Why Study Black Women Writers? ‘Cause the American Family Is Dysfunctional as Hell!
Reader, I told you that I would be back with Part II of this blog. Now, it took me a little longer than expected, but I am back. And as promised, I will address Toni Morrison. Not only am I addressing Toni Morrison, I am linking her to Zora Neale Hurston and demonstrating how Black women writers portray the dysfunctionality of the American family.
Okay, I am supposed to be writing a series on mental health? Right? Well, it kind of does not feel that way, Reader. Doesn’t it feel like I have duped you all into a series of lectures that I would give to my upperclassmen in literature? Here’s the thing and here’s a secret: all of literature -and I mean absolutely all of it — of the early 20th century, was cycled through psychology. Yep. This includes theatre. Now that you know the secret, can you better understand some of that weird, abstract, loopy theatre that includes plays with those spare sets like Waiting for Godot? These plays were not meant to have large, colorful sets with blaring music. No. These plays were meant to be works of the psychological interior, brought to the exterior, and presented to the audience as a thought-provoking series of events.
Some stories were even presented as psychological case studies. One of the stories that I am thinking of here is “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather. Though we know her for the prairie trilogy that includes, My Antonia, O Pioneers, and Song of Lark, she wrote a heavily-anthologized presented like a psychologist’s notes. And detective stories were not called detective stories at all when they were first being formed. They were called, “ratiocination stories.” Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter,” was supposedly based on reasoning and thinking. It called on the reader to help create the story with the writer, using the power of reasoning the figure out the storyline. It inspired the Sherlock Holmes series that would go on to define the genre.
Reader, that was a very long introduction. I said all of that to say this: I am writing about literature, because literature is many students’ introduction to psychology and why we need to study psychology. For many people of color, we are hesitant to even take a psychology class. Literature class is a gateway into discussions and explorations of the interior safely and away from the fearful tactics of our families and communities. People of color have been taught to not air our dirty laundry. We have been taught that even admitting that we need help is “weak.” We have been taught to hold our emotions in and keep our pain to ourselves. We just deal. And sometimes, the way that we deal is not always healthy (that next week’s posting, so stay tuned). For many people, literature class is the first and only time where they see and explore the full dysfunction of the American family, and not the projections of dysfunction onto the bodies of Black and brown people that we normally see in popular culture and on the nightly news. And no group of writers is more adept at portraying American family dysfunction than Black women writers.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), she tells the story, supposedly of her parents: how they fell in love, how her maternal grandmother cursed the marriage because John Buddy (Hurston’s father) was an “over the creek Negro,” how John Buddy rose to become a powerful preacher who just would not stop cheating on his wife, the death of his very capable wife Lucy, the subsequent demise of John Buddy’s family, and John Buddy’s death.
Though critics are cool toward Jonah’s Gourd Vine as a work of art but a good freshman effort, there is something in this book that we are all missing. John Buddy is the son, or stepson of an alcoholic. He becomes an Adult Child of an Alcoholic and sometimes seems to overperform in certain areas while underperforming in others. Like most ACoAs, he cannot reconcile the two sides of himself and does not seem to understand his own internal motivations. In a seemingly schizophrenic state of existence, John Buddy falls apart without his wife there to hold the pieces of himself together.
His demise begins in childhood and certain trends in American society at the turn of the twentieth century. As an “over the creek Negro,” John Buddy is rumored to be the child of white man and a Black woman. However, the going narrative in contemporary African American criticism is that light and bright skin equals privilege. Not at this time. Light skin is not right skin. Light skin affords John Buddy’s no privileges and speaks to his mother’s impropriety at the time of the narrative. The rest of the community questions Amy’s morality, and Lucy’s mother, wrapped in classism and elitism, refuses to attend their marriage ceremony. The white man, the owner of the plantation where John Buddy receives a psychological reprieve from the abuse of his stepfather all but admits that he is John Buddy’s father. No one questions this white man’s morality.
When Hurston was writing, it was common practice for white men to keep Black paramours, whether it was voluntary or not. Whereas Black men could be hung for so much as looking at white women, no one questioned the morality of white men for sleeping with and fathering children with Black women. Instead, the community and even white academic men questioned the morality of Black women. Ida B. Wells, who would have been writing a generation before Zora Neale Hurston, was initiated cruelly into this reality. During a yellow fever epidemic, Wells's mother, father, and a sibling perished. Wells, who was only about 14 at the time, wanted to keep the rest of her family together. Meanwhile, her father, Jim Wells, had left some money with a doctor who he’d assisted with the patients and dead bodies by making coffins until he succumbed. Wells went with the doctor, a white man, to retrieve the money a bank in town. Seeing Wells’ determination to keep the family together without the interference of others in Holly Springs, who wanted to divide the rest of the children and send them to various homes (and divide the money Jim Wells left for the care of his children among various men in Holly Springs) someone started a vicious rumor that Wells was seen “keeping company with” or “talking with” a white man in town. Wells, who was sharp of tongue and quick with her temper, knew the implications of this rumor. Wells grew outraged at the injustice and the assault on her reputation. She left the school that Jim Wells helped to found, Rust College, and never returned, even when some of the school officials apologized. Wells did not even obtain her teaching degree at LeMoyne College in Memphis, and refused to marry any man from her hometown or the Memphis area. Instead, she finished at Fisk and waited for marriage, careful not to damage her reputation further with men who would be so careless during a time of great distress. Now, I want to repeat with an addition: Rust College (which is still in operation www.rustcollege.edu) officials apologized and asked her back as a teacher (which Wells refused), but for Wells, the damage to her pride as a woman and to her grieving heart (remember: she’d lost both parents and a sibling when this rumor seemed to come from nowhere) had been done and she was done with the Black men of Holly Springs and Memphis, general!
For more information about the Yellow Fever Epidemic and its damage to Holly Springs, Mississippi, there is a museum to its devastation:
Wells speaks about this harmful incident at length in her unfinished autobiography. She speaks about it at length in her diaries, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis.
While Hurston has been lionized as a fiction writer, her attention to American family dysfunction, nonprivilege of light skin, and rape places her in the canon with a generation of Black women writers who came before her. Hurston, the fiction writer, incorporated the social concerns of Ida B. Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and others.
Wells, Hurston, and others, through their writings, point out that white marriages were often dismal and white families were dysfunctional. White American men were not faithful and their misbehavior was blamed on the wife by social teachings such as the Cult of True Womanhood or Domesticity. Wells and N.F. Mossell crafted an alternative vision of womanhood that held men responsible for their own behavior, Nobler Womanhood. The noble woman worked for her family, her community, and her race and not to change the behavior of an adult man.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Cult of True Womanhood and the damage that it did to white American families, please see the definitive article on it by Barbara Welter:
https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/WelterBarbaraCULTWOMANHOODinAQ1966.pdf
In Hurston’s text, the reader sees the strain that the community’s disapproval of Amy’s morality (even though we never know if Amy were raped or not) puts on Amy, her marriage, and her children. John Buddy’s stepfather is an abusive alcoholic who refuses to heed the advice of his wife. He only listens to white men. His mother and sister abuse John Buddy and he abuses Amy, his wife, verbally and physically. In addition, he overworks John Buddy while verbally abusing the boy once he becomes inebriated. One can say that the kernel of John Buddy’s demise is planted while still in childhood. The only validation that John Buddy ever receives from anyone at any time are from the brief sexual encounters that he has with Big ‘oman and others, the encouragement from Lucy (his future wife) and his grandmother on the plantation, and the hero-worship of his brother. His mother tries to fight for him. Amy tries to keep her family together. When John Buddy tires of his stepfather’s abuses, she sends her son to his grandmother — and not his real father. Hurston does not explain why Amy comes to retrieve him to work as a sharecropper again for the family. Amy does not explain it to her son. She simply tells him that there are things he does not understand. John Buddy runs away from the family and into the hands of a fate that would eventually lead John Buddy to his greatest socio-economic heights and to his death. As a matter of fact, before John Buddy dies, he thinks of going back home to rub his success in the face of his abusive stepfather.
Writing her first novel decades later, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (1970), tells the heartbreaking story of Pecola Breedlove, who was raped and impregnated by her father.
The book begins with a frame narrative: an American frame narrative. When it starts, we begin with the familiar Dick and Jane reader. The short, simple sentences of Dick and Jane are innocent enough. Dick and Jane are brother and sister. They come from the classic, white American nuclear family. It is the picture that all of my mother’s Baby Boomer generation would have read.
But something goes awry. As we read the familiar, simple sentences, Morrison removes the punctuation. Then the words run together. This is a physical implication that this picture of the classic, white American nuclear family is dysfunctional as Hell.
Then, the real narrative begins. And seemingly, this run-away, night-marish version of the Dick and Jane reader has nothing to do with the story of Pecola Breedlove. But, it has everything to do with Pecola, though it is not the center focus of Morrison’s narrative. Couched in Claudia’s lyrical backwards-looking narration of a harsh community who judges these poor Breedlove with Black elitism and a false sense of superiority, is a white character. For decades, critics and academics alike have ignored this white character. Her name is Rosemary. When Claudia and her sister pinch Rosemary’s white skin just to hurt her, Rosemary does not respond the way a child should respond to painful stimuli. Instead, Rosemary asks them if they want her to take down her panties. Hummmmmmm.
Claudia and her sister stand there looking puzzled. In response to pain, a child asks if she should take down her panties? What is going on in this child’s household? Pecola Breedlove, the dark-skinned, poor, Black girl who lives in the storefront is not the only child being sexually exploited by someone in the home. Rosemary, the white girl who rides in the Buick in the middle of the Depression eating bread and butter is being sexually abused also. And because she is white and rich, nobody, even those of us who teach and write about this book, suspects a thing.
Reader, I am finding a hard time writing a conclusion for this post. Instead of concluding, I’m going to leave you with the textbook that I am using for this class. It is a MAGNIFICENT collection of Black women writers from across the African Diaspora. It has personal essays, journalistic writing, science fiction, poetry, letters, you name it (okay, I wasn’t doing the Shirley Caesar thing). I want you Reader, to seriously read some of the writers that I have mentioned in this blog post or to at least pick up this anthology and discover some new favorites. Next week, as aforementioned, I will return to straight up psychology stuff. Like most English people, I have secondary degree in psychology. There is something about it that I never could shake. My area of theory is postcolonial theory. And you want to know who my favorite theorist is? Yep. You guessed it. The psychiatrist, Fanon.
Now, Reader, this post has gone on and on. I feel that I have made my point. There are links, pictures. All of the good stuff that makes a blog post worth reading. I am about to spend the rest of this Sunday morning binge-watching another one of my favorite dysfunctional family shows, Mama’s Family. If you like this, press the hands. If you really like it, I’ll see you in class.
