Words of Fire (94 page)

We have been slaves
here
and we have been slaves
there.
Our white great-grandfathers abused and sold us
here,
and our black great-grandfathers abused and sold us
there.
This means—should mean—that we are free now. We don't owe them anything but our example of how not to be like them in that way. Slavery forced us to discontinue relating to each other as tribes: we were all in it together. Freedom should force us to stop relating as owner and owned.
If it doesn't, what has it all been for? What
the white racist thinks about us, about anything, is not as important as this question.

But crucial to our development, too, it seems to me, is an acceptance of our actual as opposed to our mythical selves. We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes, but we are “white,” too, and we are red. To attempt to function as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I believe, to psychic illness: “white” people have shown us the madness of that. (Imagine the psychic liberation of white people if they understood that
probably no one on the planet is genetically “white.”) Regardless of who will or will not accept us, including perhaps, our “established” self, we must be completely (to the extent it is possible) who we are. And who we are becomes more obvious to us, I think, as we grow older and more open to the voices of suffering from our own souls.

For instance, I know about Old Mister's father—that he was a slave owner—because he was also my great-great-grandfather. But I didn't begin to
feel
him,
let
myself feel him, until I was in my late thirties. I discovered his very real presence in an odd way: I began to hear him pleading to be let in. I wrote a poem about this called “Family Of”
^j

I used to read this poem occasionally to my students, but stopped. The young white men present always thought “This small, white man” meant them, and that they were being “murdered” and excluded even in the classroom; the black men and women seemed to think the same thing, and that the “murder” was both literal and justified. They may all have had a point, and the poem does work on that level. However, the impetus for the poem came out of my struggle with my great-great-grandfather, the slave owner and rapist (what
else
was he? I've often racked my brains!) whom I had no intention of admitting into my self. The more I heard him plead, like a damned soul, to be let into my psyche (and it occurred to me that karmic justice being as exact as it is, I might be the only one of his descendants in whom his voice still exists), the more I denounced him as a white man, a killer, destroyer of the planet, a Wasichu, naturally no part of me. Get lost, you old bastard, is essentially what I said. Being a part of me already, however, he couldn't.

I dreamed of him. My image of him at the time—and over a period of years, and still—was of a small, white,
naked,
pale-eyed, pale-haired, oldish white man. Weak-looking; weak, near-sighted eyes, weak limbs. Ineffectual.
Hard to imagine him raping anyone—but then, she, my great-great-grandmother, was only eleven.

That is what I learned from relatives when I began to ask questions about “this small, white man,” wringing his hands and crying and begging outside my psyche (on his knobby knees) all alone. Already I had found my Indian great-great-grandmother, and she was safely smoking inside my heart.

It took the death of John Lennon to squeeze the old man through. John had been Irish, too (though born in Liverpool). And when he was murdered (and I
loved
him, “white” as he was, for there is no denying the beauty and greatness of his spirit), I felt the price we pay for closing anyone off. To cut anyone out of the psyche is to maim the personality; to suppress any part of the personality is to maim the soul.

And so, I opened the heart of my soul, and there, with the Africans, are the Indian great-great-grandmother and the old white child molester and rapist. Lately I have been urging him to enlarge his personality to include singing or making music on the fiddle. And to stop shouting!

But when I wrote a poem about the peaceful coming together racially, at last, of my psyche, a black male critic wrote the following:

These comments, by black poet and writer K. T. H. Cheatwood, appeared in a review of my collection of poems
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
in the
Richmond
(Virginia)
News Leader,
in the winter of 1984. Unfortunately, in quoting my poem-dedication to my white and Indian ancestors, he left off the most important section:

Mr. Cheatwood thinks, apparently, that I should be ashamed to mention, to “advertise,” my great-great-grandmother's rape. He assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being “white.” I, on the hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (for I, too, have been called everything but a child of God), and that inasmuch as my great-great-grandmother was forced to endure rape
and
the birth of a child she couldn't have wanted, as well, the least I
can
do is mention it. In truth, this is all the herstory of her that I know. But if I affirm
that,
then I can at least
imagine
what the rest of her life must have been like. And this, I believe, has some importance for us all.

We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. we are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I've come to believe they
all
did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They've paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.

So, these are my thoughts. Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women
and
men, as I
reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

Your sister,

Alice

1986

In my response to Mpinga I did not touch on what I consider the egregious hypocrisy of many of the critics of the novel and the movie. In letters sent to the producers of the film while it was being shot (letters threatening picket lines, boycotts, and worse if the script was not submitted to them, prior to filming, for approval), members of the group Blacks Against Black Exploitation of Blacks in the Media made it clear that a primary concern of theirs was not merely the character of Mister, but a fear of the “exposure” of lesbianism “in the black community.” One of the letters expressed the fear that, just as the use of cocaine skyrocketed in the black community after the showing of
Superfly,
a movie about a racially mixed, black-ghetto hustler, pimp, and dope dealer that many black audiences identified with in the seventies, lesbianism, apparently in their view another “plague,” would race through the black community in the eighties. It was also stated that homosexuality was “subject to control” by the community, and that love between black women was okay as long as it wasn't publicly expressed. (This brought to mind the sentiment of white supremacists that they don't mind black people being free, as long as they confine their freedom to some other planet.)

If the concern of critics had sincerely been the depiction of the cruel black male character Mister, as played by Danny Glover (in a film that is, after all, about a black woman, whose struggle is precisely that of overcoming abuse by two particularly unsavory men), they were late in sounding the alarm. What of black actors, men and women, who play CIA agents? United States spies? Members of COINTELPRO? These characters are used to legitimize real organizations that are involved in assassinating our leaders and heroes around the world and destabilizing and destroying whole Third World
countries
besides. Yet, because they're middle class, speak Standard English, are never permitted to sleep with anybody at all, they are considered decent models for us to have.

In my opinion, it is not the depiction of the brutal behavior of a black male character that is the problem for the critics; after all, many of us have sat in packed theaters where black men have cheered (much as white racists have cheered at images depicting blacks being abused) when a black woman was being terrorized or beaten, or, as in one of Prince's films,
thrown in a garbage dumpster. Rather, it is the behavior of the women characters that is objectionable; because whatever else is happening in the novel and the film (and as is true more and more in real life), women have their own agenda, and it does not include knuckling under to abusive men. Women loving women, and expressing it “publicly,” if they so choose, is part and parcel of what freedom for women means, just as this is what it means for anyone else. If you are not free to express your love, you are a slave; and anyone who would demand that you enslave yourself by not freely expressing your love is a person with a slaveholder's mentality.