Maybe the disparity started with physical competition. I wasn’t a tomboy. But I didn’t like it that boys thought we couldn’t beat them at sports when we beat them at other things. And when puberty hurled its gonadotropins our way, the few girls who’d always played soccer and baseball with boys and sometimes beat them got shut out. Shut out by the boys; looked down on by sports-deriding girls they were supposed to start being friends with.
For me, the worst was trying to master the special effects of boy-girl pursuit. It was grueling. Hint, then declare; confess, prevaricate; have power, yield control—all the while trying to protect your tenuous sense of self. It was maddening, this business of playing shallow, acting giddier than you were. My sister had the strongest will of anyone I knew. But in the company of boys she’d make her voice higher and softer, become more obliging. Then, the boy gone, she’d switch right back into mastery mode. And my brainy, sharp-tongued best friend. “How will I know what to think if I don’t know what he thinks?” she asked her diary after a high school date with a sweet, quiet, and handsome boy. Some years later it struck her that he may have had no thoughts to express.
—
Thenthenthenthen…lurking or imposing itself, stirring and wearying you: the perpetual question of The Negro Woman. Her history of struggle, degradation, triumph; her exclusion from the rewards of bourgeois femininity; her duty to strengthen the Negro family. Not a history one wanted to haul through one’s social life. Not a history one wanted to lumber into the sexual revolution with. Not a history one wanted to have sternly codified by white sociologists and Black Power revolutionaries who found the faults of The Black Woman much the same as those of The Negro Woman. She was bellicose, she was self-centered; she was sexually prudish when not castrating.
The solution: Black Woman, concur, submit, and improve your attitude!
Florynce Kennedy was the first black feminist I saw in public and in action. Lawyer, protester, organizer, she was born in 1916, the same year as my mother—and four years before women of any color got the vote. A whiplash tongue and a cowboy hat; suede and leather pants (am I imagining that she sometimes wore chaps?); dangling earrings and many necklaces (some with women’s rights symbols, some with bright stones and feathers). She was tall and fabulously grandstanding. She’d planted herself and thrived in every movement that counted: civil rights, anti-war, black power, feminism, gay rights. Her principles never swerved; her tactics never staled. She used to say something like this:
When black women tell me feminism is a white woman’s thing, I tell them: you’ve spent all these years, all these centuries, imitating every bad idea white women came up with—about their hair, their makeup, their clothes, their duties to their men. And now, they finally come up with one good idea—feminism—and you decide you don’t want anything to do with it!
—
Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.
So I won’t trap myself into quantifying which matters more, race, or gender, or class. Race, gender, and class are basic elements of one’s living. Basic as utensils and clothing; always in use; always needing repairs and updates. Basic as body and breath, justice and reason, passion and imagination. So the question isn’t “Which matters most?,” it’s “How does each matter?” Gender, race, class; class, race, gender—your three in one and one in three.
Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you. That’s your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don’t stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.
All of them shifting even as I write.
Don’t let me end in the realm of lilting abstraction. It comes down to this: Am I someone whose character and behavior do not hold the world back in these ways? Have I made a viable life for myself?
An adult life takes shape. You (me) are a writer, a journalist, a critic. You are a woman who grew up as a Negro and usually calls herself black. (“African American” is strictly for official discourse.) Genealogically speaking, you are of African, Irish, English, and Indian descent.
You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation (not an untrue one, though not quite sufficient) is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements (institutions’, people’s), by so much dread of disapproval, that the discipline of solitude—severe solitude—has been required to give you the sense of an independent selfhood. The intensities of friendship suit you better.
Friendship’s choreography is for multiple partners: for varied groups and surprisingly sustained duets.
“The human psyche is pathetic,” I say—I declaim—to my psychopharmacologist.
“It’s what we have, Miss Jefferson,” he replies, “it’s what we have.”
And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best.
There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what?
So what?
Go on.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without a much-loved family of friends who spurred me to write, think, and persevere: Lynn Jones Barbour, Alexandra Chasin, Susan Dickler, Ann Douglas, Wendy Gimbel, Sophia Hall, Anthony Heilbut, Laura Karp, Adrienne Kennedy, Jo Lang, Betty Shamieh, Betty Ann Solinger, Laurie Stone, and Wendy Walters. Special thanks to friends Elizabeth Kendall, irreplaceable first reader, and Charlotte Carter, impeccable first copy editor.
Parts of this book were published, in different forms, in Book-forum, MORE, The Believer, Guernica, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, and What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. I am grateful to the editors.
I was enormously helped by a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and stimulated by the company of colleagues and friends at Columbia University, especially that of Phillip Lopate, guardian of the essay in all its forms.
Many of my family’s Chicago friends are gone. I salute their graceful ghosts and honor those living, particularly Sue Barnett Ish, Wyonella Smith, the Northeasterners, and the Birthday Club members. St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church and its rector, Richard L. Tolliver, were bulwarks for my parents; additional thanks to Father David Stanford and Cheryl A. Harris for their kindness to my mother in her last years. Mary Willis and Jacqueline Blakely were crucial to her well-being and to mine. I will never forget their kindness.
It’s been a pleasure and honor to work again with my editor at Pantheon, Erroll McDonald, and with my agent, Sarah Chalfant. Thanks to Ellen Feldman, my scrupulous production editor; Nicholas Latimer, my ebullient photographer; Josie Kals, whose attention never flagged; and the rest of the Pantheon staff. Oliver Munday’s jacket design was perfection.
Finally, loving gratitude to my niece, Francesca Harper, who shared her memories, her humor, her photographs, and the company of her husband, Eric Cohen, and their daughter, Harper Io Denise Cohen.
Notes
“to see my race lifted”: Frances Jackson Coppin quoted in We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 205.
“the lighter accomplishments”: Joseph Willson, The Elite of Our People: Joseph Willson’s Sketches of Black Upper-Class Life in Antebellum Philadelphia, ed. Julie Winch (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 89.
“You have seen how a man”: Frederick Douglass, The Narrative and
Selected Writings, ed. Michael Meyer (New York: Modern Library College Edmons, 1983), 75.
“on account of her care and attention”: Willson, The Elite of Our People, 52.
“suitable household and Kitchen furniture”: Ibid., 54.
“undoubtedly excite the mirth”: Ibid., 79.
“The prejudiced world has for a long time”: Ibid., 97.
“that portion of colored society”: Ibid., 87.
“The machinery of the watch”: Ibid., 88.
“in the manner of suitors”: Ibid., 103.
In fact, after receiving a small number: Ibid., 48–49.
“Fred. Douglass and his able compatriots”: Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, ed. Julie Winch (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 45–46.
“tonsorial profession”: Ibid., 52.
“separated from the white race”: Ibid., 45.
“If the reader will accompany me”: Ibid., 48.
“Mrs. Rutgers is an illiterate woman”: Ibid., 49.
“and is good for one hundred thousand dollars”: Ibid., 51.
“Not so bad a speculation”: Ibid., 55.
“is a good man”: Ibid., 60.
“They are both no doubt sorry”: Ibid., 60–61.
“rather dilapidated”: Ibid., 60.
“can command the cool sum”: Ibid., 59.
“will startle many of our white friends”: Ibid., 63.
“the result of the unwearied and combined action”: Ibid., 47.
“On the wharf was a motley assemblage”: Charlotte Forten Grimké, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 388–89.
“I wonder that every colored person”: Ibid., 140.
“I will pray that God”: Ibid., 376.
“full of the shouting spirit”: Ibid., 402.
“These people have really a great deal”: Charlotte Forten quoted in We Are Your Sisters, pp. 281, 510n.
“that noblest of compensations”: Ibid., 284.
“to promote social intercourse”: Willson, The Elite of Our People, 68.
“for almost any offense”: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (Guttenberg eBook, 2005), chapter 1.
“The Southern white man says”: Ibid.
“linked with that of every agony”: Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 122.
“such new and alluring vistas”: Ibid., 143–44.
“the lowly, the illiterate”: Mary Church Terrell quoted in Mary Helen Washington, introduction to Cooper, A Voice from the South, xxx.
“Does any race produce more”: W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 288.
“the only Southern book”: Henry James quoted ibid., 277.
“a willingness to sacrifice and plan”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address,” Boulé Journal (1948), in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 350.
“a group of selfish, self-indulgent”: Ibid., 349.
“pathological struggle for status”: E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1997), 212.
“It appears that middle-class Negroes”: Ibid., 1.
“I have lived it for over eighty years”: Gerri Major with Doris Saunders, Black Society (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1976), vii.
“exclusive” and “prestigious” schools: Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000).
“Virtually all Negro field artillery officers”: Major Welton I. Taylor with Karyn J. Taylor, Two Steps from Glory: A World War II Liaison Pilot Confronts Jim Crow and the Enemy in the South Pacific (Winning Strategy Press, 2012), 45.
Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got: Langston Hughes, “A Note on Humor,” from The Book of Negro Humor, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, ed. Christopher C. De Santis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 525.
“You’ve got to be taught to be afraid”: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” South Pacific (1949).
“Blow out the candle”: Phil Moore, “Blow Out the Candle.”
“While tearing off a game of golf”: Cole Porter, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
“I’m here to tell you”: Clyde Lovern Otis and Murray Stein, “Smooth Operator (Mercy Mister Percy).”
“Sherman Billingsley cooks for me”: June Carroll and Arthur Siegel, “Monotonous,” New Faces of 1952.
“The child, not the lesson”: John Dewey, The School and Society, quoted in William Harms and Ida DePencier, 100 Years of Learning at The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1996), www.ucls.uchicago.edu/about-lab/current-publications/history/index/aspx.
“The question of the child’s future”: James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Penguin, 1990), 56.
“The thousand injuries of Caucasians”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”; my alteration.
“A wrong is unredressed”: Ibid.
“Stitch Stitch Stitch”: Thomas Hood, “Song of the Shirt,” in Adventures in English Literature, ed. R. B. Inglis et al. (Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1952), 436–37.
“He weeps by the side of the ocean”: Edward Lear, “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear,” quoted in John Lehmann, Edward Lear and His World (New York: Scribner’s, 1977), 116.
“Well, son, I’ll tell you”: Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 30.
The secret signal: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 88.
“Fat black bucks”: Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo,” in American Poetry: Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 2000), 215–77.
“BOOM, kill the white men”: Ibid., 276.
“they all repented”: Ibid., 278.
“ ‘Mumbo…Jumbo’ ”: Ibid., 280.
“Gr-r-r—there go”: Robert Browning, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” in Victorian Verse, ed. George MacBeth (New York, Penguin, 1969), 102–4.
“The story of the Negro in America”: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 19.
“One may say that the Negro in America”: Ibid.
“The ways in which the Negro”: Ibid.
“We cannot ask”: Ibid.
“This world is white no longer”: Ibid., 129.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel”: Ibid., 11–12.
Awaiting each colored child: Johnson, Along This Way, 56.
“I am a black woman”: “Mari Evans, I Am a Black Woman (New York: Morrow, 1970), n.p.
good-looking in a boring way: Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 14–15.
“The poor bitch”: Ibid., 25.
“Thief!” Sexton wrote: Anne Sexton, “Sylvia’s Death,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Mariner, 1999), 126.
“You don’t know what love is”: Don Raye and Gene de Paul, “You Don’t Know What Love Is.”
I cry your mercy: John Keats, “I cry your mercy,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 371.
Every day a little death: Stephen Sondheim, “Every Day a Little Death,” from A Little Night Music, 1997.
“A sense of incalculable past loss and injury”: Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 122.
“I think
this journal will be disadvantageous”: Mary Boykin Chestnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 22.
“I had wanted to compromise with Fate”: Charlotte Brontë, Villette (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972), 222.
“I sometimes wish that I could fall”: Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 238.
“You are you”: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Country Mouse,” in The Collected Prose (New York: Noonday Press, 1993), 33.
“My hand is stuffed”: Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Children of the Poor,” in Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 53.
“Plunge ahead”: Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 91–92.
“I have stories to tell?”: Wendy Walters, “A Letter from the Hunted in Retrospect,” in Longer I Wait, More You Love Me: Poems (Berkeley, Calif.: Palm Press, 2009), 30.
“in the drifting community”: Rachel Carson, “The Edge of the Sea,” in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, ed. Linda Lear (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 139.
“If there be anything like a colored lady”: Charlotte Hawkins Brown, quoted in Charles W. Wadlington and Richard F. Knapp, Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 16.
“What kind of pictures do we select”: Quoted in Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 74.
Buy mother a box of handkerchiefs: Charlotte Hawkins Brown, “Mammy”: An Appeal to the Heart of the South; The Correct Thing To Do—To Say—To Wear (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1995), 5, 10, 33, 46, 77.
“Dear Friend”: Ibid., 33.
“To Do and to Say”: Ibid., 37, 110, 43, 114.
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