In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
Page 24
In other stories, I am interested in Christianity as an imperialist tool used against Africa (“Diary of an African Nun”) and in voodoo used as a weapon against oppression (“The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff”). I see all of these as religious questions.
The poem “Revolutionary Petunias” did not have a name when I sat down to write it. I wanted to create a person who engaged in a final struggle with her oppressor, and won, but who, in every other way, was “incorrect.” Sammy Lou in the poem is everything she should not be: her name is Sammy Lou, for example; she is a farmer’s wife; she works in the fields. She goes to church. The walls of her house contain no signs of her blackness—though that in itself reveals it; anyone walking into that empty house would know Sammy Lou is black. She is so incredibly “incorrect” that she is only amused when the various poets and folk singers rush to immortalize her heroism in verse and song. She did not think of her killing of her oppressor in that way. She thought—and I picture her as tall, lean, black, with short, badly straightened hair and crooked teeth—that killing is never heroic. Her reaction, after killing this cracker-person, would be to look up at the sky and not pray or ask forgiveness but to say—as if talking to an old friend—“Lord, you know my heart. I never wanted to have to kill nobody. But I couldn’t hold out to the last, like Job. I had done took more than I could stand.”
Sammy Lou is so “incorrect” she names her children after Presidents and their wives: she names one of them after the founder of the Methodist church. To her, this does not mean a limitation of her blackness; it means she feels she is so black she can absorb—and change—all things, since everybody knows that a black-skinned Jackie Kennedy still bears resemblance only to her own great-aunt, Sadie Mae Johnson.
But the most “incorrect” thing about Sammy Lou is that she loves flowers. Even on her way to the electric chair she reminds her children to water them. This is crucial, for I have heard it said by one of our cultural visionaries that whenever you hear a black person talking about the beauties of nature, that person is not a black person at all, but a Negro. This is meant as a put-down, and it is. It puts down all of the black folks in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana—in fact, it covers just about everybody’s mama. Sammy Lou, of course, is so “incorrect” she does not even know how ridiculous she is for loving to see flowers blooming around her unbearably ugly gray house. To be “correct” she should consider it her duty to let ugliness reign. Which is what “incorrect” people like Sammy Lou refuse to do.
Actually, the poem was to claim (as Toomer claimed the people he wrote about in Cane, who were all as “incorrect” as possible) the most “incorrect” black person I could, and to honor her as my own—on a level with, if not above, the most venerated saints of the black revolution. It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
Although Sammy Lou is more a rebel than a revolutionary (since you need more than one for a revolution) I named the poem “Revolutionary Petunias” because she is not—when you view her kind of person historically—isolated. She is part of an ongoing revolution. Any black revolution, instead of calling her “incorrect,” will have to honor her single act of rebellion.
Another reason I named the poem “Revolutionary Petunias” is that I like petunias and like to raise them because you just put them in any kind of soil and they bloom their heads off—exactly, it seemed to me, like black people tend to do. (Look at the blues and jazz musicians, the blind singers from places like Turnip, Mississippi, the poets and writers and all-around blooming people you know, who—from all visible evidence—achieved their blooming by eating the air for bread and drinking muddy water for hope.) Then I thought, too, of the petunias my mother gave me when my daughter was born, and of the story (almost a parable) she told me about them. Thirty-seven years ago, my mother and father were coming home from somewhere in their wagon—my mother was pregnant with one of my older brothers at the time—and they passed a deserted house where one lavender petunia was left, just blooming away in the yard (probably to keep itself company)—and my mother said Stop! let me go and get that petunia bush. And my father, grumbling, stopped, and she got it, and they went home, and she set it out in a big stump in the yard. It never wilted, just bloomed and bloomed. Every time the family moved (say twelve times) she took her petunia—and thirty-seven years later she brought me a piece of that same petunia bush. It had never died. Each winter it lay dormant and dead-looking, but each spring it came back, livelier than before.
What underscored the importance of this story for me is this: modern petunias do not live forever. They die each winter and the next spring you have to buy new ones.
In a way, the whole book is a celebration of people who will not cram themselves into any ideological or racial mold. They are all shouting Stop! I want to go get that petunia!
Because of this they are made to suffer. They are told that they do not belong, that they are not wanted, that their art is not needed, that nobody who is “correct” could love what they love. Their answer is resistance, without much commentary; just a steady knowing that they stand at a point where—with one slip of the character—they might be lost, and the bloom they are after wither in the winter of self-contempt. They do not measure themselves against black people or white people; if anything, they learn to walk and talk in the presence of Du Bois, Hurston, Hughes, Toomer, Attaway, Wright, and others—and when they bite into their pillows at night these spirits comfort them. They are aware that the visions that created them were all about a future where all people—and flowers too—can bloom. They require that in the midst of the bloodiest battles or revolution this thought not be forgotten.
When I married my husband there was a law that said I could not. When we moved to Mississippi three years after the lynching of Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman, it was a punishable crime for a black person and a white person of opposite sex to inhabit the same house. But I felt then—as I do now—that in order to be able to live at all in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose. Otherwise, I’d just as soon leave. If society (black or white) says, Then you must be isolated, an outcast, then I will be a hermit. Friends and relatives may desert me, but the dead—Douglass, Du Bois, Hansberry, Toomer, and the rest—are a captive audience…. These feelings went into two poems, “Be Nobody’s Darling” and “While Love Is Unfashionable.”
“For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties” is a pretty real poem. It really is about one of my sisters, a brilliant, studious girl who became one of those Negro wonders—who collected scholarships like trading stamps and wandered all over the world. (Our hometown didn’t even have a high school when she came along.) When she came to visit us in Georgia it was—at first—like having Christmas all during her vacation. She loved to read and tell stories; she taught me African songs and dances; she cooked fanciful dishes that looked like anything but plain old sharecropper food. I loved her so much it came as a great shock—and a shock I don’t expect to recover from—to learn she was ashamed of us. We were so poor, so dusty and sunburnt. We talked wrong. We didn’t know how to dress, or use the right eating utensils. And so, she drifted away, and I did not understand it. Only later did I realize that sometimes (perhaps) it becomes too painful to bear: seeing your home and family—shabby and seemingly without hope—through the eyes of your new friends and strangers. She had felt—for her own mental health—that the gap that separated us from the rest of the world was too wide for her to keep trying to bridge. She understood how delicate she was.
I started out writing this poem in great anger; hurt, really. I thought I could write a magnificently vicious poem. Yet, even in the first draft, it did not turn out that way, which is one of the great things about poetry. What you really feel, underneath everything else, will present itself. Your job is not to twist that feeling. So that although being with her now is too painful with memories for either of us to be com
fortable, I still retain (as I hope she does), in memories beyond the bad ones, my picture of a sister I loved, “Who walked among the flowers and brought them inside the house, who smelled as good as they, and looked as bright.”
This poem (and my sister received the first draft, which is hers alone, and the way I wish her to relate to the poem) went through fifty drafts (at least) and I worked on it, off and on, for five years. This has never happened before or since. I do not know what to say about the way it is constructed other than to say that as I wrote it the lines and words went, on the paper, to a place comparable to where they lived in my head.
I suppose, actually, that my tremendous response to the poems of William Carlos Williams, Cummings, and Basho convinced me that poetry is more like music—in my case, improvisational jazz, where each person blows the note that she hears—than like a cathedral, with every stone in a specific, predetermined place. Whether lines are long or short depends on what the poem itself requires. Like people, some poems are fat and some are thin. Personally, I prefer the short, thin ones, which are always like painting the eye in a tiger (as Muriel Rukeyser once explained it). You wait until the energy and vision are just right, then you write the poem. If you try to write it before it is ready to be written you find yourself adding stripes instead of eyes. Too many stripes and the tiger herself disappears. You will paint a photograph (which is what is wrong with “Burial”) instead of creating a new way of seeing.
The poems that fail will always haunt you. I am haunted by “Ballad of the Brown Girl” and “Johann” in Once, and I expect to be haunted by “Nothing Is Right” in Revolutionary Petunias. The first two are dishonest, and the third is trite.
The poem “The Girl Who Died # 2” was written after I learned of the suicide of a student at the college I attended. I learned, from the dead girl’s rather guilty-sounding “brothers and sisters,” that she had been hounded constantly because she was so “incorrect”; she thought she could be a black hippie. To top that, they tried to make her feel like a traitor because she refused to limit her interest to black men. Anyway, she was a beautiful girl. I was shown a photograph of her by one of her few black friends. She was a little brown-skinned girl from Texas, away from home for the first time, trying to live a life she could live with. She tried to kill herself two or three times before, but I guess the brothers and sisters didn’t think it “correct” to respond with love or attention, since everybody knows it is “incorrect” to even think of suicide if you are a black person. And, of course, black people do not commit suicide. Only colored people and Negroes commit suicide. (See “The Old Warrior Terror”: Warriors, you know, always die on the battlefield.) I said, when I saw the photograph, that I wished I had been there for her to talk to. When the school invited me to join the Board of Trustees, it was her face that convinced me. I know nothing about boards and never really trusted them; but I can listen to problems pretty well. … I believe in listening—to a person, the sea, the wind, the trees, but especially to young black women whose rocky road I am still traveling.
*See “Beauty When the Other Dancer Is the Self”
1973
A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF MS.
I REALIZED AT THE National Black Feminist Organization conference that it had been much too long since I sat in a room full of black women and, unafraid of being made to feel peculiar, spoke about things that matter to me. We sat together and talked and knew no one would think, or say, “Your thoughts are dangerous to black unity and a threat to black men.” Instead, all the women understood that we gathered together to assure understanding among black women, and that understanding among women is not a threat to anyone who intends to treat women fairly. So the air was clear and rang with earnest voices freed at last to speak to ears that would not automatically begin to close. And then to hear Shirley Chisholm speak: to feel all of history compressed into a few minutes and to sing “We love Shirley!”—a rousing indication of our caring that we could not give to Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman or Mary McLeod Bethune. To see her so small, so impeccable in dress, in speech, and in logic, and so very black, and to think of her running for President of this country, which has, in every single age, tried to destroy her. It was as if, truly, the faces of those other women were just beneath the skin of Shirley Chisholm’s face. And later, at the same general meeting, being one among and with all those black women, I thought of all the questions about us I have been asking myself.
For four or five years I have been watching the faces of young black men and women as they emerge from the movie houses of this city, their faces straight from Southern black homes and families, which means upright, Christian, striving homes with mothers and fathers who are shown respect. I’ve watched them, innocence and determination to grow mingling in their bodies, respond to images of black women and men they never have seen before. Watched them stagger, slink, or strut away from the Sweetback flicks … a doomed look on the faces of the young women, a cruelty or a look of disgust beginning behind the innocence on the faces of the young men. And I have asked myself: Who will stop this slinging of mud on the character of the black woman? Who will encourage the tenderness that seeks to blossom in young black men? Who will stand up and say, “Black women, at least, have had enough!” And I began to feel, at the conference, that, yes, there are black women who will do that.
And I looked again at Shirley Chisholm’s face (which I had never seen before except on television) and was glad she has kept a record of her political and social struggles, because our great women die, often in poverty and under the weight of slander, and are soon forgotten. And I thought of how little we have studied any of our ancestors, but how close to zero has been our study of those who were female.. . and I have asked myself: Who will secure from neglect and slander those women who have kept our image as black women clean and strong for us? And at the conference, I met women who are eager to do this job.
And of course I thought of Frederick Douglass. And knew that his newspaper would have been pleased to cover our conference, because we are black and we are women and because we intend to be as free as anyone. He understood that it is not incumbent upon the slave to make sure her or his uprising is appropriate or “correct.” It is the nature of the oppressed to rise against oppression. Period. Women who wanted their rights did not frighten him, politically or socially, because he knew his own rights were not diminished by theirs. I’m sure he would have sent someone from his newspaper to see what things—abortion, sterilization, welfare rights, women in the black movement, black women in the arts, and so forth—we were talking about. I don’t think he would have understood—any more than I do—why no representatives from black magazines and newspapers came. Are not black women black news?
And then, when I came home, I stood looking at a picture of Frederick Douglass I have on my wall. And I asked myself: Where is your picture of Harriet Tubman, the General? Where is your drawing of Sojourner Truth? And I thought that if black women would only start asking questions like that, they’d soon—all of them—have to begin reclaiming their mothers and grandmothers—and what an enrichment that would be!
When we look back over our history it is clear that we have neglected to save just those people who could help us most. Because no matter what anyone says, it is the black woman’s words that have the most meaning for us, her daughters, because she, like us, has experienced life not only as a black person, but as a woman; and it was different being Frederick Douglass than being Harriet Tubman—or Sojourner Truth, who only “looked like a man,” but bore children and saw them sold into slavery.
I thought of the black women writers and poets whose books—even today—go out of print while other works about all of us, less valuable if more “profitable,” survive to insult us with their half-perceived, half-rendered “truths.” How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names. Yet, we do not know them. Or if we do, it is only the names we know and not the lives.
Someone claimed, rhetorically, that we are the only “true queens of the universe.” I do not want to be a queen, because queens are oppressive, but even so the thought came to me that any true queen knows the names, words, and actions of the other queens of her lineage and is very sharp about her herstory. I think we might waive the wearing of a crown until we have at least seriously begun our work.
I thought about friends of mine whose views do not differ very much from mine, but who decided not to come to the conference because of fear. Fear of criticism from other black people (who, I assume, consider silence a sign of solidarity), and fear of the presence of lesbians. The criticism will no doubt be forthcoming, but what can one do about that? Nothing, but continue to work. As for the lesbians—a black lesbian would undoubtedly be a black woman. That seems simple enough. In any case, I only met other black women, my sisters, and valuable beyond measuring, every one of them.