Words of Fire (38 page)

Certainly the wholesale rape of slave women must have had a profound impact on the slave community. Yet it could not succeed in its intrinsic aim of stifling the impetus towards struggle. Countless black women did not passively submit to these abuses, as the slaves in general refused to passively accept their bondage. The struggles of the slave woman in the sexual realm were a continuation of the resistance interlaced in the slave's daily existence. As such, this was yet another form of insurgency, a response to a politically tinged sexual repression.

Even E. Franklin Frazier (who goes out of his way to defend the thesis that “the master in his mansion and his colored mistress in her special house nearby represented the final triumph of social ritual in the presence of the deepest feelings of human solidarity”)
⁴³
could not entirely ignore the black woman who fought back. He notes: “That physical compulsion was necessary at times to secure submission on the part of black women . . . is supported by historical evidence and has been preserved in the tradition of Negro families.”
⁴⁴

The sexual contest was one of many arenas in which the black woman had to prove herself as a warrior against oppression. What Frazier unwillingly concedes would mean that countless children brutally fathered by whites were conceived in the thick of battle. Frazier himself cites the story of a black woman whose great-grandmother, a former slave, would describe with great zest the battles behind all her numerous scars—that is, all save one. In response to questions concerning the unexplained scar, she had always simply said: “White men are as low as dogs, child, stay away from them.” The mystery was not unveiled until after the death of this brave woman: “She received that scar at the hands of her master's youngest son, a boy of about eighteen years at the time she conceived their child, my grandmother Ellen.”
⁴⁵

An intricate and savage web of oppression intruded at every moment into the black woman's life during slavery. Yet a single theme appears at every juncture: the woman transcending, refusing, fighting back, asserting herself over and against terrifying obstacles. It was not her comrade brother against whom her incredible strength was directed. She fought alongside her man, accepting or providing guidance according to her talents and the nature of their tasks. She was in no sense an authoritarian figure; neither
her domestic role nor her acts of resistance could relegate the man to the shadows. On the contrary, she herself had just been forced to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity in order to assume her rightful place beside the insurgent male.

This portrait cannot, of course, presume to represent every individual slave woman. It is rather a portrait of the potentials and possibilities inherent in the situation to which slave women were anchored. Invariably there were those who did not realize this potential. There were those who were indifferent and a few who were outright traitors. But certainly they were not the vast majority. The image of black women enchaining their men, cultivating relationships with the oppressor, is a cruel fabrication that must be called by its right name. It is a dastardly ideological weapon designed to impair our capacity for resistance today by foisting upon us the ideal of male supremacy.

According to a time-honored principle, advanced by Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and numerous other theorists, the status of women in any given society is a barometer measuring the overall level of social development. As Fanon has masterfully shown, the strength and efficacy of social struggles —and especially revolutionary movements—bear an immediate relationship to the range and quality of female participation.

The meaning of this principle is strikingly illustrated by the role of the black woman during slavery. Attendant to the indiscriminate, brutal pursuit of profit, the slave woman attained a correspondingly brutal status of equality. But in practice, she could work up a fresh content for this deformed equality by inspiring and participating in acts of resistance of every form and color. She could turn the weapon of equality in struggle against the avaricious slave system that had engendered the mere caricature of equality in oppression. The black woman's activities increased the total incidence of antislavery assaults. But most important, without consciously rebellious black women, the theme of resistance could not have become so thoroughly intertwined in the fabric of daily existence. The status of black women within the community of slaves was definitely a barometer indicating the overall potential for resistance.

This process did not end with the formal dissolution of slavery. Under the impact of racism, the black woman has been continually constrained to inject herself into the desperate struggle for existence. She—like her man —has been compelled to work for wages, providing for her family as she was previously forced to provide for the slaveholding class. The infinitely onerous nature of this equality should never be overlooked. For the black woman has always also remained harnessed to the chores of the household. Yet, she could never be exhaustively defined by her uniquely “female” responsibilities.

As a result, black women have made significant contributions to struggles
against the racism and the dehumanizing exploitation of a wrongly organized society. In fact, it would appear that the intense levels of resistance historically maintained by black people and thus the historical function of the black liberation struggle as harbinger of change throughout the society are due in part to the greater
objective
equality between the black man and the black woman. Du Bois put it this way:

Official and unofficial attempts to blunt the effects of the egalitarian tendencies as between the black man and woman should come as no surprise. The matriarch concept, embracing the clichéd “female castrator,” is, in the last instance, an open weapon of ideological warfare. Black men and women alike remain its potential victims—men unconsciously lunging at the woman, equating her with the myth; women sinking back into the shadows, lest an aggressive posture resurrect the myth in themselves.

The myth must be consciously repudiated as myth, and the black woman in her true historical contours must be resurrected. We, the black women of today, must accept the full weight of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains. Our fight, while identical in spirit, reflects different conditions and thus implies different paths of struggle. But as heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom.

ENDNOTES

1
It is interesting to note a parallel in Nazi Germany: with all its ranting and raving about motherhood and the family, Hitler's regime made a conscious attempt to strip the family of virtually all its social functions. The thrust of their unspoken program for the family was to reduce it to a biological unit and to force its members to relate in an unmediated fashion to the fascist bureaucracy. Clearly the Nazis endeavored to crush the family in order to ensure that it could not become a center from which oppositional activity might originate.

2
Herbert Aptheker, ed.,
A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States
(New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 272.

3
Andrew Billingsley,
Black Families in White America
(Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 61.

4
John Henrik Clarke, “The Black Woman: A Figure in World History,”
Essence
(July 1971).

5
Karl Marx,
Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 389. [Davis's translation.
Ed
.]

6
Friedrich Engels,
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
(New York: International Publishers, 1942), 107.

7
Frederick Douglass,
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 96.

8
W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater
, Voices from Within the Veil
(New York: AMS Press, 1969), 185.

9
Lewis Clarke,
Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution
(Boston: 1846), 127 [Quoted by E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in the United States
].

10
Moses Grandy,
Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America
(Boston: 1844), 18 [Quoted by Frazier].

11
Ibid.

12
Marx,
Grundrisse
, 266. [Davis's translation. Ed.]

13
Earl Conrad, “I Bring You General Tubman,”
Black Scholar
1 nos. 3–4 (January/February 1970): 4.

14
In February, 1949, Herbert Aptheker published an essay in
Masses and Mainstream
entitled “The Negro Woman.” As yet, however, I have been unable to obtain it.

15
Herbert Aptheker, “Slave Guerrilla Warfare” in
To Be Free, Studies in American Negro History
(New York: International Publishers, 1969), 11.

16
Herbert Aptheker,
American Negro Slave Revolts
(New York: International Publishers, 1970), 169.

17
Ibid., 173.

18
Ibid., 181.

19
Ibid., 182.

20
Ibid., 190.

21
Ibid., 145.

22
Ibid., 201.

23
Ibid., 207.

24
Ibid., 215.

25
Ibid., 239.

26
Ibid., 241–242.

27
Ibid., 247.

28
Ibid., 251.

29
Aptheker,
Documentary History
, 55–57.

30
Aptheker,
Slave Revolts
, 259.

31
Ibid., 277.

32
Ibid., 259.

33
Ibid., 281.

34
Ibid., 487.

35
Aptheker, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 27.

36
Aptheker,
Slave Revolts
, 342.

37
Aptheker, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 28.

38
Ibid., 29.

39
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
(New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 18–19.

40
August Bebel,
Women and Socialism
(New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910), 66–69.

41
Frantz Fanon,
A Dying Colonialism
(New York: Grove, 1967), 119.

42
Du Bois,
Darkwater
, 172.

43
E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 69.

44
Ibid., 53.

45
Ibid., 53–54.

46
Du Bois,
Darkwater
, 185.

M
ichele Wallace, born in Harlem and the daughter of feminist artist Faith Ringgold, was a founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization (1974). She is best known for the controversial feminist polemic she wrote in her twenties—
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
(1978)—which is a critique of the male-dominant civil rights and misogynistic Black Power movements, and a scathing expose of sexual politics within the African American community. She also debunked the myth of black women as “superwomen” who have no need for feminism.
Black Macho
generated a storm of criticism within the black community, including among black feminists such as June Jordan and Gloria Joseph. In her introduction to the new edition of
Black Macho
, entitled “How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now” (London: Verso, 1990) Wallace provides her own critique of the book, which twelve years earlier sparked a major debate within the black community. “Anger in Isolation” appeared in the
Village Voice
four years before
Macho
and explains why she became a feminist and how difficult it was for a young black woman in the early years. Wallace, a prolific cultural critic, is presently a member of the faculty at CUNY where she teaches women's studies and film studies. Her recent publications include
Invisibility Blues
(1990) and
Black Popular Culture
(1992), edited by Gina Dent, the proceedings of a conference at The Studio Museum in Harlem, December 8-10, 1991, which Wallace convened.

W
hen I was in the third grade I wanted to be president. I can still remember the stricken look on my teacher's face when I announced it in class. By the time I was in the fourth grade I had decided to be the president's wife instead. It never occurred to me that I could be neither because I was black. Growing up in a dreamy state of mind not uncommon to the offspring of the black middle class, I was convinced that hatred was an insubstantial emotion and would certainly vanish before it could affect me. I had the world to choose from in planning a life.

On rainy days my sister and I used to tie the short end of a scarf around our scrawny braids and let the rest of its silken mass trail to our waists. We'd pretend it was hair and that we were some lovely heroine we'd seen in the movies. There was a time when I would have called that wanting to be white, yet the real point of the game was being feminine. Being feminine
meant
being white to us.

One day when I was thirteen, on my bus ride home from school I caught a brief but enchanting glimpse of a beautiful creature—slender, honey brown, and she wore her hair natural. Very few people did then, which made her that much more striking.
This
was a look I could imitate with some success. The next day I went to school with my hair in an Afro.