Early in 1978 there was a series of articles in The New York Times on the changes in the black community since 1968. It covered the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Movement, the economic and social situation for blacks today. Never once did it mention the contribution black women made to the Civil Rights Movement. The article spoke of three Americas: one white, one middle-class black, one poor black. No particular notice was given to the fact that that poor black America consists largely of black women and children. It was as if these women and children did not exist.
The history of the period has been written and will continue to be written without us. The imperative is clear: Either we will make history or remain the victims of it.
In 1978, I concluded Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman with these words. It is impossible for me to look back at this book without the conviction that the significance of black women as a distinct category is routinely erased by the way in which the Women’s Movement and the Black Movement choose to set their goals and recollect their histories.
At that time the difficulty was that you weren’t supposed to talk about both racial oppression and women’s oppression at the same time. Now, with the success of Alice Walker and The Color Purple, and the virtual institutionalization of multicultural feminist inquiry in the U.S. (thanks to the work of June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks), such dualism would appear to be less of a problem.
Yet the mainstream media still make this basic error on a daily basis, giving combinations of racism and sexism additional power to do their dirty work. In the realm of the dominant discourse, viewing women’s oppression and black oppression as mutually exclusive areas results in the myth of a color-blind society and the myth of gender equality. Except for the occasional mainstream focus on “racism” or “sexism,” both of which are very narrowly defined and delimited to suggest that in most cases whites are blind to race or gender difference, the charade goes on that anybody who tries can become happy and rich in the U.S.
Moreover, these myths further serve to mystify the structural inability of the mainstream to admit that women’s oppression and racial oppression sometimes are seen in combinations which create a third and entirely different category of problems with regard to the black woman or woman of color. There is the further presumption that women of color are somehow too small a “minority” to conceptualize. But what it is really impossible to conceptualize in the realm of the dominant discourse is that women of color are actually a majority in the world.
It seems telling now that I drew my final example of how black women were being metaphorically disenfranchised by the Women’s Movement and the Black Movement from an article in The New York Times, a paper which I now regard as the quintessential historical document in the white phallocentric tradition. The New York Times is the key voice of this brand of liberal humanism—although it is still not unusual among white males on the left in the U.S. to think that to talk about “race” is automatically “racist;” to see or acknowledge color difference is “racist.”
Such feelings are vestiges of earlier stages of anti-racism. But what worries me is that such people don’t realize that they thus become the instruments of the “invisibility” that Ralph Ellison described so well, although I don’t suppose he thought it was ideological. Not only do I see “invisibility” as a problem of ideology; I also see it as the final, and most difficult to combat, stage of racism. The fact that it involves conjunctions not only of racism and sexism but also conjunctions of capitalist exploitation and compulsory heterosexuality makes it even more difficult to diagnose. I suspect that such conjunctions cannot be resolved at all. Rather they must be unpacked, examined and disarmed.
Today I understand the problem as one of representation. My view then was that blacks had been systematically deprived of the continuity of their own African culture not only by the oppression of slavery and the racism and segregation that followed it, but also by integration and assimilation, which had denied them the knowledge of their history of struggle and the memory of their autonomous cultural practices. In the process of assimilation, integration and accommodation, blacks had taken on the culture and values of whites in regard to sexuality and gender. This did more than make it inevitable that black men would be sexist or misogynistic: it also made inevitable black women’s completely dysfunctional self-hatred.
For me, then, to say that black men hated black women or vice versa was simply an extension of saying that black people hated themselves. The resulting mythology was really an extension and reversal of the white stereotypes about black inferiority. It dictated that black men would define their masculinity (and thus their “liberation”) in terms of superficial masculine characteristics—demonstrable sexuality; physical prowess; the capacity for warlike behavior. Black women would define their femininity (or their “liberation”—which was not, however, a movement) in terms of their lack of these same superficial masculine characteristics—precisely because the myth of their inferiority, the black female stereotype, had always portrayed them as oversexed, physically strong and warlike. One of the myths I called “Black Macho” and the other I called “The Superwoman.”
The arguments by which my book is best known—that Black Macho and interracial relationships helped to destroy the political effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement; that black men and women hated one another, were all minor points in my larger argument, which was really about black nationalism with a feminist face and black female self-determination. I now feel that the biggest failure of the book was that I didn’t understand the problems inherent to nationalism as a liberationist strategy for women. I thought that the men were simply leaving women out because it hadn’t really occurred to them to do otherwise. I didn’t see that it comes automatically to nationalist struggles to devalue the contributions of women, as well as gays or anybody else who doesn’t fit the profile of the noble warrior or the elder statesman.
I had already come to see that what a lot of people were referring to as revolutionary concepts were not revolutionary at all, but reactionary. What I didn’t understand was just how hard it really is to even conceptualize effective revolution, the kind of revolution that might really change our present global inhumane and inegalitarian economic and political arrangements.
I used history, literature, sociology, autobiography and journalism to support my argument, although I didn’t then recognize that none of them offers a transparent window on the world, but rather that they are all discursive modes, and as such intrinsically given to lapses into “fiction.” Consequently, whereas then I spoke of black women making history and being written about, I now think it is more important that black women “write” their own histories, since the power to write one’s own history is what making history appears to be all about.
If I had to do it over again, I would no longer maintain that Black Macho was the crucial factor in the destruction of the Black Power Movement, not because I no longer think it is true at least in some sense—and certainly it was true in the world I inhabited then—but because it was a claim that was impossible to substantiate at the level of sociological, historical or journalistic data. While it may be a valid interpretation of events to say that a brand of black male chauvinism contributed to the shortsightedness and failure of the Black Power Movement, there are other interpretations equally valid—for instance, that police and CIA repression were also factors in the demise of the movement. Moreover, from another perspective (although not necessarily my own) the Black Liberation Struggle can be viewed as never ending or beginning but rather waxing or waning, usually invisible to the dominant discourse, virtually since blacks became slaves in the Americas.
My critique of the Black Power Movement was based upon a limited perception of it taken primarily from the mainstream media; through my reading of literature written by white writers such as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe; and, more importantly, by black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver. What I learned from this perspective was more important than many of my critics have been willing to allow.
Media analysis has never been a focus of Black Studies, or of the most visible black intellectuals. But it is impossible to imagine the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement without the technological innovation of the 7 o’clock evening news, which continually brought into all of our homes the footage from the latest Civil Rights encounter between police and protesters in the South. And, although black male writers have become somewhat unfashionable as a group (as opposed to black women writers), it was the black male writer who established the intellectual foundation of Black Liberationist thought, to the extent that such a thing existed. In fact, the heavily anti-intellectual impulse of Black Power rhetoric (which I described as Black Macho) was one of its greatest weaknesses. But my arguments were completely rooted in readings of literature, popular culture and the media.
My perspective on such matters has shifted from a preoccupation with “what really happened”—I will never really know about most of the events of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power since I wasn’t there—to a preoccupation with the politics of interpretation, specifically with who writes the history of the 60s and how that knowledge of “the past” determines power in “the present.” For the most part, it is the white male left that is writing the history of the 60s.
The most important historical documentation of the 60s coming from the perspective of black participants has been the “Eyes on the Prize” Series of PBS television documentaries, and the books that have followed them, by Washington Post reporter Juan Williams. Not surprisingly, this version of events underplays the contribution of women, and the story of how the Women’s Movement, the Peace Movement and the white male left emerged from the Civil Rights Struggle. But what did surprise me is how heavily these documentaries followed what the networks had already established to be important in their initial coverage of the movement. Since “Eyes on the Prize” relied heavily on available footage and made no real attempt to subvert that context, what little interpretation there was (as against the “transparent window on the past” approach) was intensely phallocentric, elitist, and exclusionary.
As it happens, I like the story about heroism, sacrifice and courage in the black community, North and South, that “Eyes on the Prize” tells. But if one believes, as I do, that the purpose of historical narrative is to help us to understand the present, then the “Eyes on the Prize” story is simply inadequate to that task.
If Black Macho gives the impression that I felt as though interracial dating constituted a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, I need to say that is no longer my conviction—if it ever was. I had meant to point it out as symptomatic of an aspect of my changing environment as a young black woman in New York. Again, the crucial matter is what it can tell us about interpretation. For instance, interracial dating is scarcely mentioned in most official black or white (male) histories of the sixties. Rather it is black or white women—Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975); Alice Walker in Meridian (1976); Sara Evans in Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1980); Paula Giddings in When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Blacks on Race and Sex in America (1981)—who take seriously such issues for what they can tell us about the lives of ordinary women and their access, or lack of access, to power and fulfillment.
As for the quote that adorned the cover of the book, and that caused so much stir:
I am saying … there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between black men and black women that has been nursed along largely by white racism but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of blacks about the sexual politics of their experience in this country.
I stand by it only to the extent that it is also possible to say that there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between Jewish men and women, or Italian men and women, or Irish men and women, or Puerto Rican men and women, or Asian men and women, that has been nursed along largely by anti-Semitism, or anti-Catholicism, or orientalism, or cultural intolerance, but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of Jews, or Italians, or the Irish, or Puerto Ricans, or Asians, about the sexual politics of their experience in this country. Only to the degree that such sexual hatred is true of other ethnic groups as well, is it true of Afro-Americans.
The assertion is not so ridiculous as it may sound on the surface. I think it is true to some degree that as the men of an ethnic group become middle-class, educated and prosperous in America, they may grow to resent in an unconscious way the working-class women of a prior generation—more specifically their mothers—who remain behind and who may come psychologically to represent to them the old ways before assimilation and success. They may try to the best of their ability to marry a woman as unlike this figure as possible. In the case of the successful black male, she might not be black, just as in the case of some successful Jewish males, she isn’t Jewish, in the case of some successful Italian males, she isn’t Italian—and so on. But thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, this is no longer a crime.
Also, there are many black men who love black women, and vice versa, although I didn’t know it at the time I wrote Black Macho.
Black Macho was criticized for the idea that becoming American means becoming a kind of imitation “white” person and, therefore, self-hating. I don’t believe that anymore either. Rather I share James Baldwin’s and Henry Louis Gates’s (in “Race,” Writing and Difference) view that racial difference is essentially mythological and highly ideological. Although blackness is something we can legitimately say we’ve experienced in a variety of concrete ways, it is not an essential category that we can empirically or biologically distinguish from other racial experiences. It only makes sense if we view it archeologically (after Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge and Houston Baker in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Culture), as a discourse or a series of discourses concerning a matrix of material conditions, social relations, economic, political and cultural issues—beginning with the onset of the African slave trade in the seventeenth century and continuing until today.
In this context, whiteness, more than any other racial designation, is an invention of American ideology; a way of combating the fear of “the other” within, or the dread of polysemous and polyvocal selves through various social policies. Wanting to be “white,” therefore, is an ideological fantasy, socially constructed and yet utterly impossible to achieve, like wanting to be without sin. Nevertheless, as long as there are white people who want to be white, it seems probable to me that there will also be black people who want to be “white” or, more to the point, black people who don’t want to be “black” or “other.” As for wanting to be “black,” this has always been played out as a more heterogeneous phenomenon.
In regard to whether or not we should be concerned specifically to establish the relationship between our present cultural behavior and previous African cultural patterns, I still think such activity is worthwhile. Although I am strongly attracted to and persuaded by the postcolonial arguments of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Trinh Minh-ha, I don’t think they begin to exhaust what we can possibly say about our relationship to “other worlds” beyond the hegemony of the West.
What they’ve done for me is to problematize the notion of a “homeland” or an indigenous culture. Afro-Americans, after all, are not immigrants, although we have always counted recent arrivals from the Caribbean and from Africa among us. As a group, we have been in the Americas longer than anyone apart from the Indians. Moreover, the question of whether or not our “homeland” in Africa should be a crucial factor in our culture, or in our discourse, has been a controversial issue among Afro-American intellectuals since the nineteenth century and perhaps before.
The more important issue to me is that historically, we have continued to create alternative cultural formations which not only interrogate and subvert the dominant discourse but which also continue to contest the viability of an institutionalized and commodified dominant discourse. Whether such activity stems from our experience of slavery, segregation and oppression, or from cultural precedents in previous African societies, or some combination of the two, is not the most crucial issue here. What’s most important is the opportunity it seems to offer to think in counter-hegemonic ways about the function of culture.
Since I wrote Black Macho, there have been enormous changes in the availability of materials on the history and literature of white and black women during slavery, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement. Not only have we seen the emergence of Black Women’s Studies: since 1979 Women’s Studies and Black Studies have become prominent academic and intellectual discourses. When criticisms of the book left me feeling uninformed, I went back to graduate school at Yale in 1980, first in Afro-American Studies and then in American Studies. Although my primary interest had always been in literature, the emphasis on literary studies there was on deconstruction and theory, so I focused on history.
The biggest thing I learned about history, or linear historical narrative at Yale was that it is always written by someone in particular and, therefore, never quite “true” in the factual sense. In order to be “true” in any sense that is usable to the present, “history” has to be dialogic; it has to find innovative strategies for taking into account contradictory voices and interpretations. The fact that literature had always probably been better at doing this than “history,” which generally likes to hold on to its status as a Master Narrative, gave me a renewed interest in literature. I had written and continued to rewrite a novel that no one would publish, which was a story about the experiences I had had in publishing Black Macho. So I was enormously interested in knowing more about the criteria of literary value.
While teaching writing and Afro-American Literature, I read a lot in the fields of cultural studies; literary criticism; and feminist film, TV and art criticism. Since then, I’ve finally completed a Master’s in Afro-American Literature and Literary Criticism at the City College of New York where I am now, also, an Assistant Professor of English. I don’t necessarily feel much smarter or older than when I wrote Black Macho but I understand better the relation between my personal history and History. Although I don’t love it anymore, I still want people to read it.
If the truth be told, I think the thing that most attracted me to feminism in the beginning was its implicit critique of the family. Backed up by the Moynihan Report and other authoritative sources, the conventional wisdom was that black families were entirely different from white families. If I had read such material when I wrote Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Wilhelm Reich’s warnings about family repression as laying the foundation for political authoritarianism, and R.D. Laing’s picture of how certain families almost automatically produced schizophrenic children, would have best summarized my most frightening intuitions about how the family functioned, regardless of race.
I had read little Freud, Reich or Laing then, or even Juliet Mitchell’s 1974 Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which has since helped make this material accessible to me. It was New Yorker humorist James Thurber’s hysterically funny version of uptight eccentric New England white families, in which disparate personalities are constantly clashing and never listening to one another, that best filled in what I saw when I thought of “the family.”
I then thought of the conventional family as a torture chamber designed to oppress and repress women. I have never understood why American feminists weren’t more interested in how the family in particular, and personal relationships in general, fulfill a crucial role in reconciling women especially to our station in life. More specifically, our parents, who were broken in by their parents, must break us in. It is their painful duty to be the first to make us realize what we can realistically expect to accomplish in this life and to help us understand what is impossible. If anything, this is even more true in the “minority” or black family. For me, this is what August Wilson’s play Fences is really about. The most suggestive model that history offers us is less than one hundred-and-fifty years old: it is of the slave family in the antebellum South in which a slave mother beat her children in order to prepare them for the Master’s whip and, perhaps, in the case of the girls, to prepare them for the Master’s caress.
I have taught autobiographical writing to women of my own age and older at the Center for Worker Education (which is a branch of CCNY) in New York. Their struggle to write their own stories is, invariably, the struggle between their mothers, and sometimes their fathers, and themselves. Most of them can see their parents’ side in any early childhood incident better than they can see their own side. They find it difficult to even remember having feelings of their own as children. All they can remember is what their parents felt; what their parents insisted they should feel. Autobiographical writing may partly be about reclaiming that childhood self; acknowledging her blamelessness. Yet this is almost impossible for many women to do in their writing about their earlier lives. Instead, they insist that there is no point in looking back; that, yes, their parents were strict or mean but the more important thing is that they are not raising their children as they were raised. They talk with their children. They defend them when they are wrongly accused. They love them openly. Or so they say.
It is my conviction that the only way to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is openly to discuss them. Whether in nations, families or individuals, the practice of being on speaking terms with your past lives is the only thing that makes it possible to trust yourself or anybody else. Freedom, liberation, happiness and fulfillment don’t come “naturally.” Rather they must be struggled for, moment by moment, against the tide of institutionalization, commodification and repression.
In The Myth of the Superwoman, the much more difficult half of the book to write, I talk about the conflict between my mother and myself and my stay in a juvenile home when I was seventeen. Using this story as my foundation, I come to a variety of conclusions regarding the feasibility of feminism in the black community.
The thing that still remained to be worked out was my relationship to my family as a writer and as a woman. At the time, the hard thing for me to admit was that my family life was a seriously troubled one. I conceded only that relationships between men and women, and between mothers and daughters, in the “black community” were plagued by the intimidating shadow of normal “white” American life, as it was projected through the media and popular culture. While this was indeed true, I now think that the scope of the problem is much wider. The problem was not with the black family but with the family; not with “black” or “white” culture but with the fact that in the U.S. cultural diversity is thought of as something superficial that we need to get rid of. What’s helped to clarify this situation is the way in which “family” and traditional values are repeatedly defended by the right in order to build its opposition to progressive changes—from abortion rights to Civil Rights (for blacks, gays, Latinos and Asians) to welfare rights to the right of free expression.
Not only wasn’t I knowledgable enough then to support such a thesis; I hadn’t yet put my life together with what I had learned, what I properly understood to be my knowledge of the world. This was partly because I was still denying my life; denying the exceptions and contradictions it raised to what then were my views as a feminist. Perhaps the crucial deception was painting a picture of myself as a child of the black middle class who had grown up in all the middle-class security of my white counterpart in Scarsdale, a place I’d never been but which I found fascinating to imagine as presenting precisely the same dangers as life on Sugar Hill in Harlem.
At this stage of my life, I have often mentioned in writing how my father was addicted to heroin and died of a drug overdose when I was thirteen years old. Yet it was a story I was incapable of telling when I wrote Black Macho. I had learned to be so ashamed of who and what my father was that very few of my friends even knew about him. What I was taught to say, and what I said in the book, was that he was a classical and jazz musician, and that he had died in a car accident. Of my stepfather, who was an assembly-line worker at General Motors and who was really the man who had shaped my conception of men, I said as little as possible.
In the fifties, when they were still in college, my father Earl, who was a jazz musician, and my mother Faith, who was an artist, were secretly married. They had grown up on Sugar Hill in Harlem together, their mothers sewed downtown in the factories together, and they had been going together since Faith was sixteen. But my grandmother Momma Jones was so strict with Faith, although she was twenty, that Faith didn’t tell Momma Jones she was married until she came home so late one night, Momma Jones threatened to beat her. After that, Faith and Earl, who had very little money, spent some time living in Brooklyn, some time living at Momma Jones’s house, and some time living at the house of my other grandmother Momma T. A little over two years later, Earl and Faith had borne two children: my sister Barbara and myself. Meanwhile, Earl’s drug habit, which was fashionable in the jazz musicians’ circle he frequented (Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Max Roach, Abbie Lincoln, Bud Powell), had grown much worse. She finally divorced him because of it after four years of marriage, when I was two.
We then lived with my grandmother Momma Jones, whose house was on Edgecombe Avenue, directly next to the apartment building in which my other grandmother, Momma T, lived. My father often visited Momma T, so there would have been a great deal of opportunity for me to see him had I not been forbidden to by my mother—although she felt she could not explain to me why I wasn’t supposed to see him until I was about six. Yet I still saw him almost every time I was allowed to visit Momma T, though I never got to know him. I don’t think the knowledge I’ve gathered over the years about drug addiction, jazz musicians, racism and black male alienation in the 50s will ever fill the void created by his absence. I didn’t realize that I loved him until he was dead. Or rather, I could not not love him.
When my uncle, who was also addicted to drugs, came to live at my grandmother’s house, after having spent some time in jail, we moved again to a “middle income” project in the Bronx called St. Mary’s so that we wouldn’t get a chance to know him either.
The man I did get to know was my stepfather Birdie, who had been a friend of my father since he was a teenager. He, too, grew up on Edgecombe Avenue, but he never finished high school and he never went to college. He dated my mother from the time we left my father’s house and, in fact, it had been him who had moved us from Momma T’s house to Momma Jones’s house across the roof of the two adjacent apartment buildings. He was there at Christmas with the tree and the presents. He took us to the library and the movies and the park, while my mother kept up with her studies in college and then graduate school. He was kind, funny, and he liked to take us for walks through the old neighborhood and tell everybody that we were his daughters. This was actually quite amusing since he was very light and looked white, and we were just the opposite.
In May 1962, when I was ten years old, Faith married Birdie and he began to live with us. Almost from the very first day, I remember it as being a kind of a nightmare that wouldn’t end. His own childhood had been hellish—although that wasn’t the way he talked about it. He talked about it as though it was a joke and he had deserved the treatment he had gotten. His mother had left him at the hospital because she couldn’t pay the bill. She had not come back to get him. His aunt had raised him with the help of her husband who worked in the post office. She was a violent alcoholic who went in and out of the mental hospital. Periodically, she would get drunk and put him out in the middle of the night. He would sleep in the hallway or on the roof. With a life like this, it should come as no surprise that he quit high school when he was sixteen and got a job, although he always said he was stupid for leaving school.
After he married my mother, I came to know him as very unpredictable and vulgar. Although he wasn’t violent, I always thought he could be. I was very much afraid of him. I had never heard anyone curse the way he did and I now think that when the carload of men that he rode with stopped at a bar on their way back to Manhattan from Tarrytown, he, too, would drink too much, which would explain his erratic behavior. When I grew older, I learned by drinking with him that his mood could change radically when he drank.
He had very specific rules and regulations about how the house should be kept. My sister and I were not supposed to go in my parents’ bedroom; we weren’t supposed to eat in the living-room; we were supposed to wash and dry all the dishes (my mother didn’t do housework); we were supposed to have gone to bed hours before he got home. He worked the night-shift at General Motors and when he would get home about 3 a.m., he would often wake us all up, including my mother, if he thought his rules weren’t being kept. Cursing and screaming, he would then chase my mother around and threaten to beat her or threaten to beat us. Eventually he would calm down and just want to talk. Sometimes, if it wasn’t a school night or if it was in the summer, he would go out to get ice cream or some other snack for us. Then he would tell stories about his childhood and how he was treated. He would tell us how lucky we were.
I had my first sexual experience not long after Faith and Birdie were married while riding to school on the elevated train that passed in front of our building. A man, whose face I never saw and whose race I can’t remember, felt me up. I was too terrified to protest and he never said a word.
I don’t remember ever talking about sex with my mother. On the other hand, my stepfather rarely talked about anything else. The way he talked about it was to tell us stories, often quite humorous, about his own tendency as a young man to exploit unsuspecting females. The point of these conversations, which he was only too happy to make explicit, was that men could not be trusted: they only wanted one thing and we would be better off to never let them have it. If we insisted upon having sex though, we should use a condom, which he called a raincoat.
During those years he and my mother often broke up but they always went back together again. It was my mother’s idea that she needed his financial support and his “firm hand” to raise us. Although she was and is a brilliant artist and a feminist, I’ll admit I never understood this attitude. Admittedly, since those times (the worst of which I have not described), he has slowly changed, even mellowed. I suspect he’s sorry now for the way he acted then, although he has never said so. Perhaps because of this, it has taken a long time to finally concede that he has become a different man, no longer the man that terrorized me.
When I began to date as a teenager in Harlem, I expected and found no better men than my father and stepfather had been. I expected and found hostility, anger, competition, violence, dishonesty, misogyny and ignorance. These experiences had a lot to do with my “theories” about black men and black male/female relationships as a black feminist. The story I’ve told doesn’t make those “theories” any less true or untrue. It simply makes them less global. I am not saying that there aren’t some black men out there who are mean to women and, indeed, I see this meanness as a political issue in our community. What I am saying is that I was not actually aware then that there was any other kind of man.
When I wrote The Myth of the Superwoman, I was warned by my agent and editor that it was extremely risky for me to tell the story of my confinement at seventeen in a juvenile home. Indeed, it would have been risky, or at least transgressive, if I had told the whole story of the family turbulence that led to my being placed there. Needless to say, it was a much more complicated and important affair than I talked about in the book. Only in recent years, have I begun to come to the defense of that little girl, to listen to her story instead of taking my mother’s side against her. This is not so easy to do because, through fear, I had been learning for years to ignore and discount her.
I made some kind of realization in that Catholic home that allowed me to become a feminist. I think it had to do with listening to the little girl inside of me in the form of other little girls who clearly had been abused, neglected and deprived. I was quite certain that I had never been abused, neglected and deprived; that whatever had happened was my fault entirely. Now I am no longer convinced of that. It is my own story I want to listen to now, but I am only at the beginning of doing so. Meanwhile it seems almost impossible to get many black women to believe this is important despite the success in the marketplace of black women’s writing. Historically, it is not at all unusual for black women to find their stories difficult and embarrassing to tell.
The first novel by a black woman was Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, written in the 1860s about the racist way she was treated as an indentured servant in the North. Feeling that she couldn’t afford to give offense to white abolitionists who insisted that the enemy was the slave-owning class of the South, she handled the problem by writing a “novel” about a character named Frado. Her autobiographical account is thus translated into the third person and, by her own admission, she “purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.” Frado’s white, unmarried mother had abandoned her as a child. As an adult, Frado married a fake fugitive of slavery, who abandoned her as well. These “realistic” features broke with the sentimental conventions of women’s fiction in the nineteenth century, and thus helped to doom her work to obscurity. When I wrote Black Macho, Wilson’s book was completely unknown. It wasn’t until 1983 that Afro-American literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. rediscovered it and helped to get it republished in a new edition.
I find myself much more sympathetic now to two other black female writers of the same period whom I mention extensively in Black Macho: Harriet Jacobs and Charlotte Forten Grimke. While I then criticized them both for Victorian scruples unnatural and self-contemptuous in black women, Afro-American literary criticism has enabled us to see them in an entirely different way now.
In the introduction to an annotated edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jean Fagin Yellin establishes that Jacobs did, in fact, write her own narrative instead of having dictated it to the white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, as was once thought. This makes her the only black female to have actually written her own slave narrative in the tradition of Frederick Douglass and so many other black male ex-slaves. When we think about this, we begin to see the sentimentalism of her text in another light. Harriet Jacobs had no alternative other than to publicly acknowledge that she had willingly had sex with a man outside of marriage, in order to tell the story of her life as a slave and her escape. It was precisely the signs of her reluctance—her use of a pseudonym, her deployment of the tactics of conventional nineteenth-century women’s fiction and her insistence that she managed to escape the lust of her cruel master—that made black literary scholarship denigrate the value and authenticity of her narrative for so many years.
Charlotte Forten Grimke, too, was until recently lost to us as the middle-class black girl of the nineteenth century of Ray Allen Billington’s invention, via his 1953 condensed edition of her journals. The more complete journals were only made available in 1988 in The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers, again edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Brenda Stevenson’s sensitive introduction to that edition, and the expanded text, shows Forten to have been a sad young woman whose mother died when she was a baby and whose father virtually abandoned her as a child. Although she was produced by the union of two of the best abolitionist families in black Philadelphia, she was for most of her life barely able to scrape by financially. She suffered from respiratory ailments and was almost always too sick to work. Her ambition was to be a poet but financial necessity dictated that she be a teacher, work that she didn’t much like although it was still a rare privilege for a black woman then. Her interesting black abolitionist family seems to have caused her as much grief as comfort but it should come as no surprise that Charlotte, who was deeply religious and self-sacrificing, rarely allowed herself to write about their problems in detail. The only person she ever really criticizes is herself.
It has been my intention in writing this new introduction to Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman to talk about why my views have changed and how I came to write some of the things I wrote in 1978. It has been much harder than I expected. When I first re-read the book in preparation for writing this, my immediate gut response was to destroy the book so that no one would ever read it again. How many black women writers, in the twentieth, nineteenth, or even eighteenth centuries have thought and done precisely this?
I wanted to destroy the book because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black woman writer could ever offer was so palpable in its pages. In obsessively repeating the stereotypes of black women and black men, I wanted to burst free of them forever. However, this has only been slightly more possible for me than it was for Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs and Charlotte Forten. But perhaps if we can begin to claim our own words and our own feelings within the public sphere, we will seize the means of re-producing our own history, and freedom will become a possibility in a sense that it never has been before.
New York, 1990