by Alice Walker
One day I flew across country and made a stop at the airport in Dallas. I was coming from San Francisco, where recently a popular cookbook written by a white man had appeared with a giant Aunt Jemima/Mammy on the cover. I never picked it up, though I saw it everywhere. I felt insulted by the image and by a white person’s appropriation of it. In the airport I ambled along, looking in all the book and gift shops. In the gift shops there were rows and rows of Aunt Jemima/Mammy dolls. Jet black, grinning cloth faces, huge hoop earrings, the ever-present and colorful bandanna wrapped around her head. Only in New Orleans, on a visit years before, had I seen a greater number and variety. This was at a time, in the Sixties, when black people everywhere were struggling to define their own identity. The reaction of white racists was to stock their stores with images that demonstrated their resistance to this liberating behavior. Sambos, jockeys, Jemimas, Hoodoo queens, abounded. I picked up one of the dolls and looked at it closely. “Did you already buy that?” drawled the clerk. “No,” I said, “I never did.” I put “Tits” down and ambled on to the cafeteria.
And there she was. A half dozen of her. Some large, some not. Some middle-aged, some quite young. No one of a size or age to compete with Hattie McDaniel, or the hefty sister on the grits box, or my mother. But dressed in long, flouncy antebellum dresses. With large, shiny hoop earrings, and with the obligatory plump and somehow ridiculous bandanna. Texas was hanging on to its version of its past, where there was always a big fat black woman standing next to a big black pot. Well, they were, these real-life Jemimas, standing next to pots; black miniatures of the ones “Tits” and her sisters labored over in the capacious open fireplaces of “before de war.” Using large black spoons, the women ladled out beans and soup and gravy and rice. Their faces dignified, reserved, even serene. It occurred to me that the black woman is herself a symbol of nurturing, and that these women, throughout all their incarnations in this country, and for millennia before they arrived here, would have been standing or sitting just so, in whatever tribe or clan, being sure that everyone was fed. In other words, what I was seeing, as if for the first time, was a very ancient image which the modern world, quite without knowing why, had found impossible to do without. As I picked up my tray and started through the line I smiled, for I felt something sweet coming over me. A sureness. A peace. It was, in fact, the belated recognition that I was in the presence of the Goddess, She who nurtures all, and that no matter how disguised, abused, ridiculed, she may be, even white supremacists have been unable to throw her away. And She is with us still. Furthermore, I realized I loved Her.
Some years later, on my way to a winter retreat in Mexico, I pick up a weekly magazine on the plane. There’s an article about an exuberantly racist radio talk-show host, all the rage, apparently, in New York City, and one thing he said strikes me as particularly interesting. “The closest I’ve ever come to going to bed with a black woman,” he said (presumably to the snickering laughter of his radio audience), “was to masturbate while thinking of Aunt Jemima.” When I go grocery shopping in the local village I am thinking of this, mulling it over, as I fill my bag with leche, arroz, queso, tortillas, and half a dozen cans of jugo de durazno, which I love. The village is named after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and large men on small burros still meander past; there are always lots of laughing children playing in the dusty street. Everyone is brown and seems healthy, though on first take the village—which has no plumbing or sewage system, no paved streets—looks poor. As I await my turn at the counter I glance about the small tienda and notice that above the door, where in many establishments here there is a painting of the Virgen de Guadaloupe, there is instead a black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Her lipstick seems to have been spread on with a butter knife, her false eyelashes sweep her cheeks. She is pale as death itself. Sleeping with her, I think, would be like sleeping with a clown. And yet I recognize the relatedness of this image—dead white sex symbol—to that of “Tits” Jemima. Know that one’s tits were for nourishment, the other’s for play. And that this image of Monroe, of any white woman who resembles her, is the consciously desired object. The consciously desired, by white men especially, image of the goddess. The only problem is that—though her image hangs over the door of this Mexican man’s corner market, displacing the brown Virgen de Guadaloupe, which I’m sure used to be there—she is just hanging in midair, made-up, possibly drugged, doing nothing. Certainly she is not near the food. Not near the cooking pots. As goddess (sex goddess, they’ve named her, these men who’ve created her in their own image of themselves as women), what would Monroe actually be able to provide? I contemplate her image as I walk out the door. If anything, her dazed and vacant look promises emptiness. Oblivion. Did the men who slept with her—the Kennedys, Sinatra, and the rest—wake up from her bed needier than before? No doubt. And when she washed off the makeup and rolled up the eyelashes and wasn’t even the female clown they went to bed with, what then?
If Jemima is Tits, I think, driving home, avoiding the self-possessed white cows who wander across the road, then Monroe is Cunt. And she is Cunt for a very good reason. Cunts give birth. Tits, strictly speaking—and this separation of function between the black woman and the white has been done strictly—do not. If you’re a white man, you can fantasize having sex with Monroe and even fantasize a child as the result. Tits Jemima, though, that’s another thing. She might be your food supply from birth, but the white-supremacist society has done everything in its power to make her unacceptable as the mother of your child. She cannot ever be perceived as a goddess. Certainly not. Of any kind.
And yet. There she is, in the Dallas, Texas, airport. Her big tits right next to the big black pot; a potent symbol, the big black pot, in itself. For isn’t the black pot of a black woman’s womb the vessel from which white men secretly fear they came, just as the big black hole in the cosmos is the black pot into which they fear they will disappear? Who else worries about such things? In any case, there she is. She’s making almost nothing at this shitty job, and her children are probably at home alone in a cold house, being baby-sat by television, watching shows in which the white mother’s child wants for nothing. But Tits Jemima’s stirring something warm and it smells good. And when you come forward in your hunger, you don’t even have to ask. She just says, “Chile, you looks hongry. Have some of this soup.” What are you going to do?
At night I sit up in bed, a chilled glass of jugo de durazno in hand, and I listen to a tape by Marion Woodman. She is a well-known Canadian psychoanalyst with a not-very-soothing voice. Just before I give up on the tape she says a startling thing. She mentions that in the dreams of her analysands, and in those of more and more people in the world, a surprising and specific figure is appearing. Guess who? It is the figure, Woodman says, of a large black or “chocolate” woman. Woodman calls her the Black Madonna.
I listen, enchanted. Realizing the world is, at long last, turning. And from the inside out. Tits Jemima, I think. There in the unconscious, where she’s always been, most internal and external doors slammed against her.
I drain my glass of peach juice, which connects me to the land of Jemimas, my beautiful mother, and my Georgia home, and permit myself a thought about the private sexual behavior of the racist radio talk-show host. There he is, chalk-white fingers wrapped around his fat, putty-colored weenie. He is pumping away, staring deeply (he likes to think) into the vacant, vaguely come-hither eyes of Marilyn Monroe, who gazes druggedly down from a photograph on his bedroom wall. In her grave she is a skeleton, but he doesn’t think of that. He pumps and he pumps, closing his eyes, visualizing those eyes, those cheeks, those lips under their crust of lipstick, those milky breasts which have never held milk. Marilyn, Madonna, he croons, rotating his awkward hips. Where shall he stick it? he is wondering, when all of a sudden he realizes Marilyn—her mouth, her tits, her cunt, and her ass—has completely disappeared. A large warm brownness beckons him. He is so offended that he will not at first acknowledge it a
s the body of a woman, or look at her face. When he does look, in the urgency of his orgasm, which he is not quite racist enough to forgo, he sees it is the face and body of one who has always accepted him as he was, fed him, and given him haven between those enormous, mountainlike breasts. He tries to pull back, to find Marilyn or Madonna or some other acceptable image, but can’t. Sleeping with Madonna, he thinks, would be like working for the Mafia. You’d have to toe the line. Marilyn would probably be sleeping off her sleeping pills. And besides, didn’t she die some years ago? Coming, he remembers black baby-sitters and maids his parents employed when he was a child, and how, against his feeble will, they charmed him. He thinks of Aunt Jemima, and how he will have to make a joke out of this experience for his radio show. He thinks this will prove he is still in control.
Woodman tells one analysand’s dream: She is at a large outdoor party and there are many people present, all eating and drinking and making merry. In the middle of the very large lawn there is a cage, and in this cage there is a large black woman. The dreamer goes up to the woman in the cage and says, “What are you doing in there?” The large woman replies, “Who do you think is giving the party?”
Who indeed.
In the airport in Dallas, Texas, a place I associate with the assassination of the only United States president who made me laugh, that is the question that was answered for me. As I sat that day, eating my soup across from the Aunt Jemimas behind the counter, I looked carefully into each one’s face. They were tired, yes. I could tell their feet hurt. But I did not see stinginess. I did not see meanness. I did not see cruelty or greed. I knew that left to themselves, they would—any one of them—feed me if I said I was hungry and had no money to pay. Because that’s who they were. The ones giving the party. The ones caged in the foolish antebellum dresses and Aunt Jemima bandannas. The ones kept out of sight by being made grotesquely visible. The Goddess who can never be thrown away, for though she is caged, that is only because she is inside us.
POSTSCRIPT: Months after publishing this essay I discovered that Jemima was the name of the eldest of three daughters born to Job after Yahweh repaid his faith by removing all afflictions from him and restoring to him all that he had formerly possessed, and more. The name means “daybreak,” “God’s blessing,” “prosperity.”
Treasure
A statement read upon acceptance of the California Governor’s Award for Literature, March 25, 1994.
If We Are to Be Treasures, Let Us Demand to Be Treasured
A few months ago I was informed I had been chosen for this award, which would designate me a “treasure” of the State of California. Because I love California, this appealed to me. Unfortunately, a few weeks later I learned that a short story and an essay of mine had been removed from the California State Achievement Test, which is administered to tenth-graders. My story was termed anti-religious by a fundamentalist Christian group called the Coalition for Traditional Values. The essay was described as anti–meat eating, which would be, presumably, an insult to the meat-eating tenth-graders of the state, who would be taking the test.
Of course, if one’s work is censored out of the curriculum of the state’s children so easily, and with such flimsy excuses, there is no point pretending one is a state treasure. I declined the designation.
It was only after hundreds and thousands of people sprang into action, individually and through various organizations—teachers, students, writers, journalists, state and national educators, legislators, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Writers Union, People for the American Way, and the American Civil Liberties Union, to name a few—and publicly denounced the decision of the Department of Education, that my story and essay were returned to the pool of literature that will be used for future tests.
Without this activity, I would not be here. I would consider this ceremony itself meaningless. I accept the designation of “state treasure” in the name of those who fought for my work. And for your right, and our children’s right, to enter, with understanding, a larger world. You have very passionately and beautifully affirmed my value to you, and so the term rightly belongs to me. Thank you.
I want each of you to know that just as I now accept the designation “a treasure” of our state, you are each, individually, and all of you, collectively, a treasure to me. And I have something to ask of you.
Even more offensive than anti-religious and anti-meat-eating views to the Christians who sought to suppress my work was the fact that the primary character in my story is a black unwed mother. (They have clearly forgotten Mary and seem never to have heard of the birth of Jesus.) They did not wish to give this young woman any space at all in society, not even in the imagination of our children. And yet, I ask you, what is the point of the rest of us being treasures to each other if any unwed mother, black or otherwise, is denied? She is the most isolated, the most vulnerable, the most scared, and, I believe, the most sacred.
And this is what I ask of you: to the long list of California’s endangered treasures—you, me, the wild rivers, the black bear, the spotted owl, and the redwood tree—consciously add the unwed mother. We, as a society, have left her alone too long, with results that are obvious to us all. Indeed, society’s treatment of her reflects the abandonment and neglect of that other scorned and unprotected mother of us all: Mother Earth. And see how angry and disgusted She has become with us.
If we are to be treasures, let us demand to be treasured.
And let our awareness of, and tenderness to, the most helpless be our diamonds and our gold. Our last five minutes on Earth are running out. We can spend those minutes in meanness, exclusivity, and self-righteous disparagement of those who are different from us, or we can spend them consciously embracing every glowing soul who wanders within our reach. Those who, without our caring, would find the vibrant, exhilarating path of Life just another sad and forsaken road.
Perhaps the greatest treasure left to us, maybe the only one, is that we can still choose.
Heaven Belongs to You
WARRIOR MARKS
AS A LIBERATION FILM
Remarks made at the Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, California, on the screening of Warrior Marks, February 24, 1994.
You Still Have a Life to Live
The film you are about to see is only one of many efforts we will have to make to change the practice of female genital mutilation. Efforts which will undoubtedly be the work of many generations.
I was talking this afternoon to my friend the director of the film, Pratibha Parmar, who lives in London. She told me that the wife of the man who was our driver while we were filming in Africa had recently been in Britain. And that she was distraught because her husband, whom we had all liked so much, and who was very aware of the dangers and pain involved in female genital mutilation—and who also knew why we had come to Africa to make our film—had nonetheless permitted his own daughters to be mutilated. His excuse: Mutilation is “women’s business.” The wife is Scottish. The husband Gambian. The children who have been mutilated are by his first wife, a Gambian woman, for whom female genital mutilation is custom and tradition. While we were filming in Gambia we talked at length with the second wife, who was worried about the fate of her husband’s daughters. She had been willing to have the girls live with her and her husband, in an effort to save them.
The sad thing is, I can understand our driver’s sense of powerlessness as a man. His first wife’s sense of duty to tradition. His second wife’s horror and disappointment. We are not talking about bad or evil people. Far from it. They are, however, trapped in a behavior that severely harms them.
It is from the perspective of our own contradictions as a society that we must seek to comprehend this grave problem faced by millions of our children and suffered by millions of our women. And suffered as well by men, who are by no means exempt from the self-inflicted wounding of the total society that mutilation ensures.
Warrior Marks is not a film about the virtues or the piteousness of victimhood. It
was conceived, from the first, as a liberation film. These mutilations of body and spirit have occurred for from three to six thousand years. It is likely that they will continue well into the future, no matter what we do. That is why I try to focus on one child or one woman, when I think of the struggle ahead, instead of on all the millions who are at risk.
With this film, we, Pratibha Parmar and I, are sending a message to our sisters, millions of them yet unborn—and to our brothers who love them—and that message is this: If, in fact, you survive your mutilation, and the degradation that it imprints on soul and body, you still have a life to live. Live it with passion, live it with fierceness, live it with all the joy and laughter that you deserve.
Because your elders have told you that you are unclean does not make it so.
Because your mother has told you that you must hang your head in sorrow because you were born female does not make it so.
Because your father tells you he owns you body and soul and can do what he likes with you does not make it so.
Because your religion tells you there is a God who demands pieces of your flesh, and your perpetual suffering in sex and child-bearing, does not mean this is your religion or your God.
We know that the women and children who suffer genital mutilation will have to stand up for themselves and, together, put an end to it. But that they need our help is indisputable.
