Army and the Federal Government. See
The Journal of Charolotte Forten
on the “Port Royal Experiment” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Through her Northern bourgeois myopia, Forten recounts her experiences as a black teacher among the black freed men and women and her Northern white women peers.

From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, an African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in
Black Books Bulletin
, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).

Seabury Press, New York, 1970.

The whole argument is painfully reminiscent of Eldridge Cleaver's misogynist assertion, twenty years ago, that rape is a political act, and Norman Mailer's contention that black men were more in touch with their sexuality than whites.

This is not to imply that all sexist cruelty among black people was inherited from white slave owners. On the contrary, in the sections of
The Color Purple
that are set in Africa there is an exploration of the historical oppression of women that is endemic to many traditional African cultures and that continues today.

The poems in this essay are from
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
by Alice Walker (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).

One shining example of criticism by a black man offered
with
love is the review of
The Color Purple,
the movie, by Carl Dix that appeared in the
Revolutionary Worker.
He expressed concern over the way so many of Celie's problems seemed to be solved by her receiving a house and business left to her by her father (who had been lynched when she was a child). He correctly argues that the inheritance of private property is not a viable solution in terms of the masses of poor people and wishes that this aspect of Celie's existence could have been more progressive. I understand this criticism and feel it does indeed project our thoughts forward into the realm of better solutions for the landless, jobless, and propertyless masses. However, I also feel that for Celie's time—the post-Reconstruction era in the South, whose hallmark was the dispossession of blacks—this solution was in fact progressive; it spoke eloquently of the foresight of her father in his attempt to provide for her in a society where black people's attempts to provide for their coming generations were brutally repressed.