Words of Fire (66 page)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, both rural and urban black women followed the role models of black female artists, singers, dancers, and actresses who expressed and reinforced the sensuality of African traditions by shaking and shimmying on stages and in clubs and roadhouses. Black women leaving the restrictions of the rural South agreed with Bessie Smith:

These black women lived lives of explicit sexuality and erotic excitement with both men and women. As they broke away from the traditional paternal restraints within the black community, they were castigated for seeming to reflect the truth of the white man's views of black women as whorish and loose. But these “wild women”
⁶⁵
did not care, modeling for Southern rural black women a city life full of flashy clothes, fast cars, and access to sophisticated men.

However, most black women did not have access to the mobility of a freer sexual life even within marriage until the 1960s, when large-scale urbanization, a shift from domestic to clerical jobs, and the breakup of the traditional kinship networks of the rural South took place. Even then, black women's sexuality was still contained within a white male patriarchy that continued to view her as already sexually liberated.

Black woman could not be completely controlled and defined by her own men, for she had already learned to manage and resist the advances of white men, earning and internalizing a reputation for toughness and strength, for resiliency and resolve, that enhanced the myth of her as both matriarch and wild woman. Her political resistance increased her potential to become a woman of power, capable of defining herself and rising to protect herself and her children, frequently throwing the mantle of protection over black men as well.

Slavery and womanhood remained interconnected long after the formal bondage of black people was over. Being a black woman with a black man could still mean slavery. And the woman could not be separated from the color. Being a black woman without a black man could also still mean slavery. And the color could not be separated from the woman.

These contradictions have been fully explored by only a few black women, for black women and black men continue to be engaged in a community of struggle to create a space in which to live and to survive:

Sex between black women and black men, between black men and black men, between black women and black women, is meshed within complex cultural, political, and economic circumstances. All black sexuality is underlined by a basic theme: where, when, and under what circumstances could/ would black men and black women connect with each other intimately and privately when all aspects of their lives were considered the dominion of the public, white master/lover's power?

If the sexual act between white men and black women was a ritual
reenactment of domination, the oppression failed to completely dampen the sexual expression of black women within the black community, which often became a ritual enactment of affirmation of her freedom and happiness within intense emotional connections with her men, her sisters, her children, her gods, and more often with herself. In spite of centuries of personal and political rape, black women could still say, “i found god in myself/and i loved her/i loved her fiercely.”
⁶⁷

History, traditionally written as a record of public events, has obscured and omitted the relationship between public events and private acts. Therefore, sex has always been in the closet of American history, hidden away from and kept outside the public realm of political and economic events. White men used their power in the public sphere to construct a private sphere that would meet their needs and their desire for black women, which if publically admitted would have undermined the false construct of race they needed to maintain public power. Therefore, the history of black women in America reflects the juncture where the private and public spheres and personal and political oppression meet.

The master/lover ruled over the world; he divided it up and called everyone out of their name. During the day, he would call her “wench,” “negress,” “Sable Venus,” “dusky Sal,” and “Auntie.” He described and wrote about her endurance, ate her biscuits, and suckled her breasts. At night he would chant false endearments and would feel engulfed within her darkness. He would accuse her of raping herself, naming his lesser brothers as the fathers of his and her children. He would record every battle, keep every letter, document each law, building monuments to himself, but he would never tell the true story, the complete story, of how he used to rape to make the profit, of how he used the bodies of women to satisfy his needs. He would never tell how he built a society with the aid of dark-skinned women, while telling the world he did it alone.

He would cover the tracks between his house and hers, he would deny the semen-stained sheets she was forced to wash. History would become all that men did during the day, but nothing of what they did during the night. He would forget her children. He would deny his love or lust for her. He would deny his failure to obey his own laws. He refused to listen to the logical extension of his argument for the massacres, the slave raids, the genocide, the lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan. He could not live up to his own fears and arguments against mongrelization of the race, the separation of black from white. He built an exterior world that reflected his fragmented insides.

But the woman learned to face him, the rapist who hated and loved her with such passion. She learned to use her darkness to create light. She would make the divided, white and black, external and internal world into wholeness. She would “lean on Jesus,” reaching out to help and for help,
and would gather around her children and kin to help them make the world whole and livable. She would mother all the children—black and white—and serve both men—conqueror and conquered—knowing “all there was to know,” for she could not separate the color from the woman.

Only a few daring men, mostly black ones, would recognize that only she understood what it had taken for white men to dominate the world and what it would mean, finally, to be free. But some black women who voiced what they knew did not survive:

But others sold down river survived and remembered their mothers and fathers, remembered the white master/lover, the black master/lover, and the black brother/lover. They, in their turn, gave their daughters and sons the gifts of determination and freedom, the will to love and the strength to have faith. Some would accept these gifts, some would reject them. History, however, would obliterate the entire story, occasionally giving it only a false footnote. But deep within the daughters' hearts and minds it would be remembered, and this memory would become the historical record everything had to be measured by.

ENDNOTES

1
Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
(New York: Dell Publishing, 1960).

2
See Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

3
T. Obinkaram Echewa, “African Sexual Attitudes,”
Essence
2, no. 9 (January 1981): 56.

4
Sarah La Forey, “Female Circumcision” (manuscript).

5
Winthrop Jordan,
White over Black
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 3—43.

6
Richard G. Hofstadter,
America at 1750: A Social Portrait
(New York: Vintage, 1973), 108.

7
Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, 116.

8
Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,”
Black Scholar
3, no. 4 (December 1971): 7.

9
Barbara Chase-Riboud,
Sally Hemings
(New York: Viking, 1979), 284.

10
Jordan,
White over Black
, 3—43.

11
Ibid., 148.

12
Gary Nash,
Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America
, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 115—26.

13
A Leon Higgenbotham, Jr.,
In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process—The Colonial Period
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 43—47.

14
Jordan,
White over Black
, 138—39.

15
Ibid.

16
Cited in Carl Degler,
Out of Our Past: Forces That Shaped Modern America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 32.

17
Ibid., 83.

18
Hofstadter,
America at 1750
, 111.

19
Ibid., 115.

20
Ibid., 116.

21
Degler,
Out of Our Past
, 163.

22
————,
Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves
(Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1968), 2.

23
Herbert Gutman,
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750—1925
(New York: Pantheon, 1976), 76, 138.

24
Degler,
Autobiographical Accounts
, 1.

25
Degler,
Out of Our Past
, 34.

26
Davis, “Black Woman's Role.”

27
E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in the United States
, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 53.

28
Gerda Lerner, ed.,
Black Women in White America
(New York: Vintage, 1973), 156.

29
Ibid., 154.

30
John Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1949), 139.

31
Jacqueline Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery” (manuscript, 1980).

32
Quoted in John Blassingame, ed.,
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 221.

33
Chase-Riboud,
Sally Hemings
, 284.

34
Autobiographical Accounts
, 1—2.

35
Quoted in Anne Firor Scott,
Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830—1930
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 50.

36
Ibid., 34—36.

37
Ibid., 37.

38
Ibid., 52.

39
Jordan,
White over Black
, 148.

40
Scott,
Southern Lady
, 52.

41
Autobiographical Accounts
, 1.

42
Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman,” 41—42.

43
David Katzman, “Domestic Service: Women's Work,” in
Women Working: Theories and Facts in Perspective,
ed. Ann Stromberg and Shirley Harkness (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1978), 381—83.

44
Autobiographical Accounts
, 1.

45
Frazier,
Negro Family
, 67.

46
Chase-Riboud,
Sally Hemings
, 40.

47
Frazier,
Negro Family
, 47.

48
Scott,
Southern Lady
, 53.

49
Barbara Omolade, “African and Slave Motherhood” (masters thesis, Goddard College, 1979).

50
Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman,” 36.

51
Results of Oral History Class Projects—Black Women's History Courses, 1975—1982—comp. and ed. Barbara Omolade.

52
Frazier,
Negro Family
, 73—124.

53
Joanne Grant,
Black Protest: History Documents and Analysis from 1619 to the Present
(New York: Fawcett, 1968), 33.

54
Blassingame,
Slave Testimony.

55
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Darkwater
(New York: Schocken Books, 1925), 172.

56
Gutman,
Black Family
, 17.

57
Lerner,
Black Women in White America
, 291.

58
David Katzman,
Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 85—90.

59
Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,”
Conditions: Two
1, no. 2 (October 1977): 25-52.

60
Lerner,
Black Women in White America
, 79, 220.

61
See, for example, Franklin Frazier,
Black Bourgeoisie
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 71—78.

62
Frazier,
Negro Family;
oral history survey, cited in n. 51.