Black American Women's Writings

Eva Lennox Birch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315504070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This work discusses a range of novels, short stories and essays by black American women writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present time. It begins with a survey of 19th-century black women's slave narratives, early sentimental novels and autobiographies and then focuses on six writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. The text shows how these writers have developed the preoccupations, themes and narrative strategies of their literary ancestors.

1 Pioneering voices

DOI: 10.4324/9781315504094-1

It is beyond my present competence and scope to offer anything other than a selective sampling of particular modes of black address from the nineteenth century. Those chosen have been identified by black critics as the foundation stones on which a black American women’s literary tradition was built, and consist of slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, autobiographical as well as sentimental novels, and oral culture. None of these cultural manifestations was the preserve of females alone, but subsequent women writers have used them differently from men.

Any white reader who approaches black American literature must start by recognising that the experiential reality described is a unique one. Black roots in American history were planted in institutionalised slavery. To this fact white readers of black writers must constantly return, for it is the source of the gulf which lies between our history as white imperialists, and theirs as the oppressed. Individual voices from slavery, in the form of slave narratives, unite in clear testament to the inhumanity of enslavement. Their importance lies in the fact that they express the only area of a slave’s life over which the slave could exercise control: her thoughts and feelings. Consequently the autobiographical statement in black literature has acquired such significance for critics that Selwyn R. Cudjoe describes it as ‘the quintessential literary genre’, ¹ allowing insight into the psyche of the black American in slavery. The black scholar Stephen Butterfield also identifies slave narratives as the building bricks of black American literature:

And little by little, book by book, they construct the framework of a black American literature. Autobiography in their hands becomes so powerful, so convincing a testimony to human resource, intelligence, endurance, love in the face of tyranny, that, in a sense, it sets the tone for most subsequent black American writing. ²

Those qualities of resourcefulness, intelligence, love and endurance described by Butterfield, survive and are celebrated still in the writing of black American women today, echoing the thoughts and struggles of their ancestors.

There has been an endless procession of books about slavery, though few written by slaves, which is why the authentic voices of the slave narratives demand our attention. Some of these accounts were collected in slave times at the prompting of active Abolitionists who used them as evidence in their struggle to rid the South of slavery, and the circumstances of their production mean that they speak of collective physical and emotional suffering. Almost three-quarters of a century after Abolition had been achieved, in the 1920s and 1930s, over two thousand former slaves were interviewed, whose oral statements were transcribed by willing researchers. ³ These accounts remained largely unpublished until the 1960s, when the Second Black Renaissance in art, writing and music coincided with the Civil Rights Movement. Previous historians had expressed doubt about the historical accuracy of recollections of people considered too old to remember reliably. Now that we have access to these accounts of lives spent in disparate geographical locations in the South, an undeniable common truth emerges about the conditions endured. Particularly poignant are the shared concerns and anguish of the female slaves who, although ignored by history, were not silent and whose oral accounts of their enslaved condition, as Marjorie Pryse suggests, ‘enlarge our conventional assumptions about the nature and function of literary tradition’, in that they force us to recognise the oral as an integral part of that tradition. ⁴ These narratives record how the female slave had to endure the same harsh physical working conditions as her male counterpart, as well as those accorded to her because of her sex. Her additional burdens were sexual exploitation – which could mean rape – and the demands of child-bearing. A reading of these accounts dispels any doubt that black women were vulnerable to physical, sexual and emotional abuse at any time from their white owners. Regarded by the worst of the owners as livestock, some were bred for sex and sale, put to work as children, and lived lives of unremitting toil.

Black women were considered to be ‘naturally’ sexually available, more passionate than white women, more willing to have sexual intercourse. With such an opinion of their sexuality, it is not surprising that the rape of a black woman by a white man was not considered a crime. The vulnerability of female slaves to sexual ambush and exploitation is that which marks off their experience as being different to that of the men. It also marked them off from white women who were the untouchable wives and mothers of the white owners. The definition of the black woman in terms of rampant sexuality and the denial of that same sexuality to the white women, did nothing to foster sisterly bonds between them. As Harriet Jacobs shows in her autobiographical account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ⁵ such a distinction added further trials to the already harassed slave girl. Not only did Jacobs have to endure constant sexual attacks from her master Flint, but she had to contend with the vicious jealousy of his wife. The ‘jealous mistress’ became a vindictive and relentless persecutor who vented her own sense of sexual inadequacy and marital betrayal on the defenceless object of her husband’s lusts. Harriet Jacobs explains her taking of a white lover to free herself from Flint’s attentions, but even the birth of her children did nothing to alleviate her situation. Many slave narratives attest to the vehemence of the attacks made upon black women by white mistresses driven to desperation on the birth of their slaves’ half-white children, whose arrival faced them with the unpalatable fact that their own husbands and sons had fathered them. The slave narratives also reveal that maternal bonding could be emotionally catastrophic for women whose children could be sold away from them, with no account taken of the parent’s or child’s anguish. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stand against this in Uncle Tom’s Cabin ⁶ is conveyed in a narrative consisting of ‘mother’ stories, in which the inevitable evil of separation of mother from child is castigated as being even more destructive than physical violence. The enslaved mother was denied what nineteenth-century domestic ideology deemed to be the most sacred duty of the white mother: that of providing constant physical care and moral guidance to her children. Yet these black women survived, quickly learning strategies for survival for themselves and their children. Moreover, the enforced sundering of maternal ties intensified the bonding, particularly between mothers and daughters, through whom family history is traditionally passed on. Over a century after Abolition Toni Morrison re-creates the intensity of a slave mother’s maternal feelings in her flight for freedom, and her determination to have her own children out of bondage, in her novel Beloved, which is a fictive rendition of a history found in the slave narratives.

Actual slave narratives are testaments describing appalling physical and emotional cruelty, and as such are addressed to the white oppressors. They stand as indictments of an horrendous evil and detail both resistance and reaction to that evil. In them, women record their abuse, men their anger and frustration at their own impotence to change the situation. In his work on black autobiography, Butterfield identifies the voice of the ‘mass’ in these narratives as dominant:

[The black autobiographer] is not an individual with a private career, but a soldier in a long, historic march towards Canaan. The self is conceived as a member of an oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to the other members. ⁷

Butterfield traces the links between the slave narratives and twentieth-century black autobiographers, and in his analysis of the autobiographical voices of male writers this connection is affirmed, but he admits that the female autobiographer, exemplified in Maya Angelou, was writing out of a different, female tradition in autobiographical statement. Many black male slave narratives, like that of Frederick Douglass ⁸ who was born in slavery in 1818 and who rose to prominence to become a federal administrator, were inspirational ‘success stories’, written as protest, accusation, defiance and intention: to shake dominant white society into effecting social change. The informing impulse in these is social rather than personal. The black woman, perhaps reflecting the position of women in the white, patriarchal society from which she was excluded, ponders the personal, expresses the intimate, salvages the emotional highs and lows of female experience. Even in those narratives written by women at the instigation of Abolitionists there is an insistent demand for self-fulfilment, in their expressed desire for work that would provide economic independence. The perceived need for self-definition through work is as strong in these narratives as is the cry from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. ⁹ This novel challenges and questions the ideology of gender in the West which had rendered the middle-class white British woman impotent and often redundant within her society. The demand of such white women was for an education and economic independence which would enable them to escape from the confines of the domestic sphere. How more challenging to this ideology was the very existence of enslaved women who could demand nothing, and for whom ‘escape’ meant something very different. For black women the idea of female exclusion in the supposed safety of the domestic sphere was an unimagined luxury. The narratives they have left constantly interrogate those notions of gender which, although inscribed in the social institutions of British and American society, were applicable only to white women. Sojourner Truth summed this up in her gesture at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 when, addressing a racially mixed audience, she bared her breast and asked ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ Clearly Sojourner Truth was demanding an examination of the construction of gender in American society, and asking why it excluded black women. Yet despite their perceived ‘inferiority’ to white women, what emerges from a reading of these narratives is a refusal of the female slave to accept victim status. Many detail attempts to escape, to find work as free women, and to buy relatives out of bondage.

That the slave narratives are at the root of much of the black writing which followed, as protest and witness to black status in America, cannot be denied. However, not all blacks were slaves. Some had been freed, some had bought freedom, some had escaped. As early as the 1830s in Boston and Philadelphia black women were forming their own literary societies, thus giving opportunity and encouragement to those amongst their number who wanted to write. That some black women could write and manipulate the English language more skilfully than could many whites had already been shown in the eighteenth century in the writing of Phyllis Wheatley, whose devotional poetry disproved the white assumption that the blacks were incapable of ever aspiring to the same level of literacy as their masters. Other challenges to notions of white intellectual and moral supremacy came in the shape of the spiritual autobiographies, the earliest of which pre-date the fugitive slave narratives by some fifty years. This is not surprising in the light of the enforced illiteracy of the slave, and the access to literacy of free blacks. The slave narratives express in particular the narrators’ awareness of a physical self, the spiritual autobiographies an awareness of the spiritual self. William L. Andrews, in his introduction to three nineteenth-century spiritual autobiographies by women, comments that ‘Like the fugitive slave narrator, the black spiritual autobiographer traced his or her freedom back to the acquisition of some sort of saving knowledge and to an awakening from within’. ¹⁰

Of the women whose autobiographies are edited by Andrews, Jarena Lee (born in 1783) and Zilpha Elaw (born in 1790) were the daughters of free parents, whilst Julia Foote (born in 1823) was the child of former slaves who had bought freedom. Their autobiographies express a common demand for individual female self-hood, through spirituality. This is still extant, and is a predominant concern expressed in the writing of Alice Walker today, although she rejects Christianity as a channel for that spirituality. Paradoxically, although Elaw, Lee and Foote demanded a freedom to preach a religion now depicted by their twentieth-century literary descendants as a factor in women’s oppression, their demands can be recognised as an expression of a ‘womanism’ with which Walker could not argue.

In her excellent essay on ‘Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures; Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women’ ¹¹ Frances Smith Foster argues that the life stories by Afro-American women in the nineteenth century ‘present protagonists who transcend the images of the victimised slave woman and the home-bound True Woman’ (p. 35). They present themselves as pioneers in the struggle of the black woman for self-definition and independence. It is interesting to examine the personal histories of Lee, Elaw and Foote in the light of this comment. All three found voice through their commitment to the Christian religion, and an organisation which because of its hierarchical and patriarchal structure seemed an unlikely breeding-ground for female independence. Yet the black African Methodist Episcopal church to which they belonged had allowed, as did the slave narratives, an expression of group humanity, and had provided opportunity for cohesion amongst the blacks. In Long Black Song, ¹² Houston A. Baker argues convincingly that the violent disruption of the Africans’ identity in slavery had been exacerbated by their enforced abandonment of native gods. Christianity was imposed upon them. When the first abducted Africans were landed in the Americas as slaves in 1619, the English Church was eager to convert them to Christianity, and slave baptismal records go back as far as 1641, although the African slaves were initially loath to embrace the religion of their oppressors. Evangelicising of slaves began in earnest in the early eighteenth century through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, newly formed in London. Such efforts were not always welcomed by the Southern whites, who feared the opportunity provided by communal worship for possible slave insurrections. So great was the concern of some States that they enacted measures to prevent the gathering together of slaves on the Sabbath. What they could not legislate against, however, was the great tide of nonconformist religious movements that swept through the colonies in the 1730s, a time now referred to as ‘The Great Awakening’, to which blacks as well as whites responded. By 1775 blacks comprised nearly one-quarter of the colonial population, and had been recruited in large numbers to the Baptist Church.

This alien religion offered Africans of disparate tribal origin a common focus. Victims of a diaspora, they were quick to embrace a religion which promised liberation – albeit only in a spiritual sense – personal redemption, and eventual retribution for their oppressors. They were particularly attracted to Old Testament stories where they were able to find identity with the enslaved Israelites. Yet whilst they accepted the Christian message, they were forced to worship in a church where physical segregation of blacks from whites emphasised their supposed inferiority. They were not allowed to sit in the body of the church, nor to take Communion with white worshippers. There was an obvious contradiction in a church which preached that humankind was made in God’s image, yet was unable to conceive of a humankind that was not white. Some whites justified enslavement as a natural consequence of innate racial inferiority, or as ‘a punishment resulting from sin or a natural defect of the soul’. ¹³ Some even argued that blacks had no souls. Jarena Lee found difficulty in convincing her employer of her religiosity until a time when he ‘seemed to admit that colored people had souls’ (Sisters, p. 47).

The first black man to be granted a licence to preach was George Leile, a slave in the ownership of a Baptist deacon. Leile assisted in the founding in 1780 of the first Negro congregation in America – the African Baptist Church in Savannah. In the same decade another ex-slave, Richard Allen, was finding a mission in Christianity. Allen was born into slavery in 1760 in Philadelphia where attitudes towards manumission were more tolerant than those in the deep South, and by the age of 17 he had bought his freedom. He then began a career as an itinerant Methodist preacher – as did Elaw, Lee and Foote, who followed him – but, unlike theirs, his mission was recognised in his appointment to the Old St George’s Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia. Here he drew large congregations of black as well as white worshippers, until the racism of the whites erupted. They demanded that the seats be reserved for the whites, while the blacks should stand around the walls of the church. Animosity reached its height in 1787 when white deacons seized and forced to their feet the praying Richard Allen and an associate minister Absalom Jones. Outraged at this act, Allen decided upon separation from the whites. Allen and Jones established the Free African Society, to which Jarena Lee belonged, but by 1794 the two ministers had gone their separate ways. Jones formed the African Episcopal Church which later affiliated with the mainstream white church, and Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church which has remained separate from the white. By 1815 Allen had been elected as the first black bishop of America, and the AME remains today as one of the largest black American denominations.

The AME afforded the blacks the opportunity to join in worship and to come to enlightenment in their own way. As testified to in the spiritual autobiographies, this involved a conventional path to God via conversion, prophetic dreams, trances and visions. Hurston, in The Sanctified Church, ¹⁴ notes: ‘The vision is a very definite part of Negro religion. It almost always accompanies the call to preach’ (p. 85). This call to preach, however, was only acceptable in black men. The American church was clearly racist, but the black church was equally sexist. Richard Allen’s only response to Jarena Lee’s request for permission to be ordained, was that church rules would not allow it. In seeking to preach, women were interrogating patriarchy with questions that could not be answered. Lee asks: ‘And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? Seeing the saviour died for woman as well as the man?’ (Sisters, p. 36). In a church that was devoutly served by women (in the capacity of cleaners, fund-raisers, needlewomen and carers), such a challenge to male authority was met with hostility. Although Bishop Allen gave Lee permission to hold prayer meetings in her own house, and later allowed her to take her mission abroad, she was never granted a licence to preach.

Lee’s autobiography was published in 1849, after which she see...