In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  Of course in the nineteenth century, few of the former slaves could read at all, having been denied literacy under penalty of law, and certainly could not hope to struggle through a novel, however true it might have been to their experience. It is understandable that writers wrote to the capacities of the audience at hand. Yet their depictions of themselves and black people as whiter than we are has led to a crippling of the imagination and of truth itself for which we pay dearly—in anger, hurt, envy, and misunderstanding—to this day.

  Fortunately, for us, there came a black woman writer who did not view her black women characters through the eyes of men, black or white, and it is in her work—coming after Brown, Watkins, Kelly, and Hopkins in the nineteenth century, and after Fauset, Larsen, and Toomer in the 1920s (writers who still depicted black women as fair-skinned, if not actually white-skinned; and in other ways atypical)—that black women begin to emerge naturally in all the colors in which they exist, predominantly brown and black, and culturally African-American. Though Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known heroine, is described as being light of skin and feathery of hair, as soon as she opens her mouth we know who and what she is, and her hands, though genetically “light,” are brown from the labor she shares with other blacks, from whom she is not, in fact, separate, though all three of her husbands attempt to convince her that she is.

  Many dark-skinned black women find it hard to identify with Janie Crawford and speak disparagingly of her “mulatto privileges.” “Privileges” that stem from being worshiped for her color and hair, and being placed—by her color-struck husbands—above other black women while not being permitted to speak in public because her looks are supposed to say it all.

  And, for the black man—if we judge by our literature and too often, unfortunately, by reality—the white-looking woman’s looks do say it all. But what do these “looks” in fact say? For the dark-skinned black woman it comes as a series of disappointments and embarrassments that the wives of virtually all black leaders (including Marcus Garvey!) appear to have been chosen for the nearness of their complexions to white alone. It is true that Frederick Douglass’s first wife was black-skinned, but he managed to hide most of her activity in his life. According to research done by Sylvia Lyons Render, Annie Murray Douglass sewed the very sailor suit Douglass escaped from slavery wearing, yet nowhere does he give her adequate credit for her help. His second wife, the wife he chose in freedom, was white; this marriage continued a pattern that began in the days of slavery, when white was right and the octoroon or quadroon offspring of a raped black or mulatto mother was the next best thing to white. A look at the photographs of the women chosen by our male leaders is, in many ways, chilling if you are a black-skinned woman. (And this “chilling” experience is one that the dark-skinned black woman can hardly escape having in these times of black pictorial history.**) Because it is apparent that though they may have consciously affirmed blackness in the abstract and for others, for themselves light remained right Only Malcolm X, among our recent male leaders, chose to affirm, by publicly loving and marrying her, a black black woman. And it is this, no less than his “public” politics, that accounts for the respect black people, and especially women, had for him, and this that makes him radical and revolutionary, in a way few of our other black male leaders are.

  Black black women are not supposed to notice these things. But to tell the truth (and why shouldn’t we? We may be living our last months on earth), this is often all we notice. We are told such things are not “serious” and not “political” and mean nothing to the black liberation struggle. And some of us, after all, marry white men; who are we to “complain”? But no black woman pursues and proposes to octoroon or quadroon or white men as a matter of female prerogative; the patriarchal society in which we live does not permit it. The man chooses; frequently with the same perceptivity with which he chooses a toy.

  Every black man in Their Eyes Were Watching God lusts after Janie Crawford. They lust after her color and her long hair, never once considering the pain her mother and grandmother (one raped by a white man, one by a black) must have endured to “pass along” these qualities to her. Never once thinking of Janie’s isolation because of looks she did not choose, or of her confusion when she realizes that the same men who idolize her looks are capable of totally separating her looks from her self. These were all back-country folk, and they wouldn’t have thought of it in these terms, but their true interest in Janie is sadistic and pornographic, just as that of the white men of the time would have been. And I think this is one of the reasons Hurston (with her usual attention to the difference between what black folks said and what they meant) made her character so “fair”: to point this out to us.

  The first few times I read Their Eyes I managed to block the significance of the scene in chapter seventeen in which TeaCake beats Janie. Feminists have often flagged my attention to it, but I always explained it as simply a “mistake” on Hurston’s part. In truth, I missed the point entirely of what happened, and what happened provides one of the most important insights in the book.

  As the Hurston reader will recall, TeaCake is very jealous of Janie where Mrs. Turner’s brother—he of light skin and flyaway hair—is concerned. There is no reason for this, as Janie time and again insists. One reason TeaCake is jealous is because it is so unusual for a woman as light and well-to-do as Janie to be with a man as poor and black as he is. Not because all the light-skinned women chase after and propose to light-skinned men, but because both light- and dark-skinned men chase after and propose to light-skinned women. Since the light-skinned men generally have more education than the blacker men, and better jobs (morticians to this day in the South are generally light-skinned blacks, as are the colored doctors and insurance men), they have the advantage of color, class, and gainful employment, and so, secure the “prizes” light-skinned women represent to them. Like all “prizes” the women are put on display and warned not to get themselves dirty. (Other black black people often being this “dirt.”) Their resemblance to the white man’s “prize,” i.e., the white woman—whom they resemble largely because of rape (and I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape)—must be maintained at all times.

  Unlike Janie’s first two husbands, TeaCake has discovered that his “prize” is as attractive dirty as she is clean and supports her in her determination to dress, speak, and act as she likes. But he must still show his male friends, and the ubiquitous Mrs. Turner, who wishes to bring Janie and her brother together (light belongs to light, in her mind), that his ownership is intact. When Mrs. Turner brings her brother over and introduces him, TeaCake has a “brainstorm.” Before the week is over, he has “whipped” Janie.

  He whips her not, Hurston writes, “because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. Everybody talked about it next day in the fields. It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made men dream dreams.”

  An astute reader would realize that this is the real reason TeaCake is killed by Janie in the end. Or, rather, this is the reason Hurston permits Janie to kill TeaCake in the end. For all her “helpless” hanging on him, Janie knows she has been publicly humiliated, and though she acts the role of battered wife (from what I read coming out of battered women’s shelters, the majority of such batterings end in sex and the total submission—“hanging on helplessly”—of the wife) her developing consciousness of self does not stop at that point. She could hardly enjoy knowing her beating becomes “visions” for other women—who would have to imagine themselves light and long-haired, like Janie, to “enjoy” them—and “dreams,” i.e., sexual fantasies, for TeaCake’s male friends.

&nb
sp; “TeaCake, you sho is a lucky man,” Sop-de-Bottom told him. “Uh person can see every place you hit her. Ah bet she never raised her hand tuh hit yuh back, neither. Take some uh dese ol’ rusty black women and dey would fight yuh all night long and next day nobody couldn’t tell you ever hit’em. Dat’s de reason Ah done quit beating mah women. You can’t make no mark on’em at all. Lawd! wouldn’t Ah love tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie! Ah bet she don’t even holler. She jus’ cries, eh TeaCake?” [My italics]

  “Dat’s right.”

  “See dat! Mah woman would spread her lungs all over Palm Beach County, let alone knock out mah jaw teeth. You don’t know dat woman uh mine. She got ninety-nine rows uh jaw teeth and git her good and mad, she’ll wade through solid rock up to her hip pockets.”

  [To which TeaCake replies:]

  “Mah Janie is uh high time woman and uster things. Ah didn’t git her outa de middle uh de road.”

  What is really being said here?

  What is being said is this: that in choosing the “fair,” white-looking woman, the black man assumes he is choosing a weak woman. A woman he can own, a woman he can beat, can enjoy beating, can exhibit as a woman beaten; in short, a “conquered” woman who will not cry out, and will certainly not fight back. And why? Because she is a lady, like the white man’s wife, who is also beaten (the slaves knew, the servants knew, the maid always knew because she doctored the bruises) but who has been trained to suffer in silence, even to pretend to enjoy sex better afterward, because her husband obviously does. A masochist.

  And who is being rejected? Those women “out of the middle of the road”? Well, Harriet Tubman, for one, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shirley Chisholm. Ruby McCullom, Assata Shakur, Joan Little, and Dessie “Rashida” Woods. You who are black-skinned and fighting and screaming through the solid rock of America up to your hip pockets every day since you arrived, and me, who treasures every ninety-nine rows of my jaw teeth, because they are all I have to chew my way through this world.

  That black men choose light and white women is not the women’s fault, any more than it was their fault they were chosen as concubines to rich plantation owners during slavery. Nobody seems to choose big, strong, fighting light or white women (and these have existed right along with those who could be beaten). Though there used to be a saying among black men that fat white women are best because the bigger they are the more whiteness there is to love, this is still in the realm of ownership, of “prize.” And any woman who settles for being owned, for being a “prize,” is more to be struggled with than blamed.

  We are sisters of the same mother, but we have been separated—though put to much the same use—by different fathers. In the novels of Frank Yerby, a wildly successful black writer, you see us: the whiter-skinned black woman placed above the blacker as the white man’s mistress or the black man’s “love.” The Blacker woman, when not preparing the whiter woman for sex, marriage, or romance, simply raped. Put to work in the fields. Stuck in the kitchen. Raising everybody’s white and yellow and brown and black kids. Or knocking the overseer down, or cutting the master’s throat. But never desired or romantically loved, because she does not care for “aesthetic” suffering. Sexual titillation is out, because when you rape her the bruises don’t show so readily, and besides, she lets you know she hates your guts, goes for your balls with her knees, and calls you the slime-covered creep you are until you knock her out.

  Perhaps one problem has been that so many of our leaders (and writers) have not been black-skinned themselves. Think of Brown, who could pass; Chesnutt, who could and did pass; Toomer, who passed with a vengeance; Hughes, who could pass (when young) as a Mexican; Booker T. Washington, John Hope, James Weldon Johnson, Douglass, Du Bois, Bontemps, Larsen, Wright, Himes, Yerby … all very different in appearance from, say, Wallace Thurman, who was drawn to write about a black black woman because he was so black himself, and blackness was a problem for him among other blacks lighter than he, as it was among whites. We can continue to respect and love many of these writers, and treasure what they wrote because we understand America; but we must be wary of their depictions of black women because we understand ourselves.

  Suppose you have a daughter, and she is black-skinned, and she is enrolled in African-American studies at, for instance, Harvard. She is in an overwhelmingly white setting and required to try to see herself as half a dozen white-looking black women in the nineteenth century, and as at least two dozen white and yellow women in the early twentieth. There will be an occasional black- or brown-skinned woman in the texts, but she will be—well, in Brown’s novel, for example, let us take a look. After pages and pages of the tribulations of white-looking Clotelle (and her mother and sister before her), on the last page we encounter a mulatta named (of course) Dinah.

  Here is the exchange between Clotelle, the white-looking octoroon, who speaks clear, precise English, and Dinah, who is brown, cannot pass, and talks “black.”

  “I see that your husband has lost one of his hands: did he lose it in the war?” asks Clotelle.

  “Oh no, missus,” said Dinah. “When dey was taken all de men, black and white, to put in de army, dey cotched my ole man too, and took him long wid’em. So you see, he said he’d die afore he’d shoot at de Yanks. So you see, missus, Jimmy jes took and lay his left han’ on a log, and chop it off wid de hatchet. Den, you see, dey let him go, an’ he come home. You see, missus, my Jimmy is a free man: he was born free, an’ he bought me, an’ pay fifteen hundred dollars for me.”

  [Brown continues:]

  It was true that Jim had purchased his wife; nor had he forgotten the fact, as was shown a day or two after, while in conversation with her. The woman, like many of her sex [though obviously not like the “missus,” Clotelle], was an inveterate scold, and Jim had but one way to govern her tongue. “Shet your mouf, madam, an’ hole your tongue,” said Jim, after his wife had scolded and sputtered away for some minutes. “Shet your mouf dis minit, I say: You shan’t stan’ dar, an’ talk to me in dat way. I bought you, an’ paid my money fer you, an’ I ain’t gwine ter let you sase me in dat way. Shet your mouf dis minit: ef you don’t I’ll sell you; fore God I will. Shet up, I say, or I’ll sell you." This had the desired effect, and settled Dinah for the day.

  Is it this same fear of being “sold” that keeps black women silent, one wonders, imagining—as apparently Brown could not—the horrifying impact of these words on a woman formerly sold only by whites. And yet, our silence has not saved us from being sold, as “Dinah” herself is “sold”—as a “scold” and object of ridicule and sale to the readers of Brown’s day.

  Clotelle, Iola LeRoy, and Megda are actually “sold” as pitilessly as Dinah, though their “sale”—into the structured colorism of the black middle class (which generations later Janie Crawford exposes and escapes)—is camouflaged by the promise of “upward” mobility, i.e., proximity to, imitation of, and eventual merger with (or, as Chesnutt wrote, “absorption into”) the white middle class.

  No wonder “black” nineteenth-century heroines seem so weak and boring! They are prisoners of a fatal social vision. Their destination—total extinction as blacks within, at most, two generations—is preordained. One imagines their grandchildren saying—as the white grandchildren of American Indians do, while adding another feather to their cowboy hats—“I’m not prejudiced against those people, I’m one-twelfth (Indian) (black) myself.”

  In his landmark essay “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War….” This is a true statement, but it is a man’s vision. That is to say, it sees clearer across seas than across the table or the street. Particularly it omits what is happening within the family, “the race,” at home; a family also capable of civil war.

 
In paraphrase of this statement I would say that the problem of the twenty-first century will still be the problem of the color line, not only “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” but the relations between the darker and the lighter people of the same races, and of the women who represent both dark and light within each race. It is our “familial” relations with each other in America that we need to scrutinize. And it is the whole family, rather than the dark or the light, that must be affirmed.

  Light- and white-skinned black women will lose their only link to rebellion against white America if they cut themselves off from the black black woman. Their children will have no hip pockets in which to keep their weapons, no teeth with which to chew up racist laws. And black black women will lose the full meaning of their history in America (as well as the humor, love, and support of good sisters) if they see light and white black women only as extensions of white and black male oppression, while allowing themselves to be made ashamed of their own strength and fighting spirit: that fighting spirit that is our birthright, and, for some of us, our “rusty black” joy.

  As black women, we have been poorly prepared to cherish what should matter most to us. Our models in literature and life have been, for the most part, devastating. Even when we wish it, we are not always able to save ourselves for future generations: not our spiritual selves, not our physical characteristics. (In the past, in our literature—and in life too—the birth of a “golden” child to a dark mother has been perceived as a cause for special celebration. But was it? So much of the mother was obliterated, so much changed, in the child, whose birth as often as not was by her unplanned.) But perhaps we can learn something, even from the discouraging models of earlier centuries and our own time. Perhaps black women who are writers in the twenty-first century will present a fuller picture of the multiplicity of oppression—and of struggle. Racism, sexism, classism, and colorism will be very much a part of their consciousness. They will have the wonderful novels of black African women to read—Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and others—as nineteenth-century black women did not. They will have a record of the struggles of our own times. They will not think of other women with envy, hatred, or adulation because they are “prizes.” They will not wish to be prizes themselves. How men want them to look, act, speak, dress, acquiesce in beatings and rape will mean nothing whatsoever to them. They will, in fact, spend a lot of time talking to each other, and smiling. Women of all colors will be able to turn their full energies on the restoration of the planet, as they can’t now because they’re tied up with all this other stuff: divisions, resentments, old hurts, charges and countercharges. And talk about the need for teeth and hip pockets then! Women who are writers in the twenty-first century will undoubtedly praise every one.