Notes from the Abyss

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (July 19, 2021) — In reading the works of African American writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, it becomes clear how frequently (and brutally) African American women were violated by white society—both slave-owning and otherwise. Even their erstwhile helpers failed to give them their due, often failing to see African American women at all, much less as equals, and treating them like children to be patronized rather than agents of their own fate.

But a sampling of African American fiction and essays—by William Wells Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Victor Séjour—reveals the central importance of African American women to African American families and society. Reminders of their importance to their families and their society bear repeating even in an allegedly post-racial twenty-first century United States of America.

As uncomfortable as one may be with the title, the Plastic Ono Band’s song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” is a jarring yet empathetic statement of the low regard societies worldwide had for women at the time. The indictment of global attitudes toward women was valid then. Unfortunately, it seems just as valid now. Women were and are taken advantage of by partners, families, employers, religious authorities, and the governments who profess to “protect” them.

If, as John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote, “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” imagine how worse it is—and, for current purposes, was—for women for whom the shock word in the song and its title traditionally applied. Imagine how much worse that it was for women born into slavery or just a century or two removed from it.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s concise statement of the status of women in general, published early in the twentieth century, remains relevant today:

The world wants healthy babies and intelligent workers. Today we refuse to allow the combination and force thousands of intelligent workers to go childless at a horrible expenditure of moral force, or we damn them if they break our idiotic conventions. Only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children. This is the damnation of women.

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins. (Du Bois 2014, 760-761)

A few lines below that passage, Du Bois adds the following observation, “All this of woman,— but what of black women? The world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darker sisters.” (Du Bois 2014, 761)

African American women, the rocks upon which their family and society were built, were treated with little regard by those who desired or needed what the women offered. In the case of Clotel or “The Mulatto,” the women were raped by owners, beaten and abandoned by partners, and often cheated by those whom engaged in business with them with allegedly legally binding contracts. No one who wronged them would ever be held to account.

Given those conditions, Anna Julia Cooper offered an eloquent plea for justice:

I would beg … to add my plea for the Colored Girls of the South:—that large, bright, promising fatally beautiful class that stand shivering like a delicate plantlet before the fury of tempestuous elements, so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause and defend their honor with their life’s blood; in the midst of pitfalls and snares, waylaid by the lower classes of white men, with no shelter, no protection nearer than the great blue vault above, which half conceals and half reveals the one Care-Taker they know little of. Oh, save them, help them, shield, train, develop, teach, inspire them! Snatch them, in God’s name, as brands from the burning! There is material in them well worth your while, the hope in germ of a staunch, helpful, regenerating womanhood on which, primarily, rests the foundation stones of our future as a race. (Cooper 2014, 624)

Even allies in the movement for social justice treated them as mantelpieces, objects to be seen and even praised, but quickly forgotten as the conversation in the room moved on. What was most galling is how African American women’s white Christian coreligionists—the people commanded by Christ to love their neighbors as themselves—failed to consult with the women even when discussing African American welfare. Cooper, in her speech chided her white Christian allies for holding meetings to discuss African American welfare without inviting any of the African Americans they claimed to work on behalf of. The attitude toward African American women by their so-called defenders reminds one of a comment by one of the 1960s leaders of the left—possibly Abbie Hoffman—who, when asked about the position of women in their movement, answered, “horizontal.”[1]

While the four pieces sampled here depict the plight of African American women in various ways, some of the more revealing moments are in the unconscious ways they are treated by their respective authors. In “The Mulatto,” the female characters are used in large part as props to set up the central conflict and climax. Even taking into account it is a short story and economy is key, it is hard to get much of a feel for either the protagonist’s mother or wife—other than they are his mother or wife and the abuse each woman endures fuels his desire for retribution. The female characters in the other work of fiction, Clotel, are more fully fleshed out—vital given that the protagonist is an African American woman. There are hints of Clotel as a passive character to whom injustices are done, but she, her mother, and sister are given more of an active role in their respective narratives than the women in “The Mulatto.”

While the essays by Cooper and Du Bois, are ardent defenses of African American women, neither is entirely satisfactory to the task at hand. “Womanhood,” for example, seems to lose the thread at times, focusing more on at-times questionable historical assertions[2] and religious governance—appropriate to some extent given the context of the original address—but one would expect that, with the word “Womanhood” in the title, there would be much more focus on women in the piece. Still, it gets a pass for what is arguably the key quote from the essay:

Only the Black Woman can say “when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” (Cooper 2014, 627)

It is a bold statement. But it is impossible to dispute its accuracy.

“The Damnation of Women” is much more focused on women’s issues specifically, and it is not marred by the distractions in Cooper’s essay. Nevertheless, it should be noted that Du Bois veers into paternalism and prudery in some of his comments on the plight of African American women:

Grown up I see the problem of these women transfused; I hear all about me the unanswered call of youthful love, none the less glorious because of its clean, honest, physical passion. Why unanswered? Because the youth are too poor to marry or if they marry, too poor to have children. They turn aside, then, in three directions: to marry for support, to what men call shame, or to that which is more evil than nothing. It is an unendurable paradox; it must be changed or the bases of culture will totter and fall. (Du Bois 2014, 760)

Nevertheless, his sociologically trained mind is more on than off target:

Upon this African mother-idea, the westward slave trade and American slavery struck like doom. In the cruel exigencies of the traffic in men and in the sudden, unprepared emancipation the great pendulum of social equilibrium swung from a time, in 1800,—when America had but eight or less black women to every ten black men,—all too swiftly to a day, in 1870,—when there were nearly eleven women to ten men in our Negro population. This was but the outward numerical fact of social dislocation; within lay polygamy, polyandry, concubinage, and moral degradation. They fought against all this desperately, did these black slaves in the West Indies, especially among the half-free artisans; they set up their ancient household gods, and when Toussaint and Cristophe founded their kingdom in Haiti, it was based on old African tribal ties and beneath it was the mother-idea.

The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there was no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children. To be sure, custom and religion replaced here and there what the law denied. … (Du Bois 2014, 763)

Du Bois cites a number of statistics revealing the importance of African American women to their families and society as a whole throughout his essay. The data give his argument a weight that should not have been denied by the white powers holding African Americans down at the time. Yet it was, and to some extent in the last few decades of the so-called “welfare queen,” still is ignored.

Much progress remains to be made. The United States of America is nowhere near united, and neither has it become post-racial. The depressing popularity of the Trump administration and its near-constant race-baiting has left many wondering whether African Americans—and other Americans of color—will ever actually reach the promised land. With respect to the African American community, one can argue that it has been and remains African American women themselves whose enforcement of custom and religious norms will eventually make it possible for their community to have what the law—and white supremacy—has long denied.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on July 19, 2021.

References

Brown, William Wells. 2014. “From Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 270-290. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Cooper, Anna Julia. 2014. “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 619-633. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 2014. “The Damnation of Women.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 760-771. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Séjour, Victor. 2014. “The Mulatto.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 1, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Valerie A Smith, 298-309. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

[1] I have long remembered the story, but not enough to be certain about the details—DML.

[2] For example, Cooper criticizes Islam for its treatment of women and credits feudalism, with its emphasis on chivalry, with improving the lot of women. However, Western notions of chivalry developed in part from Islamic traditions imported into Western Europe via Muslim kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula. Another mistaken assertion is her discussion of the barbarian destruction of Christian Rome. The fact is that the barbarians who ultimately dealt the Roman Empire its death knell were largely Christians at the time.