The Study of African American Women’s Writing: Pasts & Futures

I would like to close by reflecting briefly on Emory’s campus symbols. Our crest contains a torch and a trumpet, invoking the light of truth and the call to spread the truth. Indeed, this invocation to seek and spread truth embodies our university’s motto: the wise heart seeks knowledge. This motto is meant to remind us of the need for sustained inquiry and for the dogged pursuit of knowledge. Albert Einstein once warned that those who set themselves up as judge in the fields of truth and knowledge shall be shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. Personally, I am not afraid of being laughed at, especially for standing up for the truth. I have been laughed at for far less. What’s more, I would hazard that what we need right now, frankly, is more broken boats, for surely it is a risky time and our political waters are more than a bit choppy. And while a boat may be truly safest in a harbor, that is not what boats were made for.

In his 2015 book Honoring Maya Angelou, Tavis Smiley recalls Angelou’s reminder that the surest road ahead is the one that you create. As she put it, “Baby, we find our path by walking it.” Charting new paths and telling our courageous and sometimes inconvenient truths along those roads has long been the hallmark of African American women’s fiction. I am reminded of the words of Audre Lorde, “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

In her collaborative memoir with her husband, With Ossie and Ruby, Ruby Dee wrote, “Looking back is tricky business. It is seeing through time, people, events; it’s remembering subtleties and attitudes. It’s getting the facts straight, even though the facts may have little to do with ‘telling the truth.’” And so when I think about how I could talk with you about the history and the status of African American women’s writings as a discipline or a point of interest, or even about my own place in it, my experiences as I pursue the elusive goal of understanding and knowing, I don’t hesitate to talk about me as a person. When I started out back in the day, we believed the personal was political. I still believe that, but I also believe what Barbara Christian wrote: “I can only speak for myself, but what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life.”

When I began teaching and researching in the 1970s, I was eager – overeager – and idealistic. I was a graduate student and a freeway flyer, which is what we called adjuncts. I taught a course here, taught a course there, ran up and down the freeway trying to make a living. For a wonderful while, one of my jobs was at UCSD’s Third College, a legacy of Angela Davis and others. At first I tried to do it their way. As a graduate student at the University of Southern California, I took independent studies courses from the only African American professor, Lloyd Brown, a Jamaican whose definition of African American was, fortunate for me, international and, unfortunately for me, patriarchal to the extreme. However, the closest my comprehensive exam came to anything like my own focus was a question on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Two years and two children later, I was accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of California, San Diego, and that was a little bit better. UCSD’s was a wonderful program that required three comparative foci, and so I did Milton, the novels of the Mexican Revolution, and the Harlem Renaissance. I persuaded Roy Harvey Pearce to chair a dissertation on autobiographical writings of enslaved African Americans, but all in all my graduate work was supervised and enabled by men who paid scant attention to women’s writings.

My first book, Witnessing Slavery, came from my dissertation and focused primarily on men, in part because I had defined the topic as first-person, independently published narratives of flight and escape, with narrators living happily ever after. And that was not the way women’s writings went. In the antebellum period, very few women published anything on their own, and very few women wrote memoirs. I inadvertently excluded most women. But I knew they were missing. I had grown up knowing African American women published books – even in the antebellum period. I remembered the teachers at my all-black schools who taught us more than was in the curriculum handed down to us in those old tattered textbooks. I knew about Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and I knew there had to have been others. They were out there, and so I began to pursue where.

So that’s how I began my career in early African American women’s writings. I was discomfited by my work on the formerly enslaved and I kept reading. And what’s really interesting is that all along the way, my research was grounded not in what I learned in the academy but in what I learned from the teachers and librarians in my segregated school, from the people in my church and the leaders of my youth organizations, and from the books my mother gave me when I was a child. Years later, Dr. Me began deliberately to look for, work through, and try to write something about the history of early African American women. I eventually learned enough to teach an African American women writers’ class, whose syllabus was published in But Some of Us Are Brave.

I stopped being a freeway flyer and landed a tenure track position, I was so grateful to be teaching a four/four load and to this day I think the unsung heroes are those who teach more. If you’ve got something to say, then the more people that hear you, the better the world is. But I was also grateful that tenure track came with $250 a year for professional growth. And so I could attend the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting. At the MLA, I met Lenore Hoffman, Deborah Rosenfelt, and Paul Lauter. When Deborah and Lenore got a grant to teach women’s literature from a regional perspective, combining research and teaching experimental courses, helping our students learn to uncover, investigate, analyze, and collate narratives by African American and other women, they included me.

At the same time, at Benedict College, Marianne W. Davis included me in a grant to explore the contributions of black women to America. I worked very hard to uncover the materials that would define the contributions in California, Hawaii, and Alaska, but the libraries were barren. Again I turned to my community and the women’s clubs that privately published biographies and saved minutes of meetings, celebratory booklets, and other data; they had the material I needed to begin to understand what women’s writing was about. And that marked me.

Attending conferences, hanging out with women’s studies folk, starting black faculty groups, and leading black literature sessions at existing conferences led to collaborations, co-operations, and lifelong friendships with others who were similarly struggling in their roles. Often we were the only ones in our department, in our college, in our university, in our city, maybe, who had a serious interest in the literature of African American women. For context, this group included Nellie McKay, Barbara Christian, Claudia Tate, Mary Helen Washington, Debbie McDowell, Sue Houchins, Helen Houston, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Kenny J. Williams, among many others. And we always defined the literature not just as published materials, but as writings. And the rest was history.

What I hope you see in this is two patterns. First, I came to research because it helped me be a better teacher. Teaching was and always has been my first love because I really believe that education is power – and miseducation leads to misery – so you have to educate – inclusively and accurately – the whole person. The second is that I became a better researcher because my work was nurtured in collaboration, in community, and in commitment. Which is not the same as mentoring and networking, don’t get me started on that. Looking back is tricky business. Anticipating the future is foolish. I never thought I would become a college professor or that I would go from Milton and the Mexican Revolution to Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckly, and Sonia Sanchez.

I am a convert to the concept of Sankofa. Sankofa – from the Twi language of Ghana – is represented by a bird whose feet and body are facing forward, but whose head is turned over its back, holding an egg in its mouth. I have a little statue in my office. The idea is that in order to go forward, you must go back to the past and find out and carry back what is most important. That is the little egg. So if I want to talk about the future, I have to talk about the past. And I believe history, besides being a made-up thing that suits the purposes of those who make it up, is a wheel that moves in many directions. With my current work, I’m returning to where I started. I am thinking again about the literary implications of the kitchen table press and beauty shop talk and church chatter.

When we talk about the future, though, I prefer to talk about my former students, who have done fascinating work and of whom I’m so proud. They are doing public scholarship, working in Afrofuturism and in other genres like mysteries and romances and so-called children’s literature that have been neglected or disparaged but form the bedrock of our ideas and ideals. There’s nothing mundane at all about the domestic, about religion, about love and marriage, about family. As the future opens, these genres will get the credit they deserve. My students are part of a generation that thinks about how literature and health are connected, about the whole practice of medical narratives and narratives as therapy. They explore the diversity of African Americans’ experiences, especially the diasporic nature of African American women. From New Haven, Connecticut, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Birmingham, Alabama, Davis, California, Phoenix, Arizona, across this nation and in others, they are working on little-explored aspects of women’s writings; if you really want to know about the futures, then you probably should just stop, look, and listen to them.

When we consider that it took Ralph Ellison a score of years to write Invisible Man, and Alex Haley twelve to write Roots, the four years of labor poured into Sturdy Black Bridges seem almost insignificant. However, Sturdy Black Bridges is a different kind of experience from that of Roots or Invisible Man, not in quality or even concept, but in its eclectical commitment. That eclecticism, represented in works as diverse as Margaret Walker’s classic poem “Lineage” and Mae Jackson’s “Cleaning Out the Closet,” has been at times frustrating; more often it has led to valuable exposures – encounters with people, places, and ideologies which have enhanced our own and others’ lives.

The volume marked my first encounter with Toni Cade Bambara. I took myself over to her apartment on Simpson Road with a tape recorder that I did not even know how to operate, and I interviewed her with her daughter, Karma, running around. The interview that appeared in Sturdy Black Bridges, “Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks,” is among the first, if not the first, published interview with Toni, whose pioneering text The Black Woman (1970), which had appeared three years earlier, is now iconic in black feminist studies.

As we wrote in Bridges:

The shape of this anthology is incomplete and fluid – all collections are which purport to be fundamental. But the work is generically incomplete, for such are the lives of people, and Black women, among others in the First World, are people, creating and destroying with regular frequency ideas and even dogmas. Hence, the unfinished song of Sturdy Black Bridges.

Now almost forty years later, it is impossible for us to have imagined what Sturdy Black Bridges might have set in motion in terms of scholarly output establishing the richness of our black women’s literary tradition that began in the United States in the nineteenth century. In my first published essay in Sturdy Black Bridges, “The Women of Brownsville,” which I have no memory of writing, I analyzed Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry – I do remember her poetry – and deployed, without perhaps realizing it, a black feminist lens that is now pervasive and the results of which are now dazzling in their brilliance. This is what I wrote:

An obvious difference between Gwendolyn Brooks and male writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison who have used the urban environment as a setting for their works is the greater amount of attention she devotes to the experiences of females. While women are not absent from Wright’s or Ellison’s ghetto worlds, they remain background figures who are of secondary importance, at best, to the central actions of their novels. Like Ann Petry, Brooks focuses on the impact of the urban experience on females as well as males. Her sexual identity as well as her racial identity have molded her vision of the city.

I want to end with another writer and literary critic, Professor Gloria Wade Gayles, who also teaches at Spelman in the English department and I think understood even better than we did what we were trying to do in Sturdy Black Bridges. I want to read from her preface to the anthology:

I rejoice. I celebrate. I dance with my soul. There is reason to celebrate the publication of this work, for our lives have been touched in various ways by black women who are real-life models for images in literature. As mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, lovers, wives, children. As people who were and are major architects of the black experience. It is a special book, because it refuses to pay homage to the “system’s” distortions of black women and to our refusal too long to correct those distortions. It is a bridge we have needed to cross over on into a deeper understanding of and more sensitive appreciation for our women as positive forces in our experience.

I have moved a long way from Sturdy Black Bridges in my more recent work. I have moved way away from literary studies and have spent most of my last twenty years, I would say, as an archeologist, trying to uncover and make the case that we also have a very rich black feminist intellectual and theoretical tradition. And I’m working on one of my favorite projects right now, which may never get published: a long essay about the radical feminist politics of Coretta Scott King. It will reposition her and take her out of the narrow roles of “mother of the civil rights movement” and widow. It will place her where she belongs as one of the most radical figures in the civil rights movement, particularly around LGBTQ issues, which many people don’t know. I’m also working on a memoir. And third, I am working on a rewriting of the history of so-called second wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement, putting African American women at the center of that history.

Like many of you, I was first introduced to black women’s storytelling through the oral tradition. My great-grandmother, Rosa Marie Clay, was the first to convey the power of words to shape one’s understanding of the world and one’s purpose in it. She and her husband, my great-grandfather Monroe Earl Clay, left Texas in search of work and a life beyond the cotton fields and the racism embedded in the same land worked by their forebears. In fact, McClendon County, Texas, where Rosa’s grandparents had been enslaved, was also the location where her father Junius McClendon was born in 1865. Eventually, Junius would marry and raise his family on the same land, on sharecropper’s wages, which most of you know was “just below nothing.”

Rosa and Monroe sought to create a life beyond the culture of abuse that forced African Americans to negotiate their existence on a daily basis. Leaving four of their five children in the care of relatives, they ventured into unknown territory, riding the wave of westward migration in search of opportunity. In Richmond, California, both found work in the Kaiser shipyards, before my great-grandfather was drafted into the Navy and shipped off to the Pacific theater.

In California, Rosa became one of 600,000 African American women who joined the wartime labor force. She was, in fact, a riveter: Rosa the riveter. There can be no doubt that she, like Camille Billops’ mother, Alma Dotson, worked alongside other African American, white, and Mexican women, many of whom shared similar backgrounds, fears, and dreams for the future. Being gainfully employed was an essential part of their plans for success and empowerment as women, and their desire for independence. After the war, Rosa and Monroe returned to Texas. Shortly thereafter, she decided she wanted more out of her life. She refused to allow herself or her children to be subjected to the ongoing abuses heaped on African Americans seeking to better themselves, their families, and communities. Instead, she chose to return to California, where her children could gain access to a quality education, and live in more favorable social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances, which meant sacrificing her family ties to Texas. But Rosa was determined. She found work as a domestic in the homes of white people, many of whom employed her up until the time of her death in 1982.

Unfortunately, her experiences moving to California, working in the defense industry during the war, and as domestic labor are essentially unknown to a majority of my extended family members. And with the passing of four of her five children – my grandmother died this past January – most are in jeopardy of losing their inheritance. Now, what exactly is this inheritance that I speak of? I’ll come back to that.

As the matriarch, Rosa was the head of the family. With the absence of my great-grandfather, who visited occasionally, everyone came to her for advice and guidance. As an aside, I recall those occasional visits by Monroe, which were sometime in the 1970s. I remember he was always reserved in his emotions and would often spend time alone with his thoughts. He said very little. He was the epitome of stoicism. Only recently was I made aware of some of his experiences in the military that haunted him, and other traumas that he endured and relived each and every day. Taking the pain, which eventually broke him.

Opposite of this tremendously stoic figure was Rosa, who would often tell stories about her experiences working for whites in Santa Clara, Campbell, and San Jose. For the most part, they were pleasant experiences. At least the ones she shared. I remember her constantly telling one of my uncles that Mr. and Mrs. “so and so” were good white people. She told him that “they were fair” and always gave her things to take home. When she needed something, they went out of their way to help her. But my uncle wasn’t buying it.

Reflecting on it now, his response reminds me of a passage from the introduction of Farrah Jasmine Griffin’s Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, where she writes:

Given the historical and political contexts in which African American women have lived, and given their own desire to shape and influence these contexts for the benefit of all Americans, it is understandable that they often felt it is necessary to present highly censored “positive” images to an often hostile public. Thus many have kept the most personal aspects of their lives as well as the full range of their thoughts secret.

While Rosa remained for most part optimistic about her dealings with her employers, I also recall her saying that she couldn’t bring herself to trust them. Them, being white people. No matter how nice they were; no matter how much they tried to extend themselves for her benefit. She too was mindful of the past, which for her was always present. Her personal and communal traumas would not allow her to give herself fully to people outside of her family, her community, or the Pentecostal Church. She was cautious of making herself vulnerable to the ways of white folks.

She understood how power worked: she had to. So she worked, and she worked hard to create a buffer to protect herself and her children from danger the best way she could. But she also embraced the present and the future simultaneously by teaching her grandchildren and great-grandchildren how to take care of themselves: how to be independent, just, aspirational, and above all, resilient. These are the lessons that have shaped generations of African American children. This is the inheritance I believe is present in black women’s writing and storytelling.

In the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library we have dozens of collections that account for the tremendous breadth and depth of black women’s experiences as writers, activists, artists, and administrators. Through their own distinctive writing and the intersections found throughout the materials within the Rose Library collections, to quote from Dr. Sheftall’s Words of Fire, “these women share a collective history of oppression and a commitment to improving the lives of black women, especially, and the world in which we live.”

Indeed, beyond the scope of what most would expect the Stuart Rose Library to have in terms of the literary output of black women writers like Alice Walker, Pearl Cleage, and Natasha Trethewey; we have the personal and professional papers for numerous black women artists, educators, writers, and entrepreneurs, whose individual and collective lives reveal the nuances and challenges of living in, and negotiating space within a world resisting the assertion of black womanhood. A number of the collections are in need of exploration and elevation. Included among these are the Rev. Dr. Ella Mitchell; artist and art historian Dr. Samella Lewis; poet, playwright, and teacher May Miller; composer, musician, and teacher Geneva Southall; activist and writer Louise Meriwether; journalist and novelist Almena Lomax; model and entrepreneur Ophelia Devore-Mitchell; and journalist and writer Viola Andrews, to name but a few.

By example, Viola Andrews, who many of you know as a writer and columnist here in Atlanta, was also the mother of visual artist and activist Benny Andrews, and the novelist Raymond Andrews. And she had a tremendous influence on their lives as artists and people. In 1930, Viola married George Andrews, who was a sharecropper in Madison County, Georgia. Between 1932 and 1953, the couple had nine children. After the birth of their last child, Gregory, Viola decided to move to Atlanta with her children to raise them in an environment where they would have a chance at life.

When she moved to Atlanta, she attended Beaumont’s School of Vocational Nursing, and later worked as a nurse at McClendon Hospital. In 1971, she enrolled at the Atlanta School of Biblical Studies, and in 1972, she integrated the white Lakewood Presbyterian Church when she began to teach evening Sunday school.

She was a writer of short stories and a newspaper column. Her short story “Go Down Moses” appeared in the literary magazine Time Capsule in January 1971. She served as Religious Editor at the Metro Atlanta Community Bulletin and wrote a weekly column on religion. In the collection we have copies of these materials and more, including her autobiography, several other short stories, and a book of poems entitled Body, Spirit, and Soul.

The collection consists of papers of the Andrews family, including writings, correspondence, photographs, religious material, scrapbooks, and other miscellaneous papers.

All of her children maintained a relationship with her, writing her frequently and sharing stories about their lives, and how they benefitted from her nurturing. In a two page letter dated January 24, 1989, the youngest, Gregory Andrews, writes:

Hi, Mama,

How’s my sweet brown cupcake? Wonderful I hope. I received your inspiring letter. It was a joy to hear from you. I think about you everyday. I wish I could have sent you more money.

When I be working on my job, a lot of you is still in me. You always told me to work hard and do the best job possible. Don’t worry about the best guy. I be thinking about all of the values you instilled in me. I’m proud of you Mama. I love you very much. I work like everyday is my last day. Tomorrow is not promised. Some people complemented me on this. I was blessed to have a mother like you.

Clearly, this mother and son relationship demonstrates the kind of influence she had on her son’s development as an adult, and as a man. It also demonstrates a child’s claiming his inheritance from his mother, who successfully guided her sons through adolescence into manhood. His voice of appreciation is not unique, but it is important to acknowledge in the scope of the role of black women raising children to become responsible and respectful adults. Like my memories of the resilience of my great-grandmother Rosa, the archives of black women writers are important to our understanding of where we come from, but most importantly who we come from. The collections of stories of resilience, perseverance, and success represent our collective inheritance that we should not ignore, nor abuse for personal gain. We have an obligation to share these stories and learn from them.