by Alice Walker
And we talked and we discussed and we sang for Shirley Chisholm and clapped for Eleanor Holmes Norton and tried to follow Margaret Sloan’s lyrics and cheered Flo Kennedy’s anecdotes. And we laughed a lot and argued some. And had a very good time.
1974
BREAKING CHAINS AND ENCOURAGING LIFE
Four stories:
1. AT TWO O'CLOCK in the morning when I was living in Brooklyn, I received a call from a black woman who had recently invited me to read at her school. I had, in fact, spent the night in the house she shared with her third-world woman, nonblack lover, and had had an enjoyable time.
Among the preliminaries of this conversation was the news that she and her lover had broken up, and did I know I was beautiful and did I know my eyes were sad?
She had heard I intended to move to San Francisco. She intended to do the same. In fact, intended to “haunt” me. To “camp” on my doorstep.
I could not advise that, I said.
Well, in that case, she had been reading my work, and teaching it, and decided I myself was not in it. She implied this was fraud.
And another thing, why do you write so patronizingly about lesbians?
What?
Well, I think you misrepresent black women. I know more about black women than you’ll ever know. I think . ..
I don’t give a damn what you think, I said. And hung up.
2. I am speaking to a class of thirty on feminist aesthetics. A white woman says: I would love to work with black and third-world women, but I’m a separatist.
A what?
Well, black and third-world women always seem connected to some man. Since I am a separatist, this means I can’t work with them. What do you suggest I do?
Personally I’m not giving up Stevie Wonder and John Lennon, no matter what, I reply, but you should do whatever you want to do, which obviously is not to work with black and third-world women.
My daughter, sitting beside me, looks up from her Rosa Guy novel. Mom, she whispers, shocked, there’s only one other black woman in here. She knows my motto is “Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your home.”
This lone black woman, no doubt angered at her isolated position in the class, annoyed that both of us, in such a “separatist” environment can count only as diversion and entertainment, attacks me bitterly, as if to obliterate the pain of her own presence.
3. A lesbian friend who tried on two occasions to “pull me out of the closet” before accepting the friendship I offer, tells me there is a developing split in black lesbian ranks.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah. Between black-women-identified women and white-women-identified black women.
And who judges?
Well, there are these black women with white women lovers and they bring ’em to meetings and it’s just disruptive. We only have so much time and money to spend getting our own shit together, and we end up wasting it discussing them.
Her present though outgoing lover is a white woman. She met me while I was in an interracial marriage.
We sigh.
Two thoughts come to mind. A swaggering one first: Black women are notorious for loving anybody they want to love and some of those they don’t. And, less swaggering: Black women love those who love them.
4. I am doing meditation at a center in Oakland. A new black woman acquaintance, who I hope will become a friend, carries me off to her house afterward.
She says. Have you seen Conditions: Five, The Black Women’s Issue?
No, I haven’t, I say with excitement, where is it?
I have it, she says.
Great, I say. Don’t let me leave without looking at it.
You’ll be disappointed, she says.
Why? I ask.
The writing is terrible.
Really?
And it’s put together poorly.
Oh, no!
And it’s full of lesbians.
Hummmm. Well, don’t forget to show it to me.
But she does forget, still saying as I leave an hour later: You’ll be disappointed.
If I hadn’t helped my sister
They’d have put those chains on me!
—Niobeth Tsaba, Song of a Sister’s Freedom
One of the most exciting and healthiest things to happen lately in the black community is the coming out of black lesbians. Conditions: Five. The Black Women’s Issue (which also includes work by many nonlesbians) reflects this with power, intelligence, and style. There are poems, essays, book reviews (of Shange’s Nappy Edges, Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, and Lorde’s The Black Unicorn) excerpts from journals, and part of a novel in progress. Reading the collection is not unlike seeing women breaking chains with their bare hands.
“This bullshit should not be encouraged,” a black male student and critic declared in a 1975 review of Ann Allen Shockley’s lesbian novel, Loving Her, which appeared in the now defunct Black World magazine. One is struck by the use of patriarchal intimidation in this remark, and, since the critic is presumably much younger than Shockley (a librarian for many years at Fisk University), it is surprisingly disrespectful of her life. For surely black women have earned the right to write about anything they please; and to denigrate this right reveals an antipathy to us so vast that all recorded history cannot, apparently, limit it. To say that a black lesbian is writing “bullshit” because she expresses her own perception of existence is as presumptuous as the belief that lesbianism will disappear if black people refuse to “encourage” it.
In an invaluable essay in Conditions: Five called “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview” Shockley writes: “Until recently there has been almost nothing written by or about the black lesbian in American literature—a void signifying that the black lesbian was a nonentity in imagination as well as reality. This unique black woman, analogous to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, was seen but not seen because of what the eyes did not wish to behold.”
The “eyes did not wish to behold” women loving women in a primary or sexual way, and so, Shockley writes, even black women writers who might at least have written novels, stories, or even reviews of lesbian work, opted instead to write nothing, or to join those who in various often subtle ways agreed that “this bullshit should not be encouraged.” She shows how negatively black lesbians are presented in the work of several contemporary black women authors, and how such depiction reinforces antilesbian stereotypes already prevalent in the black community.
“It is my belief,” writes Shockley, “that those black female writers who could have written well and perceptively enough to warrant publication chose instead to write about black women in a heterosexual milieu. The preference was motivated by the fear of being labeled a lesbian, even if in some cases they were not” (my italics).
And because of this, and I think Shockley’s belief is largely true, many black women writers, whose responsibility is to the truth and to our children (who may, for all we know, be gay or lesbian, as we too may be or become: we’re born but we aren’t dead), have backed down, have said, by their silence or negative, stereotypical portrayals of black lesbians: “This bullshit should not be encouraged.”
And yet, as Audre Lorde says in the poem quoted by Gloria Hull at the opening of Conditions: Five:
Whether we speak or not,
The machine will crush us to bits—
and we will also be afraid
Your silence
will not
protect you
Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel make this observation chillingly real in their introduction. As they were compiling materials for this volume in New Haven and Boston, between January 29 and My 28, 1979, twelve black women were systematically sought out and brutally murdered in Boston’s third-world communities. “While we were working to create a place for celebration of Black women’s lives, our sisters were dying. The sadness, fear, and anger as well as the unforeseen need to do political work around the murders affected every as
pect of our lives including work on Conditions: Five. The murder of Black women right where we lived also made crystal clear the .. . need for such a publication and for a Black feminist movement absolutely opposed to violence against us and the taking of our lives on any and all levels.”
One of the most remarkable pieces in Conditions: Five is an excerpt from Beverly Smith’s journal that was almost lost to us. It describes her attendance, “masquerading as a nice, straight, middle-class Black ‘girl,’” at the stuffy, upper-middle-class wedding of her close friend “J-----.”
She is irretrievably lost to me and I to her. She’s getting married and since I’m a dyke I am anathema to her. She’s made her feelings on homosexuality clear on several occasions. (I no longer use the terms homosexual or homosexuality to refer to lesbians.)
Two last things and then I’ll stop. Last night I was on the second floor after going to the bathroom (I must have gone four times, I was hiding and trying to maintain my sanity). I went into a bedroom where J----and others of her bridesmaids and Susan (the wife of a friend of H----’s) were talking. J----was talking about what still needed to be done and about her feelings concerning the wedding. Mostly anxieties over whether everything would go well. But at one point she said something to the effect that “It seems strange. We’ve been together all our lives [her three friends] and after tomorrow we won’t be.” Her friends assured her that they’d still be a part of her life. Ha! I know better. She’ll be H---’s chattel from now on. It occurred to me that celebrating a marriage is like celebrating being sold into slavery. Yes, I’m overgeneralizing (I’m only 90-95% right); but in this case I feel sure.
One piece of evidence for the above. At the rehearsal yesterday J---- was on the fourth floor shouting to someone. H---- yelled up to her, “J----, don’t shout!” J---- replied, defending herself, and H---- interrupted her by saying sharply, “J----!” as if he were reprimanding a child or a dog. I was sick. This is the essence. He will try to make her into his slave, his child, in short, his wife.
The only people Smith feels drawn to at the wedding are the servants catering the affair.
Directly after her own wedding some years earlier, Smith burned all the journals she had written, “partly because I felt I had no safe place for them away from my husband and partly because one of my duties in that marriage was to forget who I was before it.” For four years she kept unpublished her notes on J---’s wedding, a crucial piece of black women’s experience, until the support of other black feminists and lesbians permitted her to deal with it.
Reading Smith’s biting, often arch account of the wedding (“Did I mention that this is frightfully badly organized? Everything in chaos. But I have no doubt it will come off. Unfortunately.”) I think of another New England dyke (who may have fainted at the word, for all I know), Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958), who, sadly, according to Gloria Hull’s moving essay “Under the Days: The Buried Life and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké,” was never able publicly to affirm her love of women, not even, often, to the women themselves. And who, though considered a good “minor” poet by male critics who were as patronizing then as they are now, published very little, and what she did publish was mutilated by her attempts to camouflage the truth.
The question … is: What did it mean to be a Black lesbian/poet in America at the beginning of the Twentieth century? First, it meant that you wrote (or half wrote)—in isolation—a lot which you did not show and knew you could not publish. It meant that when you did write to be printed, you did so in shackles—chained between the real experience you wanted to say and the conventions that would not give you voice. It meant that you fashioned a few race and nature poems, transliterated lyrics, and double-tongued verses which—sometimes (racism being what it is)—got published. It meant, finally, that you stopped writing altogether, dying, no doubt, with your real gifts stifled within—and leaving behind (in a precious few cases) the little to survive of your true self in fugitive pieces.
And for what?
So that, fifty years later, a young black man can say, with much of the black community echoing his hostility to the priceless expressions of a black woman’s life: “This bullshit should not be encouraged.”
Grimké wrote:
The days fall upon me;
…
They cover me They crush, They smother.
Who will ever find me
Under the days?
Grimké’s life was indeed a buried one. She was smothered by “the days” that did not encourage her, and “had no spirit left to leave us.” Unlike her contemporary Alice Dunbar-Nelson, poet and journalist, wife of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and lover of women and men, who managed to affirm her complete self in unpublished material she contrived to leave behind, Grimké was defeated. Flattened Crushed. “She is a lesson,” says Hull, “whose meaning each person will interpret as they see fit and are able. What she means to me, is that we must work, write, live so that who and what she was never has to mean the same.”
In Shockley’s essay on the absence of black lesbians in American literature, she quotes Muhammed Ali’s response to a female reporter for the Amsterdam News who asked him to comment on the ERA and the equalizing of economic opportunities. Ali replied: “… some professions shouldn’t be open to women because they can’t handle certain jobs, like construction work. Lesbians, maybe, but not women.”
A black woman, perhaps (let us say) our daughter, needs to work. Has to work. Wants to work. Wants to work at construction. She reads Ali’s words and knows all her community will respect and believe what he says. Our daughter’s spirit is torn. If she takes the job her head is bent, her shoulders hunched against the assaults of ignorance. If she does not take the job, she starves, goes on welfare, or is easily defeated by a world that prefers broken black spirits anyway.
In this one comment Ali undermines our daughter’s belief in the wholeness of her maternal ancestors (were not our slave great-grandmothers, to whom modern-day construction work would doubtless seem easy, women?), threatens her present existence, and narrows her future. As surely as if he clamped a chain on her body, he has clamped a chain on her spirit. And by our silence, our fear of being labeled lesbian, we help hold it there. And this is inexcusable. Because we know, whatever else we don’t know and are afraid to guess, black lesbians are black women. It is in our power to say that the days of intimidating black women with impunity are over.
I was once criticized because I wrote that Zora Neale Hurston’s critics said she “must have been” bisexual, she had such tremendous drive. “I’ve never seen that in print,” the person criticizing said. I replied that our oral tradition, which works as well as ever, kills successful black women off at house parties. For black women, malicious gossip (elevated to the status of “news” in the sad examples of Hurston and Nella Larsen) is the criticism that damages our lives and our work, which, because we are women, is rarely considered on its own terms.
During the sixties my own work was often dismissed by black reviewers “because of my life style,” a euphemism for my interracial marriage. At black literature conferences it would be examined fleetingly, if at all, in light of this “traitorous” union, by critics who were themselves frequently interracially married and who, moreover, hung on every word from Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, John A. Williams, and LeRoi Jones (to name a few), all of whom were at some time in their lives interracially connected, either legally or in more than casual ways. Clearly it was not interracialism itself that bothered the critics, but that I, a black woman, had dared to exercise the same prerogative as they. While it is fine for black men to embrace other black men, black women, white women and white men in intimate relationships, the black woman, to be accepted as a black woman, must prefer being alone to the risk of enjoying “the wrong choice.” Now that I am no longer married, the value of my work is questioned because of my “politics.” This means, I think, what the first dismissal meant: that I am a black woman. So
mething is always wrong with us. To those who feel this, “lesbianism” is simply another, perhaps more extreme, version of “something wrong with us.” After all, it is passé to say we’re too black, or too loud, or that our kinky hair clashes with pastel interiors. And to say we’re too bourgeois or work too closely with whitefolks raises eyebrows if it comes from black professors at Harvard or Yale. The charge of “emotionalism” occasionally bandied in our direction today merely replaces an earlier charge of unemotionalism, hard-heartedness, and frigid bitchiness.
Luckily, we have a fighting tradition. Ida B. Wells wrote many years ago that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” which the murdered black women in Boston should have known. But in any case, if we are writers, we have our typewriters, and if we are not writers, we have our tongues. Like black men and women who refused to be the exceptional “pet” Negro for whites, and who instead said they were “niggers” too (the original “crime” of “niggers” and lesbians is that they prefer themselves), perhaps black women writers and nonwriters should say, simply, whenever black lesbians are being put down, held up, messed over, and generally told their lives should not be encouraged, We are all lesbians. For surely it is better to be thought a lesbian, and to say and write your life exactly as you experience it, than to be a token “pet” black woman for those whose contempt for our autonomous existence makes them a menace to human life.
Conditions: Five represents a continuation of the struggle for self-definition and affirmation that is the essence of what “African-American” means in this country. It is because black lesbians are black women out of this tradition that the chain will never be accepted as a natural garment.
1980
IF THE PRESENT LOOKS LIKE THE PAST, WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
DEAR----,