e One such example is the Port Royal Experiment (1862), the precursor of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Port Royal was a program of relief for “freed men and women” in the South Carolina Sea Islands, organized under the auspices of the Boston Education Commission and the Freedmen’s Relief Assoc. in New York and the Port Royal Relief Assoc. in Philadelphia, and sanctioned by the Union Army and the Federal Government. See The Journal of Charolotte Forten on the “Port Royal Experiment” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Through her Northern bourgeois myopia, Forten recounts her experiences as a black teacher among the black freed men and women and her Northern white women peers.
f From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, an African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).
g Seabury Press, New York, 1970.
h The whole argument is painfully reminiscent of Eldridge Cleaver’s misogynist assertion, twenty years ago, that rape is a political act, and Norman Mailer’s contention that black men were more in touch with their sexuality than whites.
i This is not to imply that all sexist cruelty among black people was inherited from white slave owners. On the contrary, in the sections of The Color Purple that are set in Africa there is an exploration of the historical oppression of women that is endemic to many traditional African cultures and that continues today.
j The poems in this essay are from Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful by Alice Walker (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
k One shining example of criticism by a black man offered with love is the review of The Color Purple, the movie, by Carl Dix that appeared in the Revolutionary Worker. He expressed concern over the way so many of Celie’s problems seemed to be solved by her receiving a house and business left to her by her father (who had been lynched when she was a child). He correctly argues that the inheritance of private property is not a viable solution in terms of the masses of poor people and wishes that this aspect of Celie’s existence could have been more progressive. I understand this criticism and feel it does indeed project our thoughts forward into the realm of better solutions for the landless, jobless, and propertyless masses. However, I also feel that for Celie’s time—the post-Reconstruction era in the South, whose hallmark was the dispossession of blacks—this solution was in fact progressive; it spoke eloquently of the foresight of her father in his attempt to provide for her in a society where black people’s attempts to provide for their coming generations were brutally repressed.
© 1995 by Beverly Guy-Sheftall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 95-69570
eISBN : 978-1-595-58765-7
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
Established in 1990 as a major alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses, The New Press is the first full-scale nonprofit American book publisher outside of the university presses. The Press is operated editorially in the public interest, rather than for private gain; it is committed to publishing in innovative ways works of educational, cultural, and community value that, despite their intellectual merits, might not normally be commercially viable. The New Press’s editorial offices are located at the City University of New York.
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