In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

by Alice Walker

  After our talk of all the things hoped gone forever but now “back with the wind”—the KKK, obscene national “leadership,” “good hair”—I thought somewhat uneasily of something I had said in reply to your question about Color. You may recall that we were speaking of the hostility many black black women feel toward light-skinned black women, and you said, “Well, I’m light. It’s not my fault. And I’m not going to apologize for it.” I said apology for one’s color is not what anyone is asking. What black black women would be interested in, I think, is a consciously heightened awareness on the part of light black women that they are capable, often quite unconsciously, of inflicting pain upon them; and that unless the question of Colorism—in my definition, prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color—is addressed in our communities and definitely in our black “sisterhoods” we cannot, as a people, progress. For colorism, like colonialism, sexism, and racism, impedes us.

  What bothers me is my statement that I myself, halfway between light and dark—a definite brown—must align myself with black black women; that not to do so is to spit in our black mother’s face. Meaning the primordial, the Edenic, the Goddess, Mother Africa. For now I recall meeting your actual mother, who looks white, as did your grandmother, whose picture you once showed me, and whose beautiful old clothes you sometimes wear. For you, the idea of alignment with black black women solely on the basis of color must seem ridiculous and colorist, and I have come to agree with you.

  Still, I think there is probably as much difference between the life of a black black woman and a “high yellow” black woman as between a “high yellow” woman and a white woman. And I am worried, constantly, about the hatred the black black woman encounters within black society. To me, the black black woman is our essential mother—the blacker she is the more us she is—and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

  Ironically, much of what I’ve learned about color I’ve learned because I have a mixed-race child. Because she is lighter-skinned, straighter-haired than I, her life—in this racist, colorist society—is infinitely easier. And so I understand the subtle programming I, my mother, and my grandmother before me fell victim to. Escape the pain, the ridicule, escape the jokes, the lack of attention, respect, dates, even a job, any way you can. And if you can’t escape, help your children to escape. Don’t let them suffer as you have done. And yet, what have we been escaping to? Freedom used to be the only answer to that question. But for some of our parents it is as if freedom and whiteness were the same destination, and that presents a problem for any person of color who does not wish to disappear. Thinking about color, thinking about you, me, my daughter and mother, I thought of a story that illustrates some of what I’ve just said. It begins in the South, when I was in my late teens, and ends in a coffee shop in New Mexico some twelve years later

  Doreena, who figures prominantly in the story, haunts me, even today, and I find myself worried about her, and wondering how she is. She was, when I knew her, a brilliant, elegant, and very very black girl. To look at Doreena was as Mari Evans says in one of her poems “to be restored.” For she was “pure.” Genes untampered with. Totally “unimproved” by infusions of white or Indian blood. She was beautiful. However, the word “beautiful” itself was never used to describe black women in those days. They might be called “handsome” in a pinch. “Her skin is black but she is sure nuff pretty,” someone might have thought, but not sung. Stevie Wonder’s lyrics, though in our time backward in this one instance (“but” rather than “and”), would have been considered revolutionary in the fifties and early sixties. “Beautiful” was for white women and black women who look like you. Medium browns like me might evoke “good-looking” or “fine.” A necessary act of liberation within myself was to acknowledge the beauty of black black women, but I was always aware I was swimming against the tide.

  In any case, Doreena was rejected by a very light-skinned young man whom she had been dating for some time, with an eye toward marriage. His parents said she was too dark and would not look right in their cream-colored family. And she did what many black black women do when rejected because of their color, she flung herself into the purest, blackest arms she could find. Those of a West Indian. (She might, instead, have gone the other “traditional” way: into the arms of a “real” white person, thumbing her nose at the “fakes.”)

  Well, there went our sister Doreena. Off into a sexist, patriarchial, provincial culture she didn’t understand, one felt fairly sure.

  And what of the young man? Let us call him Hypolytus. Hypolytus married a Finn. (Memo to his parents.) And, at a coffee shop in New Mexico where he and I spent an hour over lunch, he told me the following tale: He and his Finnish wife had divorced rather soon. For one thing, she insisted on living in Finland; a move he had definitely not expected, since he was of the “Whither thou goest .. .” school, but ascribing this commitment only to women, of course; and he had recently visited her and their daughter there. While there, he took the daughter shopping. And it was the various shopkeepers of Helsinki—used to American tourists—who translated for him and the child, because she did not speak English and his scant knowledge of Finnish had lapsed.

  I think it was hearing this story, and feeling so deeply that our brother Hypolytus had been tricked by society and his parents that caused me to examine color oppression in my own experience and my own life. I remembered ----, who was asked by the light-skinned girls who shared one end of our college dormitory to move somewhere else, because she was so dark; the men who came to call on them found her blackness “inharmonious.” I remembered being literally pushed off the sidewalk outside the Dom in New York, by young black men who wanted to speak to the white women I was with. Perhaps it is no accident that my best friend during this period was a black black woman from Africa who was never approached by black men for dates. She dated instead a white seminary student from Texas, while my fiancé was an Irish Jew from New England.

  This essay is for you. You are younger than I, so I think of you as a younger sister who will take all that your older sisters have learned even further. A sister I do not wish to lose to the entreaties of parents or grandparents standing behind you whispering “lighten up” or “darken up” the race. Nor do I, a dark woman, intend to give you up. When we walk down a street together and those who hate their black mothers admire only you (really your skin color and hair) we will not let this divide us, but will think instead with pity of their ignorance and sure end in self-eradication. For no one can hate their source and survive, as has been said.

  The woman whose statement precedes the essay was my teacher in high school. A woman of courage, great love of us, and soul. It can only be good for us as a people to attempt to deal with the pain and alienation she reveals to us here.

  In Sisterhood,

  Alice

  A Consciousness Raising Paper for Black Black Women and Whiter Black Women Who Wish to Struggle Together Over the “Dirty Little‘Secret’” of Color in African-American Life

  Equally important, however [to “What it is, brother?”], is “What it is, sister?” No one dares to utter the plight of her reality, not even my black sisters themselves. But what it is, is the great cannon of cruel racism directed toward the black black woman by the black middle class. The black middle class has for generations excluded the black black woman from the mainstream of black middle-class society, and it has, by its discrimination against her, induced in itself a divisive cancer that has chopped the black race in this country into polarized sections; consequently the black middle class has devoured its own soul and is doomed, a large number of black working class people believe, to extinction.

  What it is, is an insanity that has helped whites turn blacks on themselves and that has caused the black middle class to claw itself into a form of psychic annihilation.

  Thus the black working class is beginning to ask itself
the questions: “What is a people that props itself up on the color of its skin? And what is a people that excludes the womb-source of its own genetic heritage?” For certainly every Afro-American is descended from a black black woman. What then can be the destiny of a people that pampers and cherishes the blood of the white slaveholder who maimed and degraded their female ancestor? What can be the future of a class of descendants of slaves that implicitly gives slaveholders greater honor than the African women they enslaved? What can be the end of a class that pretends to honor blackness while secretly despising working class blackskinned women whose faces reveal no trace of white blood?

  —Trellie Jeffers, “The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class,” The Black Scholar

  For many years I pondered Jeffers’s statement, then turned to black literature, because it is so very instructive, to see whether it had support. I began with three nineteenth-century novels by black women, as background, and this is what I found.

  In the first novel one character says to another: “But if you’d seed them putty white hands of hern you’d never think she kept her own house, let ’lone anybody else’s.

  “My! but she’s putty. Beautiful long hair comes way down her back: putty blue eyes, an’ jez ez white as anybody in dis place… .”

  In the second novel, it goes like this:

  “Meg Randal opened wide a pair of lovely dark eyes and raised two small, white hands in surprise.

  “Ethel sat down and took one of Meg’s perfect little hands in her own. Meg’s hand was her one source of pride, and it would almost seem as if she were justified in this pride. Such a delicate, white, slender, dimpled hand it was!”

  In the third novel:

  “Her dress was plain black, with white chiffon at the neck and wrists, and on her breast a large bunch of ‘Jack’ roses was fastened… . Tall and fair, with hair of a golden cast, aquiline nose, rosebud mouth, soft brown eyes veiled by long, dark lashes which swept her cheek, just now covered with a delicate rose flush, she burst upon them—a combination of ‘queen rose and lily in one.’”

  The novels quoted from are: Iola LeRoy, Or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, published in 1895; Megda, by Emma Dunham Kelly, published in 1891; and Contending Forces, by Pauline E. Hopkins, published in 1900.

  Photographs of the novelists show them to be identifiably “colored” if not literally black. Why are their black heroines depicted as white—and non-working class? After all, Frances Watkins Harper—the most notable of these writers—did not spend most of her time with white-skinned, middle-class black women; instead, she worked as a lecturer and teacher among the black- and brown-skinned freed people during Reconstruction, in the briefly “liberated” South.

  She wrote of the women:

  I know of girls from sixteen to twenty-two who iron till midnight that they may come to school in the day. Some of our scholars, aged about nineteen, living about thirty miles off, rented land, ploughed, planted, and then sold their cotton, in order to come to us. A woman near me, urged her husband to go in debt five hundred dollars for a home, as titles to the land they had built on were insecure, and she said to me, “We have five years to pay it in, and I shall begin today to do it, if life be spared. I will make a hundred dollars at washing, for I have done it.” Yet they have seven little children to feed, clothe and educate. In the field the women receive the same wages as the men, and are often preferred, clearing the land, hoeing, or picking cotton, with equal ability.

  No “queen rose and lily in one” here. No “delicate white hands.” Brown hands, and black hands, all—if not because of genetics, then because of the work. Yet no nineteenth-century black novelist, female or male, wrote novels about these women.

  Indeed, the very first novel by an African-American to be published, Clotelle, Or The Colored Heroine, by William Wells Brown, 1867, in the very first paragraph, not only offers black womanhood as indistinguishable, physically, from white, but also slanders, generally, the black woman’s character:

  For many years the South has been noted for its beautiful Quadroon [one-fourth black and capable of passing as white] women. Bottles of ink, and reams of paper, have been used to portray the “finely-cut and well-moulded features,” the “splendid forms, the fascinating smiles,” and “accomplished manners” of these impassioned and voluptuous daughters of the two races—the unlawful product of the crime of human bondage. When we take into consideration the fact that no safeguard was ever thrown around virtue, and no inducement held out to slave-women to be pure and chaste, we will not be surprised when told that immorality pervades the domestic circle in the cities and towns of the South to an extent unknown in the Northern States. Many a planter’s wife has dragged out a miserable existence, with an aching heart, at seeing her place in her husband’s affections usurped by the unadorned beauty and captivating smiles of her waiting maid. Indeed, the greater portion of the colored women, in the days of slavery, had no greater aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man [my italics]

  Notice how adroitly Brown places the responsibility for rape, child abuse, incest, and other “immoralities” squarely on the shoulders of the persons least responsible for them, being enslaved and powerless; whom he sets up for this calumny by describing them as “voluptuous” and “impassioned.”

  It is unlikely that a raped, enslaved servant to a planter’s wife assumed, because of this rape, that she had “usurped” the wife’s place in the rapist’s “affections.” Brown obviously intended blacks to feel proud of the insulting “attentions” of the rapist and victorious because of the suffering of the wife. In fact, Brown would have us believe the enslaved woman was as powerful as the enslaver, since with her smile she “captivate[d],” i.e captured, him, just as he captured her with his gun and his laws.

  Nor does Brown consider the millions of raped, enslaved African women who had no likelihood whatsoever of becoming “finely-dressed,” or ever attaining “mistress” status.

  “Bottles of ink, reams of paper …” he says. But who were these writers? They were, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, with few exceptions, white men, writing out their own sadistic fantasies about black women, and describing—in lurid detail—their own perverse sexual preferences where enslaved women were concerned. These feverishly imagined “quadroon” women were not real, and had more to do with the way white men chose to perceive black women than the way black men perceived them or black women perceived themselves.

  And yet, Brown, our first black novelist,* in this, our first black novel, gives us scene after scene and crisis after crisis in which pale, fragile blondes and brunettes—burdened by the weight of their alleged “color”—grapple with the tedium of slave life—always involved with some faithless white man or other, and rarely doing anything resembling ordinary slave work.

  The three black women novelists of the nineteenth century turned away from their own selves in depicting “black womanhood,” and followed a black man’s interpretation of white male writers’ fantasies. Consequently, as late as 1929 it was unheard of for a very dark-skinned woman to appear in a novel unless it was clear she was to be recognized as a problem or a joke. As is the case of Emma Lou in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, published in 1929, which explored the very real trials of a black black woman in a white and a color-struck black society.

  “She should have been a boy, then color of skin wouldn’t have mattered so much, for wasn’t her mother always saying that a black boy would get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment?”

  The heroine of this novel thinks of her black color as something unnatural, even demonic. Yet for millions of quite contented women, here and in Africa, black skin is the most natural, undemonic thing in the world.

  Some readers consider Charles Chesnutt’s story “The Wife of His Youth,” 1899, an example of a nineteenth-century effort at writing realistically about a black blac
k woman. But this story, of a near-white former slave who falls in love with a woman younger and whiter-looking than he, and whose plans for marriage with her are thwarted by the appearance of an earlier wife, older and blacker than he, proves the point. “The wife of his youth” is perceived by the narrator and others in the tale as both a problem and a joke. Though he acknowledges this earlier wife before his present friends, our hero’s racial philosophy is summed up neatly, by Chesnutt, in this way:

  “I have no race prejudice,” he would say, “but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black [my italics]. The one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step. ‘With malice towards none, with charity for all,’ we must do the best we can for ourselves and those who are to follow. Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”

  Fortunately, “the wife of his youth” is too old to bear children to represent this “extinction,” this “backward” step.

  It is interesting to note the changes wrought in the male hero of William Wells Brown’s novel over the course of its several versions. In the first version he is white-skinned, even as Brown was himself (his father was white, his mother “mulatta”) and capable of passing. In the final version he is black-skinned, though with straight black hair. The heroine, however, remains fair, and never becomes darker than a “dark” European.

  Viz. “… there was nothing in the appearance of Clotelle to indicate that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins, except, perhaps, the slight wave of her hair, and the scarcely perceptible brunettish tinge upon the countenance. She passed as a rebel lady….”

  One reason the novels of nineteenth-century black authors abound with white-skinned women characters is that most readers of novels in the nineteenth century were white people: white people who then, as, more often than not, now, could identify human feeling, humanness, only if it came in a white or near-white body. And although black men could be depicted as literally black and still be considered men (since dark is masculine to the Euro-American mind), the black-skinned woman, being dark and female, must perforce be whitened, since “fairness” was and is the standard of Euro-American femininity.