Why Study Black Women Writers? ’Cause Black Folk Are Just Regular
This is the second installment of a series that I am doing on Black people and mental health. This blog looks at the link between literature and psychology. This semester, I am teaching a class for upperclassmen that features Black women writers. For well over 100 years, Black women writers have been stating that Black people need to portray themselves just as they are: every day people.
Most professors do not think highly of class prep. Truth be told, there are times when we would be elbow deep in a musty archive looking through 19th century cookbooks and women’s magazines or in our labs collecting and analyzing data. Then, way too soon, the summer is over and we are faced with administrative demands for a syllabus before Labor Day (we are in the Deep South and school starts in August). There are meetings, office hours, undergraduates driving us crazy, an unending stream of emails, and that red light on the office phone that keeps beeping. Yes, the semester creeps set in and we are torn away from our research. We vow to return, but we do not see it again until Christmas break.
Though class prep can be cumbersome, I rather relish it if I have a humane teaching load. I have “received” more than my fair share of research ideas while prepping for a class. There have been conference papers, book chapters, and even a journal article…all from my class prep. Reader, I have so much class prep material, that my colleagues at a previous institution used to run in my office, look through my binders, grab whatever lecture they wanted for the day, and rush out. They had an ongoing joke about me. They would say, “Jefferson has more binders in her office than a high school superintendent.” This is in addition to my Google Drive account and another Wordpress blog that I keep just for Composition classes! Obsessive. I know. But I lost some World Lit I class prep on a crashed hard drive and had to start over from nothing. I won’t be caught slipping again, Reader.
Well, over the spring, my chair assigned me Black Women Writers. Right away, I was excited to teach the class, since I am working on a collection of essays about Black women writers. In my mind, nothing helps us understand material like preparing to teach it. This is why I dive into class preparation. Even with my first book (Heads up: a shameless plug is about to follow), I taught every last one of those primary text as a glass for English seniors BEFORE going into the revision process. The insight that I gained from the class prep made me take out one book and put in another. I never looked back at what I took out.
In addition to taking out some material, I strengthened my chapter on Black women writers (though I am still not satisfied with it to date). Perhaps there will be a second edition????
Reader, here’s a question: why would any university offer a class strictly on Black women writers? I will tell you why. There will never be another opportunity, unless you are to sit down and take a course strictly on Frantz Fanon, to link psychology and literature. There will never be another class in which the rich, inner-lives of African Americans, and not the outward reactionary/masked lives, are fully presented to the reader, explored together with the reader and the author, then analyzed, too. Nothing is explained. Nothing is taken for granted. When a student/reader opens a book by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison or Gwendolyn Brooks, the reader enters a Black world, constructed by Black people, where Black people are the center, and the writer takes for granted that a Black audience will be able to “hear” her language. People in this world, this world created in “For My People,” by Margaret Walker Alexander, are little children who play in the yard together, they live, they love, they hate as good as anybody else can hate, they are large, they are petty, they get married, they are boring, they are dysfunctional, they are whole, they are tattered, they are scarred on the inside, they are deacons, they are drunkards, they are pimps, they are soldiers, they are mothers, they are tramps, they are ladies who sing the sweet, sweet blues about a man with a heart of stone, they are drug addicts and alcoholics, they are whores, they are factory workers, they are hairstylists and barbers, they are voodoo priests and priestesses, they are sons and daughters, they are arrogant, they are condescending, they are humble, they are gracious, they are sisters and brothers, they have bad tempers and unrealized dreams, they are husbands and fathers, they are good husband, they are abusers, they are neighborhood superstars, and some of them are nothing but bums pissing in the stairwell. You know what? The people between the pages of Black women writers’ books are just ordinary people. They are somewhere between angels and trash — pretty average or pretty lousy while few are exceptional. Like. Every. Body. Else.
Since the early 1900s, Black women writers have been saying that Black people need to keep a collection of their writers. One of the first activists/journalists/writers to call for a record of Black writing was Victoria Earle Matthews.
Founder of the White Rose Mission in New York, Matthews felt that it was imperative that Black people began to keep a record of their creative output, not just as a political protest, but as a “record of the interior.” When Matthews wrote about the “interior” of Black people, she implied the psychological monologues that Black people have.
In short, what do Black people think about? What are Black people’s inner-motivations for outward behaviors?
At the time, when Matthews, Ida B. Wells, Josephine St. Pierre, and many other Black women activists were out speaking before what would be called, “scandalous” audiences (audiences that were composed of men and women in the same room), far too many white men made pronouncements about Black people’s behavior that justified the rash of lynchings of Black men that occurred across the United States. And no, these were not, “poor white trash” men. These men were university professors and other figures of authority in America.
One such example is a heinous poem, “Voodoo Prophecy,” by Maurice Thompson. Please read it here at the Library of Congress.
According to Thompon’s poem, Black people would one day use voodoo in order to take revenge on white America for the wrongs perpetrated during slavery (I find it amazing that men like Thompson and even Thomas Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and greatly feared God’s retribution to themselves individually and white people as a whole, but America cannot find the moral courage to apologize for it after all of these years).
And Black writers did answer this. One of the sharpest answers came from Gertrude Mossell, writing as Mrs. N.F. Mossell.
According to Gertrude Mossell, writing is work for African American women. Creative writing and journalistic writing are just as important as any other kind of work, because they contain a record of Black America. Writing should be valued and treated with respect. For no other reason, it could serve to beat back the racists and sexists stereotypes put forth by men like Thompson.
But answering every racist stereotype of Black people that racists put forth was not and should not be the sole motivation of Black writers, according to Zora Neale Hurston. According to Hurston, Black people are just regular folk. In her writing, she defied the trend of most Harlem Renaissance authors when portraying Black folk. She did not “clean them up,” change them or sanitize their speech. Hurston portrayed Black people just the way they were. Her world was Black. The speech was Black. The tone was happy. Yet, Hurston managed to hold racists accountable when and where it was necessary. Since her presentations were not satisfactory to the elitists, sexist criticism of the Black Harlem Renaissance critics, that part of Hurston is still not being analyzed and discussed today. Hurston asks in one of her essays (and I am paraphrasing heavily here), can a Black poet sing of the morning? Yes. Black women writers prove that they can. And what was so wrong with rural Black folk culture? Hurston was well aware of the minstrel tradition that made fun of the Black folk, but felt that it was not the responsibility of Black people to eradicate stereotypes of themselves. It was only the responsibility of Black people to show themselves as nuanced as they really were….and to be as proud of their heritage as white Appalachians were of theirs. Why should a place like Nashville, which was mostly white at the time, be allowed to celebrate its “country” roots while Black Memphis deny its roots, which was equally “country”? Solving racism was not the problem of Black folk, because Black folk didn’t invent scientific racism in the first place, and they certainly didn’t invent minstrel shows.
Perhaps, the project of Black women writers have been, since the turn of the 20th century, to show the everyday, boring Black folk. For far too long, America’s psycho-social deviancy has been assigned to Black folk as a group while denying Black individuals human foibles. For example, while Black men as a group are labeled as “brutes” and “criminals,” Black children are denied the same mistakes of childhood as other children. Black children are assigned ages that are older than what they actually are, and are given harsher punishments at school for what are considered minor offenses for their white counterparts. Repeatedly, Black children are suspended or expelled by white women teachers who are terrified of them or are aggravated, because Black children do not sit down act behave like robots or their parents refuse to medicate them unnecessarily on ADHD medicine for the sake of high-stakes testing.
Are Black children even portrayed routinely in the media? The answer is no. Do you know where you find Black children? In the pages of Black women writers.
One of the saddest, yet most hopeful books that I have ever read was His Own Where by June Jordan.
Two teenagers, Buddy and Angela, under the harshest circumstances that one can imagine, fall in love. The dysfunctionality of their home lives send the two of them looking for peace anywhere they can find it. Sadly, the only place for quiet is the cemetery. I know that this description does not sound optimistic, but I assure you, Reader, that the book is written in a very optimistic tone, and features Black children trying to find their way through a chaotic life. It is one of the few books that feature African American adolescents in all of their vulnerabilities while holding uncaring, narcissistic adults, black and white, accountable for how we fail our children generation after generation.
Okay, Okay. I am an English professor, Reader. I somehow feel that this blog is going on and on. And I haven’t made it to Toni Morrison, yet. But I promise that I will…next blog…
This post comes directly from my Black Women Writers Class. If you like it, press the little hands and give me a clap. Or, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes. I do teach online, you know. We have technology and computer-lookity-boxes down here in Mississippi.
