In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (35 page)

“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 black 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.

Of course in the nineteenth century, few of the former slaves could read at all, having been denied literacy under penalty of law, and certainly could not hope to struggle through a novel, however true it might have been to their experience. It is understandable that writers wrote to the capacities of the audience at hand. Yet their depictions of themselves and black people as whiter than we are has led to a crippling of the imagination and of truth itself for which we pay dearly—in anger, hurt, envy, and misunderstanding—to this day.

Fortunately, for us, there came a black woman writer who did not view her black women characters through the eyes of men, black or white, and it is in her work—coming after Brown, Watkins, Kelly, and Hopkins in the nineteenth century, and after Fauset, Larsen, and Toomer in the 1920s (writers who still depicted black women as fair-skinned, if not actually
white-
skinned; and in other ways atypical)—that black women begin to emerge naturally in all the colors in which they exist, predominantly brown and black, and culturally African-American. Though Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston's best-known heroine, is described as being light of skin and feathery of hair, as soon as she opens her mouth we know who and what she is, and her hands, though genetically “light,” are brown from the labor she shares with other blacks, from whom she is not, in fact, separate, though all three of her husbands attempt to convince her that she is.

Many dark-skinned black women find it hard to identify with Janie Crawford and speak disparagingly of her “mulatto privileges.” “Privileges” that stem from being worshiped for her color and hair, and being placed—by her color-struck husbands—above other black women while not being permitted to speak in public because her looks are supposed to say it all.

And, for the black man—if we judge by our literature and too often, unfortunately, by reality—the white-looking woman's looks
do
say it all. But what do these “looks” in fact say? For the dark-skinned black woman it comes as a series of disappointments and embarrassments that the wives of virtually all black leaders (including Marcus Garvey!) appear to have been chosen for the nearness of their complexions to white alone. It is true that Frederick Douglass's first wife was black-skinned, but he managed to hide most of her activity in his life. According to research done by Sylvia Lyons Render, Annie Murray Douglass sewed the very sailor suit Douglass escaped from slavery wearing, yet nowhere does he give her adequate credit for her help. His second wife, the wife he chose in freedom, was white; this marriage continued a pattern that began in the days of slavery, when white was right and the octoroon or quadroon offspring of a raped black or mulatto mother was the next best thing to white. A look at the photographs of the women chosen by our male leaders is, in many ways, chilling if you are a black-skinned woman. (And this “chilling” experience is one that the dark-skinned black woman can hardly escape having in these times of black pictorial history.**) Because it is apparent that though they may have consciously affirmed blackness in the abstract and for others, for themselves light remained right Only Malcolm X, among our recent male leaders, chose to affirm, by publicly loving and marrying her, a black black woman. And it is this, no less than his “public” politics, that accounts for the respect black people, and especially women, had for him, and this that makes him radical and revolutionary, in a way few of our other black male leaders are.

Black black women are not supposed to notice these things. But to tell the truth (and why shouldn't we? We may be living our last months on earth), this is often
all
we notice. We are told such things are not “serious” and not “political” and mean nothing to the black liberation struggle. And some of us, after all, marry white men; who are we to “complain”? But no black woman pursues and proposes to octoroon or quadroon or white men as a matter of female prerogative; the patriarchal society in which we live does not permit it. The man chooses; frequently with the same perceptivity with which he chooses a toy.

Every black man in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
lusts after Janie Crawford. They lust after her color and her long hair, never once considering the pain her mother and grandmother (one raped by a white man, one by a black) must have endured to “pass along” these qualities to her. Never once thinking of Janie's isolation because of looks she did not choose, or of her confusion when she realizes that the same men who idolize her looks are capable of totally separating her looks from her self. These were all back-country folk, and they wouldn't have thought of it in these terms, but their true interest in Janie is sadistic and pornographic, just as that of the white men of the time would have been. And I think this is one of the reasons Hurston (with her usual attention to the difference between what black folks said and what they meant) made her character so “fair”: to point this out to us.

The first few times I read
Their Eyes
I managed to block the significance of the scene in chapter seventeen in which TeaCake beats Janie. Feminists have often flagged my attention to it, but I always explained it as simply a “mistake” on Hurston's part. In truth, I missed the point entirely of what happened, and what happened provides one of the most important insights in the book.

As the Hurston reader will recall, TeaCake is very jealous of Janie where Mrs. Turner's brother—he of light skin and flyaway hair—is concerned. There is no reason for this, as Janie time and again insists. One reason TeaCake is jealous is because it is so unusual for a woman as light and well-to-do as Janie to be with a man as poor and black as he is. Not because all the light-skinned women chase after and propose to light-skinned men, but because both light- and dark-skinned men chase after and propose to light-skinned women. Since the light-skinned men generally have more education than the blacker men, and better jobs (morticians to this day in the South are generally light-skinned blacks, as are the colored doctors and insurance men), they have the advantage of color, class, and gainful employment, and so, secure the “prizes” light-skinned women represent to them. Like all “prizes” the women are put on display and warned not to get themselves dirty. (Other black black people often being this “dirt.”) Their resemblance to the white man's “prize,” i.e., the white woman—whom they resemble largely because of rape (and I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape)—must be maintained at all times.

Unlike Janie's first two husbands, TeaCake has discovered that his “prize” is as attractive dirty as she is clean and supports her in her determination to dress, speak, and act as she likes. But he must still show his male friends, and the ubiquitous Mrs. Turner, who wishes to bring Janie and her brother together (light belongs to light, in her mind), that his ownership is intact. When Mrs. Turner brings her brother over and introduces him, TeaCake has a “brainstorm.” Before the week is over, he has “whipped” Janie.

He whips her not, Hurston writes, “because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. Everybody talked about it next day in the fields. It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made men dream dreams.”

An astute reader would realize that this is the real reason TeaCake is killed by Janie in the end. Or, rather, this is the reason Hurston
permits
Janie to kill TeaCake in the end. For all her “helpless” hanging on him, Janie knows she has been publicly humiliated, and though she acts the role of battered wife (from what I read coming out of battered women's shelters, the majority of such batterings end in sex and the total submission—“hanging on helplessly”—of the wife) her developing consciousness of self does not stop at that point. She could hardly enjoy knowing her beating becomes “visions” for other women—who would have to imagine themselves light and long-haired, like Janie, to “enjoy” them—and “dreams,” i.e., sexual fantasies, for TeaCake's male friends.

“TeaCake, you sho is a lucky man,” Sop-de-Bottom told him. “Uh person can see every place you hit her. Ah bet she never raised her hand tuh hit yuh back, neither. Take some uh dese ol' rusty black women and dey would fight yuh all night long and next day nobody couldn't tell you ever hit'em. Dat's de reason Ah done quit beating mah women. You can't make no mark on'em at all.
Lawd! wouldn't Ah love tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie! Ah bet she don't even holler. She jus' cries, eh TeaCake?”
[My italics]

“Dat's right.”

“See dat! Mah woman would spread her lungs all over Palm Beach County, let alone knock out mah jaw teeth. You don't know dat woman uh mine. She got ninety-nine rows uh jaw teeth and git her good and mad, she'll wade through solid rock up to her hip pockets.”

[To which TeaCake replies:]

“Mah Janie is uh high time woman and uster things. Ah didn't git her outa de middle uh de road.”

What is really being said here?

What is being said is this: that in choosing the “fair,” white-looking woman, the black man assumes he is choosing a weak woman. A woman he can own, a woman he can beat, can enjoy beating, can
exhibit
as a woman beaten; in short, a “conquered” woman who will not cry out, and will certainly not fight back. And why? Because she is a lady, like the white man's wife, who is also beaten (the slaves knew, the servants knew, the maid always knew because she doctored the bruises) but who has been trained to suffer in silence, even to pretend to enjoy sex better afterward, because her husband obviously does. A masochist.

And who is being rejected? Those women “out of the middle of the road”? Well, Harriet Tubman, for one, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Shirley Chisholm. Ruby McCullom, Assata Shakur, Joan Little, and Dessie “Rashida” Woods. You who are black-skinned and fighting and screaming through the solid rock of America up to your hip pockets every day since you arrived, and me, who treasures every ninety-nine rows of my jaw teeth, because they are all I have to chew my way through this world.

That black men choose light and white women is not the women's fault, any more than it was their fault they were chosen as concubines to rich plantation owners during slavery. Nobody seems to choose big, strong,
fighting
light or white women (and these have existed right along with those who could be beaten). Though there used to be a saying among black men that
fat
white women are best because the bigger they are the more whiteness there is to love, this is still in the realm of ownership, of “prize.” And any woman who settles for being owned, for being a “prize,” is more to be struggled with than blamed.