Words of Fire (32 page)

Some thousands of years ago, the female was considered the Goddess of the Universe from which heaven and earth sprang. Certainly this myth conforms to basic reality—out of one comes two. The female births both the male and the female. The Adam and Eve myth that has for so long been an important part of black women's education through our part-time father—the Negro minister—and our devoutly religious black mothers, turns this basic reality on its head and into its opposite. The male gives birth through the magical intervention of an all-powerful male God. The
rib of Adam is plucked out and made into woman by this powerful medicine man who resembles in action the African and Asian tribal priest. Indeed, this is a powerful myth, for it grants the role of man in human creation while at the same time utterly denying woman's role. Deep down we black women still believe this clever religious tale that puts us out of creation. The fact that we do exposes our terrible dependence on outside authority and our fear of trusting and thinking for ourselves.

Anthropologists have been able to trace the animal family to the first human family, and they observe that the male's only role early in human history was insemination. Then he drifted off, leaving the female to take care of herself during pregnancy, birth, and the nursing of the young. When men and women began to live together, what can be called culture began. But women controlled the first fruit or surplus, the child, by reason of its long need for protection before it could take care of itself.

This was concrete power over the child and the male in those places with a warm climate and readily available food and water. There was no real need for a male food gatherer, a hunter, in this Garden of Eden. When the male came to live with the female more often, parents and an extended family in a culture began. The children were molded and conditioned by all manner of rituals and folk stories. Their education kept them under control and made them ready to follow the customs and rules set up by parents—first by the female, then the male.

Today in the time of the cities, cybernetics, nuclear power, and space exploration, white men have developed a man-made body, the self-regulating machine. It can operate a whole series of machines and adjust itself much as our human brain is able to readjust to the needs of our body and to operate the human body. It can also do the mental and physical work of men's bodies. At last man has done away with the practical need for his own human form. Now he must turn his attention to the danger the woman's body has always posed to his rule. He struggles to perfect artificial insemination and a machine host for the human fetus. He concerns himself with the biological control of reproduction of the species. Those white males who rule the free world (capitalist world) understand that if they are to keep their rule over women and so-called lesser men, they must stop being dependent on their bodies and must perfect machines which they can control absolutely.

When any group must be controlled and used, their gods, their religion, their land, and their tools of survival must be taken away from them. These are all reflections of themselves and their inner being as well as practical means to living. This must be done by force at first.

The legend goes on to describe how the men waited for the little girls to grow up so they could have wives. Meanwhile, they plotted how they would have their own lodge or secret society from which all women would forever be excluded. The lowly servant tasks would be performed only by women. They would be frightened into submission by means of demons drawn from men's minds.

This is only one of thousands of such legends taken from all parts of the world that indicate some great crisis did occur where leadership of society was taken away from the women by force. We blacks have a splendid oral tradition and respect for the history that comes to us through our older women. Much of their practical advice on how to doctor our children, make delicious dinners out of scraps the white world throws away, how to get meaning from our dreams, how they felt about the time of slavery, and how they overcame the master, have kept our spirits up. For those of us who want to break out of the subtle oppression of all black women, stories from the past have been used extensively in our research. We have begun to feel sure that before written history there was a great fear of women on the part of males and a sense of being oppressed by their inner and reproductive powers. “The Great Earth Mother” could bring forth life and inexplicably take it away. This was one kind of power—internal power. In all the folktales it could be overcome only through external power—force. It is possible that long ago there was a time when women were murdered in some massive genocide and their ancient God-like reflection destroyed along with their temples. Archaeologists have found such temples in Asia and northern Africa, along with statues of some female goddess. But it is better for women to make the historical connections about these remains,
since black and white males still need to rule over us and cannot be depended upon to be free of male prejudice against women. It is enough for now that we note that men were determined at one time in the past to have external power over women, and her symbolic representative nature....

Historical and political understanding of ourselves and our actual place in the American Dream is more important at this time than the gun. We black women look at our backwardness, our colossal ignorance and political confusion, and want to give up. We do not like ourselves or each other. Our contradictory feelings about our black brothers, who seem simultaneously to move forward and backward, are increased by their continual cautioning that we must not move on our own or we will divide the movement. About all that we will mess up will be their black study, black power, cultural nationalism hustle. Forget black capitalism, because when the master offers you his thing, you know it's over! There have been other movements in history when revolutionary males have appeared conservative, opportunistic, or just “stopped at the pass,” and revolutionary women have always forged ahead of the males at this time to take the revolution to a deeper stage.

Black revolutionary women are going to be able to smash the last myths and illusions on which all the jive-male oppressive power depends. We are not alone anymore. This country no longer holds one well-armed united majority against an unarmed minority.... There is a whole bunch of brown and yellow poor folks out there in the world that the ruling middle-class of this country have used and abused, stolen from, and sold their shoddy goods to at way-out prices. They are fighting back now, taking over those United States companies that sucked their people and their land. They are putting out the United States Army and capitalist investors as they did in China and Cuba.

But a new stage of history really began when the poor Vietnamese men, women, and children beat up and killed a whole lot of white and black cats who had decided it was easier to fight little, brown, poverty-stricken people than fight the MAN. One-half of these courageous South Vietnamese NLF [National Liberation Front] fighters are women and children, and they have proved that no United States male, black or white, got what it takes to destroy a people who have decided in their guts to own themselves and their land. That is power United States males have forgotten, but not black women, especially those of us who are poor.

White males are only in the image of God and supernaturally powerful with unbeatable instruments of death, in our own “messed-over” minds—not in the revolutionary world beyond the borders of the United States. All that “Big Daddy” and “head of family” shit is possible because we play the game—ego-tripping black men and ourselves. If our minds are together,
we can work, think, and decide everything for ourselves. It is only a cruel, capitalist system that digs money, property, and white broads more than it digs people, that forces us to be the dependents of men and wards of the state. We recognize that black males are frail human beings, born of women who love them, not for their “dick power” or their bread, but for their gentle, enduring, and powerful humanity.

It is important for black women to remind themselves occasionally that no black man gets born unless we permit it—even after we open our legs. That is the first, simple step to understanding the power that we have. The second is that all children belong to the women because only we know who the mother is. As to who the father is—well, we can decide that, too—any man we choose to say it is, and that neither the child nor MAN was made by God.

Third, we are going to have to put ourselves back to school, do our own research and analysis. We are going to have to argue with and teach one another, grow to respect and love one another. There are a lot of black chicks, field niggers wanting to be house niggers, who will fight very hard to keep this decaying system because of the few, petty privileges it gives them over poor black women. We will be disappointed to lose some house women who will have to revert to their class and who will go with the master, like they did during slavery. Finally, we are going to have to give the brothers a helping hand here and there because they will be uptight, not only with the enemy but with us. But at the same time we've got to do our own thing and get our own minds together.

All revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of myths and the destroyers of illusion. They have always died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and equilibrium.

P
auli Murray, lawyer, professor, ordained priest, civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and a significant figure in the emergence of the modern women's movement. She was the only woman in her law school class at Howard University, the first African American to earn a doctorate in jurisprudence from Yale University Law School (1965), and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopalian priest (1977). She was a member of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, where she joined a small but growing informal network of feminists. She was also involved in the struggle to pass Title VII of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandated equal employment opportunities for women. A founding member of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she remained a crusader for women's rights throughout her life. “Jane Crow and the Law,” which appeared in the December 1965 issue of the
George Washington Law Review
and was coauthored with lawyer Mary O. Eastwood, was an early response to Title VII by feminist lawyers. Her essay “The Liberation of Black Women,” which appeared in
Voices of the New Feminism
(1970), analyzed the double burden of racism and sexism that Black women suffer. She also coined the term “Jane Crow” to refer to institutional barriers and stereotypes that prevented black women from realizing their full potential. She also critiqued the black movement in the 1960s for not resisting patriarchal frameworks and for being essentially a “bid of black males to share power with white males in a continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females are relegated to secondary status.”

For additional information about Murray and her family see
Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (1956) and her autobiography Song in a Weary Throat
(1987).

B
lack women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. Jane Crow refers to the entire range of assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements that have robbed women of a positive self-concept and prevented them from participating fully in society as equals with men. Traditionally, racism and sexism in the United States have shared some common origins, displayed similar manifestations, reinforced one another, and are so deeply intertwined in the country's institutions that the successful outcome of the struggle against racism will depend in large part upon the simultaneous elimination of all discrimination based upon sex. Black women, faced with these dual barriers, have often found that sex bias is more formidable than racial bias. If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, “I survived!”

Negro women have endured their double burden with remarkable strength and fortitude. With dignity they have shared with black men a partnership as members of an embattled group excluded from the normal protections of the society and engaged in a struggle for survival during nearly four centuries of a barbarous slave trade, two centuries of chattel slavery, and a century or more of illusive citizenship. Throughout this struggle, into which has been poured most of the resources and much of the genius of successive generations of American Negroes, these women have often carried a disproportionate share of responsibility for the black family as they strove to keep its integrity intact against a host of indignities to which it has been subjected. Black women have not only stood shoulder to shoulder with black men in every phase of the struggle, but they have often continued to stand firmly when their men were destroyed by it. Few blacks are unfamiliar with that heroic, if formidable, figure exhorting her children and grandchildren to overcome every obstacle and humiliation and to “Be somebody!”