MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (April 28, 2022) — When I read Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (2014), Hughes’ rivers strike me as conduits for the continuation of a people and a culture. Rivers exist as conduits through both space and time, transporting waters and the materials dissolved and suspended in them from their source (their headwaters) across the landscape to their eventual destination in the sea. Hughes’ poem evoked both the chronological and chorological roles that rivers played in African history.
At the risk of appearing to define women’s roles through a man’s eyes, Hughes’ metaphorical invocation of rivers seems applicable to the roles of women in African American society. This, I argue, is not merely a male notion. The works of several African American women writers bear out this notion. Women bear and more often than not raise the children. They bear and more often than not carry the culture forward through time. They are the strength of African American society, even when few notice that strength, even when they themselves doubt their own.
African American women have all-too-often been denied proper recognition for the importance of the role they play in African culture. In popular media, they are portrayed as sex objects, gold-diggers, gang-bangers, streetwalkers, welfare queens, breeders—anything but individuals with agency in their and others’ lives. Powerful, intelligent African American women such as Anita Hill, Michelle Obama, and Ketanji Brown Jackson are greeted with rampant ridicule rather than respect. White women are assumed to be competent—despite abundant evidence in the case of some prominent in public life today—while African American women are presumed to be otherwise. Marita Bonner laments the negative perception of African women in her essay, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (2014). “Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination?” she asks (1267).
Two of my African American ancestors, my grandmother Yut-Seul Yee (left), and her mother, Myrtle Mae Robinson. My great-grandmother was a granddaughter of slaves who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad.
It is a good question. The African American women in my life—my grandmother and mother—were nothing like that. My grandmother was, and my mother is, intelligent and creative people with more power in themselves than I suspect they ever credited themselves. For far too long, they have been underestimated. As Alice Walker notes in her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (2014), African American women were treated as “the mule of the world” (1182) rather than the artists they were, women who created great things even in their domestic lives. “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.” (1183) Walker noted that her mother was able to indulge her artistic sense in gardens that brought admirers wherever the family lived. “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant—almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe is her personal conception of Beauty” 1187).
Women such as Walker’s mother create: life, art, joy—ultimately everything that really matters in our lives. But all too often they do so without credit.
Lorraine Hansberry, in “A Raisin in the Sun” (2014), portrayed an African American family in which the women—despite the stereotyped notion of women as weak and subordinate—were the strongest and most pragmatic members of the Younger family. The patriarch of the family, Walter Sr., is dead by the time the play begins. But the matriarch, Lena Younger, holds the family together. She and her daughter-in-law, Ruth Younger, the wife of Walter Jr., are the caretakers of the family while Walter Jr., his sister, Beneatha, chase their at-times impractical dreams. Lena tries to keep them—especially Walter Jr, who wants to invest his father’s life insurance money in a liquor store—grounded:
… In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too . . . Now here come you and Beneatha—talking ’bout things we ain’t even thought about hardly, me and your daddy. You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done become (“Raisin in the Sun,” Act 1, Scene Two).
Lena Younger seems overly modest about her role in holding her family together. Her late husband may have been the breadwinner, but she provided the backbone and the day-to-day care to get her children to adulthood and to hold the family together during Walter Sr.’s lapses—only hinted-at but nonetheless evident—throughout their marriage. Ruth Younger is doing just as much to hold her family together during Walter Jr.’s more evident lapses. Even as Lena defers to Walter Jr. in the play’s climax over whether to sell the home she bought in a white community or continue with the family’s move, it is the strength of the two women together that bring Walter Jr. to his senses—after he foolishly lost the life insurance money—and inspire him to do what was right for the family as a whole.
Lena’s words, even as her acts seem subservient, make it all-but-impossible for him to abandon the home of the family’s dreams, “Son—I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers—but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ’em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. … We ain’t never been that dead inside” (Act III).
Even more than strength, it is the mothers’ love for their children—all their children—that keeps the family together. When Beneatha looks and an apparently broken Walter Jr. and says nothing is left to love, Lena sets her daughter straight:
There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. … Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he’s been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so (Act III).
Other African American women have noted the power of love in their ability to build and carry a community through time. Audre Lorde, in the excerpt from “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” (2014), Lorde notes how the love of other women has transformed her into the woman she is becoming: “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me—so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her” (648). Those women fuel her creativity. She writes of “Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance. … I live each of them as a piece of me, and I choose these words with the same grave concern with which I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward visions of all our lives” (649).
While the love African American women share is powerful, that love imposes a great burden among them. It can be the cause of great pain, as it was in the case of Lena and Ruth Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun.” Georgia Douglas Johnson notes the torment such love—and the hope that it inspires—can inflict in the second stanza of her poem, “The Heart of a Woman” (2014). She writes, “The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / And enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars, / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars” (5-8).
More often than not, however, they, as the Younger women do in “A Raisin in the Sun,” recover after they break, and grow stronger. Love and creation carry them through. As Walker wrote of her mother, “For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very simple ways, is work black women have done for a very long time” (1187).
Creation and love helped my grandmother survive as a single parent in an area when an unwed mother was frowned upon. She loved her art all her life, even as she was dying of cancer. My mother gardened, she sewed, she wrote—even published a pair of novels—and kept our family together when my dad and I did everything they could to tear it apart. When I speak—or at least think—of rivers, I think of two powerful women with legacies that connect me to the origins of humanity deep within the heart of Africa.
Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on April 28, 2022.
References
Bonner, Marita. 2014. “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1266-1269. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Evans, Mari. “I Am a Black Woman.” AfroPoets.net, accessed April 28. https://www.afropoets.net/marievans2.html.
Hansberry, Lorraine. 2014. “A Raisin in the Sun.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 473-530. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hughes, Langston. 2014. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1304-1305. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas. 2014. “The Heart of a Woman.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 983. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lorde, Audre. 2014. “From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 648-649. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Shange, Ntozake. 2014. “From for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1292-1293. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Walker, Alice. 2014. “In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1180-1188. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
When suitably inspired I will write something, maybe about a breaking story in science, maybe about my career as a scientist (specifically, a biogeographer). I may wage war against the forces of ignorance from the dubious bully pulpit of this blog. Or I may just tell some war story from my past in which I should have ended up dead as a result of my own stupidity.
African Americans Speak of Women
Posted by AbyssWriter on 4/28/22 • Categorized as Commentary,Race
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (April 28, 2022) — When I read Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (2014), Hughes’ rivers strike me as conduits for the continuation of a people and a culture. Rivers exist as conduits through both space and time, transporting waters and the materials dissolved and suspended in them from their source (their headwaters) across the landscape to their eventual destination in the sea. Hughes’ poem evoked both the chronological and chorological roles that rivers played in African history.
At the risk of appearing to define women’s roles through a man’s eyes, Hughes’ metaphorical invocation of rivers seems applicable to the roles of women in African American society. This, I argue, is not merely a male notion. The works of several African American women writers bear out this notion. Women bear and more often than not raise the children. They bear and more often than not carry the culture forward through time. They are the strength of African American society, even when few notice that strength, even when they themselves doubt their own.
African American women have all-too-often been denied proper recognition for the importance of the role they play in African culture. In popular media, they are portrayed as sex objects, gold-diggers, gang-bangers, streetwalkers, welfare queens, breeders—anything but individuals with agency in their and others’ lives. Powerful, intelligent African American women such as Anita Hill, Michelle Obama, and Ketanji Brown Jackson are greeted with rampant ridicule rather than respect. White women are assumed to be competent—despite abundant evidence in the case of some prominent in public life today—while African American women are presumed to be otherwise. Marita Bonner laments the negative perception of African women in her essay, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (2014). “Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination?” she asks (1267).
It is a good question. The African American women in my life—my grandmother and mother—were nothing like that. My grandmother was, and my mother is, intelligent and creative people with more power in themselves than I suspect they ever credited themselves. For far too long, they have been underestimated. As Alice Walker notes in her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (2014), African American women were treated as “the mule of the world” (1182) rather than the artists they were, women who created great things even in their domestic lives. “How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.” (1183) Walker noted that her mother was able to indulge her artistic sense in gardens that brought admirers wherever the family lived. “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant—almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe is her personal conception of Beauty” 1187).
Women such as Walker’s mother create: life, art, joy—ultimately everything that really matters in our lives. But all too often they do so without credit.
Lorraine Hansberry, in “A Raisin in the Sun” (2014), portrayed an African American family in which the women—despite the stereotyped notion of women as weak and subordinate—were the strongest and most pragmatic members of the Younger family. The patriarch of the family, Walter Sr., is dead by the time the play begins. But the matriarch, Lena Younger, holds the family together. She and her daughter-in-law, Ruth Younger, the wife of Walter Jr., are the caretakers of the family while Walter Jr., his sister, Beneatha, chase their at-times impractical dreams. Lena tries to keep them—especially Walter Jr, who wants to invest his father’s life insurance money in a liquor store—grounded:
Lena Younger seems overly modest about her role in holding her family together. Her late husband may have been the breadwinner, but she provided the backbone and the day-to-day care to get her children to adulthood and to hold the family together during Walter Sr.’s lapses—only hinted-at but nonetheless evident—throughout their marriage. Ruth Younger is doing just as much to hold her family together during Walter Jr.’s more evident lapses. Even as Lena defers to Walter Jr. in the play’s climax over whether to sell the home she bought in a white community or continue with the family’s move, it is the strength of the two women together that bring Walter Jr. to his senses—after he foolishly lost the life insurance money—and inspire him to do what was right for the family as a whole.
Lena’s words, even as her acts seem subservient, make it all-but-impossible for him to abandon the home of the family’s dreams, “Son—I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers—but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ’em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. … We ain’t never been that dead inside” (Act III).
Even more than strength, it is the mothers’ love for their children—all their children—that keeps the family together. When Beneatha looks and an apparently broken Walter Jr. and says nothing is left to love, Lena sets her daughter straight:
Other African American women have noted the power of love in their ability to build and carry a community through time. Audre Lorde, in the excerpt from “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” (2014), Lorde notes how the love of other women has transformed her into the woman she is becoming: “Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me—so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her” (648). Those women fuel her creativity. She writes of “Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance. … I live each of them as a piece of me, and I choose these words with the same grave concern with which I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward visions of all our lives” (649).
While the love African American women share is powerful, that love imposes a great burden among them. It can be the cause of great pain, as it was in the case of Lena and Ruth Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun.” Georgia Douglas Johnson notes the torment such love—and the hope that it inspires—can inflict in the second stanza of her poem, “The Heart of a Woman” (2014). She writes, “The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / And enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars, / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars” (5-8).
More often than not, however, they, as the Younger women do in “A Raisin in the Sun,” recover after they break, and grow stronger. Love and creation carry them through. As Walker wrote of her mother, “For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very simple ways, is work black women have done for a very long time” (1187).
Creation and love helped my grandmother survive as a single parent in an area when an unwed mother was frowned upon. She loved her art all her life, even as she was dying of cancer. My mother gardened, she sewed, she wrote—even published a pair of novels—and kept our family together when my dad and I did everything they could to tear it apart. When I speak—or at least think—of rivers, I think of two powerful women with legacies that connect me to the origins of humanity deep within the heart of Africa.
Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on April 28, 2022.
References
Bonner, Marita. 2014. “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1266-1269. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Evans, Mari. “I Am a Black Woman.” AfroPoets.net, accessed April 28. https://www.afropoets.net/marievans2.html.
Hansberry, Lorraine. 2014. “A Raisin in the Sun.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 473-530. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Hughes, Langston. 2014. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1304-1305. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas. 2014. “The Heart of a Woman.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 983. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lorde, Audre. 2014. “From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 648-649. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Shange, Ntozake. 2014. “From for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1292-1293. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Walker, Alice. 2014. “In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 1180-1188. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
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