Words of Fire (67 page)

63
Gutman,
Black Family,
85.

64
Lawrence Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 275.

65
Ida Cox, “Wild Women Don't Have the Blues” (Northern Music Co., 1924).

66
Lerner,
Black Women in White America
, xxv.

67
Ntozake Shange, quoted in Carol P. Christ,
Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), 117.

68
Blassingame,
Slave Testimony,
256.

D
arlene Clark Hine, John A. Hanna Professor of American history at Michigan State University, is one of the most influential scholars in the new field of black women's studies. She has played a pioneering role in the rewriting of African American and women's history because of her important scholarly and editorial work with two mammoth publishing projects—the sixteen-volume series
Black Women in United States History: From Colonial Times to the Present,
and the two-volume historical encyclopedia,
Black Women in America.
She has also published widely on black nursing history and black women in the Midwest. Her pioneering essay on “the culture of dissemblance” among African American women is a major contribution to the largely unwritten history of sexuality among black Americans. In a recent essay in Gerald Early's
Lure and Loathing
(1994), a collection of essays about Du Bois's concept of double consciousness, Hines speculates about how Du Bois might have responded to black women's “‘fineness': Negro, American, woman, poor, black woman” (338). She also argues that studying black women provides “greater illumination of the power relations that operate along the interlocking grid of race, sex, and class in America.”

O
ne of the most remarked upon but least analyzed themes in black women's history deals with black women's sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence. Author Hazel Carby put it baldly when she declared: “The institutionalized rape of black women has never been as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack. The links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years.”
¹
I suggest that rape and the threat of rape influenced the development of a culture of dissemblance among black women. By dissemblance I mean the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure, but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.

To be sure, themes of rape and sexual vulnerability have received considerable attention in the recent literary outpourings of black women novelists. Of the last six novels I have read and reread, for example, five contained a rape scene or a graphic description of domestic violence.
²
Moreover, this is not a recent phenomenon in black women's writing.

Virtually every known nineteenth-century female slave narrative contains a reference to, at some juncture, the ever present threat and reality of rape. Two works come immediately to mind: Harriet Jacob's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861) and Elizabeth Keckley's
Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
(1868). Yet there is another thread running throughout these slave narratives—one that concerns these captive women's efforts to resist the misappropriation and to maintain the integrity of their own sexuality.
³
The combined influence of rape (or the threat of rape), domestic violence, and economic oppression is key to understanding the hidden motivations informing major social protest and migratory movements in Afro-American history.

Second only to black women's concern for sexual preservation is the pervasive theme of the frustration attendant to finding suitable employment. Oral histories and autobiographical accounts of twentieth-century migrating black women are replete with themes about work. Scholars of black urban history and black labor history agree that black women faced greater economic discrimination and had fewer employment opportunities than did black men. Black women's work was the most undesirable and least remunerative of all work available to migrants.

As late as 1930 a little over three thousand black women, or fifteen percent, of the black female labor force in Chicago were unskilled and semiskilled factory operatives. Thus, over eighty percent of all employed black women continued to work as personal servants and domestics. Historian Alan H. Spear pointed out that “Negro women were particularly limited in their search for desirable positions. Clerical work was practically closed to them and only a few could qualify as school teachers. Negro domestics often received less than white women for the same work and they could rarely rise to the position of head servant in large households”
⁴

Given that many black women immigrants were doomed to work in the same kinds of domestic service jobs they held in the South, one wonders why they bothered to move in the first place. There were some significant differences that help explain this phenomenon. A maid earning seven dollars a week in Cleveland perceived herself to be, and probably was, much better off than a counterpart receiving two dollars and fifty cents a week in Mobile, Alabama. A factory worker, even one whose work was dirty and low status, could and did imagine herself better off than domestic servants who endured the unrelenting scrutiny, interference, and complaints of household mistresses and the untoward advances of male family members.

I believe that in order to understand this historical migratory trend we need to understand the noneconomic motives propelling black female migration. I believe that many black women quit the South out of a desire to achieve personal autonomy and to escape both from sexual exploitation from inside and outside of their families and from the rape and threat of rape by white as well as black males. To focus on the sexual and the personal impetus for black women's migration in the first several decades of the twentieth century neither dismisses nor diminishes the significance of economic motives. Rather, as historian Lawrence Levine cautioned, “As indisputably important as the economic motive was, it is possible to overstress it so that the black migration is converted into an inexorable force and Negroes are seen once again not as actors capable of affecting at least some part of their destinies, but primarily as beings who are acted upon—Southern leaves blown North by the winds of destitution.”
⁵
It is reasonable to assume that some black women were indeed “Southern leaves blown North” and that there were many others who were self-propelled
actresses seeking respect, control over their own sexuality, and access to well-paying jobs.

My own research on the history of black women in the Middle West had led me to questions about how, when, and under what circumstances the majority of them settled in the region. These questions have led to others concerning the process of black women's migration across time, from the flights of runaway slaves in the antebellum period to the great migrations of the first half of the twentieth century. The most common, and certainly the most compelling, motive for running, fleeing, migrating was a desire to retain or claim some control and ownership of their own sexual beings and the children they bore. In the antebellum period hundreds of slave women risked their lives and those of their loved ones to run away to the ostensibly free states of the Northwest Territory, in quest of an elusive sexual freedom for themselves and freedom from slavery for their children.

Two things became immediately apparent as I proceeded with researching the history and reading the autobiographies of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century migrating, or fleeing, black women. First, that these women were sexual hostages and domestic violence victims in the South (or in other regions of the country) did not reduce their determination to acquire power to protect themselves and to become agents of social change once they settled in midwestern communities. Second, the fundamental tension between black women and the rest of the society—referring specifically to white men, white women, and, to a lesser extent, black men —involved a multifaceted struggle to determine who would control their productive and reproductive capacities and their sexuality. At stake for black women caught up in this ever-evolving, constantly shifting, but relentless war was the acquisition of personal autonomy and economic liberation. Their quest for autonomy, dignity, and access to opportunity to earn an adequate living was (and still is) complicated and frustrated by the antagonisms of race, class, and gender conflict and by differences in regional economies. At heart though, the relationship between black women and the larger society has always been, and continues to be, adversarial.

Because of the interplay of racial animosity, class tensions, gender role differentiation, and regional economic variations, black women, as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives. The dynamics of dissemblance involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while actually remaining an enigma. Only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle.

The inclination of the larger society to ignore those considered “marginal” actually enabled subordinate black women to craft the veil of secrecy
and to perfect the art of dissemblance. Yet it could also be argued that their secrecy or “invisibility” contributed to the development of an atmosphere inimical to realizing equal opportunity or a place of respect in the larger society. There would be no room on the pedestal for the Southern black lady. Nor could she join her white sisters in the prison of “true womanhood.” In other words, stereotypes, negative images, and debilitating assumptions filled the space left empty due to inadequate and erroneous information about the true contributions, capabilities, and identities of black women.

This line of analysis is not without problems. To suggest that black women deliberately developed a culture of dissemblance implies that they endeavored to create, and were not simply reacting to, widespread misrepresentations and negative images of themselves in white minds. Clearly, black women did not possess the power to eradicate negative social and sexual images of their womanhood. Rather, what I propose is that in the face of the pervasive stereotypes and negative estimations of the sexuality of black women, it was imperative that they collectively create alternative self-images and shield from scrutiny these private, empowering definitions of self. A secret, undisclosed persona allowed the individual black woman to function, to work effectively as a domestic in white households, to bear and rear children, to endure the frustration-born violence of frequently under- or unemployed mates, to support churches, to found institutions, and to engage in social service activities, all while living within a clearly hostile white, patriarchal, middle-class America.

The problem this penchant for secrecy presents to the historian is readily apparent. Deborah Gray White has commented about the difficulty of finding primary source material for personal aspects of black female life: “Black women have also been reluctant to donate their papers to manuscript repositories. That is in part a manifestation of the black woman's perennial concern with image, a justifiable concern born of centuries of vilification. Black women's reluctance to donate personal papers also stems from the adversarial nature of the relationship that countless black women have had with many public institutions, and the resultant suspicion of anyone seeking private information.”
⁶

White's allusion to “resultant suspicion” speaks implicitly to one important reason why so much of the inner life of black women remains hidden. Indeed, the concepts of “secrets” and “dissemblance,” as I employ them, hint at those issues that black women believed better left unknown, unwritten, unspoken except in whispered tones. Their alarm, their fear, or their Victorian sense of modesty implies that those who broke the silence provided grist for detractors' mills and, even more ominously, tore the protective cloaks from their inner selves. Undoubtedly, these fears and suspicions contribute to the absence of sophisticated historical discussion of
the impact of rape (or threat of rape) and incidences of domestic violence on the shape of black women's experiences.

However, the self-imposed secrecy and the culture of dissemblance, coupled with the larger society's unwillingness to discard tired and worn stereotypes, has also led to ironic incidences of misplaced emphases. Until quite recently, for example, when historians talked of rape in the slavery experience, they often bemoaned the damage this act did to the black male's sense of esteem and respect. He was powerless to protect his woman from white rapists. Few scholars probed the effect that rape, the threat of rape, and domestic violence had on the psychic development of the female victims. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Carby has indicated, lynching, not rape, became the most powerful and compelling symbol of black oppression. Lynching, it came to be understood, was one of the major noneconomic reasons why Southern black men migrated North.