University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

On speaking terms: spirituality and sensuality in the tradition of modern black female intellectualism

(USC Thesis Other)

On speaking terms: spirituality and sensuality in the tradition of modern black female intellectualism

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content ON SPEAKING TERMS: SPIRITUALITY AND SENSUALITY IN THE TRADITION OF MODERN BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUALISM by Shakira C. Holt A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2009 Copyright 2009 Shakira C. Holt ii Epigraph In the ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing….There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other, of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun. --Toni Morrison, Paradise There occurs in [black] performances a reevaluation or reconstruction of value, one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter. --Fred Moten, In the Break Everything is everything. --African American Folk Saying iii Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to the GOD Who loves, befriends, empowers, and sustains me; to my mothers, living and gone, heroes all: Gwendolyn R. Holt, my mother who has delighted in me and fought for me from the first, Thelma L. Williams, my grandmother whose love, precious voice, and fighting instinct have made all the difference, Lue Emma Wright, my great-grandmother who was called away before I got here, but whom I love all the same, Susie Holt, my grandmother who found a way to offer love in spite of, Betty Hamilton and Rosemary Williams, Denise Kane and Shandra Conner, my dear aunts whom I’ll always love, Josephine German, my godmother, maker of sweet music, teacher-by-example, and true friend of my heart, and Alfreda Hunter, a mentor and friend who earnestly prays for and rejoices in every success; to a few of many good men, living and gone, heroes all: Deacon Arthur Wright, my great-grandfather who had a knack for spoiling girls, Professor Robert Grant, a sweet-hearted friend and mentor, Savarin Littlefield, a true prince and prom date eternal, Carl M. Holt, my father, a genuine good guy whose voice I dearly miss, Robert L. Williams, my grandfather who watches and prays for us all, and for whom this day has been a long time coming, and finally to Minister Raymond C. Mabon, my uncle and friend who has never once failed to rescue me. iv Acknowledgements I first thank my Dissertation Committee Chair, Professor Carla Kaplan, whose smart and wise and compassionate leadership and sense of humor have been invaluable to me, first as a teacher during my years in coursework, and then as a guide through the Qualifying Exams and the dissertation. Next, I thank my Dissertation Committee: Professor David Roman and Professor Alice Gambrell. (You are both absolute gold.) I also thank Committee Member Professor Sheila Briggs, who graciously stepped in and helped immensely during the home stretch. This project has benefited substantially from the expert reading, exceeding patience, and gentle support of my entire committee. I am grateful. I thank Professor George Sanchez and Professor Fred Moten for their early support and involvement in this project. I am also indebted to Professors P. Gabrielle Foreman, Tiffany Ana Lopez, Gayle Wald, and DoVeanna Fulton for their critiques of the developing project and their immense scholarly generosity. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ms. Flora Ruiz, the USC English Department Graduate Coordinator. Her willingness to straighten, to help, and to understand has been priceless to me over the course of my entire graduate career. I also thank my home department, English, for the Departmental Fellowship which financed my studies in the 2005-2006 school year. I acknowledge finally my love for all my family and friends, who have cared for me in countless ways, seeing me through very trying times. My heart belongs to you always. v Table of Contents Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Abstract vii Introduction: To Be in That Number, or When the Black Female Intellectuals Go Marchin’ In 1 Introduction References 30 Chapter One: “I Wouldn’t Have Religion I Couldn’t Feel Sometimes”: Framing African-Derived Ecstatic Christian Worship as Black Female Sensual Spirituality 33 Chapter One References 94 Chapter Two: Failed Exchange and the Phallic Woman in the Black Domestic Sphere: The Late Frye Street Stories of Marita Bonner, 1938-1941 97 Chapter Two References 151 Chapter Three: Sexual Proxies and Chocolate Victorians: Black Women Writers, the Interwar Novel, and Pre-Civil Rights Era Social Cautionism, 1947-1951 153 Chapter Three References 241 Chapter Four: “You Don’t Have to Worry ‘Bout the Way I’ll Fare”: The Intellectual Contribution of Women as Black Church Bohemians on the Gospel Highway, 1940-1968 244 Chapter Four References 351 Conclusion: Understanding It Better By and By: Brief Notes on Sketching a Tradition 354 vi References 360 Appendix A: Letters from Willa 370 Appendix B: Correspondence with “Vanoscellos” 371 vii Abstract “On Speaking Terms: Spirituality and Sensuality in the Tradition of Modern Black Female Intellectualism” is an interdisciplinary womanist and feminist project which centers the issue of class as it relates to the intellectual life of U.S. black women. Questions at the heart of this study are: Who gets to be an intellectual? Why do elite black women continue to carry the representation of black female intellectuals? What is gained when we choose to view non-elite black women as intellectuals? This project therefore represents my attempt to attend critically to those strands of black female intellection which have proven easily absorbed into traditional discourses on intellectualism, such as literature, as well as those, coming from non-elite sources, which pose problems to traditional class- based notions of the intellectual. Moreover, I frame the Western tension between the spiritual and the sensual as the key creative force in modern black women's intellectualism. Fixing a critical eye on such sites as the cultural and religious West African- derived practice of shouting, the understudied short stories of Marita Bonner, novels by Ann Petry (Country Place), Zora Neale Hurston (Seraph on the Suwanee), Dorothy West (The Living is Easy), and Gwendolyn Brooks (Maud Martha), and the lives, songs, and performances of three of African American sacred music’s most important figures, Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates, I find room to seat around a common table middle-class black women intellectuals with their working-class sisters. My fundamental argument is that viii working-class black women have been just as deeply intellectual as their elite writing counterparts, and should be brought, at last, into the formal study of the modern black female intellectual. Presenting a unique and important archive of material, this dissertation project enacts the reconciliation of middle- and working- class black women within the context of modern black intellectualism. 1 Introduction To Be in That Number, Or When the Black Female Intellectuals Go Marchin’ In Tradition. Now there’s a word that nags the feminist critic. --Mary Helen Washington, “The Darkened Eye Restored” What she had wanted was a solid. She had wanted shimmering form; warm, but hard as stone and as difficult to break. She had wanted to found—tradition. --Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha Quite correctly, “tradition” under the head of a polyvalent grammar—the language of learning woven into the tongue of the mother—is the rare union of bliss toward which African-American experience has compelled us all along. --Hortense J. Spillers, “Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction” “Talking” Points Is it plausible, or even necessary, in the contemporary critical imagination, to place gospel queen Clara Ward “in dialogue” with middle-class writer Ann Petry? Or to believe that the practice of shouting in black Christian churches has any to “say” to Zora Neale Hurston’s academic work of anthropology, beyond its usefulness as data? Is there substantial gain in doing so? Can the non-academic black female be an intellectual? Is there a “conversation” that creates, governs, troubles, halts, and advances modern black female intellectualism? Is it truly worth considering that the black female tradition of intellectualism extends across the entire socio-economic spectrum, encompassing the contributions of women who are upper- and middle-class and highly literate as well as those of women who are not? This dissertation is my argument that all of these questions are to be answered decisively in the affirmative. 2 In this study of black women intellectuals beginning in the antebellum period and ending roughly in the late 1960s, I argue that black female intellection has taken place wherever black women have been, whether in sites influenced by formal spaces of learning or by spaces far from them. This project represents my commitment to helping bring change to the common perception of the intellectual. It extends a direct challenge to the way in which it is too often decided who gets to be an intellectual. To that end, in this project, the black female intellectual is both a poor, undereducated churchgoing shouter, and a highly educated pharmacist’s daughter. She is both a bourgeois writer who married well and could capitalize on the option to work only within her home, and a struggling mother and singer negotiating the dangers of the Gospel Highway to support herself and her family. She is earthy and elite. She speaks perfect English and pitch-perfect black English. She is Northern and citified; she is a staunch Southerner who sees little need to relocate. In this dissertation, I use the histories, the thoughts, the words—spoken, sung, and written—and the cultural products, of mostly twentieth century black women of very different backgrounds in an effort to show that the common project of modern black women’s intellectualism is comprised of strikingly different elements from strikingly different contributors. Despite their blatant dissimilarities, I find unity in them through their shared affirmation of black female thought, as it has arisen boldly, sanctioned and un-sanctioned by white and black elites. With this dissertation, I wish to show the ways in which, within modern black women’s 3 intellectualism, binaries hold, commingle, and sometimes dissipate altogether as an expected result of their being “on speaking terms.” Clarifying the Black Female Intellectual Tradition Although there was once a time when black women questioned its existence because of the appalling lack of scholarship on the topic, as Barbara Christian revealed nearly thirty years ago in her foundational text, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, the North American tradition of black female intellectualism can scarcely be doubted today. That once appalling lack of scholarship on black women’s intellectualism has been replaced by the bountiful and ever-growing work of researchers and scholars like Christian and many, many others who have labored to proclaim, reclaim, and advance the contributions of nineteenth and twentieth century black women working across the disciplines, very often in activist stance. We now rest assured that the tradition is historical, vibrant, and fully alive. There is, however, in my view, a lingering crisis at the heart of the way in which too many of us continue to approach black women’s intellectualism, a crisis I attempt to help redress with this dissertation. For some time, black women scholars have articulated the need for scholars working in black women’s studies to be mindful of what sociologist Patricia Hill Collins sums up as black women’s historical “exclusion from basic literacy, quality educational experiences, and faculty and administrative positions” (342). According to Collins, mindfulness of these realities should encourage black women’s studies scholars to reach beyond the academy to include the voices of 4 black female intellectuals, creators and practitioners of black female thought, who are non-academic. However, too often, it appears to me, scholars working in black women’s studies persist in taking their cues from the trajectories of the staunchly academic studies of intellectualism and women’s intellectualism. Although no racial qualifier appears before either of these categories, the very racelessness of their nomenclatures presupposes a dominant whiteness, and in the case of intellectualism, a dominant whiteness in union with a dominant maleness. The studies of white and white female intellectual histories focus overwhelmingly on the works, thoughts, and deeds of the traditionally literate, highly educated elite, a fact which creates a serious problem when black women’s studies pours itself into these models. The problem for black women’s intellectualism lies in the fact that whiteness—both male and female—has a much longer history of traditional literacy in the West than blacks have, as Collins makes clear. I add to this discussion the voice of womanist scholar Linda E. Thomas, who writes, “The knowledge we acquire from formal institutions derives from the ideas, philosophies, and histories of the privileged; more specifically, it is information about people who wrote their histories and ideas….Thus the knowledge that we have gained is knowledge by and about the privileged” (paragraph 21). When scholars working in black female studies replicate the tendency toward the literate elite, the majority of black women’s lives are left out of academic scholarship, and black female non-academic intellectualism is barely acknowledged. 5 Collins further explains how this process of exclusion is often enacted and encouraged by the Academy: Those black women with academic credentials who seek to exert the authority that their status grants them to propose new knowledge claims about African American women face pressures to use their authority to help legitimate a system that devalues and excludes the majority of black women. One way of excluding the majority of black women from the knowledge-validation process is to permit a few black women to acquire positions of authority in institutions that legitimate knowledge and to encourage them to work within the taken-for-granted assumptions of black female inferiority shared by the scholarly community and the culture at large. (342) Academic scholars working within the field of black women’s studies have placed, therefore, with great ease, the great women writers, philosophers, professors, and orators within the category of black female intellectualism. Although indisputably invaluable, works like Carol Allen’s Black Women’s Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner, and Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, a volume of variously-authored essays on Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells among other frequently noted black women, spring to mind as fairly typical of the direction most studies of black women intellectuals have taken. This direction involves the concentration on the black (upper) middle-class and the highly literate, walking embodiments of the early- DuBoisian idea of the Talented Tenth. We have only recently begun to interrogate 6 the relationship between intellectualism and the workaday, the poor, and the most oppressed black women. In the Beginning Was the Word This tunnel-visioned interest in the intellection of the elite forges the means by which we forget that black women’s, and for that matter all, intellectualism, in truth, precedes its traditionally literate expression. This very basic truth is, I argue, the only orthodoxical point of entry into black women’s intellectualism. Many scholars precede me in pointing to the paramount importance of the collection and study of black oral cultural expressions—prayers, sermons, proverbs, songs, poems, narratives, and games. They provide more than sufficient evidence of the vibrant and agile black thought which predated black literacy, which in turn provides evidence that black women were intellectual beings long before they were literate in the context of North American education. Black women and men were thinkers before they were writers. Their very survival under the soul-killing brutalities of slavery and racial terrorism demanded they be so. Intellectualism, then, and particularly black women’s intellectualism, in its essence must be understood to be something apart from its academic and/or literate expression. For this reason, in this project, intellectualism is defined, not as an academic pursuit or development--although it may take that form—but rather as an interactive enterprise which involves the speaking of the self in relation to some Other, which may be people (including one’s self or one’s God), events in one’s own life, historical moments and movements, natural and social environments and 7 conditions, texts, songs, or other works of art. My approach to intellectualism enacts the very necessary contradiction of the beliefs that intellectualism is always the product of academia and has always been so, and that the study of intellectuals always and inevitably carries one in the direction of social elites. The inclusion of black women in any intellectual enterprise that is grounded in history changes things. I note here the classic work of literary scholars Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, editors of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, who emphasize how black women’s tradition of literary intellectualism “not only redefines tradition, but also disarms it” in special ways (Spillers 251). According to Pryse, in her introduction to the volume, this disarmament is activated by a magical, mystical quality to black women’s history of writing despite the “lasting effects of the ‘peculiar institution,’ the lack of formal education, and sexual abuse.” The magic—“women’s magic, the origins of which are as old as women themselves”—is located primarily in the linking of “black women’s biological heritage with their powers of naming each other as literary models.” She writes that in opposition to the many severe historical limitations on their production of written works, “[b]lack women have long possessed ‘magical’ powers and told their daughters stories.” These storytelling women have often shown up in black writing women’s works as sources of their “creative power.” Black women writers—in utilizing and naming their cotton-picking, sharecropping, floor-scrubbing, wet-nursing, head rag-wearing, illiterate mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers as artists and literary models—effectively and permanently 8 troubled the historical requirements for novel writing: middle-class social standing and traditional literacy (Pryse 2, 3). I will add that this black maternal intellectual/literary lineage also places an interesting spin on the traditional model of texts reading other texts and the notion of narrative desire. Because of black women’s history of exclusion from sources of formal education, North American black women writers have tended, as a group, to stand in close proximity to the black oral tradition. Barred from reading and writing, black women’s bodies and minds for many generations were the only reservoir of text, not books; the words located on their tongues, not on pages. Within this tradition, reading was transformed to listening, writing to speaking. The entire notion of writing and reading in the Western tradition was therefore rearranged by black women’s participation in it, the whole tradition forced to double back to the intrinsic literariness of orality. Moreover, narrative desire within this context reveals itself not only in the desire to be told, but, here, crucially for women who could not write in the traditional sense, in the desire to be recorded by their writing daughters, not just as sources of story, but also as symbols of women’s endurance and survival under various oppressions. Thomas redoubles the need for a sustained connection to black women’s academic and non-academic intellectual histories and current realities by articulating the womanist commitment to presenting “the overlooked styles and contributions of all black women whether they be poor, and perhaps illiterate, or economically advantaged and Ph.D.’ed. Womanists bring forth the legacy of our 9 grandmamas and great-grandmamas and carry their notions in the embodiment of life that we create daily” (paragraph 9). My academic and extra-academic approach to the concept of the intellectualism within this project allows me to acknowledge, make room for, and honor those intellectuals who hail both from within and from spaces far from the Academy, from the ranks of the Talented Tenth and from the milieu of common, everyday black folks. Clearly, my aim in this dissertation is not to displace study of the black women whose contributions to black female intellectualism have been borne of the middle- or upper classes, or of high quality educations, but rather to de-center them by firmly linking them with the equally valuable contributions of poorer, less educated black women. With this focused study of the tradition of black female intellectualism as it developed within a certain span of time in the modern age, and in specific geographical and cultural sites, I wish to show that black female intellection has been expressed powerfully by women of various educational, economic, and material strata. The project therefore intertwines the works of materially comfortable, highly educated, middle-class black women like Marita Bonner with those of women who grew up picking cotton or scrubbing floors, and who were often forced to drop out of school before they could earn a high school diploma like gospel artist and Civil Rights activist Dorothy Love Coates. My overarching goal, of course, is to demonstrate clearly that black women’s intellectualism has been and is created by both of those segments of the black population, and from all the ones in between, and that although their 10 contributions are shaped by different experiences and often go forth with different meanings to different audiences, they happen concurrently, one layered onto another, intersecting the others and diverging from them (as in any intense, satisfying conversation), all equally worthy in what they give to black women’s intellectualism. This dissertation thus stands on common ground with Joy James’ 1996 publication Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, a work in which James argues against “the primacy of elites,” which [has] create[d] the context for “non-elite blacks and women [to] appear [in the record] largely without names and specifics” (54). Given my references to James, Pryse, Spillers, Thomas, and Collins, and my acknowledgment of others who share their views, it is obvious that I am aware that this dissertation is not the first work to consider seriously the artistic and social contributions of poor and barely educated black women. However, it differs from the majority of other recent studies like it. The first is that it reaches into sacred spheres for its subjects, focusing squarely on black Christian women, particularly shouting worshippers, and gospel music artists of the forties and fifties. The most widely read and acclaimed of studies of this type have taken as their subjects decidedly secular figures like the blues and jazz women of the early twentieth century, such as Hazel Carby’s “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues” (1998), and Angela Y. Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday 11 (1999), and Farah Jasmine Griffin’s If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001). The women of hip hop have also been the subjects of scholarly works. These works include Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Gwendolyn Pough’s Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (2004), and Layli Phillips, Kerri Reddick-Morgan, and Dionne Patricia Stephens’ “Oppositional Consciousness Within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976-2004” (2005). A recent major work on the intellectual contributions of the black gospel women who dominated the middle decades of the twentieth century has yet to be published, although University of Alabama American Studies professor DoVeanna Fulton has written a forthcoming essay, “‘Come through the water, come through the flood’: Black Women Creating Representative Gospel to Remember the Mississippi River Flood of 1927,” which I cite in the chapter on the gospel women. This work also contains a very explicit argument for the intellectualism of its non-elite subjects. Although some of the gospel women studied here have been the subjects of scholarly works, often praised for their talents, artistry, and the degree to which they influenced other singers and musicians, rarely have they been named as intellectuals within scholarly works. Despite its differences from other works on the black female intellectual, this project, in some ways—almost inescapably—retreads ground that has been covered in black women’s studies for the past nearly forty years. Hortense Spillers has 12 lucidly presented the uppermost reason that black women’s studies scholars must write and rewrite works like this one in new ways, in different tenors, and in varying modes. In a 2006 roundtable with black academic intellectuals Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan, Spillers explained: It always seems that we are recreating the wheel….You know, there are all these earlier pioneers in the institutional works of the black intellectual. I mean all of that work has been done, but then what happens is that the forces that are really hostile to black life, to black people, are always operating….[W]e are in a period of opposition now that is so strong, that if we are not careful the work we are doing now is going to have to be “rediscovered” at some point. You know, people are going to have to keep doing it, or rediscover it again, or reassert it because the forces of opposition are so forceful and so powerful and they’re always pushing against us, they always want to enforce forgetfulness. They always want to do something that forgets the African presence or reabsorbs it, reappropriates it in another way. The need to confront psychological violence, epistemic violence, intellectual violence is really powerful. (301) If any would doubt Spillers’ concept of “forces” in North American life which seek to destroy over and over again the remembrance—and therefore for many the reality—of the history, the intellectual prowess, and the dignity of black people, they need simply look to the reappearance and powerful reinvigoration of nineteenth and twentieth-century racist images which have exploded once again onto the U.S. discursive landscape in response to the presidential candidacy and election of Barack Obama: a cartoon published in the New York Post likening the President to a crazed and dead chimpanzee; e-mails with watermelons growing on the White House lawn; “Obama Bucks”—a gag paper currency featuring the then- 13 candidate surrounded by images of fried chicken, watermelons, and Kool-Aid; the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” a throwback to old-time minstrelsy written by Paul Shanklin to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” distributed by Chip Saltsman, a former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, and aired on national radio by Rush Limbaugh; and most recently, the blatantly racist, Twitter- and Facebook- published “joke” of GOP activist Rusty DePass that an escaped zoo animal—a gorilla, no less--was one of First Lady Michelle Obama’s ancestors. In response to the ire of blacks and whites alike to these cultural artifacts, the reaction from offenders was curiously always the same: somehow, no offense was intended. They claimed to be shocked that anyone could attribute to their creators and distributors racist attitudes, and most claimed to have no idea that the monkeys, fried chicken, and watermelons appearing in their products had any special significance in terms of race. These are elementarily clear examples of Spillers’ “forces,” as they are leveraged by those whom she calls “people sitting around tables, sipping wine, eating cheese…just the nicest people in the world, but [who] are carefully cloaking incredible hostility” (301). In the context of North America’s tirelessly reiterative racist agenda, works like this dissertation must arise over and over again to do battle against the seemingly inexhaustible, endlessly mutating powers which seek to induce racial erasure and historical amnesia. The Tie That Binds: Spirituality & Sensuality in the Tradition I argue, moreover, that the tradition of modern black female intellectualism turns on the interplay of, or the conversation between, the spiritual and sensual. 14 This idea owes much to the work of Ross Posnock, author of Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Posnock posits that the “modern intellectual is born of a crisis of categories and an assault on the exclusionary and the proprietary” (2). Upon examination of the expressive products and practices of twentieth century black women, I have become convinced that the binarial relationship between spirituality and sensuality was undoubtedly the greatest categorical crisis driving and shaping their intellectualism. For centuries, these two categories have been drawn as opposing forces, an antagonistic duality powerfully inscribed upon black women’s culture by the influence of Pauline Christianity. This project uncovers the ways in which black women’s customary stance has been one of resistance to the notion of a clear opposition between spirit and sense. The analyses here reveal how black women have steadfastly argued for the connectedness and convergence of the two categories. In so doing, they have effectively sanctified aspects of the sensual and sensualized aspects of the spiritual, creating what I have termed “sensual spirituality.” I explore this concept at length in the chapter on shouting. Such alchemy within the black female experience has often demonstrated its power to transform the pain and brokenness caused by life under various oppressions into expressions of renewed strength, hope, and joy. This is not to suggest that the conversation between the spiritual and the sensual has been at all points easeful and unveiled for black women, especially as it relates to sexuality. Here, it has often been a discussion marked by tension, 15 devastation, repression, scorn, shame, and pain. Black women’s unique history of vulnerability to a concentrated system of sexual degradation and violence at the hands of white and black men has been the primary cause for this. In “Hearts of Darkness,” Barbara Omolade explains how the racial conquest of blacks by European slave traders was soon conflated with the sexual conquest of the black woman principally because of white men’s misreading of the sensuality which pervaded West African culture. The white slave trafficker “perceived the African’s sensual ways according to his own cultural definitions of sex, nudity, and blackness as base, foul, and bestial. He did not attempt to understand how Africans defined their own behavior.” Thus the black woman became a “being who embodied all that was evil and profane to [European] sensibilities.” The result of this overlay of white interpretation onto a non-white culture would be a horribly tangled “sexual history” on the North American continent which “became fused with contradiction and duality, with myth and distortion, with the white man’s hate and desire for the black woman, with competition and jealousy between white and black women for white men, with love and struggle between black men and black women” (Omolade 362, 363). Caught in this complex and frequently menacing sexual culture, black women developed a host of coping and survival strategies, one of which was the use of dissemblance, which Darlene Clark Hine explores in “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance.” She writes: 16 One of the most remarked upon but least analyzed themes in black women’s history deals with black women’s sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence….[R]ape and the threat of rape influenced the development of a culture of dissemblance among black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure, but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives from their oppressors. (380) Tricia Rose, author of Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy, sees black female dissemblance about sex and sexuality as an attempt by black women to protect both themselves and black men in a culture in which stereotypes of the black male rapist and the sexually promiscuous black woman prevail: Simply telling one’s story isn’t simple at all. Black women’s sexual lives, like those of many women, sometimes involve abuse and mistreatment at the hands of men. For black women, though, this means making public statements about black men that might serve to support stereotypical images of black men as violent, dysfunctional, and criminal. Black women’s sexual lives are pinned between the powerful uses of distorted myths about black sexuality to fuel racist, demeaning stories about black men and women and the sexuality myths used to maintain the subordination of women as a whole. (5) The black Christian church has also frequently been a contributor to the difficult points in the conversation between spirit and sense in black women’s culture. Consider, for example, the double standard found in black church culture in which a man could be free to indulge in “conspicuous consumption” of material goods and sex, while a woman who “carried on accordingly might be branded ‘whore’ or ‘gypsy’” by onlookers of both sexes in her community (Heilbut xxv). 17 There is also the fact that young women who found themselves pregnant before marriage were often forced to render a public apology to the entire congregation during Sunday service, and many times were effectively “sat down,” or kicked out of all church groups and activities, usually until an appropriate period of punishment had been observed. The boyfriends and lovers of these women usually escaped unscathed, or were perhaps coerced into marrying the sullied girl. Whatever the case, generally speaking, black Christian men have not been forced to endure the humiliation of making public confessions of private falls from grace. Taking into account both the highs and the lows of the conversation between the spiritual and sensual, I aim in this project is to situate under the category of black female intellectualism the elite black female literary tradition in intimate proximity to the black female folk projects of churchgoing and gospel music composition and performance. “Heading” in the Right Direction: Feminist Implications of the Project Though this project is grounded in and arises from my own interests and training in literature, it is fundamentally historical in nature. All of the writers and singers discussed in these pages—Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates—are now gone, as are their times. Because of the historical nature of this study, I see a need to be explicit in articulating the fractured and fracturing way in which historical works on women are often put forth. 18 In “Women’s History as Intellectual History: A Perspective on the Journal of Women’s History,” Hilda Smith complains that present-day theory has worked a curious effect upon women’s history. She writes that it “has turned women from the past”—and the present, as well, I would argue in the case of black women—“into somewhat truncated beings, namely headless ones.” She argues that the “strong emphasis on the importance of the body to women’s past has consistently been framed as a body from the shoulders down; women’s minds have been excluded from this body” (26). While the focus on the body has helped historians and other scholars to recapture the human, physical realities of their subjects, it has also decreased awareness of the degree to which those bodies, their behaviors and their experiences were commanded, navigated, and understood by women’s minds. If the redress of this separation of women’s bodies from women’s minds is an imperative for the study of white women’s histories, how much more of an imperative it is for the study of black women’s histories is almost impossible to understate. Throughout its history on these shores and others in the West, blackness has been ensnared in a web of meanings and representations, nearly all negative and working in one way or another to maintain or advance racist ideologies. In fact, as scholar Fred Moten provocatively phrases it, “The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take place” (1). These discursive representations have hung particularly on the black body, and even more specifically on the black body as it relates to 19 sexuality. Whiteness scholar Richard Dyer explains, “All concepts of race are always concepts of the body and also of heterosexuality” (20) because they are the means through which stable categories of race, and therefore racial hierarchies, are able to be reproduced. Cornel West begins “On Black Sexuality,” with an elaboration of these ideas: Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality. The obsession has to do with a search for stimulation and meaning in a fast-paced, market-driven culture; the fear is rooted in visceral feelings about black bodies fueled by sexual myths of black women and men. The dominant myths draw black women and men as either threatening creatures who have the potential for sexual power over whites or as harmless, desexed underlings of a white culture. (514) West goes on to list the most familiar black mythico-sexual archetypes as Jezebel, who is naturally hypersexual and is the chief competitor with white women for the attentions of white men; Sapphire, the quintessential black wicked bitch; Aunt Jemima, who appears most often as the distinctly asexual, loyal servant Mammy; Bigger Thomas, the amoral, animalistic rapist and craver of white female flesh; Jack Johnson, “the super performer—be it in athletics, entertainment or sex—who excels over others naturally and prefers women of a lighter hue”; and Uncle Tom, who can be thought of the masculine face of Mammy (514-515). These racial mytho-sexual representations of blackness were formed in antebellum North America, and persist to this day. bell hooks, in the fourth chapter 20 of Black Looks: Race and Representation, discusses both the efficacy and the legacy of these images, especially those relating to the black female: Representations of black female bodies in contemporary popular culture rarely subvert or critique images of black female sexuality which were part of the cultural apparatus of 19 th century racism….Most often attention was not focused on the complete black female on display at a fancy ball in the “civilized” heart of European culture, Paris. She is there to entertain guests with the naked image of Otherness. They are not to look at her a whole human being. They are to notice only certain parts. Objectified in a manner similar to black female slaves who stood on auction blocks while owners and overseers described their important, salable parts, the black whose naked bodies were displayed for whites at social functions had no presence. They were reduced to mere spectacle. Little is known of their lives, their motivations. Their body parts were offered as evidence to support racist notions that black people were more akin to animals than other humans. (62) The black female body apart from all intellectual interiority—thinking, theorizing, judging, assessing—has served for a very long time as a symbol for both black women’s inherent degradation, and black corruption and inadequacy in general (hooks 62). Farah Jasmine Griffith adds powerfully to this discussion: Until the…celebrations of Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison, few were willing to grant black women the title genius. Since the earliest days of our nation, black women were thought to be incapable of possessing genius; their achievements were considered the very opposite of intellectual accomplishment. All persons of African descent were thought to be unfit for advanced intellectual endeavor. Black women in particular were body, feeling, emotion, and sexuality” (14). 21 Too often, even today, black women are only their bodies. In a recent HBO special The Blacklist: Volume One, which first aired on August 25, 2008, tennis champion Serena Williams bristles at the way in which reaction to her black and powerful build so often obliterates in the minds of those who witness her game the extent to which she is a strategist, a thinker, a planner on the court. To many, she is instead an unstoppable and unthinking, brute black force who simply overpowers her opponent with her unnatural strength. This usually white opponent, in her powerlessness against Williams’ full framed, well-muscled, and yet curvaceous blackness, becomes all the more whitened and feminized in her defeat to the thusly blackened and masculinized Williams. Only this physical part, the part which simultaneously captivates and offends the Western eye and sensibilities, is attributed to Williams’ treasure of professional triumphs. She explains, more than a little wistfully, “I never get credit for [the] mental.” Through analysis of shouting, gospel performance, and literature which is frequently concerned with sex, the body of the black female is featured prominently in this project. However, I make the attempt always to connect the black female body to its head--the thought, the intellection, and the belief systems that motivate its behaviors and modes of expression. It is crucially important that even in the most physical of expressions, such as shouting and dancing in church, the black woman be seen as an intellectual being, a view which is necessary to halting the continued destruction of her image into headless corporeality. 22 Acknowledging Normativity in the Project: The Womanist Trap? In 1983, Alice Walker published In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, which is roundly considered to be the womanist foundational text. According to Walker’s oft-noted four-part definition, a womanist is a woman who loves other women, sexually or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility...and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually or non-sexually. Committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: 'Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?' (xi) Many also remember and refer to Walker’s highly poetic analogy: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” which makes clear womanism’s similarity to, and difference from, feminism. Since that time, womanism, a branch of black feminism, has developed as a critical, social, artistic, and academic perspective which concerns itself primarily with the ontological and epistemological truths of black women. Womanists now span the academic disciplines and the world. There are womanists working in literary studies, ethics, history, and art. The one location in which it has taken root most deeply is the arena of black women’s religious studies. Within two years after the appearance of In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, black women theologians and scholars who were members of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature “decided to carve out living space as womanists” by convening the AAR’s first ever Womanist 23 Approaches to Religion and Society convention under the heading of the Womanist Consultation. Cheryl Gilkes Townsend, author of If It Wasn’t for the Women, presided over the first conference, as Katie G. Cannon, Alison P. Gise, and Angela D. Sims recall in “Womanist Works in Word.” Religious studies womanists are now into their third generation of scholars. The field has evolved from the days in which Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, and Renita Weems formed what Monica A. Coleman calls the “initial triumvirate.” Womanists are simultaneously renewing their original aims and pushing forward to break lingering boundaries. Cannon, Gise, and Sims write: Conscientization is the first step in establishing womanist prerogatives. In fact, we African American women begin our work by the exposing the triple dynamics of race-sex-class oppression….[W]e privilege the intellectual values of communal narrative, [and thereby]…enhance the moral touchstones that stand in opposition to institutionalized images of subordination. Further, womanist scholars typically see recovering mythic memory as a major prerogative….Mythic memories assist in critiquing the hierarchical construction of gendered identities, enabling us to declare our own moral agency in a world that systematically denies it. The triple emphasis of these womanist scholars working within and through a religious context of awareness of social and political realities, orality and community, and memory of bodily and social experience has obvious relationship to this project, which fuses black women intellectuals’ confrontation of unjust social contexts, their internalization of the struggle to live within and outside of them, and the varied expressions of their responses to them. In its focus on the connection between what Cannon et al. call the “real-life biotexts” of black—explicitly or 24 vaguely Christian—women in relation to black female intellectualism, this dissertation can be understood as a womanist project. While I use this project to execute many of religious womanism’s mandates, I also readily admit replicating one of its most common tendencies. In a roundtable discussion entitled “Must I Be Womanist?” which appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion in 2006, Monica A. Coleman documents her frustration with the developmental trajectory of womanism within religious studies. She likens the field to an insufficiently furnished house, writing, “There are not enough chairs, couches, or beds for me or many of the black women I know and love. It isn’t a place where we can be who we are in some of the most important ways we live— sexually, spiritually, or politically.” One of the issues Coleman calls out is the hegemonic force of Christianity within womanist studies: I…feel that womanist religious scholarship has not done well in reflecting the religious pluralism of black women’s faith associations. When Walker writes that a womanist “loves the Spirit,” womanist religious scholars seem to have read, “loves the Christian spirit.” I cannot fault womanists for being true to their own faith declarations, which are often Christian….In this process, however, womanists have often assumed that black women’s religious experiences are Christian….Intentionally or not, womanists have created a Christian hegemonic discourse within the field. Although I am not formally a religious studies scholar, this womanist project could be perceived as yet another example of the privileging of the Christian religious experience which has taken place among womanists. I humbly acknowledge this. As a Christian scholar and as a Christian minister, I write this dissertation to function in many ways as an interrogation of certain aspects of my own religious 25 tradition, which coincidentally is the religious tradition of the majority of religious studies womanists. This means, of course, that I fail to discuss in depth the many spiritual ontologies which exist outside of this realm. Here I find particularly helpful the words of Australian Indigenous Christian womanist Lee Miena Skye, written in response to Coleman’s critique: …[F]undamental to the universal womanist theological academic tradition is the search for wholeness. This is always contextual. Therefore, we cannot write for the wholeness of others whose context is different from ours, be it a cultural, spiritual, social, political, sexual, economic, or gendered context. We can only respect, sympathize, and support them; to do otherwise would be arrogant. (paragraph 8) Chapter-by-Chapter In Chapter One of this project, entitled “‘I Wouldn’t Have Religion I Couldn’t Feel Sometimes’: Framing African-Derived Ecstatic Christian Worship as Black Female Sensual Spirituality,” I explore black women’s participation in the cultural and religious practice of shouting in Christian churches. I take pains to present shouting’s West African origins, its decidedly non-Western defining characteristics, and its transmission from generation to generation. I argue that the shout is the foundation of the ongoing conversation between the spiritual and the sensual in black women’s culture and is a significant means by which black women have made crucial disruptions of a set of geographical, social, and spiritual binaries: Africa and the New World, slavery and emancipation, South and North, and certainly, spirit and sense. It, for me, is the very core and root of modern black female intellectualism. 26 In Chapter Two, entitled “Failed Exchange and the Phallic Woman in the Black Domestic Sphere: The Late Frye Street Stories of Marita Bonner, 1938- 1941,” I focus on three of the last short stories written by the greatly understudied Bonner. In discussing this important black female Modernist writer, I highlight her rather alarming views on the state of the black domesticity. In Bonner’s stories, black homelife is depicted as ravaged—almost as a matter of fact—undone by sustained racist, classist, and sexist assaults. I argue that Bonner’s work presents a very clear tension between the spiritual and the sensual for black women, who as imaged in her short stories, never fail to pay for their moral goodness and high aspirations with physical and emotional detriment. In Chapter Three, entitled “Sexual Proxies and Chocolate Victorians: Black Women Writers, the Interwar Novel, and Pre-Civil Rights Era Social Cautionism, 1947-1951,” I analyze four novels by black women—Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks--who all appear to be writing under a particular pressure which, I argue, could only have been caused by the broiling racial tensions which would spark the Civil Rights Movement. Two of the four novels, Petry’s Country Place and Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee, use white heroines to displace and confound the racial discomfort which would have resulted from using black female characters to explore female sexuality at a time when blacks were coming under intensifying racial scrutiny. I argue that Petry’s Glory and Hurston’s Arvay are what I have termed “sexual proxies,” revised versions of a 27 uniquely North American literary device called “Africanism,” first analyzed by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. The other two novels, West’s The Living is Easy and Brooks’ Maud Martha, play with the (dysfunctional) notion of the black woman as a “lady” constructed on the white Victorian model. West’s Cleo is a skin-deep embodiment of the Victorian lady. Under her beauty, impeccable dress, and carefully absorbed New England ways, Cleo is all cold-hearted, cutthroat capitalism and control. Vulnerability is a dangerous, detested, and ultimately useless mode of being in her view, and she seeks to avoid it at all cost. Cleo is thus a representation of the black female body and soul so ensnared by the racist, sexist, classist agenda at work in North American society that she lives estranged from her own self. The final book redeems the black heroine from the hell Cleo cannot escape. Brooks’ Maud Martha, in order to compensate for her being a “flower of ordinary allurements,” is intent on being good to the nearly absolute disconnection from all things bodily. I argue that her powerful and very vocal reconnection to her body through the process of giving birth to a daughter is the means by which Maud Martha comes to appreciate the “skin she’s in” as a source of the goodness she seeks and not an estrangement from it. In Chapter Four, entitled “‘You Don’t Have to Worry ‘Bout the Way I’ll Fare’: The Intellectual Contribution of Women as Black Church Bohemians on the Gospel Highway, 1940-1968,” I situate the Golden Age of gospel music as a mostly 28 working-class intellectual and artistic enterprise which came to maturity alongside the Civil Rights Movement. Examining the traveling gospel artists of this time as part of a largely overlooked bohemian culture intimately connected to the black church, I seek to reclaim the folksy, earthy elements of black church culture which are too often lost in scholarly treatments. These elements make gospel a natural choice for capturing black women’s engagement with the spiritual and the sensual, which I examine through the works, lives, and performances of black, working-class intellectuals Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates. Some will no doubt wonder at the near absence of Mahalia Jackson from this chapter. Although Jackson provides anecdotal entry into Chapter Four, I exclude prolonged analysis of her simply because of her long reign in scholarly and mainstream, gospel and secular treatments as the iconic American gospel singer. Of course, there is always more to say about such a hugely important figure in North American and African American women’s history; Jackson studies have yet to exhaust themselves by far. However, her extended history of service as the singular face of gospel music has more often than not worked to create a cultural and musical vacuum, wherein she becomes isolated from other black gospel singers of the period, who tend to disappear behind her massive crown. It is quite telling that she is usually compared to white opera and popular singers of her day, and not to her black gospel contemporaries. 29 In this project, I wish to honor Jackson, while pushing beyond her to other black sacred music performers. Whenever possible, however, I do use anecdotes which depict Jackson in community with her female gospel peers. Looking past Mahalia Jackson in gospel music affords the modern cultural studies scholar both greatly needed contextualization of Jackson within the realm of her black gospel contemporaries, and acquaintanceship with other largely unknown and greatly understudied 20 th century African American female gospel artists. The Conclusion, entitled “Understanding It Better By and By: Brief Notes On Sketching a Tradition,” functions as a brief overview of black women’s spirit and sense-driven intellectualism in the remaining decades of the twentieth century, and suggests other applications of the main premise of the project. The following dissertation represents my own small contribution to marking and announcing the tradition of black female intellectualism in all its range, glory, beauty, challenge, and tragedy. For those of us who wish to continue the work of establishing a black maternal artistic ancestry, the tradition of black female intellectualism has the power to generate for us all a “set of falterless customs,” an august and “polyvalent grammar” spoken in the multiple tongues of our thinking, creating, storytelling, reading, writing, shouting, preaching, songwriting, singing mothers. 30 Introduction References Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. New York: Harper & Row, 1953. Cannon, Katie G., Alison P. Gise, and Angela D. Sims. “Womanist Works in Word.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 21.2 (Fall 2005): 135(12). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A13881233 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Coleman, Monica A. “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 22:1 (Spring 2006): 85(50). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A14583678 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Collins. Patricia Hill. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Bevery Guy-Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995. Dyer, Richard. White. London, Routledge, 1997. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. New York: Limelight, 1997. Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 380-387. hooks, bell. “Selling Hot Pussy.” Black Looks: Race & Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. James, Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1996. 31 Moten, Fred. "The Case of Blackness. " Criticism. 50.2 (Spring 2008): 177(42). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 20 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A194621 07&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Omolade, Barbara. “Hearts of Darkness.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 362-378. Posnock, Ross. Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard, 1998. Pryse, Marjorie. “Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the ‘Ancient Power’ of Black Women.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Rose, Tricia. Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sex and Intimacy. New York: Picador, 2003. “Serena Williams.” The Blacklist: Volume One. Prod. Timothy Greenfield Sanders, Elvis Mitchell, and Michael Slap Sloane. HBO. 25 Aug. 2008. Smith, Hilda. “Women’s History as Intellectual History.” Journal of Women’s History. 20:1 (Spring 2008): 26-32. Spillers, Hortense J. “Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. ---, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan. “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’—Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 99. Thomas, Linda E. “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm.” Cross Currents: 48.4 (Winter 1998): 488 (1). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T004&prodld=ITOF&docid=A54086429 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. 32 Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983. Washington, Mary Helen. “The Darkened Eye Restored.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist. ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin, 1990. West, Cornel. “On Black Sexuality.” The Cornel West Reader. New York: Civitas, 1999. 514-52 33 Chapter One “I Wouldn’t Have Religion I Couldn’t Feel Sometimes”: Framing African-Derived Ecstatic Christian Worship as Black Female Sensual Spirituality What shall I render unto God for all His blessings? What shall I render? What shall I give? All I can render is my body and my soul. That’s all I can render; that’s all I can give. --African American Version of Charles Wesley’s “What Shall I Render to My God?” Well, if you don’t believe in shouting, That’s alright with me Some folk don’t believe in shouting, That’s alright with me… Doubt and ignore it But I belong to the Lord’s crew David said rejoice in the Lord, And that’s the way we Christians do If you don’t believe in shouting, That’s alright with me. --Dorothy Love Coates & the Harmonettes, “That’s Alright with Me” Described, Not Defined In her 1976 autobiographical tome, Singin’, Swingin’, and Getting Merry Like Christmas, Maya Angelou shares the spiritual quest which marked her young adulthood and led her to join a string of churches over a matter of months. Still unsatisfied, she found herself visiting the Evening Star Baptist Church one Sunday morning. She tells of her experience during the sermon: “Dry Bones in the Valley” was my favorite sermon. I…knew that that sermon, properly preached, could turn me into a shouting, spinning dervish. I tried for the first few minutes to rise and leave the church, but the preacher swung his head to look at me each time I poised myself to leave. I sat again. He told the story simply at first, weaving a quiet web around 34 us all, binding us into the wonder of faith and the power of God. His rhythm accelerated and his volume increased slowly, so slowly he caught me off guard. I had sat safe in my own authority in so many churches and waited cautiously for the point in the service when the ignition would be sparked, when “the saints” would be fired with the spirit and jump in the aisles, dancing and shaking and shouting their salvation. I had always resisted becoming a part of that enchanted band. The minister’s voice boomed, “These bones shall walk. I say these bones shall walk again.” I found myself in the aisle and my feet were going crazy under me— slithering and snapping like two turtles shot with electricity…There was no turning back. I gave myself to the spirit and danced my way to the pulpit. (38, 39) The experience Angelou recounts here is a cultural and religious practice commonly known as “shouting.” Shouting is actually a euphemism, a handy catch- all term, which encompasses a range of behaviors which can include clapping, dancing, pacing, running, rocking back and forth, fainting, rolling on the floor, vigorously rubbing parts of the body, most often the thighs or the belly, as well as using the voice as in loud crying and other utterances. As intriguing as the external shouting behavior can be, even more so for most observers of the shout is the deep distraction of the shouter. This mindset of the shouter—the sense of an overwhelming and, for several moments, unbreakable inwardness—is very often the much larger source of fascination. Other points of intrigue for observers of shouting are shouting’s essence (“What is it?”), its authenticity (“Is it real?”), its dignity (or apparent lack thereof: “Nothing but foolishness!”), and its relevance to non-black people (“It’s a black thing.”) While all these issues are brought to bear on this discussion of shouting, they are but a means to discuss at lengths shouting’s West 35 African origins and its continuing intellectual significance for its practitioners, particularly black women. In this study of shouting, I will examine its history in the New World and the African sacred cosmology which has deeply informed it and all black Christianity. This historical grounding of shouting helps me to center African American slaves and their poor and working-class descendants, who for the most part owned and could buy little to nothing, and the fruits of whose labor was, more often than not, not their own. These are people whose relationship to the intellectual has most often been questioned, denied, or begrudgingly admitted with many reservations. My principal concern is the historical vital importance of shouting to black churchgoing females, and the ways in which shouting has served this population as a vehicle of intellectual expression. Shouting, and the religious cultures out of which it emerges, represent for me systems of intellection through which participants have expressed themselves in relation to the Divine and the rest of the believing community. Some Common Difficulties in Shouting Discourse There are those observers of shouting who dismiss shouting as pure entertainment, an elaborate performance put on by “believers” as a sign of holiness. On the one hand, the entertainment value of shouting cannot be doubted. Youtube currently overflows with thousands of shouting clips from churches all over the country. These videos can be watched at will by members of the general public who 36 have computers and access to the internet. These videos are often shared by viewers with others for their high interest, and in some cases, rather comedic content. However, the attitudes which dominate shouting communities outlaw the use of, and approach to, shouting as mere entertainment; for worshippers in these communities, shouting must exist as something more than amusement. It is therefore the job of culturally grounded work on shouting to bear in mind the generally sober and reverential approach towards shouting taken by shouting communities. Some observers are sure that it is simply learned behavior which the pre- conditioned shouter exhibits in response to various cues in the worship environment. This is an interesting hypothesis to be sure, and certainly has its rightful applications, but it forespeaks a methodology which would do little to explain shouting’s existence or its usefulness to shouting communities from the days of New World slavery to this day. Others still are convinced that it is a bodily manifestation of supernatural power, as is the case in spirit possession, the Africanist sister-practice of shouting, an opinion which is discussed later in the chapter. The fact that there is no consensus among observers of shouting about what it is exactly may be due to four of shouting’s basic aspects. The first is that shouting is cultural, not universal. It is not a shared experience among all blacks, for example, or all North Americans, or even all Christians. Its practice is confined to distinct shouting communities within the Christian church. Sociologist Korie Edwards, author of “Race, Religion, and Worship: Are Contemporary African- 37 American Worship Practices Distinct?” has found that while 91 percent of African American churches practice “verbal affirmation” or call-and-response-type participation in worship services, only 57 percent practice “spontaneous physical worship,” or shouting. Edwards found that approximately 55 percent of whites practice verbal affirmation, but only 8 percent practice spontaneous physical worship (6). His analysis offers no data on other racial or ethnic groups. For example, data on shouting versus non-shouting Hispanics in Catholic and Protestant, and particularly Pentecostal, churches would be helpful in extending shouting beyond its usual black/white basis of racial comparison. Despite its limitations, however, Edwards’ analysis provides grounds on which it may be agreed safely that most people do not shout, have never shouted, and will never shout. There is therefore bound to be incredulity and conflicting interpretations about a practice experientially foreign to many of its observers. The second major difference of opinion occurs over the proper classification of shouting. Is it a phenomenon, a happening: an instance in which the Divine sovereignly sets His attention upon an individual in such a manner that the interaction causes the shout? Or is shouting a practice: a manner of worship instigated by the worshiper whose goal is to make contact with the Holy? Even among shouters, this classification is never a fixed one. Shouting is notoriously adaptable. For example, there are times when a shout is the product of a worshiper “pressing her way.” To “press one’s way” in black Christianity is to make a strong determination to offer heartfelt worship, focusing on God alone, which sometimes 38 results in shouting. There are other times, however, when a shouter seems to be especially chosen and perhaps would have preferred not to shout, but strong promptings seemingly emanating from an external Source compelled such a manner of worship—as in the case of Angelou above. Pointing up the ambiguous source of shouting, Timothy J. Nelson, author of “Sacrifice of Praise: Emotion and Collective Participation in an African American Worship Service,” quotes from the liturgy which is part of the worship at the African Methodist Episcopal church he observed for twelve months: Minister: Effective worship consists of two grand movements. All: The people of God must move toward God and God will move toward the people. (9) Because of the bilateral movement—the people moving towards the Divine in worship and the Divine moving towards those who worship--that is acknowledged within this particular worship community, and which is generally accepted among other shouting communities, I will refer to shouting here as both a practice and a phenomenon. The third difficulty is located in the fact that shouting is not easily defined as one act, or as one type of act. Shouting does not exist as a static, fixed practice that is nearly always the same no matter who does it or when. In this way, it is not, for instance, like the Catholic at her confession, or the Muslim upon her sajjada. Although a shout may be distinct to a particular shouter, shouting is better understood as a network of varying expressions taking place within a specific 39 context of worship. This added variability undoubtedly helps to confound easy definition. Lastly, shouting, like most cultural practices, is prone to instances in which individuals may assume its aspect to suit their own ends. Stories abound about shouters who “fake and shake” for attention to outdo other shouters, or to appear especially “saved and sanctified.” Although these instances may take place within a church or a worship service or a sacred music performance, they occur outside of the act of worship nonetheless. To most Christians in shouting communities, outside of worship, a shout is little more than common entertainment, and can easily be made vulgar and repulsive, robbed of its dignity as a signifier of communion with the Sacred. Because of this, issues often arise around shouting authenticity. At the center of the issue is the sincerity of the emotion from a shout proceeds. Within the nexus of the body, the Divine, and the shout, Nelson found that proper emotion acts as a type of scientific control. Nelson places the worship services of shouting communities within the context of Arlie Hochschild’s “feeling rules” as a means of establishing that “there are normative standards which identify how a worshipper is supposed to feel.” Feeling rules are correct emotions which attend specific occasions. These feeling rules are determined by the occasion, which “carries with it a proper definition of itself.” Feeling rules “not only pressure people into displaying the situationally ‘correct’ emotion…but actually motivate them to try and experience appropriate emotions and suppress inappropriate ones” (2). 40 According to Nelson, there are five basic feeling rules which tend to regulate worship in shouting churches: worship, gratitude, love for God and fellow Christians, joy, and hope. These, he finds, are emphasized and heightened throughout services by hymns and other songs, liturgical calls-and-responses, prayers, and sermonic statements. The feeling rules thereby set the stage for genuine shouting which is predicated upon real, correct emotion and engagement with the Divine (2, 3). Emotion, however, is difficult to verify, although the community often bases its response to shouts on the emotion it perceives to be at work in the shouter. Issues of authenticity and legitimacy are extremely important in the evaluation of individual shouts which constantly takes place within shouting church cultures. Nelson includes testimony from one worshipper whom he questioned on the issue of authentic shouting. The respondent, whose name Nelson changed to “Sherline Singleton,” explained, “[I]t is a proven fact that every shouting doesn’t have the Holy Ghost—they just shouting.” When Nelson pressed “Singleton” on “how congregants could shout without the prompting of the Spirit,” she replied matter-of-factly, “Music.” She likened inauthentic shouting to a young person’s automatic response to good music: “‘Cause when you were younger and you hear something you like even if you didn’t get up and dance, you knew how to move to the music….You know how to dance already—and when you hear drums or hear a good beat on an organ that you can dance to [then you can do it]” (6). 41 In her first autobiographical volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou recalls the hysterical antics of one Sister Monroe who lived in the tiny Stamps, Arkansas community where Angelou was raised. Angelou recreates Sister Monroe’s wild church dramatics, which resulted one Sunday in a poor beleaguered preacher, a good Samaritan-deacon, and Sister Monroe herself in an unseemly tangle “down on the floor behind the altar [with] their legs spiked out like kindling wood” (40). The following Sunday, an out-of-control Sister Monroe, unhinged by another sermon, literally attacked the visiting preacher, using her purse to “hit him on the back of the head….Twice.” The blows to the back of his unsuspecting head knocked the preacher’s dentures out of his mouth onto the church floor (42). Deacons had to rescue the then-toothless man from Sister Monroe’s clutches. Young Angelou, who was not much older than six years old at the time, and her older brother Bailey, were completely undone by the series of unbelievable events and ended up in an unstoppable laughing fit on the floor, right in the middle of service, behavior which earned them the “whipping of [their] lives” (44). The disapproving response of Sister Monroe’s church fellows, such as Angelou’s grandmother who had tried to dissuade the woman with “threatening looks” (43), and the “deacons, ushers, unofficial church members, and some of the bigger children” who had tried (and failed) to block her rush to the pulpit, support the notion that the maniacal aspect of Sister Monroe’s behavior was quite out of bounds, even for a shouting church. 42 Nelson discovered evidence of the high degree of surveillance and policing which govern shouters and shouts within African American worship communities. He writes: …[O]rder…is enforced by the whole congregation through sanctioning, but it is the particular duty of the ushers. These guardians of ritual order, with their uniforms and white gloves, stand at attention at their posts in the four corners of the sanctuary and constantly monitor the behavior of participants. When someone begins to shout, they are immediately surrounded by ushers of the same sex who will link arms around the dancing person. Officially this is because of the belief that the shouter has no consciousness of those around him and might inadvertently injure himself or others. But it is also a very effective form of surveillance and control, and ushers will remove someone they feel is disrupting the service. Also, by not surrounding someone who begins to dance, ushers can withhold legitimacy from their shout…. (6) My use of Nelson’s application to shouting culture of Horschild’s “feeling rules” aids me in making an initial declaration of the intellectual boundaries within which shouting takes place and within which it is assessed by members within the culture, resulting either in community support or collective sanction. However, this rather subjective aspect of shout evaluation makes the act an “in the eye of the beholder” practice, and thus subject to both unwarranted sanction and outrageously bad behavior, as in the case of Angelou’s Sister Monroe. For my purposes, then, shouting will be approached as a cultural and religious practice (and phenomenon) that is based upon proper emotional response toward the Person and attributes of God (love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, gift- giving, etc.), and God’s manifested desire to engage with the worshipper who has 43 assumed the correct emotional attitude towards Him. Shouting is a highly policed practice, from which the community, acting as a body of collective authority, can deny a shouter’s claims of authenticity. Shouting is a state that is induced most often by music, as will be later discussed, but can be motivated by powerful preaching, as Angelou’s own shouting experience demonstrates. Womanist Implications of Shouting I see shouting as the perfect womanist act partly because of its close association with “the oral cultures bequeathed to [African American women],” and arising most frequently from segments within the African American population “whom power brokers have hounded into silence, rendered invisible, or considered exceptional because of their inherent critique of binary categories of racialized societal structures” (Cannon et al. paragraph 7). Womanism is an academic branch of black feminism, generally considered to have begun in the early to middle 1980s, with the publication of Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose in 1983. Although womanist intellectuals work in every discipline within the Academy, womanism has been a most visible enterprise within the field of black religious studies. Religious womanism combines the interests of black feminism with those of black liberationist theology: women, the disenfranchised, the poor, others who fall within the “least of these,” and the transformative power of religion in matters of social justice for, as Walker expressed it, the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (ix). In my view, the shout is fundamentally womanist because it 44 can be interpreted as a practice which both confronts and transcends “what the twin scourges of sexism and racism, merged into one oppressive entity, actually do to human beings…[which is to] confine the imagination, perplex the will, and delimit free choice” (Cannon et al. paragraph 9). Roxanne Reed has examined the function of gendered sound within the African American worshipping community as it is depicted in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. For Reed, the feminine “wordless cry, holler, moan, or wail” which takes place in worship achieves “primacy over the written text,” “suggests a historical time without relying on a defined chronology,” and is legitimated by an African “ancestral heritage” which presages black musical forms (2). This context of sound, into which the shout can be placed, is distinctly feminine and claims space from and against “patriarchal privilege,” which has traditionally extended to black folk preaching, an oral expressive form from which most black women were formally excluded for decades after slavery. The sound of the black feminine in worship is thus a symbol for the triumph of the feminine over historically masculine arenas— writing, history, and form. Reed marks a movement in the Morrison text from the formless but highly meaningful distinctly feminine utterance to the formal communal song which achieves salvation and restoration for the collective body of worshippers, enveloping the masculine along with the feminine. This view is quite in keeping with Reed’s womanist perspective, which is committed to the survival of entire persons and communities. 45 However, I trace within the text of the extra-literary black worship service a reversal of this movement wherein black women, who are often forced to make salvation happen on a day-to-day basis, carrying their children and grandchildren, their men, and themselves through the rigors of living with barely enough of anything, are able to use the formal communal song as the point of departure into a moment of salvation and restoration for themselves. The shouting woman can thus throw off the complexities of life that is triply hostile to her race, sex, and class, (and quadruply and/or quintuply so, if considerations of age, weight, or sexual orientation are made), and engage directly with the Divine Whom she sees as a Giver and Sustainer of strength, joy, and provision. This rather selfish function of the shout—working renewal for the individual—is also quite womanist. Walker’s famous four-part definition of womanism makes just such a provision. According to Walker, the womanist is “[n]ot a separatist, except periodically, for health” (Walker ix). My concept of the shout and Reed’s concept of gendered sound can be placed in critical triangulation with Fred Moten’s “shriek,” as it appears in “Resistance of the Object.” For Moten, the shriek, an expression of the distinct pain and suffering of the black female, is a passionate and primal “phono-photo-porno- graphic disruption” of spirit and matter, and other binaries (14). Closely related, then, the shout, black gendered worship sound, and the shriek all take center stage as historical black female performances which unapologetically disrupt categories, 46 and which require watching, listening others to record and interpret the signs of dissolution and convergence within them. “Oh, Glory!”: Snapshots of Shouting in Pop Culture The Sister Monroes of the black church, while fodder for amusing church stories, are not the focus of this chapter. It is worth suspecting, however, that their ilk have become the basis for many of the stereotypical images of the shouting black female littered throughout U.S. popular culture. Over the last thirty years, U.S. viewing audiences have consumed many images of shouting black women—from the judgment-pronouncing, back-bucking, hand-waving, “Oh, glory!”-crying Aunt Esther played by comedienne Wanda Page on Redd Foxx’s 1970’s situation comedy Sanford and Son to the hyper-religious mother played by Loretta Devine in the 2001 film Kingdom Come to 2003’s Bringing Down the House in which Queen Latifah in one scene assumes the persona of a shouting, hymn-singing church woman. Black comediennes have even incorporated the shout into their stage acts. One, in a performance on the now defunct stand-up comedy program BET’s ComicView, played a track of upbeat church music and mimicked an entire shout from start to finish, ending the routine on the floor, amusingly covering her own legs with a cloth, in reference to the custom in shouting churches of having attendants lay cloths over the legs of female shouters to keep them from exposing too much once “slain,” or knocked prostrate, by the Holy Ghost. There are also the random television appearances of everyday black women who, to the bemused puzzlement of white- 47 bred hosts, clap and jump and loudly cry “Hallelujah!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” for winnings on game shows and for new furniture and appliances on surprise home improvement programs. From time-to-time, there are less comical, more poignant representations of black female shouting, such as in the made-for-cable television life story of American Idol winner, Fantasia Barrino, called Life Is Not a Fairytale. Starring as herself, Barrino reenacts the pre-Idol moment of her return to church. Unwed and pregnant, she enters the church during a Sunday service already in progress. Singing the hymn “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” she moans and cries her way down the aisle to the front of the sanctuary. There, she is gathered into the welcoming arms of her choir director mother and her pastor grandmother. There are also scenes such as the one in the 1989 NBC “telefilm” Polly: Comin’ Home!, which offer highly stylized, Alvin Ailey-like dance numbers to represent the passion and movement of the shouting black church. While beautiful and visually stimulating, such scenes lack the improvisational and individual quality of true shouts. Black men have also portrayed shouting black women from time to time, such as when Robert Guillaume, dressed in a black mourning dress and veil, preaches, jumps, and dances like a Sanctified woman in a storefront church, eulogizing himself as the character Fishbone in a guest appearance on the 1970’s situation comedy Good Times, or when Martin Lawrence, in his fat-suited role as Big Momma takes over a Sunday service in an incredibly athletic display, or when 48 comedian Ricky Smiley, donning fanciful church hats, impersonates shouting black women, most notably his grandmother, in his stage act. There are even popular culture images of shouting in which white men are the central shouting figures, such as in the comedically overstated, highly stylized scene in the movie Blues Brothers in which John Belushi, as Jake Blues, shouts upon experiencing an epiphany in a black church where James Brown is the pastor and Chaka Khan is the lead singer of the choir. There is Leap of Faith in which Steve Martin plays a fake faith healer named Jonas Nightingale, and The Apostle in which Robert Duvall plays a real one named Sonny. Most recently, Abe “Grandpa” Simpson takes a turn shouting in The Simpsons Movie, rolling on the floor of the First Church of Springfield, spouting unknown tongues-like utterances and yelling revelations from the heavens. These popular culture instances of shouting provide evidence that shouting is a highly citational act and suggest that shouters may even be becoming stock characters on the popular culture scene. In popular visual media, shouting serves mostly as comic relief; that much is clear. In more respectful moments, it serves to portray revivalist Christianity, black and white, as a mildly compelling anachronism—quaint, sometimes fascinating, but largely outmoded and lacking relevance to mainstream U.S. society. In the communities where it originates, however, what purposes does shouting serve? What deeper significances might shouting possess at the level of the spiritual, the physical, the historical, the social, and the cultural? 49 Spiritual Sensuality: The Black Woman’s Shout In this chapter, I will argue black women shouters have wreaked havoc on a set of geographical, social, and cultural binaries, abrading divisions between North and South, between slavery and emancipation, and between the African and the American. Principally, I will argue that black women shouters regularly call into question the binary of spirit and body. Among impoverished and struggling black populations, black spirituality and black sensuality have typically shared the body as conduit of desire, contact, and pleasure. Though essentially a spiritual phenomenon, the shout is expressed always and necessarily through the body, which means that there is a baseline sensuality in the shout that is always present and in effect. The shout within black women’s culture can be viewed therefore as the ultimate thesis in proof of the indivisibility of spirit and sense. Because this emphatic usage of the body simultaneously expresses the spiritual and the sensual, or the spiritual in terms of the sensual, I will refer to it as “sensual spirituality.” Black female sensual spirituality as a cultural modality stands in stark contrast to the compartmentalization of spirit and body found in traditional white culture. Whiteness scholar Richard Dyer offers useful elucidation of historical black and white mindsets regarding the place of the body in relation to the spiritual. Foregrounding in his classic study White the difference between “white spirit” and “black soul,” Dyer writes that many whites have often viewed blacks as more spiritual, as having “more soul” than whites. This notwithstanding, however admirable black spirituality and soul may be in the white mindset, they are no match 50 for white “spirit,” which Dyer translates as “get up and go, aspiration, awareness of the highest reaches of intellectual comprehension and aesthetic refinement” (23). This imaginative link between whiteness and immateriality explains why the “white spirit” is ever poised to “both master and transcend the white body,” shedding all corporeality as if at will, while the “non-white soul [is always and necessarily] prey to the promptings and fallibilities of the body” (23). It is, however, precisely this ultimate indivisibility of black body from black spirit which has lent itself to what many whites have perceived as spirituality deeper than what they possess. While white spirit is equal to white intellectualism and achievement regardless of and sometimes even minus the white body (imaginatively speaking), black soul, on the other hand, is black spirituality expressed through and not apart from the black body. It is important here not to dismiss “black soul” and “white spirit” as shallow essentialist notions which fail to take into account other racialized ontologies. Most people would agree that the “black cerebral” and the “white earthy” also exist as ontological modalities. However, the racial configurations which Dyer emphasizes are useful in that they do point to and prepare us to accept a fundamental historical difference in black and white approaches to the spiritual, particularly within Christianity. While white Christianity, according to Dyer, has focused on whites’ “closeness to the pure spirit that was made flesh in Jesus [and] their spirit of mastery over their and other bodies” (24, 25), black religions—both conjuring religions which were transported to the New World by enslaved Africans and black 51 evangelical Christianity—have tended to make use of the body as an instrument of the spiritual. In these worship communities, the body is not a thing to be “mastered,” but is rather a thing to be offered in contact with powers unseen yet announced through their effects upon the body. On Black Men and Other Christians Although this chapter is devoted to the black female shouter, I readily acknowledge that there are others who shout. Black men, for instance, do shout and dance—not in the portrayal of women for laughs, but as themselves, as part of their worship practice, which has been the case throughout history. A particularly captivating example of black male shouting is found in an audio-visual posting on the Youtube website. Entitled “Boy Shouting Hard,” the clip captures a young black man, perhaps in his thirties, in an actual church service, who dances passionately in the aisle. His feet move at a fantastic clip to the “shouting music” the musicians play, while his arms alternately cross in front of his body and jut out from his body in a wide scissors-like pattern. His “holy dance” is characterized by quick steps, intermittent dips caused by the bending of his knees, and the lateral and back-and-forth movement of his entire body. After a while, he leaves off dancing and launches into a one-legged hop that leads him up the aisle and nearly out of the sanctuary. As he passes the camera, he praises in an “unknown tongue” and claps his hands in what appears to be triumph. His face is contorted in what can only be described as joyous agony. As he comes back down the aisle, his one-legged hop gives way to a run, which soon turns him around and leads him up the aisle again. 52 What is amazing is how oblivious the shouter seems to everyone and everything else around him throughout his ecstasy. He pays no attention to the minister in the background or to the consuming gaze of the other congregants. He is what some contemporary black churchgoers simply call “in,” a term which describes a state of pronounced engagement with the Divine which sometimes partially and sometimes wholly eclipses all but the Divine. This contemporary young black man is one in a long line of shouting black men, such as the following black preacher and former slave, whose experience with the ecstasy of black worship is referenced by black religion scholar Albert J. Raboteau in the classic work Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, first published in 1978: The old meeting house caught fire. The [S]pirit was there. Every heart was beating in unison as we turned our minds to God to tell Him of our sorrows here below. God saw our need and came to us. I used to wonder what made people shout but now I don’t. There is a joy on the inside and it wells up so strong that we can’t keep still. It is fire in the bones. Any time that fire touches a man, he will jump. (64) Another black male shouter was witnessed by father of American landscaping and one-time journalist, Frederick Law Olmsted: As soon as I had taken my seat, my attention was attracted by an old negro near me, whom I supposed for some time to be suffering with a nervous complaint; he trembled, his teeth chattered, and his face, at intervals, was convulsed. He soon began to respond aloud to the sentiments of the preacher, in such words as these: “Oh, yes!...” ( Raboteau 61) 53 Zora Neale Hurston recorded her observation of two male shouters in the South of the late 1920’s: (11) During sermon. Man quietly weeping: nineteen seconds. Cried “Lawd! My soul is burning with the hallow-ed fire!” Rises and turns round and round six times. Carried outside by deacons. (12) During sermon. Man jumping wildly up and down flat- footed crying “Hallelujah!”: twenty-two seconds. Pulled back into his seat. Muscular twitching: one minute thirty- five seconds. Quiet weeping: one minute. Perfect calm. (93, 94) Men undoubtedly do shout and have done so from the inception of black ecstatic worship on the North American continent. I believe, however, that black women shouters play an especially significant role in that they call heightened attention to, and thereby intensify, the sensuality of the moment in which the shout goes forth. Perhaps this is so for the same reason that bouncing, gyrating girls in music videos are so attractive to the eye whatever the personal politics of the viewer regarding such unapologetic exploitation of female sexuality. There can be great pleasure in witnessing the female body in motion. I also acknowledge the fact that there are whites, both male and female, who shout—not as actors in Hollywood films, but as members of worshipping Christian communities. It seems that the first whites who practiced shouting in the antebellum South may have adopted the practice from watching slaves in worship. Methodist minister John Watson produced an 1819 diatribe against black worship practices and their growing influence on whites: “The evil [of the manner in which 54 blacks worship] is only occasionally condemned and the example has already visibly affected the religious manners of some whites” (Raboteau 67). For Watson, if the black “evil” could not be completely eradicated as he wished, it should at the very least have been contained, so as to keep whites free of its apparent savagery. Watson’s wish for containment of black “religious manners” might have been considered naïve given the relative intimacy of the living situations of whites and blacks in the North American South and their mutual attraction to evangelical Christianity. Frederick Morgan Davenport, author of Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals (1910), devotes two chapters to the analysis of white ecstatic behavior in revivalist meetings. In one chapter, he examines Kentuckians in revival in 1800; in the other, his focus is worshippers in North Ireland’s Ulster County in 1859. Morgan’s observations inspired Melville J. Herskovits to note that the behavior of the white Kentuckians bore similarities to the African “tradition of violent possession,” which was therefore “reason to hold that, in part at least, it was inspired in the [American] whites by…contact with Negroes” (Raboteau 60). It appears that some whites found the power evoked in black worship services to be surprisingly contagious. Olmsted wrote of his own experience in that same black church in Louisiana: Sometimes the outcries and responses were not confined to ejaculations of [“Oh, yes!” and the like], but shouts, and groans, terrific shrieks, and indescribable expressions of ecstasy—of pleasure or agony—and even stamping, jumping, and clapping of hands were added…I was once surprised to find my own muscles all stretched, as if ready for a struggle—my face glowing, and my feet stamping—having been infected unconsciously…. (Raboteau 62) 55 White religious ecstasy has continued into the present day and experienced notable resurgence in the middle and late twentieth century. Matt Wray, in “White Trash Religion,” writes about the young counterculture whites who embraced Christianity in the sixties and seventies: More recently, the 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the rise of the “Jesus People,” a.k.a. “Jesus Freaks” and “born- agains,” those hordes of counterculture youth who dropped out, turned on, and tuned in to Christianity, becoming born- again hippies, bringing to Christianity some aspects of the radical anti-establishment subcultures from which they arose. The Jesus People forsook acid and other mind-altering drugs in favor of the bread and wine of Christian communion and the ecstasies of charismatic worship. (195) This chapter is therefore not a denial of the shouting practices of others—black men, or whites, or any other shouting community, such as those Spanish-speaking communities within the Pentecostal faith, for example. Rather, it is a close examination of the practice among black U.S. women, exploring both its meaning and function for them as “spiritual sensuality” and an ongoing connection to both Southern and African cultures. Into the Black Sacred The particular cultural and historical origins of black Christianity must be thoughtfully considered in any account of black church culture. The religious worldview of black Christians, which C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, authors of The Black Church in the African American Experience, call the “black sacred cosmos,” is inextricably tied to an “African heritage which envisaged the whole universe as sacred, and to [blacks’] conversion to Christianity during slavery 56 and its aftermath” (2). Raboteau offers key insights into this African heritage, particularly its inherent “openness,” which is principally responsible for its survival in the New World. Beginning Slave Religion with a succinct overview of the ways in which the Atlantic slave trade destroyed the “political, social, and cultural systems that had ordered” the existences of enslaved Africans, he names slavery’s systematic disruption and destruction of “family [and] kinship ties” as its “most brutal” aspect. Such biological and cultural ties among the enslaved were considered particularly dangerous by slave traffickers, as they held the potential to aid the captured Africans in achieving the unification necessary for large-scale rebellion (4). Despite slavery’s physical, cultural, and existential assault on African people, their beliefs and customs did not wholly wither, as has been argued in the past by some. Rather they survived in numerous folkloric, musical, linguistic, and religious remnants which the enslaved Africans passed on to their children. Rabouteau makes plain that the surviving African cultural modalities were not “preserved as static ‘Africanisms’ or as archaic ‘retentions,’” but rather “as living traditions putting down new roots in new soil, bearing new fruit as unique hybrids of American origin.” Lincoln and Mamiya agree, writing that “black people created their own unique and distinctive forms of culture and worldviews as parallels rather than replications of the culture in which they were involuntary guests” (2). Of the surviving African cultural modalities Raboteau catalogues, African religion has certainly been one of the most long-lived in black New World cultures. 57 He elucidates: African styles of worship, forms of ritual, systems of belief, and fundamental perspectives have remained vital on this side of the Atlantic, not because they were preserved in a “pure” orthodoxy but because they were transformed. Adaptability, based upon respect for spiritual power wherever it originated, accounted for the openness of African religions to syncretism with other religious traditions and for the continuity of a distinctively African religious consciousness. (4, 5) One “African style of worship,” which I will call the “black ecstatic,” survived the bleakness of the Middle Passage, slavery, and post-slavery oppressions. Having thrived on Caribbean, North American, and South American shores, the black ecstatic tradition clearly shapes the religious worship of diasporic blacks to this day. The Two Sisters: Spirit Possession and Shouting Playing an integral role in the “liturgy of West African peoples” and their New World descendants, “ecstatic behavior in the form of spirit possession” typically occurs with aid from drummers who play the “rhythms of the gods” and from the congregants who “sing [the gods’] songs.” This communal, highly rhythmic music in honor of the gods helps to produce an atmosphere which invites the gods to “come down and ‘ride’ their devotees in states of possession.” While possessed, or taken over by the god in visitation, congregants assume the “personality of the god, dancing his steps, speaking his words, bearing his emblems, acting out his character in facial expression and bodily gesture.” New World West 58 African-derived spirit possession has historically been practiced in South America and the Caribbean (Raboteau 59). Within the U.S., the worship of some blacks in parts of Louisiana and other parts of the South—particularly where the prevailing religion among blacks was a combination of European Catholicism and African voodoo—has also included spirit possession, but spirit possession on the North American continent has been largely atypical. Attendant with the conversion of many Africans and their children to Christianity beginning in the 1700’s, black ecstatic religious behavior in the U.S. became commonly known as shouting. As earlier described in the observer accounts, shouting can be marked by loud vocal expression, handclapping, dancing, and other bodily movements (59). Certain obvious similarities between New World spirit possession and black North American shouting have prompted many to see them as one and the same phenomenon, their distinctions thought to be marked only superficially by appellation and geographical accident. This view is fundamentally erroneous. Despite their shared West African origins and other similarities, possession and shouting differ vastly from one another in essence and meaning. It is true that both spirit possession and shouting take place within the black communal worship experience, that rhythm—musical or spoken—induces the possessed or shouting state, and that the human body is believed to be brought into contact with, and to become the expressive vehicle for, unseen persons of spiritual origins. 59 However, as Raboteau points out, there are differences which mark crucial discontinuities between the two ecstatic traditions. He writes that “[o]n the level of theological interpretation and meaning, African spirit possession differs significantly from the shouting experience found in American evangelicalism” (63). Principally, unlike the participants in shouting’s New World sister tradition, “slaves and their descendants were not possessed by the gods of their fathers.” Rather, in shouting, “slaves and ex-slaves sought and welcomed the presence of the [Holy] Spirit, which moved worshipers to shout and dance…during…services” (61). For further distinction between the two, Raboteau uses the work of anthropologist Erika Bourguignon who identified contrasts between Haitian vaudouists and Spiritual Baptists from St. Vincent in the Caribbean. She pointed to the vaudouists’ impersonation of “specific, well-delineated anthropomorphic entities, with complex personalities and a great range of possible activities” including singing, dancing, smoking, eating, tree climbing, and diving into water. The Baptists, however, while in shouting state, did not embody any gods nor did they engage in activities not directly related to worship. Bourguignon also noted that the vaudouists were often drawn outward during possession, becoming involved with others, whether with the spirits in possession of other humans or with other humans. This sociality was found to contrast with the shouting state of the St. Vincent Baptists, who were “drawn inward,” away from others “to [their] interaction with the Spirit.” Nelson found “withdrawal of consciousness” among contemporary black shouters to be an enduring marker of the “genuine shout,” and 60 highlights its usefulness to shouting communities as the means by which shouts are often authenticated (6). The contrasts between New World spirit possession and North American shouting make clear that despite their shared origins and some superficial similarities, there exists explicit “discontinuity” between the two practices (Raboteau 63, 64). In more recent work, black theologian Will Coleman has adopted a similar approach of linking black African and black North American worship traditions while acknowledging their differences. In “‘Amen’ and ‘Ashe’: African American Protestant Worship and its West African Ancestor,” Coleman, like Raboteau and Lincoln and Mamiya, emphasizes the importance of the “sacred cosmology” which enslaved Africans from the West African nations of Dahomey, Yoruba, Ibo lands, and the Congo brought with them to the Americas. Coleman makes a direct connection between black Protestantism and the West African Yoruba religion, and performs a one-to-one ratio comparison between the two liturgies. However, he concludes the piece by remarking on their distinctions: The relationship [between West African and African American religions] might be described as one of “theological distance, liturgical kinship.” The theological distance may be typified by the way in which participants in the representative liturgies would not recognize the similarities between them. In those instances where they might acknowledge the same, there would still remain the challenge of affirming a strong kinship in the face of doctrinal differences. (3) Rhythm as the Portal to Black Transcendence There are reports of blacks shouting in revivalist camp meetings in the U.S. dating back as far as the late 1700’s. For example, in 1790, it was noted by one 61 white observer that Virginia slaves were much more vocally expressive than whites during the sermon, and were “more subject to bodily exercise,” which grew “extravagant” when met with “an encouragement.” While antebellum blacks and some whites commonly participated in forms of ecstatic worship, the slaves’ “special responsiveness” to religious services was remarked upon by many whites. The “poor slaves,” as it appeared to another observer, welcomed the camp meetings with “unmixed delight.” In the early 1800’s, a white Georgian preacher recorded the events of a recent revival, which on the first day was marked by a “gentle and comfortable moving of the spirit of the Lord,” a moving which grew “much more powerful” during the extended night service. Before dawn, however, the white attendees “retired,” but the “black people” continued to worship into the coming day (Raboteau 61). What was so seemingly attractive to the slaves about the revivals and the regular slave services, as well? What was the cause for their apparent “unmixed delight” in worship? There were many causes, of course; the response to worship is a deeply personal and complex one for individuals in any population. However, one reason behind the slaves’ great enjoyment of worship was undoubtedly its significance as an opportunity for them to engage in their own, decidedly African cultural expressions-- namely dance, song, ecstasy, and the all-important rhythm which “based” or undergirded them all. Raboteau explains that the “bodily exercises,” for example, described by the observer of the Virginia slaves can be attributed to the retention among the slaves of 62 expressing “religious emotion in certain patterned types of bodily movement influenced by the African heritage of dance” (61). In addition to engaging in individual ecstasies of dance, slaves often engaged in an elaborate, communal form of dance called the “ring shout.” Also called “running sperichils” (71) or “praying and singing bands” (Harris 3), the ring shout took place with the congregants standing in a circle. It was characterized by “circular movement, shuffling steps and stamping, postures and gestures.” Some slave communities used ring shouts as a vehicle of communal prayer; others used them for mourning the dead. Well- traveled observers noted the similarities between the American ring shout and other circular, communal ecstasies in West Africa, Haiti, and Jamaica. The following description of a ring shout comes from historian and musicologist W.F. Allen: Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together…But the benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young men and women…boys…young girls barefooted, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the “sperichil’ is struck, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But most frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to ‘base’ the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance alike are extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house….It is not unlikely that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some African dance. (Raboteau 71) 63 Like their religious dancing, the distinct singing of the slaves was also African-derived. Distinguished by “call and response, polyrhythms, syncopations, ornamentation, slides from one note to another, and repetition,” the African style in which the slaves sang, much like later traditional black church hymns and moans, “could not be reduced to musical notations, which explains why printed versions do not capture the peculiar flavor of the slave songs” (74). These slave songs, widely known as “spirituals,” were quite a varied repertoire, encompassing both the “exciting tempo and rhythmic stamp of the shout [and] the slow, drawn-out ‘sorrow songs,” and some styles in between. Influenced by Biblical images and themes and white “sacred and secular songs,” spirituals combined African vocal techniques with “praise of the Christian God,” and thus became a site of convergence for “African style and European hymnody” (74). Such singing continually arrested the attention of many white listeners, whose frequent response was to describe the singing as wild and barbaric, although less repulsed listeners used phrases such as “strangely fascinating” and marked its “peculiar quality” (74). Songs were regularly used in black worship and were fundamentally instrumental in the shout because of the rhythm contained in them. Among the African cultural expressions kept alive in the worship of the slaves, rhythm was paramount. Rhythm formed the basis of the slaves’ dancing, singing, preaching, and shouting; for these African and African-influenced peoples, nearly all communal religious expression hinged on rhythm. 64 White North American slaveholders very early on began to suspect and distrust tribal drumming because of its great value to the enslaved Africans. Unlike their South and Latin American counterparts, U.S. slaveholders, fearing widespread slave rebellion planned and executed through drummed messages, almost universally banned drumming among the slaves. To fill the void created by the lack of drumming, North American slaves began to place great emphasis on “hand- clapping, foot-tapping, rhythmic preaching, hyperventilation, antiphonal (call and response) singing, and dancing” (64, 65). African drumming, therefore, did not disappear on the North American continent; it actually expanded, splintering off into many surrogate rhythm-keeping forms. To wit, as drumming moved from a literal medium to figurative media, it became a multi-faceted mechanism in the cultural and religious expressions of slaves. Their engagement with multi-layered rhythm was fundamental to shouting, as the “patterns of motor behavior preceding…the ecstatic experience” (64, 65) induced the shout. Moving, clapping, rocking, stomping, singing, and talking to some kind rhythm were almost always antecedents to shouting. Rhythm—whether spoken, clapped, stomped, or sung—acted for these displaced Africans as a gateway to contact with the Transcendent. Such contact, according Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto, is characteristically “mysterious, terrifying, and fascinating” (Lincoln and Mamiya 2). 65 Shouting in the Twentieth Century The cultural and religious practice of shouting became a legacy transmitted from one generation to the next, crossing over into the twentieth century. In her anthropological studies on the Southern black church in the late 1920’s, Zora Neale Hurston found remarkable continuities between the shouting of slaves decades earlier and its expression among twentieth century Southern blacks. The distinct African quality of shouting had remained intact, prompting Hurston to write, like so many observers before her, “There can be little doubt that shouting is a survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods.” She also reinscribes the essential relationship of rhythm to the shout, explaining the shout as an “emotional explosion responsive to rhythm” of various types (91). Much like W.F. Allen in his description of the ring shout, Hurston describes the way shouting can be simultaneously individual and communal: Shouting is a community thing. It thrives in concert. It is the first shout that is difficult for the preacher to arouse. After that one they are likely to sweep like fire over the church. . . .It is absolutely individualistic. While there are general types of shouting, the shouter may mix the different styles to his liking, or he may express himself in some fashion never seen before. (92) Hurston also captures the great physicality of the shout: Sometimes the arms are swung with such violence that others are knocked down. Sometimes in the ecstasy the shouter climbs upon the pew and kicks violently away at all; sometimes in catalepsis he falls heavily upon the floor . . . .The silent type take with violent retching and twisting motions. Sometimes they remain seated, sometimes they jump up and down and fling the body about with great violence. Lips pursed, eyes closed. The seizure ends by 66 collapse. The vocal type is the more frequent. There are all gradations from quiet weeping while seated, to the unrestrained screaming while leaping pews and running up and down the aisle. Some, unless retrained, run up into the pulpit and embrace the preacher. Some are taken with hysterical laughing spells. (92) Hurston, like her anthropological forebears, found that in the shout, there is manifested in, through and upon the body the workings of an Influence black Christians have identified since slavery as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is typically recognized among Christians as the third “Person” of a triune God. Though unseen, the “Spirit,” or the “Holy Ghost” as some prefer to call this Divine Person, must be said to play heavily upon the human senses to evoke such responses as violent swinging of the arms, twitching, running, dancing, laughing, and crying out in people who are otherwise well. A popular gospel vamp proclaims shouting as a total-body experience, declaring, “I can feel Him in my hands/Feel Him in my feet/Feel Him all over me.” Shouting therefore exists as a dynamic representation of the physical in communion with the Metaphysical and the natural in intimate encounter with the Supernatural. In How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous World Singers, Willa Ward, Clara Ward’s elder sister, remembers witnessing shouting in the Philadelphia churches of her childhood in the twenties and thirties. She recalls chiefly the power of the shout to transform the shouters from sorrowful women of heavy burdens and broken bodies to graceful dancers who moved with power and ease: 67 By the time the choir got really involved in one song or another, bodies in the pews would be jerking, skipping, clapping, fainting, shouting—just plain transformed by the spirit. Two things always amazed me: first, how some of those who had barely been able to hobble in to church now had some of the best and most vigorous steps; second, how the women kept their hats on. (21) The music of the black gospel church of the twentieth century would carry the shout and the manifestation of the Spirit which produced it into larger and larger venues in gospel concerts and performances. The effect was often what Anthony Heilbut, author of The Gospel Sound, calls in various places “scarifying”: For those who saw them, the greatest gospel performances became moments that could haunt or even change their lives forever….One didn’t have to be saved to be haunted by the sheer generosity, vocal, emotional, and physical, of those gospel moments. All the great soul singers grew up trying to equal them. But where are the young artists with heart and soul great enough to shout hundreds of people at one time? Even in the forties, many singers were scared to “move out that deep. When the spirit got too high, some of us would run away from it.” Those who moved on while people screamed and hollered and fainted—and in a few instances died—were simply the most powerful performers in the country. (xxxi) This depiction of shouting or rather the Spirit behind it as absolutely overwhelming at times, even to those who had helped invoke Him, exemplifies Otto’s classification of experience with the Divine as “terrifying.” Such moments mark for believers the Holy Spirit’s reality, divinity, sovereignty, and awesome power, which is never to be played with. For this reason, church-going mothers have historically warned their children never to “play church” or fake a shout, which 68 could stir the ire of a Holy God Who had the might to cut off the blessing of life. Gospel singer Bessie Griffin remembered such a warning from the cousin who raised her: “She’d tell me shouting’s [alright], but when you shout make sure you’re not playing, because if you’re not sincere, you might break your neck. Do [only] what the Spirit of God leads you to do” (Heilbut 134, 135). Shouting as Feminine Disruption, Public Sensuality, and Visual and Sonic Pleasure I. Feminine Disruption: “No More Order!” Hurston highlights crucial gender dimensions with regard to shouting which must be brought to bear on this discussion of the spiritual and the sensual. Despite her tendency to attach masculine pronouns to the “shouter,” Hurston makes plain that “women shout more frequently than men.” This she attributes to women’s greater emotionality (92). Of the twelve subjects in her anthropological descriptions of shouting events, only two are men. Hurston documents the female shouters as crying out, screaming, scrambling or falling backwards over pews, jumping, running, making “ferocious faces,” going stiff, violently shaking, and collapsing into others’ arms (92, 93). Although culturally codified and understood—even expected and welcomed—within the church community, the shout functions as a disruption none the less. The faces, bodies, and voices of shouting black women work to disrupt the flow of the service as business as usual, marking the assertion of a distinctly female presence into the overwhelmingly masculine narrative of the worship. Anyone who has ever been to a shouting church can attest: a shout takes time and attention, and 69 has the power to change completely the planned course of a service. A shout can bring things to a grinding halt, suspend routine and deeply trouble the efficient transition from one event to the next as listed on the program. Ministers have been known to utterly abandon their plans to preach, not daring to “[s]quench the Spirit” Who has taken over the service. Regarding such moments, black worshippers—most often women and gay men--often proclaim in retrospect, “Baby, there was no more order!” This disruption of order, or business-as-usual recalls Moten’s shriek, a passionate and primal “phono-photo-porno-graphic” rupturer of those contexts which are based upon female participation but which often ignore female interiority. II. Shouting as Black Female Public Sensuality Many observers, including those within the church, have noted the shout’s resemblance to sexual ecstasy—particularly in women shouters. This is not to suggest that shouting is “sexual” in the way that the human sex act is “sexual.” On the contrary, shouting for most is a sensual experience that is far more consuming than sex, primarily because the Person with Whom shouters interact is thought to be wholly Spirit and not matter. As such, His purposes can be said to be spiritual and not biological. The pleasures of shouting, however, are often expressed through the sounds, movements, and facial expressions commonly associated with sex. Some women shouters, overwhelmed by the experience, close their eyes and moan. Some unconsciously hug themselves around the waist, or bend over the pew in front of them, rubbing their own shoulders, or bellies, or thighs. Some roll about on the 70 floor, shouting or moaning, “Ooh, Jesus!” Some whisper His Name, as in closest intimacy to a lover. Some parade back and forth, their faces uplifted, their eyes turned heavenward in rapture. Some dance with abandon before the altar or in the aisles before collapsing, spent, to the floor. Asked to describe the experience which led them to behave in such a manner, most can speak only in the vaguest terms: “He blessed me,” or “It felt good.” A gospel song declares simply but provocatively, “I feel good, good, good…Something ‘bout singing for my Jesus makes me feel good.” Only the very boldest will openly compare the ecstasies of contact with the Holy Himself to the pleasure of the sex act. In fact, most will aver that the two exist in entirely different spheres and are wholly unrelated. A paltry few, however, will confess the likeness in confidence to the least judgmental, most liberated of their Christian friends. It is worth noting that many Christian black girls growing up in shouting churches have their first shouting experience around the time of their first sexual stirrings in pubescence or in the late stages of pre-pubescence. It cannot be accidental that for many young women, the first shout coincides with their burgeoning awareness of themselves as sexual beings. The very first of Rudolf Otto’s classic descriptions of human responses to encounter with the Divine is “mystery.” It could very well be that as some young women approach or experience the mystery of sexual maturation, some become ready to engage the Divine as the Mystery of all mysteries on a heightened level of experience; some may even do so in effort to counteract new feelings of a sexual and therefore exciting but troubling nature. 71 A literary instance of the simultaneity of sexual maturation and shouting takes place within Hurston’s 1948 novel Seraph on the Suwanee, through the white Baptist heroine Arvay Henson, who, as I argue elsewhere in this project, is a characterological stand-in, or “proxy” for the black female character Hurston could not use at the time: For the last three years, Arvay had been having hysterical seizures, classified in the local language as “having fits.” Sometimes they came upon her in church right after the sermon, but more often she was took down right after she got home from the service, and usually when some extra brash gallant had forced himself upon her to the extent of seeing her home. (6) The temporal proximity of Arvay’s “fits” to religious activities such as church attendance and to attempts by local young men to court her is telling of that decidedly sensual aspect of shouting which may perhaps have to be “sorted out” before a young woman can experience shouting within a more spiritual context, wherein the pleasure of the senses is experienced as a direct result of interaction with the Holy, and not of desire for, or protest against, physical intimacy. While some black Christian women have been known to shout alone at home—such occasions revealed most often in humorous but poignant stories to their friends--most shouting takes place in church, in the presence of others. Shouting is largely a public act. The fact that it is also overwhelmingly sensual—even to the point of seeming sexual at times--argues for black women’s public, and yet largely unspoken, embrace of a unifying force which brings spirit and sense into intimate relationship. Through shouting, a highly physical act, black women make a case 72 against traditional Western conceptions of corporeality as anti-spiritual; they posit instead that there is ultimately no divisibility of spirit from body, while the body lives. Black women shouters also prove, in antithesis to the gender bias which has so often shaped sexual hierarchy within the church, that the distinctly feminine as represented by the female body is regularly deemed worthy enough by the Divine Himself to experience divine visitation. This is a critical statement which bears repeating through the iterational act of shouting because Western “Christian mythology [has] depicted woman as the source of sin and evil; racist-sexist mythology” in its turn “simply designated black women the epitome of female evil and sinfulness” (hooks 85). In “Erotic Justice: Authority, Resistance, and Transformation,” womanist theologian Katie G. Cannon presses the point, writing: Black women's bodies have been degraded, demeaned, demonized, and locked into an oppressive gaze of so-called normative beauty created in opposition to us. Black women, in turn, have been taught (and far too many of us continue to teach) that we must suppress, repress, compress, and depress the sexual aspect of our humanity, by reinforcing norms and practices that proclaim pro-creational sex as a gift from God and relational or recreational sex as the devil's handiwork. The black church community tends to confine women's sexuality to a centralized abstract, Puritanical condemnation, instead of applying, appealing to, or earnestly making a case for scripture as an authoritative source regarding these matters. (2) Furthermore, because black women have been targets of a historical association in white racist mythology with the hypersexual and with the bodily disease often associated with hypersexuality, shouting black women revel in their basic holiness and physical and moral purity before God. Shouting unravels sexist 73 and racist mythologies, declaring loudly that the Divine is in fact pleased with and desires communion with the black feminine. Especially ironic is that many black women shouters more than likely would not articulate shouting in these terms. Having absorbed traditional Pauline and patriarchal teachings all their lives, as Cannon points out, some would prefer to submit to a traditional Western worldview which holds body separate from spirit, as well as to the patriarchal bias which oppresses them in the church. Black feminist theologian Jacquelyn Grant has spoken out against sexist ideologies within the black church which have been used to consign black women to ministries of “service” and not leadership. In one of her early essays, Grant wrote: It is often said that women are the “backbone” of the church. On the surface this may appear to be a compliment, especially when one considers the function of the backbone in the human anatomy….In any case, the telling portion of the word backbone is “back.” It has become apparent to me that most of the ministers who use this term have reference to location rather than function. What they really mean is that women are in the “background” and should be kept there. (325) The truth is that black women, even in the church, “are often most victimized by the very sexism [they] refuse to collectively identify an oppressive force” (hooks 81). Though underacknowledged and heavily suppressed, even among black women themselves, black women’s persistent and largely unbroken continuum of sense and spirit is clearly a remnant of black Americans’ West African heritage. In the cultures of West Africa, and in many other non-Western cultures, the proximity of the bodily to the spiritual is much closer than in Western cultures. In a sacred cosmos in which the entire universe is seen as bearing relation to the holy, there is 74 little need for the pointed distinction between flesh and spirit on which Western Pauline Christianity builds its case. The view that the dancing and shouting of slaves were foreign and therefore “barbaric,” as well as inherently “sinful” was always first articulated by non- shouting white Others, not by the slaves whose natural cultural impulse was to worship in dance. These observers often sought to ban such black religious expression altogether, objecting to the blatant use of the body in what was supposed to have been worship, a matter of spirit. White mandates against black dancing actually influenced the alteration of black religious movement in some Southern locales. To avoid being cited and punished for dancing, Christian slaves created a “sacralized” system of rhythmic movements wherein their feet were barely lifted from the floor. This introduced the widespread use of shuffling into black religious and other dancing (Raboteau 66). Some shouts and secular dances still pronouncedly involve this shuffling of the feet. Unfortunately, strains of this restrictive influence mark the response of some to shouting and dancing in the black church today. There are those who possess a staunchly Western attitude, considering shouting and dancing heathenish, vulgar, and sinful, and therefore will not worship in shouting churches. There are those who will shout using vocal and other bodily expressions such as lifting the arms, clapping and waving the hands, patting the feet, and falling prostrate, but will not dance. There are those who will in fact dance and shout in church, but only in church; all other dancing is thought to be sinful and “worldly.” 75 III. Shouting as Spectacular and Sonic Pleasure Consideration of the public act of shouting as spectacle augments the discussion by incorporating the larger faith community of which the shouter is a crucial part. As I have mentioned, shouters are very closely observed by all within the church community, a fact which confirms Otto’s classification of encounter with the Divine as “fascinating.” Ushers and other attendants stand at the ready to assist the shouter—removing eyeglasses lest they be flung off the face and broken; rescuing beleaguered babes-in-arms from shouting mothers, grandmothers, and aunts; covering the legs of prostrate shouters with special cloths designated for the purpose; blocking stairs, windows, doors, and pews to keep the ecstatic shouter safe; fanning lest the shouter overheat. Other congregants look on and sometimes laughingly call encouragement to the shouter. “Praise Him!” is a common exhortation spoken by witnesses, used to urge would-be shouters to “go in,” or to “go forth,” as the case may be. Some watch for the moment when the shouter approaches her “breakthrough,” which can be understood as a moment of special grace manifesting in the shouter as a heightened sense of spiritual understanding, power, or liberty, joy, or the gift of tongues. At such times, respected elders of the church—usually older women called “Mothers,” and sometimes her peers called “sisters in the Lord”--will gather close around the shouter, laying hands on her. Sometimes they speak encouragement: “That’s right; praise Him,” “Come on, come on, come on.” Sometimes they model praise: “Thank You, Jesus,” “Hallelujah,” “Bless You, 76 Lord.” Sometimes they speak in tongues themselves, as if to coax the novice into her first utterances by faith in the unknown language. While “playing church,” or fake shouting, in church is strictly forbidden throughout black Christian culture, in less solemn moments, members of the church community, having been watching the shouting activity very closely, mimic the shouts of their intimates in jest after services—often to great hilarity. Members of church communities mark shared remembrances by who shouted, when, and how. Even young toddlers and preschoolers can be called upon to reproduce the distinct shouts of certain church members. The conspicuousness of the shout gives reason to consider it as spectacle which may be said to contain pleasure for both the shouter and those who gaze upon the shouter. Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” discusses “scopophilia” as a phenomenon encompassing “circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at” (587). In the moment in which a shout goes forth, those shouters who are aware of being watched—not all are--and their gazers may enter into mutual pleasure stemming from being watched and from watching. For those who gaze upon the shouter in her ecstasy, the pleasure can be based upon two distinct “pleasurable structures”: The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of…stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. (589) 77 This may explain why in highly charged church moments, shouts become highly communicable, spreading quickly through the church at large—“thriving in concert,” as Hurston phrases it. Viewing the ecstasy of a particular shouter can be understood as stimulating in the viewer both a feeling of pleasure and a sense of identification with the shouter “based on a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings…” (588). Susceptible congregants who then begin to shout themselves can be understood as doing so in the throes of a type of religious “mirror phase.” Jacques Lacan explained the mirror phase as the period in infancy “crucial to the constitution of the ego” in which “a child recognizes its own image in the mirror” (588). Looking upon another in worship ecstasy reinforces one’s own standing as an ego with relation to the Holy, and as a person possessing an independent ability to interact with the Holy. The desire to engage that independent ability is stirred strongly by the visual pleasure which comes from watching another in the ecstasy of such interaction. The pleasure for the shouter who remains conscious at some level of her environment, along with the overshadowing ecstasies attendant with encountering the Holy, might be located not only in being watched but also in having instigated the identification and stimulation in her fellow congregants who have followed her into the shouting state. 78 For the modality of shouting, I will also add to the scopophilic a “sonophilic” component wherein the sounds of ecstasy coming from a shouter can also induce the necessary stimulation and identification, leading to rapturous experiences for the listener who then becomes a shouter. The pleasure of shouting’s sonophilic aspect lie in the shouter’s being heard—overheard in fact—and in the listener’s hearing. Shouting in the Northern Church The Great Migration is the well-documented twentieth-century exodus of blacks out of Southern states into Northern cities. Although the Migration tends to be studied in segments or shifts which focus on its early period or its second wave for instance, viewed broadly in its fullest spectrum, the Great Migration occurred over a lengthy sixty years. The North by South/Great Migrations website reports that “between the years 1900 and 1960, over 4,809,000 African-Americans fled the South's oppressive conditions.” A handful of cities proved to be popular choices among the Migrants as the “vast majority…settled in Northern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York.” Black migration was always greatest during times of war because the “loss of labor due to military enlistment” opened doors of opportunity among working-class blacks in the industrial North. One Northern institution which was directly affected by the swelling numbers of black newcomers was the black Christian church. Although it had been previously believed that the Migrants tended towards small storefront churches 79 because of the tendency of these churches to preserve the “old ways” of the Southern churches Migrants had left behind, Michael W. Harris, author of The Rise of Gospel Blues, has found that “the actual movement of migrants to storefront churches was not [so] predictable.” The assumption behind this thought is that all black Southerners had previously belonged to small, “earthy” storefront-like churches in the South, which is untrue. Harris reports that in black Chicago, from 1916 well into the 1930’s, churches of all sizes “enjoyed increased memberships attributable to the influx of migrants,” as “migrants were likely to prefer worship similar to that found in their former churches.” This fact announces the diversity among black churches in the South. Depending upon a complicated mixture of the Migrants’ need for familiarity and what the move North meant to them personally, some found new church homes in the “large old-line congregations that formed the original core group of Baptist and Methodist churches,” and some others gravitated towards the smaller storefronts (118). Importantly, some avoided church altogether. Harris writes that for some Migrants, the “move north marked the deliberate rejection of their southern culture,” which “[i]n some cases…included the forsaking of church in general” (119). Studies during this period on the churchgoing trends among black “‘lower-class’ persons” revealed that far fewer Migrants who felt social pressure to claim church affiliation actually belonged to churches. Harris defines “lower-class” as a double- voiced classification, used firstly as a broad pejorative for “recent migrants,” and secondly as one for “those maladjusted for urban living.” Harris’ mention of non- 80 churchgoing blacks calls attention once more to the fact that the “religious ideology of migrants was…not monolithic” (119), a reality which necessitates making certain further distinctions among churchgoing blacks, as well. Over the 60 years of the Great Migration and even in the years preceding it, the black Christian church, although usually referenced in “sociological and theological shorthand” as “the black church,” was actually quite a diverse body, as it is today. The “black church” properly applied is a qualified term, according to Lincoln and Mamiya, “limited to those independent, historic, and totally black controlled denominations which were founded after the Free African Society of 1787 and which constituted the core of black Christians.” There are of course black Christians who worship outside of the black church; there are black Episcopalians, Catholics, and Charismatics, for example. Today, however, the overwhelming majority of black Christians worship with the seven major denominations of the black church, which fall into three main “communions”—Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal. Eighty percent of all black Christians belong to these communions, with another six percent affiliated with smaller communions (Lincoln and Mamiya 1). Crucially, even among these denominations and communions, there are important distinctions. There are the “traditional” or “old-line” congregations like the ones Harris mentions and the “contemporary” ones, marked by certain revisionistic tendencies in ideology and practice which their traditional counterparts do not embrace. There are the hard-line, single-focus denominationalists or 81 communionists, and the churches which combine the theological approaches and the worship practices of two or more communions or denominations. There are earthy black churches and high-toned ones. There are the gospel churches and the hymnal book churches. There are the noisy churches and the contemplative churches. The black church is also very much a race- and class-conscious institution. Black churches have always been shaped by the educational, professional, and economic achievements of their pastors and members. Such distinctions have long driven differing church tastes, beliefs, and practices. Harris explains, for example, the way in which some Northern black ministers “were encouraged to adopt white cultural values while being trained in southern black colleges…[and] transmitted these values to members of their congregations” (119). Accordingly, some churches have clung fast to their black Southern roots while some others have derided such cultural and social ties as links to a degraded, ignorant, poverty-stricken past. In close conjunction with the prevailing attitude in a church towards Southern folkways, another major distinction has diversified black churches in the North, as relates to ties to the South: shouting churches and non- shouting churches. Black Northern disapproval of shouting has been documented from shortly after Emancipation. Ohio-based African Methodist Episcopal minister Daniel Alexander Payne (1811-1893), a professor at Wilberforce University, looked upon shouting with great disdain, as is evident in his response to witnessing a ring shout: …I attended a “bush meeting,” where I went to please the pastor whose circuit I was visiting. After the sermon they 82 formed a ring, and with their coats off [,] sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way. I requested the pastor to go and stop their dancing. At his request they stopped their dancing and clapping of hands, but remained singing and rocking their bodies to and fro. This they did for about fifteen minutes. I then went, and taking their leader by the arm [,] requested him to desist and sit down and sing in a rational manner….To the most thoughtful and intelligent I usually succeeded in making the [ring shout] disgusting; but by the ignorant masses, as in the case mentioned, it was regarded as the essence of religion. (Harris 3) The attitude of Payne, an educated minister and professor living in the North in the years just after slavery is representative of the attitude of blacks who felt that “indigenous black culture” was “an impediment to the assimilation of Afro- Americans into the mainstream culture.” For these blacks, “singing was one way they could demonstrate that they deserved a place in the white culture to which they were still denied access” (3). Many of these “racial uplift” blacks were of the mind that music which was overtly Negro in character, such as that which was sung by the “ignorant masses” within black Christianity, would only keep whites reminded of blacks’ racial difference and their very recent social status as slaves. The disgust with which these black people met religious folk singing was born of their deep- seated fear of a never-ending term for all blacks as social pariah who would continue to receive only the very worst U.S. society had to offer. Harris explains this “clash” of cultures within the black church as symptomatic of the “tension between ethnicity and the melting pot,” which “numerous ethnic groups” have confronted in North America. That the black 83 church would become the site upon which the clash played itself out was “virtually foretold by the manner in which many [black churches] were founded during the first years of the post-Emancipation period.” He writes: Numerous black churches came into existence with the aid of the northern-based, white missionary organizations that had entered the postwar South with the stated purpose of uplifting former slaves. Generally, these groups sought to provide education and ministerial training for those freedpersons and their children who possessed leadership potential, a devotion to religion, and what the white emissaries would regard as a modicum of intelligence….Within a decade after the Civil War, northern white church organizations had founded scores of the missions, elementary schools, colleges, and theological seminaries. (5) The Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Methodist Episcopals, the U.S.A. Presbyterians, the Quakers, and the United Presbyterians all vied with one another for control of the social betterment of blacks. They built churches and schools for blacks with alarming speed. Harris writes that this Christian competition actually resulted in the over-construction of black schools; by 1895, more black institutions called “universities” existed than there were “universities of any kind in both Britain and France” (5). This high level of involvement from the white Christian church helped to fashion some upwardly mobile blacks, called “assimilationsists” or “progressives,” as “funnels for the inpouring of non-black values into black society” (5). This was one cause of the clash. For on the other side were the “traditionalists,” those blacks who “expressed their allegiance to the self-contained culture of their slave ancestors. 84 Among these people, the ring shout, so bothersome to Payne [and those he represented], thrived along with the spirituals, hand clapping, and foot stomping that gave it life” (3). Harris depicts the paternalistic white, Northern missionaries, the black “assimilationists,” and the black “traditionalists” as participants in a three-way tug- of-war for the soul of black America, and perhaps more honestly, for the manner in which that soul expressed itself. He explains what lay at the heart of the matter for the assimilationists and the traditionalists: That two of these wanted to recast [post-bellum black culture] in the mold of white mainline culture and the third wanted to remain more insulated is little more than arithmetically significant. Of greater importance is that two of these minds—though of the same race—disagreed about the appropriate cultural expression of that race. (8, 9) The “division between these two black minds” would cast a shadow over black Christianity even into the twentieth-century. While some black churches, marked by a cultural elitism wholly unappreciated by other black Christians, would begin to implement “European classical instrumental music and choirs” into their worship, others would cling to what were disdainfully regarded by the other side as “cornfield ditties” and a “heathenish mode of worship” (8). The cultural practice of shouting, of course, rode the line of demarcation. Cherished by traditionalists and detested by assimilationsists, shouting became de rigueur in some churches and anathema in others. The Great Migration would only help to carry the tensions farther North with each swell of the lengthy black exodus. 85 Musical developments within the black church bore out this marked division. Among Northern traditionalists in the twentieth century, gospel music—with its appreciation of black religious (and non-religious) folkways and its frequent goal of “shouting the church” would flourish. Most “progressives,” conversely, would not touch gospel until decades after its heyday. Even to the present day, to some listeners, “progressive” versions of gospel songs, much like “progressive” reworkings of the old slave songs and spirituals, sound uncannily European, decidedly un-Negro. Because shouting had become part of a hotly contested body of black religious practices, those women who carried on the practice in the North did so to the disdain and chagrin of their non-shouting neighbors. Much like their African forebears had done in instilling distinctly African cultural modalities into their offspring, shouting black women kept the black ecstatic alive and functioning as a key aspect of black Christian worship and passed it down to present-day shouters. Black women of Southern origins in the North have in a sense shouted in what could be seen as a trans-geographic and trans-temporal form of worship, closely connected with the South, with her enslaved ancestors, and with the West African heritage which produced the shout on these shores. A Brief Study of Shouting in Black Women’s Literature, 1928-1948 Black women literary artists of the early twentieth century often took the shout into arenas which lay beyond black churches by making use of shouting in their works. The fact that shouting appears in the literature suggests that the 86 conversation between the spiritual and the sensual was a salient one for black women of all classes, educational backgrounds, and professions. As co-bearers with black men of racist assaults on black sexuality, black women apparently sought to resolve the disjointed approach of the Western world to those people who are simultaneously black and female and spiritual and sensual. Black women writers found the shout to be an effective trope in this fight against negative images of black women. In deploying the shout in crucial scenes, black women writers reclaimed for black women a sacred space in which the entire physical and psychical being of the black woman—particularly their senses of estrangement from their core identities and their frustrations in living under the daily assaults of racist and sexual oppression—were honored and healed. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the shouting passage in Nella Larsen’s 1928 publication Quicksand. Racially mixed heroine Helga Crane enters a storefront church to become entangled in a spiritual orgy that builds relentlessly toward the climax of her salvation: Behind her, before her, beside her, frenzied women gesticulated, screamed, wept, and tottered to the praying of the preacher. . . .And as Helga watched and listened, gradually a curious influence penetrated her. . .she felt possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and sling herself about. (113) The sensual-sexual aspects of this scene cannot be denied: beset round about by women who have been driven to the point of frenzy by rhythmic prayer, Helga, unsaved and therefore a virgin to the process, is first “penetrated” and then aroused 87 by the desire to join the intoxicated women. She is finally overcome by this desire and gives vent to it: Maddened, she grasped at the railing, and with no previous intention began to yell like one insane. . . .She was unconscious of the words she uttered, or their meaning: ‘Oh God, mercy, mercy. Have mercy on me!’ but she repeated them over and over. (113-114) Because this conversation between the spiritual and the sensual takes place in a church service, Helga’s seduction actually becomes her salvation. Her fall becomes the ultimate sign of grace. Upon her vocal release, those about her offer a “thunder- clap of joy” which marks the moment of her reception of salvation, as well as her induction into the world of sensual spirituality. It is true that Helga’s seduction into salvation also leads to her assumption of a bleak, miserable, ill-fitting life, as determined by gender roles governing the place of women within the black church and in general society. In this, however, Helga is very much like her real-life counterparts, those hundreds of thousands of black women down through the decades who experienced such intense, ecstatic highs in the same church which oppressed them, and went home to everyday lives which were marked by loneliness, repression, depression, dissatisfaction, and various forms of violence. In relation to shouting, Helga can be seen as the epitome of its various cultural inscriptions. Helga is the product of black and European parentage. She begins her story in the South but travels North and South again, replicating and 88 reversing the Great Migration. From fairly humble means, she becomes a teacher; she ends her story, however, as a poor preacher’s wife, having children with a frequency that saps her strength, health, and pleasure in life, depicting both black upward mobility and its seemingly inescapable undoing. She spends the majority of the book carefully repressing her sexuality, denying herself physical pleasure. Some might say that it is her running from the “voluptuous visions” and burning fleshly desires involving one Dr. Robert Anderson (109) which leads her to be overcome by the ecstasy and dramatic release of the shout. Helga thus embodies the many convergences of race, class, geography, and spirit and sense which have characterized and shaped the shout. Around the time that Larsen was writing Quicksand in the late 1920’s, Hurston was in the South observing shouts. In her 1948 novel Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston created a shouting white heroine named Arvay, who struggles most of her life with emotional, and to a lesser degree, physical intimacy. Dorothy West’s character Cleo, heroine of her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, looks down upon her shouting Baptist husband Bart, who, compared to the hard-edged capitalist social climber she is, is nearly feminized in his ability to relate to God and to people physically and emotionally. Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street can be seen as a morality tale about what happens when the shout, in actual or symbolic terms, is not present as a release of frustration and overwhelm. Lutie Johnson is another sexually repressed black female character. Throughout the narrative, the divorced Lutie is literally haunted 89 and hunted by sex, and by projections made by black and white others about her sexuality. Even though the reader suspects that Lutie rather enjoys her status as a beautiful, shapely brown woman, she is ever straight-laced and Victorianist in her dealings with men, and thus manages to keep herself unspoiled sexually. Despite her absolute control over her bodily appetites, Lutie ends up giving vent to a frustration which, upon its release, is murderous. Undone by poverty and hopelessness, the strains of striving to keep it all together, and the constant message from others that she is first and foremost an object signifying the basely sexual, she finds one day that she couldn’t stop shouting, and shouting wasn’t enough. She wanted to hit out at [Boots], to reduce him to a speechless mass of flesh, to destroy him completely, because he was there in front of her and she could get at him….The blood pounding in her head blurred her vision so that she saw not one Boots Smith but three of him….He happened to be in range at the moment he set off the dangerous accumulation of rage that had been building in her for months. When she remembered there was a heavy iron candlestick on the mantelpiece just behind her, her vision cleared…He was so close to her that she struck him on the side of the head before he saw the blow coming….And she struck him again and again.” (428-430) Lutie’s shouting, occurring outside of the replenishing, restorative context of worship, is woefully ineffectual. It will not suffice as the expression of the emotion she is feeling. Although presumably a Christian, Lutie is not a churchgoer. She has no established community with which she can sing and pray and shout her great troubles into manageable trials, into small sicknesses “not unto death,” as Barbara Christian has noted: 90 The Street is different from most novels by Afro-American women in that its female characters are so cut off by everyone and everything. In almost all other novels that focus on the black woman, there is some hint of companionship, some human interaction, and some contact with a social institution—through the church, a tight circle of friends, or the family—that may ultimately fail to change her fate but nonetheless tries. (64) In a moment of overflowing rage, the lone Lutie, having just released a most inadequate, unsuccessful shout, feels compelled to hit Smith--who has just offered to help turn her into a whore. She wishes to knock him into oblivion. Before she is fully aware of her actions, she is doing it, hitting him repeatedly with the candlestick--which symbolizes her assumption of phallic power--until he is lifeless at her feet. The way in which Petry uses the shout here, or the lack of it, brings out the artistic or creative quality of shouting. In Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, the young black male character Clay explains to Lula, the young white woman who is pursuing him on a subway trip, that black art has largely been fueled by black need to safely vent the pressures related to living in a blatantly anti-black society. In a passionate rant, he calls her out on her ignorance of the “real” purposes served by black art: You fuck some black man, and right away you’re an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is….Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers…and don’t know yet what they’re doing. They say, “I love Bessie Smith.” And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, “Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass….And if you don’t know that, it’s you that’s doing the kissing. Charlie Parker?...All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, “Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay! Up your ass.” And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would’ve 91 played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty- seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw….And I’m the great would-be poet….[A]ll it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished….If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music….Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity. (97) According to Clay, art has played a vital role for blacks in quelling racial and class tensions, channeling them away from violence into the creation of beauty. In his estimation, were it not for the capacity of art to serve as an outlet and a powerful distraction for black people, their senses of rage and mortal offense might have resulted in wide-ranging violence against those who racially signified the social order which oppressed them. It is important to note that Petry’s Lutie is in fact a singer who has appeared on stage a few times in the nightspots of her Harlem community, but the path to success in that arena is blocked by the men who wish to use her sexually in exchange for their help. The difficulty of her life as a poor, black, single woman and mother are thus compounded by the fact that the means to pursue her art has become damned-up, plugged, thwarted. Without a transformative practice like shouting to counter the ugliness and despair around her and to give her hope for another day; without a shout of her own to bring her into relation with the Holy, who smiles upon and values the black feminine she represents; without a shout to validate the sacred connectedness of her body and her soul which no one else seems to see; without a community to hold her up, see her, and rescue her psychologically 92 and spiritually, Lutie succumbs to the seemingly inescapable soul-murdering hardships of her life, and is herself transformed by them into a murderer. Conclusion From West Africa to North America, from slavery to Emancipation, from the eighteenth century into the present day, the black ecstatic in the form of shouting has served several important purposes for black women. Black women’s general and persistent preoccupation with the relationship between spirit and sense was first and foremost expressed in the practice of shouting. The shout has been a site upon which the spiritual has been made touchable and the sensual rendered holy. Shouting has undone—if only for fleeting moments—the various oppressive ideologies which have targeted and sought to destroy or severely incapacitate the black female in U.S. society. Shouting has also served as a major black female contribution to the worship of black Christians. In eras in which black women were customarily denied the right to preach and were granted but limited authority within church communities, the shout communicated a woman’s ability to engage the Holy. This proven ability undoubtedly helped to open doors for the generations of black women who now preach and pastor all over the country. Shouting has also provided much needed relief for the unique pressures of the black female in North America, absorbing and transforming her hurts and frustrations and replacing them, down through the centuries, with hope and strength. 93 Within this project, the shout will serve rather like the singers who stood off to the side of the ring shout, buoying, supporting, “basing” the rest of the dancers and singers. The shout is the very basis of the ongoing conversation between the spiritual and the sensual for black women on the North American continent. The shout is the starting point. 94 Chapter One References “The African American Great Migration.” North by South/Great Migrations Page. 19 July 2008. http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random, 1970. ---. Singin’, Swingin’, and Getting Merry Like Christmas. New York: Random, 1976. Baraka, Amiri. “Dutchman.” The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thundermouth Press, 1991. 76-99. Boy Shouting Hard. By unknown parishioner. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uNku-8ztRos. Added 21 January 2008. Cannon, Katie G. "Erotic Justice: Authority, Resistance, and Transformation.(Critical Essay)." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23.1 (Spring 2007): 22(4). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009. <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A192900 67&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. ---, Alison P. Gise, and Angela D. Sims. “Womanist Works in Word.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 21.2 (Fall 2005): 135(12). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A13881233 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Greenwood: Westport, 1980. Coleman, Will. “‘Amen’ and ‘Ashe’: African American Protestant Worship and Its West African Ancestor.” Cross Currents. 52.2 (Summer 2002): 158(8). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/informark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T004&prodld=ITOF&docid=A922850 &source=gal &userGroupName=lapl&version=1. 95 Dyer, Richard. White. London, Routledge, 1997. Edwards, Korie L. "Race, Religion, and Worship: Are Contemporary African American Worship Practices Distinct?(Report). " The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 48.1 (March 2009): 30(23). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A194929 00&source=ga e&usGroupName=lapl. Grant, Jacquelyn. “Black Theology and the Black Woman.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 320-336. Harris, Michael W. The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford, 1992. Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. Limelight: New York, 1997. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1992. Hurston, Zora Neale. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. Larsen, Nella. “Quickand.” Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah McDowell. New Jersey: Rutgers, 1998. Lincoln, Eric C. and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Church in the African American Experience. Durham: Duke, 2001. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition. Minnesota: Minnesota, 2003. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 96 Nelson, Timothy J. "Sacrifice of Praise: Emotion and Collective Participation in an African American Worship Service. " Sociology of Religion. 57.n4 (Winter 1996): 379(1). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A191786 2&source=gal &use GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. Petry, Ann. The Street. New York: Mariner, 1991. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford, 2004. Reed, Roxanne R. "The Restorative Power of Sound: A Case for Communal Catharsis in Toni Morrison's Beloved.(Critical essay)." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23.1 (Spring 2007): 55(17). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A192900 79&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983. Ward-Royster, Willa. As Told to Toni Rose. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers. Philadelphia: Temple, 1997. Wray, Matt. “White Trash Religion.” White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz. New York: Routledge, 1997. 97 Chapter Two Failed Exchange and the Phallic Woman in the Black Domestic Sphere: The Late Frye Street Stories of Marita Bonner, 1938-1941 How silences are broken is as important as breaking them. --Tricia Rose, Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy She protected her children physically, mentally, and morally and yet created a household life in which we were encouraged to spend time alone regularly and develop our independence. She had seen worldliness and steered us away from the disheartening blandness of living only for material goals. Yet she instilled a type of worldly poise: we were to be catlike, always able to land on all fours. Balance was taught to us like the common courtesies of thank you and please. --Joyce Occomy Stricklin, “A Portrait of My Mother” Bonner used her best handwriting and apparently glossed the hard-to-read words for the readers she knew would one day find her. --“Note on the Text,” Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner Finding Bonner Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . . The William Butler Yeats poem above, “The Second Coming,” has achieved emblematic status within the modernist literary canon. Composed in 1920 immediately following the end of the First World War, it is an apocalyptic portrait of modern humanity embroiled in disaster and experiencing unprecedented doom. The poem has become famous for its conveyance of the bereavement and unease 98 that have come to characterize the modern. “The Second Coming” possesses a claim to the most modernist lamentation of them all: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Suffusing the work is a feeling that too much has occurred too quickly, resulting in the loosing of “mere anarchy . . .upon the world.” This “mere,” or pure, anarchy counts its cost in human lives and the devastation of what has been perceived as universal innocence. The narrator mourns: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . .” Residents of Marita Bonner’s fictional Frye Street were yet feeling the swell of Yeats’ “blood-dimmed tide” for years after the appearance of “The Second Coming.” Written between 1926 and 1941, Bonner’s Frye Street stories focus on the “mere anarchy” of individual and collective black lives beset by chaos and loss brought on by the facts of 20 th century American life—namely the largely uncharted transition from the rural to the urban forged by the Great Migrants, along with racism, sexism, economic exploitation, class conflict, and partner anxiety. Joyce Flynn, who introduces Frye Street& Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner, writes that “Bonner’s works offer the perspective of an educated black female consciousness on a rapidly changing America between the two world wars” (xii). Surprisingly, not many today have read Bonner or even know who she is. A search for recent scholarship on Bonner turns up precious little indeed. At this time, there are exactly two published essays on Bonner, Judith Musser’s “African American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the ‘Talented 99 Tenth’” (1997), and Allison Berg and Meredith Taylor’s “Enacting Difference: Marita Bonner’s ‘Purple Flower’ and the Ambiguity of Race” (1998). Rounding out the Bonner studies catalogue is one longer work by Carol Allen, also published in 1998, which treats Bonner as one of a tripartite group of twentieth-century elite black women, Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. Largely untaught, wholly un-anthologized, utterly un-canonized, Bonner is representative of the frequent voids which have been encountered in black women’s history and literature. My used copy of her collected works, once a book in the Tempe Public Library, says it all. The title page is stamped with large black letters: “DISCARDED.” There is no easy answer for Bonner’s near absence from North American and black literary studies. If her works are marked by somewhat uneven quality, so are those of others from her era. Zora Neale Hurston and the other participants in the Harlem Renaissance were, for the most part, young artists yet learning their craft. Many of their poems, novels, and essays fail to be excellent in a consistent, uniform way, and yet most have enjoyed widespread readership and admiration in the years since their deaths. Why Bonner studies have not yet taken hold in the Academy remains a mystery. The only short story writer discussed in this project, she is included here for several reasons. The first is her huge importance as a black intellectual who was making powerful and alarming commentary on black gender relations in the U.S. over seventy years ago, which reads as remarkably contemporary. The current 100 black, heterosexual romantic and domestic landscape is often imaged as a dry, arid land—many dangers and little nourishment. To encounter any portion of the debate made public within the last decade is to come away with the sense that the anxiety is one centered on the continuing and seemingly worsening extreme vulnerability of the black male to various racist and classist social agendas, and by crucial extension, the black woman who almost cannot help outstripping him educationally and/or professionally. This current state-of-affairs garnered a great deal of national attention in 2003 with Ellis Cose’s Newsweek article “The Black Gender Gap.” Cose wrote: Can the [educated, gainfully employed, financially self- sustaining black woman] thrive if her brother does not, if the black man succumbs, as hundreds of thousands already have, to the hopelessness of prison and the streets?...Or will she, out of compassion, loneliness or racial loyalty “settle” for men who—educationally, economically, professionally—are several steps beneath her?” Given the intense sense of interest in this topic and those related to it in the late nineties and early 2000’s, it would seem that the problems represented an altogether new crisis facing black North America. Bonner’s work reveals that nothing is farther from the truth. Bonner was making such interrogations of the present and future state of the black domestic sphere several decades before the contemporary discourse, and was in the process, giving voice to a very distinct view of the spiritual and the sensual in black women’s lives. Bonner is also indispensable to this project because her work breaks that profound silence which tends to occur in studies of black women’s literature 101 between the Harlem Renaissance and the late 1940’s. Black women’s literary studies have tended to jump from the twenties to Hansberry, or more recently to Petry or to Brooks. The thirties and early forties are often glossed over; Bonner is the figure who quietly but pointedly predominates in the literature here. In glossing over her time period, scholars have missed a great opportunity to round out black women’s literary studies with the reclamation and inclusion of Bonner. Furthermore, Bonner’s writings bridge the decade of the forties to the depressed era which immediately precedes them. The Depression was an especially fertile social environment for Bonner, who was most interested in writing about the lives of working class black people. Significantly, the Depression spanned the overwhelming majority of her professional writing career; twelve of Bonner’s sixteen writing years were Depression years. Stylistically, her work is notable for the way in which it connects literary modernism to the social realism which would become prevalent in the works of black writers of the forties and the fifties. A Brief Biographical Account Bonner came to writing from a decidedly middle-class background; she was well-educated, excelling in music and literary studies. She was born in Boston in 1899, and reared there. At Brookline High School, she took up serious study of music and German, interests which would remain central throughout her life. In 1918, she entered Radcliffe College, majoring in English and Comparative Literature. Her talents and efforts in writing during this time earned her a seat in the 102 seminar of highly esteemed writer Charles T. Copeland. She kept her love of music vital in her college years by competing in the Radcliffe songwriting contest, taking top honor in both her freshman and senior years (Flynn xii, xiii). While in college, she began her professional teaching career at a Cambridge high school. After graduating in 1922, Bonner continued her teaching, first in Washington, D.C. for eight years, and then in Chicago, where she relocated upon marrying William Almy Occomy in 1930. Bonner lived in Chicago for the next forty-one years, as a wife, mother, and teacher. Although she would live another four decades after starting a family, she would only write for one. After 1941, Bonner focused her energies on her family and on teaching, writing rarely, although her interest in writing never dissipated; well into her sixties, Bonner took writing courses. She died tragically from injuries sustained in an apartment fire in 1971 (xii, xiii, xxv). Her professional writing career began nearly half a century before her death, in the mid-1920’s, during her residence in Washington, D.C. In 1925, her first publications, a short story entitled “The Hands,” and an essay, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” appeared in The Crisis (xiii). This essay foreshadows similarly themed writings by black women, such as Francis Beale’s “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” A member of poet, playwright, and composer Georgia S. Johnson’s “S” Street salon, young Bonner had the opportunity to meet many of the black literati of 103 the day, many of whom would go on to achieve Harlem Renaissance fame—Jessie Fauset, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer, among them. Bonner’s own works from this early period display trademark brevity, fast- paced action, and striking imagery. Bonner struggled to find herself stylistically, as is evidenced by a middling quality in her work, but the early pieces reveal Bonner’s steadfast desire to focus on the black working class (xiii). The first of Bonner’s Frye Street stories appeared in 1926. “Nothing New” ushers onto the black literary landscape a fictional Chicago neighborhood, which prefigures the modern notion of the global community. A “multi-ethnic cosmos,” Frye Street is inhabited by a collection of immigrants--Danes, Swedes, Germans, Jews, Russians, Irish, and French—as well as American-born blacks, many of whom are themselves transplants from the South. Frye Street provided Bonner the means to explore social hierarchy as determined by race, class, color, and sex. Throughout the thirties and early forties, Bonner would use Frye Street to depict Chicago as a “fallen world both in terms of race relations and the doomed aspirations of the city’s black immigrants from the South” (xv, xvi). Carol Allen, who analyzes Bonner’s place as one in a triumvirate of black women intellectuals between 1880 and 1940, has named Frye Street and Environs as one of the first “sustained” explorations of the “modern metropolis and its effects on the subjectivity of black figures” from a black writer (Allen 78). Judith Musser has praised Bonner for her commitment to looking beyond her own middle-class experience, and seriously considering the lives of poor black 104 women in her fiction. Musser contextualizes Bonner’s wide imaginative scope as a direct retort both to other Harlem Renaissance writers’ tendency toward self- aggrandizement, and to the social goals of the black elite: The significance of Bonner's refusal to write from her experiences distinguishes her from other writers, in particular Hurston. Bonner's voice does not proclaim her own individuality. She does not publicize her "self." She is silent about her own familial, educational and regional environment, focusing instead on the lives of other women. Her fictional "voice" thus becomes the medium for the protests of the voiceless and powerless. In this regard, Bonner exhibits some characteristics of proletarian writers because she reflects the life of a cross section of a certain populace in order to write fiction that has social value….Marita Bonner reallocates the goals of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as a way to focus attention on the neglected issues that African American women, in particular, had to face every day. While Garvey was rallying support for the founding of a new African state, while Locke was calling for "unlocking and releasing the higher powers and faculties of human nature," while Charles Johnson was encouraging political themes as the focus of the new writing, while W. E. B. Du Bois was calling upon education to develop a higher individualism in men, Bonner was examining the realities of how this new program for education would present more challenges for African American women. (7) Bonner and the Black Domestic Sphere The stories which I will examine here are linked not only by their late Depression-era, pre-urban and urban context, but also by their predominant interest in the black domestic sphere, and in particular the vexation suffered by heterosexual love relationships within this sphere. These stories, solid representatives of literature in the social realist tradition, do not only depict black intimate space as tumultuous and deeply unsatisfying to those who dwell within it, but they also 105 depict the tumult and dissatisfaction as intimately related to the full range of social problems suffered by blacks in the larger public sphere. It is precisely Bonner’s deep interest in the social construct of the American city which leads Allen, in her chapter on Bonner entitled “Urban Problems, Urban Answers,” to conclude that the “very specific historical circumstances” of “American cities in the thirties,” such as the informal, but very real, segregation in housing zones and school districts, and rampant racial stereotypes of blacks “pushed Bonner away from strict concentration on domesticity” (77). I find quite the opposite to be true. While it is obvious that Bonner was consummately aware of the social ills faced by blacks and clearly articulated them in her fiction, she is just as cognizant of the fact that these social ills have ramifications that are lived out in the houses, flats, and tenements where these people, in fact, live. Where Allen sees Bonner’s emphasis on the social as detracting from a “strict concentration” on the domestic, I see in Bonner’s works a strict concentration on the domestic as influenced by the social. Bonner’s is not a treatment of the domestic as a space apart from the outside world; rather, it is one which attempts to announce the four walls blacks call home as ineluctably linked to the world that lies beyond them. The black domestic sphere is therefore imaged by Bonner as an extension of the American national sphere. Black female writers before her presented black home life in a similar manner, as Claudia Tate, author of Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, has argued. However, unlike in many of those earlier narratives which are examined by Tate, Bonner’s stories do not refashion racism, classism, 106 sexism, and regionalism into hazy, abstract, external forces kept at bay by the strong bonds of solidarity, love and support among members of the black family (Tate 121). Instead, these hazards are particularly keen forces which penetrate the walls, ceilings, and floors of the Frye Street dwellings, working precise devastation on the psychical, emotional, and sexual lives of the characters, most often laying waste to what, according to post-Reconstruction-era black uplift ideology, should be the bedrock of black social salvation—the family. Written between 1938 and 1941, the late Frye Street stories, “Patch Quilt,” “On the Altar,” “High Stepper,” “Stones for Bread,” and “Reap It as You Sow It” all focus on marriages gone awry—temporarily or eternally--torn asunder, typically by infidelity, though this is not always the case. The marriage in “On the Altar” is bedeviled by classism and colorism when the light-skinned heroine’s grandmother and mother object to, and destroy, her secret marriage to a penniless, dark-skinned young man; the one in “Stones For Bread” is deeply shaken by economic and lifestyle concerns when the young, educated protagonists become afraid that they are expecting a baby, and will more than likely no longer be able to afford the jaunty life they have begun to make for themselves. The other two, “One True Love,” and “Light in Dark Places,” focus on relationships between couples which disintegrate dismally before they can even progress to marriage. Whatever the particular case, each story adds to Bonner’s dire picture of the modern black domestic sphere as a mine field, promising disillusionment and danger, particularly, but not exclusively, to women. 107 In the late Frye Street stories, Bonner repeatedly depicts the black, heterosexual union as a “failed exchange.” The failed exchange is a key modernist trope, and is used to announce moments of breakdown and miscarriage in human relations. It is the marker of the myriad ways in which the modern never fails to go spinning off into multiplicities, as it is experienced by different individuals perceiving the fiction of reality from varying vantage points. It is the ultimate and inescapable inability to make oneself fully understood, and able to understand another. It is the helplessness of one to achieve lasting, meaningful union with an Other. The failed exchange is apparent in an abundance of modernist texts. It motivates the wandering, searching, perpetually unanchored existence of Stein’s Melanctha (Three Lives, 1909) and of Djuna Barnes’ Robin Vote (Nightwood, 1936). It takes the form of malaise and inanition in Lewis’ Babbit (1922), and is expressed in the impotent nihilism of Hemingway’s Jake in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Failed exchange also results in Dick’s restlessness and emotional and spiritual bankruptcy and his wife Nicole’s psychological fragility in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934). Because the failed exchange is so prevalent in these and other modernist works, and because of Bonner’s ties to the Harlem Renaissance, which is now generally discussed as the chief expressive vehicle for black modernism, there is ample cause to regard Bonner’s short stories as modernist in vision and commentary, if not in style. 108 I will discuss three of the seven late Frye Street Stories, written in 1940 and 1941: “Patch Quilt,” “High Stepper,” and “One True Love.” I am principally interested in these stories for their depiction the failed exchange as a producer of the phallic woman. The online Dictionary of Psychology defines the phallic woman as an “image or fantasy of a woman endowed with a phallus.” Exploring the body of work of photographer Helmut Newton, Donald Kuspit further explains the figure and significance of the phallic woman, writing in “The Unempathic Eye” that: Newton identifies not simply with woman, but with the proverbial phallic woman -- the woman who, in the child's imagination, is ideal, indeed, perfection itself, because she is simultaneously male and female. She has the sexual attributes of both sexes, however much one exists in symbolic form and the other as physical reality. She possesses real breasts and a symbolic penis -- often a multitude of phallic emblems -- making her omnipotent. (Eve's mischievous snake was her penis, indicating that she is the primordial or archetypal phallic woman.) The phallic woman is the mother as she appears in the child's primitive vision. Bonner’s phallic woman is not the phallic mother of childhood fantasies, but is rather a construct of the black female literary imagination grasping for respite and justice on behalf of wronged women characters. In Bonner’s stories, the abusive realities of patriarchal domination give rise to the need for women to grasp the power of the male—symbolized by the phallus--in order to prevent, halt, or avenge the wrongs which men as agents of patriarchy have perpetrated against them. I believe that Bonner’s literary fixation with the failed exchange and the phallic woman as markers of the 20 th century black domestic sphere is highly relatable to 109 the tension between the spiritual and sensual in black female intellection and cultural production. “Patch Quilt” (1940) I went to the poll line and voted And I know I voted the right way So I’m asking you, Mr. President, Don’t take away this WP and A. --Depression Era Song Sung By Black WPA Workers I learned my lesson the hard way: Some news come early Some news come late. --Ike and Tina Turner, “Humpty Dumpty” “Patch Quilt” is the only story examined here which is set below the Mason- Dixon Line “in the little southern town of Redmond.” It has great symbolic value because it marks a symbolic starting point for the Great Migrants whose stories captivated Bonner once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, and also because it is the first of at least three of the late Frye Street stories which feature Bonner’s figure of the phallic, thrusting, penetrating woman. Bearing striking similarities to Hurston’s earlier short story “Sweat” (1926), “Patch Quilt” is a Saturday in the life of washerwoman Sara Brown, and her errant husband, Jim, who is a very new hire in a Depression-era WPA-type unemployment relief program. The Works Progress (later Projects) Administration was created in January 1935 by Congress as a means of providing unemployment relief for American citizens during the severe economic downturn of the Depression. The WPA was one in a long line of New Deal-era programs aimed at putting needy Americans to work. Preceded by the Public Works Administration (PWA), the Civilian 110 Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the WPA was the embodiment of FDR’s vision to employ 3.5 million Americans at what was termed a “security wage.” This security wage was appreciably below union wages, but was double the amount of welfare stipends. Milton Meltzer, author of “Folk Life in Black and White,” reports that “for the first time, blacks entered federal agencies in increasing numbers.” These highly trained men and women, called the “Black Cabinet,” acted chiefly as race relations advisers, and pushed for black economic and political empowerment and equity in employment. As a result of their efforts, black workers became approximately twenty-six percent of the WPA work force in the South. Nationally, blacks were sixteen percent of those employed by the WPA. By 1939, more than one million blacks worked on jobs created by the WPA (1). Despite the persistent racial inequities, the WPA’s opportunities for blacks were undeniable. The WPA was also often celebrated by blacks for the hope it generated in an overwhelmingly bleak period. Ironically, this hope was born of a perception that the Depression was working as a social equalizer, placing large numbers of whites on equal footing with blacks for the first time in history. Meltzer includes testimony from sociologist Horace Cayton, who conducted a research project on the WPA. Cayton recalls: In spite of the Depression, there was hope. Great hope, even though people suffered. To be without money is a disgrace in America today. The middle class looks upon welfare Negroes as morally corrupt because they haven’t worked. But in the Depression, there were so many whites who were on relief. So the Negro would look, and he wouldn’t see any great difference. . . .[I]f Negroes were on relief, so were whites: we’re gonna have a better day. That was the feeling. . . . (2) 111 “Patch Quilt” opens with Sara preparing to iron the day’s wash and thinking about the income she expects Jim to bring into the house later that day. She mutters aloud to herself, “First time in near three years that Jim’ll bring home a pay envelope on Saturday. Shore glad the government made them put some of the colored relief men on the new road job along with the white” (211). Sara becomes so taken by the prospect of extra income that she cannot contain her desire to feast the couple’s boon. She puts away her ironing for the day, as well as the spirit of cautious conservation that has been in order while the couple eked out an existence on her earnings alone. The happy wife decides that she will go to the market to purchase “some of the things I been wanting to eat these three years.” Dressing herself in a “clean cotton house dress and her only pair of silk stockings,” Sara draws up an elaborate dinner menu that will announce the happy reversal of their fortune: “chicken and yeller yams and greens and ice-cream—if the freezer is still any good—and two kinds of cake for Sunday dinner! Got to celebrate!” (211). Readers experience Sara from the first as a woman who, despite the difficult years which she and her husband have recently endured, is nonetheless enveloped in the sensual. Immediately characterized through tactile, auditory, and gustatory imagery, Sara is identified by the passion which will be associated with her for the majority of the narrative. She is clearly a woman full of life who does not hesitate to taste again of certain of its pleasures. It is, after all, her desire for these pleasures 112 that lures her away from the hot, tedious work of ironing. Unlike Hurston’s Delia, Sara is afforded and seizes the opportunity to turn away from work, at least temporarily. Even though Sara has changed out of her work clothes into what can be understood as a simple, modest cotton shift, this ordinary dress is given a decidedly sensual edge because of the silk stockings which Sara dons, as well. The foods which she plans to purchase and prepare are staples of Southern cuisine, appreciated for their savory and sweet tastes. Later, readers learn that she has also added oysters to her list, a shellfish believed since antiquity to have aphrodisiac powers. Thoroughly caught up in her thoughts for Sunday’s celebration dinner, she pauses only momentarily to wonder at Jim’s delay in getting home, but is soon again preoccupied with her plans. Making her way to the market, Sara is intercepted by four of her neighbors. There is a precise symmetry to these encounters. The four interceptors are split evenly in terms of gender—two females and two males. The locale of the marketplace also breaks the encounters in half, so that she meets two neighbors before reaching the market and two after. All the balance here works in tandem with Sara’s high spirits to create a feeling of neatness and order which anticipates thorough devastation. Foreshadowing the coming devastation, each encounter is marked by some enigmatic statement or behavior on the neighbors’ part. Sara misreads each of these (failed) exchanges, but chalks their strangeness up to her neighbors’ envy of her decadent intentions and high spirits. 113 First there is Miss Susie, “a tall, dark colored woman of indeterminate age,” but by her manner of speaking and interacting with Sara, seems to be the elder of the two. The two women make small talk, and then in what seems to be a non sequitur, Miss Susie inquires after the resident of the hilltop cottage, one Miss Drake, who is said to be a rather aloof woman who lives with her two children, a son, Sandy, and a daughter, Marie. A very light-skinned seamstress who works for white families, Miss Drake is regarded by some of the black citizens of the town as one who “thinks she’s white,” and therefore would not be above “passing” to get work in a “white store” (213). Sara soon loses patience with Miss Susie’s rambling conversation and excuses herself from the woman’s company. Miss Susie does not offer Sara a proper farewell, nor does she meet Sara’s eyes as Sara takes her leave. Yet, after Sara has walked some distance from Miss Susie, she looks back to find the woman where she left her, gazing steadily after her (213). Sara next encounters Miss Drake’s son Sandy, who tumbles out of the clump of bushes by which Sara has stopped to rest. Sandy’s sudden appearance out of the brush recalls the passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin wherein young slave Topsy denies proper human parentage by supposing instead that she “jest growed.” Sandy becomes visibly uncomfortable when Sara asks about his mother and sister, and stutters and stammers his way through a short, disjointed exchange with Sara, who is annoyed that the boy can comport himself no better than he has (214). After meeting Sandy, Sara is soon physically enveloped in the world of the sensual as represented by the sights, sounds and great physicality of the 114 marketplace. The narrator reports that as Sara crosses Market Street, “she lost herself in the midst of mud and chicken crates, the sidewalk vendors and hawkers, the muddy automobiles and crowds of poor whites and Negroes that made Saturday the most exciting day of the week in that town.” Sara, already established as an outgoing, sensual young woman, is not overwhelmed or put off by the chaos of the scene. In fact, she is invigorated by it, and with “giddy triumph” acquires her menu items, which range the full spectrum of tastes—savory, smoky, sour, and sweet. Before making her way from the market, she stops by a Five-and-Ten to purchase an ice pick and jawbreaker candy, which she cannot help but “crunch noisily” on the way home (214). At this point in the narrative, she encounters her third neighbor Annie May Jones, a “broad black woman,” who goes unnamed in the narrative until after their exchange. Sara gleefully admits to Annie May her recent activity at the market, revealing the extravagant amount that she has paid for this one meal. Pleased with herself, and perhaps a bit eager to inspire envy in the heart of this neighbor, Sara giggles and takes note of “the effect of her statement” on the woman (214). In response, the “broad black” woman “let her eyes sweep up and down Sara’s figure” before fixing them on the top of the hill. More than likely envious of Sara’s mirth, her extravagance, and her figure, and obviously having calculated the effect of her own next words, Annie May announces, “I hear that one of them travelin’ buses done fell over on the new road!” Sara’s giggling and self-satisfaction immediately fall away, as she considers the harm that might have come to Jim. Fearfully, she 115 asks, “Ain’t nobody hurt?” Annie May, no doubt playing her role with relish now, shakes her head, saying, “I ain’t heard that. I jes’ heard about the bus! Say! Whyn’t you cut across the back lots and see!” Without another word, Sara takes the woman’s suggestion, and is off to Jim’s work site (214-215). Approaching the construction grounds, Sara sees the bus overturned in a ditch and its former passengers. She also spies the abandoned machinery used for the road construction, but can locate no workers. At this point, Sara meets her fourth and final neighbor, Uncle Eph, “a deaf Negro who claimed to be one hundred and ten.” Sara approaches him, calling out, “Who got hurt!” Uncle Eph responds, “Ain’t nobody hurt,” to Sara’s infinite relief. As Uncle Eph prepares to ready things for that evening’s night shift, Sara asks about her husband: “Is Jim gone home?” Uncle Eph does not respond. Sara, believing his failure to answer to be related to his deafness, rephrases the query in a yell: “I reckon Jim’s gone on home!” Uncle Eph responds this time by suddenly sitting back, shaking out the rag with which he has been scrubbing a lamp, and fully meeting her gaze. Like those of Miss Susie earlier, his next words are a seeming non sequitur: “Go on up to the tool shed! Go on up there!” (215). Sara decides to obey Uncle Eph’s strange directive. She takes more candy out of the bag for the walk to the shed, and the leaves the remainder behind with the old man, a symbol of the sweetness and innocence she is leaving behind as she takes this walk. She finds the shed in darkened quiet, but the semblance of emptiness is destroyed when she suddenly hears a sound from behind the door. Peering around 116 the door, she is first met by “something green” waving before her face, and next by “a low murmuring,” which is her husband’s voice saying, “You kin have it all honey. I’m crazy ‘bout you!” Looking over her husband’s shoulder, Sara discovers the object of his altruism, Marie Drake, daughter of the renowned seamstress. The girl, because she is facing the door, spies Sara first, and stares silently at her lover’s wife with “pale stricken fright,” while holding a bill of the very money that Sara has been anticipating. Sara, caught up in a sudden passion, loses her packages, but quickly locates the phallic ice pick and with it, takes several stabs at Jim and his lover. She then turns and runs “screaming and crying back into the sunshine,” and into the arms of Uncle Eph, who tells her sympathetically, “I hadn’t ought to a tol’ you honey! I hadn’t ought to a tol’ you, but I couldn’t stand no more to see this deceivin’ goin’ on!” Uncle Eph then opens the shed door open wide. Alarmed at the sight of the ice pick and blood on the ground inside, he calls to Jim and Marie. Getting no answer, Eph pulls Sara inside the shed and closes the door behind them. With a lit candle, they discover the lovers on the floor where Jim has collapsed on top of the terrified Marie. Even overcome by fear, with blood pouring from one eye, and the dead weight of a grown man pinning her to the ground, the girl has managed to retain her hold on the money. Uncle Eph is unfazed by her predicament: “You ain’t dead! Ain’t no use pertendin’. Git up” (216). 117 At his words, Marie gives voice to her hysteria, screaming, “He’s bleeding to death on me!” Examining Jim, the old man finds that he is only seriously wounded, and not dead. He makes plans to carry Jim across the field to a nearby doctor, and sends Marie home to her mother, shouting, “Git on out of here! Tell your ma it’s best to keep young ones like you tied in their own yard!” (217). Sara, for the first time in the story, is truly still and silent. Whereas she has been characterized throughout the narrative by movement and sound, she is now physically and vocally incapacitated by shock. She spends the majority of her second visit to the tool shed leaning against the door of the shed with her hands clutching her silent throat. The resolution of the narrative reveals Marie Drake’s sudden disappearance from town. Some of the black residents feel certain that she has “gone North to school,” passing for white; the truth, however, known only to her mother and brother, is that Marie, physically disfigured by her run-in with Sara, spends her life at home out of sight of the neighbors. Jim, as it turns out, has also been irreparably damaged by Sara’s discovery of his indiscretion. Rendered symbolically impotent because of a severed shoulder tendon, Jim is doubly “castrated,” by both his “useless arm hanging limp,” and his resulting inability to work. Although he had gone three years without employment prior to his job on the road construction project, Jim had maintained his status as a man during that time because the set of circumstances that reduced him to unemployment had been suffered universally, by black and white alike. Though he was without work, it was through no fault of his 118 own, and he was not alone. Furthermore, he had retained the physical power to do bread-winning work. Now, however, he stands stripped of the lack of culpability in his circumstances; his once-redeeming able-bodiedness is now also a thing of the past. He spends his days “listless on the porch,” gazing in one direction “toward the hills that hid the highway,” and in the other, toward the one hill where Marie lives as a shut-in. Sara is left piecing together the whole term of her husband’s affair like “patches in a quilt.” She remembers clearly all those “fishing trips” of Jim’s, from which he would return “absent-minded, suddenly irritable, and with little red patches. . .on his shirt,” which she only now understands as the imprint of Marie’s lipsticked mouth, and not of the “berries” he claimed them to be. She is also able to recognize the public knowledge of the affair which had prompted her neighbors to behave so strangely on her last happy day as a wife, when she had tripped joyfully to the store, shopping for “chicken and oysters, lemonade and a new ice pick.” She is humbled by the understanding that something so private and humiliating has operated as an open secret, known to everyone except her. Deeply changed by the discovery of her husband’s affair, Sara never again speaks in a way that allows the reader ready access to her words and thoughts. The narrator must now communicate on her behalf: “They had known all this. That is why they had looked at her so. And she thought it was envy.” When these neighbors tell her that she should receive “right smart insurance” from the government for Jim’s “work injury,” Sara, readers are told, does not answer. Sara is 119 forced into silence, chained to a devastating secret with her husband and his lover. She is also forced to live on as the sole provider for her household, forced to “work harder to make ends meet.” Beyond its obvious similarities to Hurston’s “Sweat,” “Patch Quilt” reinscribes Hurston’s image of the black woman as the “mule of the world,” as spoken by Janie’s grandmother in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sara, already a hardworking woman, is forced to toil on at the command of powerful forces beyond her control—global, national, local, and domestic. From the Depression, which took jobs away, to American racism, which nearly denied her husband the opportunity to work when work became available, to her husband’s decision to take a lover and give to her the money which should rightfully come into Sara’s household, Sara, is constantly assailed by economic and intimate aggressions. She can find no comfort, no rest from her troubles. Rewarded for her work only with more work, and forced to atone for the sins of others, Sara becomes the “mule of the world,” an apt picture of the black woman as beast of burden, made to carry everyone else’s burden along with her own. The change in Sara can also be explained as part bewilderment, for despite her impeccable work ethic which has kept the family afloat for three years, her faithfulness as a wife, her manifest sensuality, her ability to inspire envy in the hearts of other women with her impressive figure, and her evident love for her husband, Sara has not been able to keep her husband from straying. Her hurt 120 mirrors that of countless real-life women whose discovery of their husband’s infidelity have left them oddly ashamed, dumbstruck, and perplexed. This story openly acknowledges the privileges of black men as men in a patriarchal society. Despite their lowly standing in the American social hierarchy, their status as men gives to them access to enticements which when pursued have detrimental effects on their homes. We see Foucault’s notion of power at play in this narrative, a view which claims that even the lowliest, most oppressed person in a society is able to wield power against certain others within that society. Marriage here is a failed exchange, but so is adultery. So also are the simple person-to-person interactions between Sara and her neighbors. Sara’s misreadings of her neighbors and their inability to make themselves understood are but indications of the failed exchange in Sara’s own home, which is, in turn, symbolic of the breakdown in human relations which characterizes the modern experience. This is a story about the reality-shaping power of narrative, and the ability of knowledge come too late to irrevocably alter one’s sense of oneself and one’s universe. When the narrative of Sara’s life is replaced by one which she has not consented to live, and did not know that she was living, nothing is the same. She swallows her voice, accepting the bitter cup that has been set before her. “Patch Quilt,” like most of the late Frye Street stories, is didactic--moralistic even. This story makes a strong claim that sensuality, such as that expressed by Sara at the beginning of the story, when unsupported spiritually by truth and honor is ultimately a depraved experience, which leaves all involved wanting and deeply 121 wounded. Although Sara’s phallic moment avenges the wrong perpetrated against her, it is impotent to correct it, or to erase it. For the indelibility of what has transpired, Sara must toil on in shame and silence. Marie must live out her days as a disfigured recluse, and Jim must look with frustrated longing in two directions, when he has not the slightest possibility of traveling of either. “High Stepper” 1938-1940 “High Stepper” is perhaps the Frye Street story which deals most directly with notions of the spiritual and sensual. It focuses on the inner life of Sadie Allen, a woman whose body and mind have been ravaged by a venereal disease she contracted from her unfaithful husband. Sadie lives from day to day in a catatonic state, in which her mind settles briefly but pointedly on a host of ideas to which she is unable to give voice. Her husband Jim is the “High Stepper,” a name given to him by the male patrons of his bar, The Old Sports Club, which occupies the downstairs quarters of their home. Jim Allen is a bon vivant of the lowest kind, concerned only with having a good time. It is obvious that Jim cares more about his appearance and personal desires than he does for Sadie. Always impeccably dressed and dripping in diamonds, Jim can frequently be found about town after his own bar closed. Furthermore, to the immeasurable disgust of Sadie’s mother, he is anything but shamefaced about his affairs and the trinkets with which his paramours furnish him. Jim is especially fond and boastful of the diamond-set, gold switchblade given to 122 him by Dora, his longtime and most consistent lover. He keeps the knife in plain view, dangling from his watch chain (247-248). About once a week, Jim finds the time to break away from the continuous party of his life to “run up” to the room where his mother-in-law watches over Sadie. Sadie’s mother is never glad to see him, as she claims to detect an unease fall over Sadie’s disposition whenever Jim comes near (248). Sadie’s mother personally hates Jim, and her hate is obvious to him. In fact, he enjoys her hatred; it is one of the chief reasons that he has chosen not to put Sadie away in an asylum. Sadistically he derives a great deal of satisfaction in announcing his plans to go gallivanting to his mother-in-law, especially after spending a few moments “talking cheerful and hearty as if everything was all right between them” (249). Whenever his mother-in-law throws his indecency in his face by telling him that no respectable man with a wife as ill as Sadie would dare to leave for a night out on the town after midnight, he is always ready to throw in her face the dead weight Sadie is in their marriage: “What good is Sadie to me? What the hell kind of wife you think Sadie makes me? She been shut up sick here more’n two years in this place. . . .Most men wouldn’t be bothered with a wife what ain’t a God’s bit of good to them!” His satisfaction comes from watching the effect of his words on the old woman: “That always knocked the old lady back in her corner. That always shut her up.” Her silence is the result of imagining her daughter shut away for life in an asylum, “where the colored patients ate the leavings from other folks’ plates and slop-pails stood unemptied for days on end beneath beds” (249). 123 Sadie’s mother does not want her in a place like that for obvious reasons, and neither does Jim. However, his desire to keep her home is not borne out of love and protectiveness, but rather out of a desire to appear loving and responsible. Given his income and popularity, “it would not look right to “folks” if. . .he put his wife away. It might hurt his business if he put Sadie in the asylum.” Because of the possible detriment to his business which would result from his committing his wife to a mental hospital, he keeps to his arrangement of doing what he wants, going where he wants while providing only the basics for his wife, who “merely ate his food and sat under his roof” (250). His mother-in-law’s hatred for him grows day by day. Her hatred of him is expressed in terms of the corruption of body and mind that he has visited upon her daughter. An omniscient narrator reveals her thoughts: What woman can love a man who has brought the only girl God ever placed in her arms, first a broken heart, then a broken body— and at last—a broken mind?. . .Christ said not to hate, though. But—Christ—it seems too much to love a man as a son who has brought dirty diseases from the dirty bodies of dirty women to the baby girl you bore—clean: that you brought up: clean: to act—clean: to be finally smothered in an avalanche of uncleanness that breaks the heart, the body, and the mind. (250) The sentiments of Sadie’s mother here are crucial to the anxiety concerning the sensual, and specifically the sexual, which pervades this narrative. Despite her success in rearing a properly behaved lady who is chaste and honorable in every way, Sadie’s mother has not been able to protect her daughter from the defiling sins 124 of others. Sadie’s regulated sexuality, expressed only within the sanctifying bond of marriage, has bafflingly resulted in her ending up just as “dirty,” just as polluted as the wild, immoral women with whom Jim has illegitimately lain. Crucially, the body is presented as the source and the vehicle of the corruption, the defilement which is not satisfied to destroy only the body, but works steadily to deteriorate the mind with it. Later, when the narrator reveals Sadie’s own thoughts, carnal anxiety creeps again to the fore: “There is something destructively wrong in being so happy in things of the flesh” (251). While the narrator describes Sadie’s mind as “empty,” she also makes a point of refusing to describe it as “lost,” for “no mind can ever be lost.” Instead, according to the narrator, there are times, as in Sadie’s case, that “you are just no longer completely with yourself.” In cases like these, the mind is said to travel “back and forth eternally against the thoughts Yesterday and the thoughts of tomorrow: against minds of Never and minds of Always.” The narrator also assures—warns—the reader that despite the apparent mental vacancy, “somewhere, somewhere, though, you are bound to come back to your Self” (250). While Sadie’s mind struggles in the attempt to gather enough strength and clarity of its own, she visits distinct locations in her own mind—Never, Always, the Winds of Hate, and Yesterday. These temporary psychological stops further reveal the crisis of the sensual and the spiritual that is crux of this story. While in the mind of Always, she is said to be retching back from the ultimate satiation of a marriage purely of the flesh—fretting uneasily on the smooth glass of a 125 marriage of spirit and mind—foot-worn and soul-weary from pacing the two hell-roads that lay distinctly in her. Both were calling, begging—longing for a sure solid foot to tread them. . . .Follow one road—you leave the other, the spiritual, too far behind. There is something that makes you feel more dead than alive if you live too much in your mind. Follow the other road and you go completely outside of your body. (251) Sadie is the classic Pauline figure, caught between the “two hell-roads” of spirit and flesh “that lay distinctly in her.” She finds the pull in opposite directions as maddening as she does attractive. This visit to the mind of Always is a literary treatment of the Pauline teaching found in the Christian Testament’s Galatians 5:17, where the Apostle writes: For the desires of the flesh are opposed to the [Holy] Spirit, and the [desires of the] Spirit are opposed to the flesh (godless human nature); for these are antagonistic to each other, so that you are not free but are prevented from doing what you desire to do. (Amplified Version) Paul reveals himself as no stranger to the ongoing, internal battle between human carnality and the Indwelling Holy Spirit, Who is believed to take up residence in the saved soul of Christians. He confesses his own troubles in Romans 7: 22-24, wherein he writes: So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Revised Standard Version) 126 Paul is able to find ultimate resolution and consolation in the person of Jesus; for Sadie, however, there is no such deliverance. Her restless, unanchored mind “always seeking” restoration, “always swinging back and forth, began to fill with the words of hate that flooded unspoken in Mom and Jim.” One day, Sadie hears within herself: Words are a fountain—shaping—twisting—gesturing in the Winds of Hate. Shaping in the Winds of Hate that sleep all day in a cave of ugliness and bitterness and wait until night to whip out to shape and make gestures of words that are fountains for more hate. (252) Though the narrator makes plain that “[t]his was not her mind. This was not her self,” these thoughts catapult Sadie headlong into affective experience against which, in her fallow mental state, she has no hope of defense. In the same instant that she is so intensely bombarded with thoughts of hate, she has the physical sensation of “something hard [being] pressed against her breast.” She is assaulted by the scent of a particular perfume, which forces her mind to “plunge wildly.” She is transported long ago to “Love deep through Yesterday,” where this very scent had clung mysteriously to Jim. She remembers her questioning of Jim about the perfume, and his answer that it had been something that the barber had used on his hair. She remembers his taking her into his arms then, but calling her “Dora when he kissed her.” She remembers that it was not long after these strange experiences that “this awful sickness had begun” (253). While Sadie is remembering, Jim stoops to pick up some fallen pillows from behind her chair; his precious diamond-set knife presses against Sadie’s chest. 127 Instinctively, she presses back. As if suddenly restored to a clear mind, Sadie calls out, “Mama! He is hurting me!” Her mother, overcome by shock at hearing a straightforward utterance from her daughter, throws the glass that she has been holding, and begins to offer thanks to God that Sadie’s mind has been restored. Jim is too stunned to speak initially, but when his words come, he explains, puzzled, “My knife must a mashed against her!” He takes the knife and holds it up (253). It is a symbolic admission of the venereal disease he has transmitted to her. The phallic nature of the knife is further revealed in the next lines of the narrative. Seeing the knife, Sadie becomes a child again, exclaiming, “Pretty, pretty!” This speaks to her once-innocent attraction to the phallus. Jim, indulging his wife’s sudden interest, moves closer to her, holding the knife out to her, an act which reinscribes the sex act in its power to create both pleasure and death. However, the “words of Hate made one more great surge within her,” and she recalls again the “dazzle of diamonds,” the “scent of perfume,” and a “woman’s name—Dora.” Violently revolted, Sadie again “thrust[s] hard against the knife, as “[s]he did not want to touch it” (253-4). In pressing the knife this time, however, Sadie activates the mechanism that releases the knife’s elaborate triple blade. The exposed blades fatally pierce Jim in the side. Sadie immediately falls back into the fallow mental state in which she has been for the majority of the narrative. Staring blankly once more, she does not even know enough to “draw back her hands to wipe the blood that followed the knife 128 blades.” Sadie never again returns to consciousness. The narrator concludes, “The Wind slept. Yesterday was lost” (254). The knife here, as in “Patch Quilt,” plays a huge role, particularly, as it relates to wives in the domestic sphere. The knife, as a symbol of the phallus, is in both stories an instrument of pain and death, and is taken up by mistreated wives, and used against their unfaithful husbands. Bonner appears to be saying that, within the construct of patriarchy which accords power to the bearers of the phallus, women must avail themselves of the power of the phallus in order to avenge, or, at the very least, halt the damage they suffer at the hands of men. Women who do so are thus temporarily, but meaningfully, granted the power of men to thrust, to pierce, to penetrate. The phallic woman in the Bonner stories stands in opposition to the patriarchal woman. The patriarchal woman, embodying the worldview of the sexist cosmos around her, is consciously or unconsciously self-denigrating and uses her acquiescence to the notion of female inferiority against herself and all other women. Bonner’s phallic woman, on the other hand, rejects the falsity of female inferiority, and consciously or unconsciously, temporarily assumes the phallic power of men in a patriarchal society as a weapon against offending men. It is important to note that these phallic women take up the knife in the absence of fully audible voice. When Sara, who has been vocal for the entire narrative, comes upon her Jim with his mistress, she is struck silent. She thrusts with the knife in the void left by her thwarted voice. Her assumption of the phallus results in the symbolic castration of her husband, who is left with an “arm hanging 129 limp.” Likewise, Sadie has been rendered silent in the grip of a sexual disease contracted from her husband. With only feelings and memories to fill her thoughts, and no voice to express them, she, too, takes up the knife and, thrusting—one might guess in symbolic reversal of the sexual interlude through which Jim passed on to her the social disease—kills him. The narrative itself reveals the relationship for women between the unspoken and the assumption of the phallus: Sometimes words are merely a fountain, flooding from the soul—shaping, twisting, gesturing in the Winds of Hate. . . .Shaping—now a sword—now a tongue—now a needle— always thrusting, thrusting, thrusting through the Dark…. (252) This fountain of unspoken words within Sadie shifts shape, becoming trimorphously phallic—variously a sword, a tongue, and a needle—all with the identifying characteristic of thrusting. This trinity of phalluses is doubly inscribed in the text with Jim’s triple-bladed knife, a troubling but fascinating triune godhead concerned specifically with black female social justice. The phallic woman is a figure which obviously deeply intrigued Bonner as multivalent trope, as she appears as well in “Light in Dark Places.” When her naïve niece Tina allows a boy into their flat who means Tina no good, old blind Aunt Susie comes to the rescue, untwisting the top of her cane to reveal a “three-sided blade of an old-fashioned dagger.” Aunt Susie walks the floor of the apartment thrusting the “dagger before her.” In the process, she frightens nearly to death the 130 young man, Luke, who has been pretending to have left so that he can continue to pressure—if not force—Tina to have sex with him without the involvement or protection of Aunt Susie. The would-be date rapist flees the apartment gray-faced and barefoot, and young Tina is thereby saved from his advances (285) by the phallic Aunt Susie. “One True Love” (1941) The phallic woman in this narrative is one who must be understood somewhat differently from the ones in the stories discussed previously. There is no ice pick, knife, or sword in this story; no man is physically wounded in this narrative. The female phallicism results instead from the main character’s determination to occupy a social milieu typically reserved for men. Rather than court, marry, and reproduce, the heroine works against the grain of social pressures and expectations, and strives instead for an intellectual and professional life. Nora is the protagonist of this story. She is a class-straddling, “butter- colored maid,” who sets for herself the lofty goal of a college education in order to become a lawyer. Nora’s designs on the college life, as well as intellectual, emotional, and financial independence falls quite in line with socio-historical data on the era in which the Bonner produced this work. Historian Paula Giddings, author of When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women an Race and Class in America, reports that in the 1940s and 50s, white women were beginning to be drawn away from the nation’s campuses. One can surmise that the opportunity to work outside the home in jobs vacated by military men during the war years, and, 131 later, the desire to keep neat, well-tended homes in the postwar suburban boom were contributing factors to this trend. However, as white women began to withdraw from college or to refuse it as an option for their lives, black women were beginning to attend college in higher numbers than both white women and black men. Giddings writes that “by 1940, more Black women received B.A. degrees from Black colleges than Black men” (245). Black women’s increasing enrollment in college and entry into the white collar workforce would only continue, as by the early 1950’s, black women earned 62.4 percent of all degrees from black colleges when women were not even half of the graduates (33.4 percent) in all colleges. During this same time period, black women would grow to comprise a full 58 percent of all black white collar workers (246). According to Giddings, these young black women saw college primarily as a means to secure professional employment, which was, in turn, seen as a source of higher income and social status than they could expect to attain otherwise (249). Giddings adds that an important aspect of this data is that women of Nora’s generation were generally the “first in their families to receive college degrees” (245). Throwing off racial and gender expectations, these women were, in many ways, not their mothers and grandmothers. This is indicated by the forward- thinking Nora when she at one point sharply chides her beau for being content to do only what has been done before: “You ain’t going to do nothing your grandmother didn’t do! That’s ignorant!” (222). Nora is therefore Bonner’s embodiment of the new developments underway for young black women of the era, who, as Giddings 132 points out, did much to contribute to the establishment and enlargement the black middle class (248). In addition to reflecting and commenting on social developments concerning young black women of the era, Nora’s narrative is also one that can be said to flirt with, or at least raise interesting discussions of, the lesbian, or the female homo- sexual (as opposed to the homosexual) at the very least. There are both purchases and problems involved with the use of the lesbian as an analytical lens to examine this narrative. Taken along with the frustrated desire for female self-determination which characterizes this story, it also possesses significant implications for the characterization of Nora as a phallic woman. Nora, while serving at dinner one night for the white couple for whom she works, is nearly entranced by the particularly striking figure of a female dinner guest. She notices that the woman is “beautifully but simply dressed in black velvet,” and that her hair is stylish, cut short and done up in curls. As she serves that night, passing in and out of the dining room, Nora overhears revealing snippets of the conversation, and learns that the woman is not the wife of the lawyer she has been expecting, but rather is herself the lawyer and highly successful at that. Nora only barely avoids rudely gaping at the lawyer throughout the evening, managing to take keen mental notes on the lawyer’s manners, her pleasant voice, and her direct, level gaze. Nora immediately makes up her mind that she will also be a lawyer. She proclaims to the dinner dishes as she washes them, “I’m going to get in some kind of school and be a lawyer, too” (219, 220). Nora, the maid has clearly been 133 deeply impressed by the woman’s self-possession and confidence. But might there be something else afoot in Nora’s thorough admiration of the woman lawyer? The homo-erotic quality of Nora’s encounter turns on a phrase which the omniscient narrator chooses to use in order to express Nora’s thinking about the guest: “Every inch of her had been smart and lovely” (219 emphasis mine). This particular phrasing lends a distinct and fully committed erotic element to Nora’s intense, consuming gaze. Her gaze can be said to drink up the physical presence of the lawyer, much in the same way that men, in heterosexual narratives, visually consume the female objects of their desire. It is possible that Nora’s sudden desire to become a “lawyer, too” is a complex deflection of the erotic desire that has taken hold of her. Perhaps instead of being with the lawyer, as she actually desires, she wills rather to be like her. However, there is yet a possibility that Nora’s attraction is not (purely, if at all) lesbian in the sexual sense. Her attraction could be lesbian in the narcissistic sense, which is to say that Nora, in looking at the guest, has caught sight of a different version of herself, and has thus seen her potential as the most powerful presence in her own story, and fallen in love with it. Although the narcissistic model of desire usually drives narratives of the male homo-erotic, it could very well be that Nora’s chief desire is to be the center of a story that matters, her own story, a story for which she has finally found a suitable model in the lawyer. The narrator has, after all, already hinted at the importance of clarity on the issue of whose story is being told. Speaking of the white couple for whom Nora works, the narrator informs the reader bluntly: 134 “‘They’ had had company to dinner. (‘They’, Nora’s employers, were a Mr. and a Mrs. This is not their story—so they are merely ‘They.’)” (219) So is Nora’s a sexual desire, or is it a narrative one, by way of narcissistic desire? Some have argued that there is only a thin line between sexual and narrative desires, and that they can and often do manifest as one and the same thing. Moreover, whatever the nature of her desire, can it rightly be termed lesbian? While I do not want to detract from the plausibility of Nora’s nascent sexual, or purely intellectual, narcissistic, or narrative lesbianism(s), I want to avoid proclaiming them as authoritative or orthodox. I raise them for intellectual essay on the one hand, and for the more serious discursive nuance which they add to considerations of Bonner’s writings, on the other. Undeniably, there is ample room in which to apply to this text the expanded notion of the lesbian in African American women’s literature which was introduced by Bertha Harris, Lorraine Bethel, Barbara Smith, and other black feminist literary scholars in the 1970’s. One might, for example, look to Harris’ pointed statement that if in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature. (Smith 175) Or to Smith’s conclusion upon applying Harris’ notion: I…quickly realized that many [black women’s works] were, in Harris’s sense, lesbian. Not because the women are “lovers,” but because they are the central figures, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one another. (175) 135 It is clear that the expanded notion of lesbianism can be applied successfully to Nora’s narrative, but there is always the power of things which appeal to one’s sense of beauty, intelligence, and ideal self to arrest and fire one’s imagination. Is it correct to call such experiences lesbian simply because one woman inspires them in another? Must all homo-sexual fascination between women be classified at some point as lesbian? Perhaps some cases call for some other term, a description other than ‘lesbian,’ which is almost always heavily freighted with the homosexual, and with thousands of years of Western misunderstanding of female-female relations. The question of the lesbianism of the text, however, is an interesting case in which P. Gabrielle Foreman’s notion of the “simutext” applies, with provocative implications. Notions of the lesbian and the non-lesbian can be said to occupy legitimate space at the level of text, each rightly vying for status as a valid reading, with neither consigned to “subtext.” These opposing but simultaneous views are further brought to the fore by the path the narrative takes through Nora’s romantic life, which can be expressed in terms of one long chain of failed exchanges. At the moment in which Nora is articulating her will to become a lawyer to the dishes, Sam, the boyfriend she has momentarily forgotten all about, knocks on the back door. She has also forgotten about the show to which he has invited her. “Why ain’t you through?” Sam asks, exasperatedly marking the time as “quarter to nine!” Thus begins the couple’s first exchange in the story, an argument, and the first of many failed exchanges between them that are witnessed by the reader. Nora resents his immediate questioning of her, and makes mention of the fact that he has 136 begun questioning her without so much as greeting her properly and inquiring about how she feels. What follows is the first of many times that Nora will show her impatience and annoyance with Sam’s unpolished ways and inability to comprehend her adequately by calling him “ignorant.” “You always act so ignorant!” she tells him. He fails to understand her response; wounded, he asks, “What you got to talk so mean to me for? Ain’t you glad to see me?” She tells him that she is not happy to see him if he insists on “act[ing] so ignorant and degrading.” Shocked by her outburst, he starts, “De-who?? S’matter with you, Nora?” Nora explains her irritability as fatigue, and says that she will not be “bothered going to no show.” Sam becomes irritated himself, and huffs, “Well, good night then!” For good measure, he adds that perhaps another local girl, one Sadie Jones, would be much less averse to seeing a show with him. “Maybe so!” she replies, and taking the opportunity to insult both Sam and Sadie, she comments on the suitability of that match: “She’s your kind! Two ignorants together!” Now good and angry, and threatening to be done with Nora forever, Sam leaves and must close the door behind himself, as Nora is in too bad a mood to turn around and do it (220). Sam’s standoff only lasts a few days, however. Despite, or maybe because of his own physical and stylistic plainness, Nora is to Sam the consummate vision of beauty and elegance. The narrator expresses his attraction to her this way: “. . .Nora was elegant and beautiful and more desirable than anything ever had been to anyone 137 at anytime” (220). Having spent several sleepless nights fretting over the prospect of Nora’s having taken his grand exit seriously, Sam decides to try again. Eating the words he had spoken in anger and exasperation on Wednesday, he comes again on Saturday, bearing gifts. Knocking once more on the back door, he asks her to accompany him to another show. Nora, to whom Sam is little more than a “runty, bowlegged dark brown janitor’s helper with a shiny scalp,” answers lukewarmly, “I don’t mind.” She does, however, bother to add that she has some things to discuss with him (221). Sam’s heart “turn[s] completely over,” and he anticipates her discussion by immediately launching into talk of marriage, complete with his desire for her to relinquish her maid’s job and move into a two-room flat that Sam will rent for them and furnish with inexpensive furniture. Nora politely and quietly waits Sam out, but the narrator reveals that listening to Sam is not at all what has prompted Nora’s silence. In fact, she is only “vaguely” aware that Sam is talking in the first place. She is only waiting for him to fall silent so that she can “tell him what was in her mind” (221, emphasis mine). For the first time in the presence of the reader, Nora is excited to speak to Sam. When he finishes, she tells him, “I’ve enrolled in the night classes at the City College! I’m taking law!” Typical of their exchanges, this one quickly turns sour. “You taking law!” Sam exclaims. “How come you taking law?” he asks. She relates her goal of becoming a lawyer, to which he replies, “You ain’t! When we going to get married?” She replies in a statement that rings oddly contemporary to 138 this day and age, “I been telling you never! I got to get some education first anyhow!” Education, however, is frankly beyond what Sam cares to care about: “Aw you don’t need no education! You know enough to get along with me!” Her response acknowledges the compliment he has paid her, but is nevertheless noncommittal: “Aw, Sam!” (221, 222). On the way to the show, the couple becomes entangled in yet another difference of opinion. It is an important passage because it reveals the extent to which Bonner was attuned to certain social developments within the black population of the time. Nora confides to Sam that her employers were having a “terrible fuss,” and that the wife had held nothing back in expressing her anger to husband. Nora muses, “I don’t see why they don’t get along lovely! Everything so lovely in their home and he and she both educated.” Her emphasis on education is again a source of consternation for Sam: “What makes you talk so much ‘bout this education business now? That ain’t what makes a man and woman git on together.” Nora calls him ignorant, explaining that “if you are educated you know how to do everything just right all the time.” Sam tells her that education is no match for love when it comes to marriage: You got to love folks! A guy really got to love a girl so he kin pass by the beer gardens and the hot mamas and the sheeny what wants him to lay a dollar on a suit and a watch and a diamond and a God-knows-what-all—and bring the paycheck home to her so they kin go in on it together! Nora replies, “Aw paychecks ain’t everything!” to which he shoots back, “And education ain’t everything! You got to love folks more than books!” She retorts, 139 “And more than money!” The narrator reveals that they reach the theater, but “no conclusion to the argument” (222). The opposing views on education and the domestic sphere expressed by Nora and Sam in this passage are reflective of real life tensions between black men and college-going black women of the period. Giddings writes that black women’s continued attainment of college degrees to the point of outstripping male graduates served as a source of rancor in the black domestic sphere (248). She explains: . . .[G]ains by Black women in a society that was both patriarchal and racist presented difficulties. Black women, positioned as they were on the fulcrum of race and sex, were expected to perform several different—and often conflicting—roles. (246) The major role conflict for black women was centered on the desire for them to assist in securing the “material quality of life for their families” on the one hand, and, on the other, to conduct themselves as submissive housewives. Black male social critics such as E. Franklin Frazier—tapping into longstanding stereotypes of black women as distinctly unfeminine and lazy, and into the medieval notion of all women as possessing a dreadful “inconstancy” (Gilbert and Gubar 596)--led the attack on educated, employed black women, decrying them as “too domineering and too insecure; too ambitious and too decadently idle, all in the same breath” (252). Understandably, black women, who “by necessity” had adopted traditional gender roles in fewer numbers than white women, many times faced personal crises because of the “confusion and guilt concerning their roles.” Marrying and bearing children later than women in other populations, if at all, upwardly mobile black 140 women often “worried about how they were perceived as women at a time when their White peers were staying home, having children, and scanning the shelves for the latest appliances.” With black men leading a sustained assault on them, writing such articles as “Do Career Women Makes Good Wives?” and “What’s Wrong With Negro Women?” and with submissive, white housewives consistently presented as the absolute models of femininity, these black women were often deeply “ambivalent about being ambitious” and suffered for it. To help atone for their hypervisibility as degree earners and breadwinners, these women often bowed to the wishes of their men in other areas. After all, it was thought that “until society allowed [the black man] the opportunity to support his family in the culture that gives him values. . .he is going to have this inferiority and compensate for it by forcing his wife to be a buffer for him” (250-252). Sam fits perfectly into the mold of men of the era who were taken aback at the sweeping changes occurring in black domestic life. Sam wants a family, beginning with a wife who stays home. Despite his love for her, he is unfailingly perplexed and perturbed by Nora’s desire to go to college. Nora, representative of the bolder, more self-possessed of the black women of the age, is determined to go, motivated not only by the prospect of being able to have “lovely” things and knowing “how to do things just right all the time,” but also by the vision of herself transformed, enlarged, elevated, writ large--the heroine of her own story. There are, however, structures in place to prevent Nora from tasting the triumph which she doggedly pursues. After beginning her courses at City College, 141 she finds that her color and her class, as revealed by her diction and exacerbated by her sex, prove to be sources of derision of her by her professors and fellow students. The narrator tells us that the college “endured few colored students there but they had always been men—men whose background of preparation made professors and students of the lesser type keep their sneers under cover.” Despite her symbolic maleness, which is displayed in her desire to inhabit a sphere traditionally reserved for men, Nora lacks the benefit of physical maleness to shield her from the contempt of her classmates and instructors. Nor has she the benefit of previous scholarly training to protect her from the indignities of being so notably different. Readers learn that because of Nora’s quadruple-fold vulnerability—race, class, sex, and education--“quite a few sneers came out in the open” (223). The narrator digresses for a moment to reflect on the discomfort of straddling classes. According to the narrator, “people like to place you and your desires and tastes where they think your particular color and hirsute belong.” People who occupy a cultural standing above “shower sneers down at you, forgetting all the while that the thick coats of culture which surround them began once with one coat—thinly applied. . .on their own family tree.” People who are culturally “below you. . .try to stone you to death—sneer at you until the reach the point where you gladly smother all your ideas and ideals and crawl into a protective shell of sameness so that the mediocre mob will let you alone” (223). Class- straddlers like Nora suffer the condescension and revulsion from above and jealousy and criticism from below. There is no place of ease for them. 142 Nora, however, begins her journey towards a college degree with extreme bravery and with hard work. She keeps late nights, often having to read the material ten times in order to glean the sheerest understanding of its meaning (223). By midterms, however, Nora is severely distressed by the lessons on torts and contracts. She is snappish with Sam and having to replace ruined meals for her employers with her own money. Needless to say, she is chronically overworked, as well as overwhelmed by the rigorous schoolwork for which she has not been properly prepared. Midterms end up a dismal failure for her; she fails them all (224). When Sam comes one night to take her over to the black neighborhood for a night of celebration, Nora meets him at the back door and weeps, “They flunked me, Sam! I didn’t pass! No need to go celebrating.” Sam is initially indignant on her behalf: “You mean those old fools didn’t give you no good mark? Much studyin’ and stewin’ and strivin’ and worryin’ and stayin’ up night as you did? S’matter with them folks?” He wants to defend her honor by force: “I bet if I’se to go down there they’d pass you or sumpin!” Sam’s display of brute masculinity annoys Nora, as usual. “Why you always have to talk so ignorant, Sam? You can’t do nothing! I didn’t know enough to pass, that’s all.” He strikes back, proclaiming that her failure in school serves her right. He tells her that her enrollment in college has caused her to feel “right important.” She has failed because she has allowed herself to become “too biggity.” She throws him out, and tells him that he is “no kind of friend! Rejoicing at my downfall!” which only brings him back to his most consistent point and truest desire. “Wouldn’t fall down,” he tells her, “if you’d a married me ‘stead 143 of learnin’ law all the time!” She declares that she does not need his love, and will continue the pursuit of her studies. She shoos him away for the final time, telling him that she is suffering with a massive headache (224). When he comes the following night, he finds no one to answer the door and the kitchen dark. He figures that Nora, still angry with him, has retired early. He comes again two nights after that, and is surprised to have the door opened by a black woman he does not recognize. When he asks her about Nora, she tells him that Nora is sick. He is shocked and wants to know where she is. The maid goes to ask the lady of the house where Nora is. She brings Sam back the message that Nora has contracted “pneu-monyer” and is receiving care at City Hospital (224, 225). Sam rushes to Nora’s side, with the intent of taking her home to nurse her back to health, and is appalled at Nora’s appearance. Lying on a bed in the public ward, Nora is “grey-faced,” panting for breath, with her “nostrils flared wide—too wide.” The narrator speaks Sam’s indignation: “If ‘they’ had said a little more—if someone had said that they would pay for Nora—she would not have been shoved aside and forgotten in a public ward” (225). Sam rushes to the night nurse and asks if Nora could be moved to a private room. He offers four hundred dollars to see to it that Nora receives individual care. The nurse is unmoved by the gesture and brushes him off. He returns to Nora’s side and cries. The narrator guesses that at this moment, his love for Nora becomes a palpable energy in the room and she momentarily emerges from the stupor in which 144 she has been languishing. She tries to express her love for him, but cannot get much past the l-sound. Sam misunderstands: “I know Nora! I know you got that old law to lean on! Ef you could of just want something I coulda helped you git. Just get well! I’ll help you get that law!” Nora shakes her head in frustration: “Couldn’t he understand!” (226). This is the final, most significant, most tragic of all the failed exchanges between Nora and Sam. Just as Nora’s illness precipitates a change in Sam’s attitude towards education, it causes her to accept an understanding of love to which she has been unwilling to capitulate. She now feels that books pale in comparison to the love Sam has consistently offered her: The only thing she had remembered had been that there was someone who loved her enough to love her even when she was snappish and cross—who came back again and again— no matter what. (226) For the first time in the narrative, Nora rejoices to think about Sam. Filled with gladness, she wants to try again to tell Sam how much she loves him, but the last effort along with her teeming thoughts no doubt have sapped the little strength she has. Dying, she closes her eyes. We are told, however, that “she closed her eyes carrying with her the love that was in Sam’s eyes. She thought she smiled.” Even this facial expression, however, is subject to unfortunate misreading. Nora’s enigmatic smile is explained away by the doctor as a meaningless effect of death. Sam, left to mourn Nora’s loss, sits for an extended period crying at Nora’s bedside despite the desire of the nurses to prepare the bed to receive the next patient. His 145 only wish now is that he could have matched Nora in elegance and wonder, instead of having tried to force her to conform to his plainness (227). This story contains complexities that are not so easily found in “Patch Quilt,” or in “High Stepper.” In those narratives, it takes nothing at all for the reader to side with hard-working, faithful Sara against a straying, perfidious Jim, or with sweet, loving Sadie against yet another Jim. With “One True Love,” however, most contemporary readers will doubtlessly admire Nora for her strength, determination and passion, but most will also applaud Sam for his steadfastness and his genuine love for Nora. If Nora may be admired for her relentless, straightforward plowing through life and its hardships, Sam may be admired to the same extent for his circular trajectory, seen in his doubling back again and again to extend love to the person he values most, even when she makes it difficult for him to do so. In “One True Love,” Bonner depicts the complexities of life for black women and men of the era who were grappling with sweeping changes to social structures which had previously been considered largely immutable, namely the domestic sphere and within it the institution of marriage. Nora wants a better life for herself, and is willing to work to get it. In doing so, however, she must face the race-, class-, and gender-based derision of her professors and classmates at school, as well as the fact that she has not been adequately prepared to compete academically with her white male classmates. She must also go to school while continuing to support herself as a maid. Importantly, Nora is never situated within a 146 family or network of friends other than Sam. She is overwhelmingly alone. There are simply too many obstacles standing in the way of her attempt to assume the role of the heroine in a story of her own design. She will never be the lawyer who so awed her that evening at dinner. Furthermore, she is forced to deny herself the opportunity of being loved and loving, not because she is wholly averse to such love, but rather because heterosexual love is usually attended by structures that would only impede her personal and intellectual development. It is obvious that Sam is no Jim. Sam loves Nora; nevertheless his plan for her is not her own. Were she to adopt his vision, she would be acquiescing to her own lack of personal fulfillment, a choice that fills her with repugnance. Given these circumstances, the courtship between Sam and Nora cannot help but be a failed exchange, a notion Bonner emphasizes with the death of Nora. This story sounds an alarm for the black domestic sphere, calling for much- needed reexamination of the structures which were binding and deadly, rather than affirming and life-promoting, to women. This story pits the intellect/spirit against the traditional love union. It calls attention to paths of independence and self-sufficiency that women, across races, classes, and time periods have been taking for centuries, for a wide range of reasons—whether it was the choice of variously single, wealthy, educated, artistic women of times past to enter convents in order to protect their personal freedom from the ravages of the early modern marriage contract, or the wishes of the contemporary woman to be educated and professionally and personally established 147 before seeking marriage. This story also makes a specific complaint on behalf of North American black women, who, in their desire to be educated, appear to have a history of having to confront partners who are unwilling or unable to support them, or being faced with a total lack of suitable partners. Unlike Sara and Sadie, Nora as a phallic woman does not thrust into, or penetrate, a male body with a phallic object. Rather she announces a new day for women, particularly black women, with the insertion of herself into a male- dominated sphere. She is not at all welcomed. In fact, Nora suffers terribly, and, because of the precarious social position in which she already stands, can be said to die for her attempts to occupy male space. However, and however briefly, she succeeds at penetrating the racist, classist, and sexist barriers which have been designed to keep her out. Conclusion Suffering the bewilderment and hurt of failed exchanges in the domestic, or intimate, sphere, Bonner’s female characters are pushed into the temporary assumption of masculine power, wherein they assume the phallic power of the male to thrust, to pierce, to penetrate. In these narratives, they do this literally, such as in the cases of Sara and Sadie, who make use of knives and knife-like objects to penetrate the bodies of the men who have caused them hurt. They also do this figuratively, such as in the case of Nora, who penetrates male space with her body and desires in her attempt to reach goals that are out of step with her social, sexual, and racial status. 148 While Bonner’s phallic female characters in many ways play into the longstanding notions of the un-feminine, castrating black woman, they also declare and point to black women’s participation in the symbolic castration of black men as a last resort against black men’s perpetration of sexist ideologies which are especially harmful and hurtful to them. In Bonner’s stories, the black women who attempt to live the traditional female narrative are horribly failed by it. Sara and Sadie are good wives who only want to love their husbands and be secure in their husbands’ affections; they are repaid with infidelity, disrespect, and bodily harm. Nora’s “castration” of Sam is not born of anti-male sentiment but of pro-female desire to gain a future for herself of which she can be proud. Bonner thus redresses the image of the black woman as always already masculine and enervating of the black man. Bonner’s phallic female characters do not ever embody the male or become men; they temporarily assume male power as signified by the phallus, which argues for a black female femininity that is momentarily interrupted, not abandoned. The phallic woman in Bonner’s late Frye Street stories also displays the author’s imaginative connection to the wide-ranging changes taking place among blacks in the late thirties and early forties. Her female characters, much like the flesh and blood women of the era, are weary of the standard abuses of sexist domination. In response to them, they are possessed of an anger and a drive which announce the dawn of a new day for black women, which was attended by a decreasing tolerance for infidelity and physical abuse by men, and increasing 149 interest in the pursuit of financial independence, or the shared support of their families, if they had them, through the attainment of college degrees and professional careers. In many ways, Bonner’s characters are a foreshadowing of Hansberry’s Beneatha, who pulls away dramatically from the more traditional examples of Lena and Ruth in Raisin in the Sun. Furthermore, while the action taken by Bonner’s phallic woman can be punitive, preventive, or preparatory, it is never corrective. The conflicts in the relationships in these narratives are not sweetly resolved. Jim does not swear off other women and become Sara’s hardworking, goodly man. Sara does not rise off her sickbed, pack up her things and her mother, and leave Jim’s property for a saucy, new life. Nora does not rally in her college efforts, re-enroll and pass the next semester with flying colors; neither does she enjoy a loving, meaningful relationship with Sam until seconds before her death. Luke, the young would-be date rapist in “Light In Dark Places,” does not confess his intentions to Aunt Susie, and repent to Tina for his evil plans. A sense of unified wholeness is never achieved in these stories. The failed exchange thus remains the dominant marker of the plots, and presumably, of Bonner’s artistic vision of the black domestic sphere. The failed exchange also heavily informs Bonner’s approach to the spiritual and the sensual. In fact, the relationship between them in her fiction can be said to be the greatest failed exchange of them all. In her stories, Bonner acknowledges the sensual aspect of life, but it is an acknowledgment covered over in dire warnings of disease, disaster, and death. The corporeal anxiety which blatantly permeates “High 150 Stepper” is actually characteristic of all the stories examined here. However, contrary to what one might expect of an artist who so mistrusts the sensual, Bonner does not effectively establish the spiritual—in either its intellectual or religious forms—as a proper or stable alternative. There is no unified center for Bonner; indeed, it falls apart. Bonner’s short stories serve as a safety pin in time for this project. They hold the place of the writing black female intellectual during the War years, which effectively stopped the majority of black women’s literary production. In this project, others—Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks—will take up, post-war, where Bonner leaves off with her 1941 retirement from writing. I will examine novels by Petry, Hurston, West, and Brooks, which were written between 1947 and 1951. Because of their publication dates, they are not prewar, or even postwar, for that matter. Written in the window of time between the Second World War and the Korean War, these works are better categorized as interwar. Not only do these novels speak much about life in a world at war, but they also have much to say about the difficulties of being a black woman in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement. 151 Chapter Two References Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. New York: Garland, 1998. The Amplified Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987. Bonner, Marita. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Eds. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Cose, Ellis. “The Black Gender Gap.” Newsweek.com. 3 Mar. 2003. 27 Aug. 2008. http://www.newsweek.com/id/59790/page/1. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Legal Racing: The Simutexts of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” University of Southern California. Los Angeles, 12 Jun. 2003. Flynn, Joyce. Introduction. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Eds. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 596-611. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1984. 1985. 1986. New York: Bantam, 1988. Kuspit, Donald. “The Unempathic Eye.” Artnet.com Magazine. 11 Aug. 2008. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit10-19-01.asp7. Meltzer, Milton. “Folk Life in Black and White.” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African-American Themes. 8 Jun. 2005. http://www.nathanielturner.com/folklifeinblackandwhite.htm. Musser, Judith. “African American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the Talented Tenth.” Studies in Short Fiction (Winter 1997). 23 March 2009. “The Phallic Woman.” Dictionary of Psychology Online. 2001. 11 Aug. 2008. <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O87-phallicwoman.html>. 152 The Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: American Bible Society, 1973. Smith, Barbara. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature & Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 168-185. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroines Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford, 1996. 153 Chapter Three Sexual Proxies and Chocolate Victorians: Black Women Writers, the Interwar Novel, and Pre-Civil Rights Era Social Cautionism, 1947-1951 History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again. --Maya Angelou, Black Female U.S. Writer and Public Intellectual She had to be full of The Spirit to talk that way, and so young, and therefore apt to be deviled and pestered by the flesh. --Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwannee Keep her that land of blue! Keep her those fairies, with witches always killed at the end, and Santa every winter’s lord, kind, sheer being who never perspires, who never does or says a foolish or ineffective thing, who never looks grotesque, who never has occasion to pull the chain and flush the toilet. --Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha History never looks like history when you are living through it. --John W. Gardner, U.S. Statesman, Humanitarian, and Leadership Specialist If the Wash Ain’t Clean… There is an old African American folk saying which no doubt springs from black women’s long history as domestic workers—both without and within their own homes. The saying goes, “If the wash ain’t clean, it’ll show up on the ironing board.” Its literal meaning, involving the proper care and cleaning of clothing and linens, is simple enough to access. Beyond this practical application, however, is another, more proverbial one: If some wrong or sinister thing is at first hidden from view, time will provide just the right occasion—an “ironing board”—on which all will be laid bare. History can also be said to work in just this way. If circumstances 154 are not made “clean” from the beginning, various “ironing boards” become the sites on which a good press reveals all manner of stains, sins, errors, and transgressions. Racially speaking, from the moment of its nativity, North America’s wash was not clean. According to sociologist Joe R. Feagin, the United States of America was, from the first, a reflection of its founders’ desires for a “white republic” set up in direct opposition to and domination over “those people on the North American continent whom they defined as inferior and as problems”—namely Native Americans and blacks. Feagin views the document which emerged as a result of the 1787 Constitutional Convention as fundamentally flawed because it, in numerous ways, embodied and enacted the manifestly unjust, deeply problematic wishes of its creators (11). Several “ironing boards” before and since that time have revealed those stains, deeply set, and at times convincing cause to believe in the impossibility of expungement. The nation’s wars have been the largest of these ironing boards—the Revolution; the Civil War; the First World War; the Second World War, or Pacific, War; the Korean War; the Vietnam War. Certainly, each was different from its fellows, but all served to help frame and phrase the “Negro question” with ever- increasing volume and desperation, evoking a wide range of conflicting responses from the larger society. After the wars, which almost always played out in an international context, the next largest of the ironing boards would be the grassroots, ground-level movements of the people—black people, and many whites, who banded together in 155 direct confrontation of the racial inequities which had been woven into the fabric of the nation from the start and ground in with continued systemic support. This chapter is an examination of black women intellectuals—not during time of war, nor during an organized movement of the people to overthrow North American racial apartheid, but rather during a seeming lull in such activities. This chapter focuses on black women writers in the interwar period between the Pacific and Korean Wars, particularly those years spanning from 1947 to 1951. In addition to its being a brief intermission between U.S. international entanglements, this time period is important because of its antecedence to the Civil Rights Movement, the beginning of which is generally accepted as mid-fifties. I focus here on black female writers’ use of what I have termed “social cautionism” as a way of proceeding with care in this relatively quiet but highly uneasy historical moment. I argue that their literary social cautionism takes the form of their utilization of evasive and displacing narrative elements to confound the particular discomfort which would have resulted from a more direct, less artful approach in their otherwise unflinching depictions of life in North America for people on the wrong side of race, sex, and class divides. I also argue that the “social cautionist” paradigm used by these black female intellectuals had been developed decades earlier with the “politics of the respectability,” a religious, social, and political tool wielded by black Baptist women of the early twentieth century. Revising and revamping “respectability” from that earlier time period, black women of the interwar, pre-Civil Rights era 156 employed two major literary devices, which I call the “sexual proxy” and the “chocolate Victorian.” I explore the sexual proxy and the chocolate Victorian through the examination of four novels: Ann Petry’s Country Place (1947), Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy (1948), and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha (1951). In my view, these works represent black women intellectuals’ attempts at ironing out the nation’s dirty linen. Continuities for Black Women in Twentieth Century Viewed through the lens of history-as-repetition, the 1940’s and 1950’s can be understood as both a recurrence and an elaboration of earlier times in the twentieth century in which key forces and social shifts lent added momentum to the black demand for civil rights and equal treatment under the banner of North American democracy. According to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, these two decades at mid-century looked, in fact, very much like the early twentieth century, as both periods were characterized by “massive black migration and urbanization, [predictable] employment patterns, the heightened materialism of industrial education, the [women’s] movement, and world war” (185). For black women in particular, there are strong resonances between the early- and middle-twentieth century years. Higginbotham has noted how the period between 1900 and 1920 held black women especially between a rock and a hard place. Calling this period black women’s own “the best and worst of times,” Higginbotham explains that even as the women’s rights agenda was gaining visibility and power on the U.S. social and political scene, anti-black sentiment was 157 still quite acceptable, and even “fashionable.” For people who were both female and black, this period posed a set of problems and questions unique to those who occupied this awkward social space (185). This same duality for black women was present in the 1940’s, when, as Paula Giddings reports, “…Black women who came to the North tended to be more skilled and better educated than their male counterparts.” Black women were thus able to attain college degrees, and to have a presence in the professional labor market, which were “disproportionate within their racial group.” These 1940’s “gains by Black women in a society that was both patriarchal and racist presented difficulties” which would affect black women as North Americans uniquely “positioned…on the fulcrum of race and sex” (246). Doing Battle: Controlling Images, Defining Depictions Throughout its history in the U.S., racial oppression has drawn much of its power and dominance from the realm of the image. In her introduction to Black Looks, bell hooks historicizes the use of the image to authorize and justify black subjugation: There is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in this society and the institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all black people. Long before white supremacists ever reached the shores of what we now call the United States, they constructed images of blackness and black people to uphold and affirm their notions of racial superiority, their political imperialism, their will to dominate and enslave. From slavery on, white supremacists have recognized that 158 control over images is central to any system of racial domination. (2) Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has done an extensive study of what she calls “controlling images,” which are damning characterizations of subjugated social groups. She notes how these unsavory images perpetuate the oppression of the people to whom they are attached by “mak[ing] racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be…inevitable parts of everyday life.” Because the “intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality could not continue without powerful ideological justification for their existence,” controlling images work by fueling the ideological assumptions which undergird all social malefactions. These defining depictions cause the oppressed to appear somehow deserving of their oppression and also give the average citizen the suspicion that there is little need or hope of challenging the status quo. Instead of moving consumers of the image to feel concern and compassion for oppressed groups, controlling images move consumers to feel disgust, fear, hatred, and apathy toward the oppressed, further empowering the state of subjugation (69, 70). I will add that they also encourage certain individuals within subjugated groups to engage a network of choices which effect their embodiment of the projected images. Controlling images thusly feed a steady flow of energy into the unending cycle of domination and subjugation. 159 Black Women and Respectability In the early twentieth century, black Baptist women, pulling from the black club and racial uplift ideologies of the century before, devised a political strategy aimed at simultaneously shutting down racism and building up their own people through the conscious undoing of controlling images of blacks. Higginbotham has called their political strategy the “politics of respectability” because of its focus on using individual and collective morality and social propriety to wither racist agendas which broadcast images of blacks as immoral, immature, unproductive, untrustworthy, and fit only for continued economic exploitation and social degradation. The Baptist women saw such images as responsible for perpetuating white hatred and indifference on the one hand, and black ineptitude and moral dissipation on the other. A crusade against such images, the black Baptist women’s politics of respectability went forth as a mélange of “biblical teachings, the philosophy of racial self-help, Victorian ideology, and the democratic principles of the Constitution of the United States,” which the women energized with their own intentions and interpretations. These black Christian women saw their mission as not only to “counter racist images and structures” propagated by white racist America, but also to call out and correct “what they perceived to be negative practices and attitudes among their own people.” They saw their political ideology as the means by which they could preach a message of reformation to both the wayward individual and to the “entire structural system of American race relations” (Higginbotham 188). 160 Their line of attack was complex indeed, with its parallel emphases on “morals and manners,” social protest, middle-class uplift, and solid identification with the black working poor. Higginbotham explains that these grass-roots politicians, working from a position which was after all situated within the larger structure with which it sought to do battle, both “reflected and reinforced the hegemonic values of white America…[and] simultaneously subverted and transformed the logic of race and gender subordination” (187). Respectability Revisited: Social Cautionism As I have pointed out, interwar black women intellectuals found themselves working in a social milieu similar to the one in which the black Baptist women had labored a generation earlier. Like their mothers and grandmothers, black writing women of this period wrestled against fully operational, longstanding controlling images. The controlling images of just the black woman alone cut the black writing intellectuals’ work out for them. Barbara Christian notes these images as racial inferior (5); distinctly un-feminine female (7); fat, black-skinned, large-breasted, remarkably asexual, “contented and loyal” mammy (11); brown-skinned, voluptuous, “naturally lascivious,” sexually loose black woman (15); “melancholy” tragic mulatta [most often associated with “yellow” skin] (16); and “dark and evil” conjure woman (16). Also complicating the situation of black women writers of this period was that they were moving headlong, along with the rest of the nation, into the prime Civil Rights years. I believe that the products of black women’s collective and 161 singular literary imaginations during the interwar period announce the advent of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the intensified white gaze of that era seems to be already upon these writers; they write as in the glare of the socio-political moment that is everywhere around them, though not yet fully articulated. Though Giddings chronicles a definite downturn in radical agitation among blacks in post-World War II North America and notes among them a simultaneous marked upswing in materialism (249), the racial turbulence of the fifties and sixties had to have been already brewing. Such a well-sustained movement could not have been a spontaneous social phenomenon arising as from nowhere. There appears then to be a dichotomous relationship between what seems on the surface to have been an ebbing in the black desire for social change, and what had to have been a steadily growing black radicalism underneath. In The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, historian George Lipsitz asserts that the racism, suspicion, and poor treatment heaped upon black soldiers in the Pacific War of the early forties “contributed to a new militancy” among black people. Other historians have noted the embrace by black military personnel and their supporters of the “Double V” campaign during the War years—meaning black “victory at home and abroad.” Lipsitz writes that in the post-War years, black soldiers, having been asked along with Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans to “fight for freedoms overseas that they did not themselves enjoy at home,” became radicalized by the hypocrisy of a nation that would entice disenfranchised citizens out of a segregated nation only to enlist them as soldiers in 162 a segregated military and them send them home to a nation where racial apartheid was still ubiquitous. According to Lipsitz, the very vocal and very visible protests to racial oppression in the fifties, otherwise known as the Civil Rights Movement, were a direct result of the radicalization stemming from black experiences during and after the War (203, 193). Quite in step with the work of Lipsitz on this issue is that of Jennifer Frost, who has written on filmic representation of blacks during the post-War years. Frost explains how this filmic representation was often in the crosshairs of “civil rights activists” who desired “to build upon the momentum toward racial equality in the United States and ‘black dignity in cinema’ gained during World War II” (38). Frost also discusses at length how actress-turned-Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper “launched a defense of conservative beliefs and attitudes and an attack on civil rights efforts in Hollywood and in [the] United States, just as the Cold War began, and modern Civil Right Movement took shape” (39). Importantly, Frost marks the year 1946 as “the decisive year. The first year of peace following the end of World War II was also the year in which Hollywood would either further ‘the war-driven, nuanced changes in racial depiction’ or ‘restore its prewar racial order.” Frost reports that the NAACP took a vested interest in keeping a close eye on which path Hollywood decided to take and opened a Hollywood bureau in this crucial year (40). Frost’s work thus supports the notion that the interwar years were years of highly intense civil rights activity as well as opposition to such activity. This position only makes sense given the proximal relationship between these years and those of the Civil Rights Movement. 163 I believe, however, that there is coalescence between the somewhat differing understandings of blacks in this historical moment of Giddings on the one hand and Lipsitz and Frost on the other. I therefore choose to see both viewpoints as correct. Perhaps the waning of membership of black organizations in the crucial years between 1940 and 1955, which Giddings sees as evidence of a decline in concern over black political advancement, took place because greater numbers of blacks no longer trusted these groups to represent them adequately in the fight for their rights as citizens, not because they no longer cared about those rights. Furthermore, because the Civil Rights Movement can be understood to begin officially around 1954 with Brown vs. the Board of Education, radical sentiment among blacks must have been surging in the interwar period of the late forties and early fifties, even while the membership of political organizations suffered dramatic losses. Perhaps the growing black concern with status and material comfort, which Giddings cites as another sign of the decline of racial militancy, was in fact one catalyst among many for the increasing black demand for fairness in housing, employment, and education which would birth the Civil Rights Movement. Black female writers—no doubt feeling the surging black radicalism and the growing white backlash which all blacks would have felt, along with the ongoing imagistic and physical vulnerability of black women—armed themselves with a neo-politics of respectability, which Frost studies in film under the appellation “the politics of representation,” and which I study in literature under the term “social cautionism.” Carefully working within the bounds of heterosexual marriage or 164 relations, and through characters who unfailingly embody (and defy) some aspect of the Victorian lady, these interwar intellectuals found ways to contest sexist and racist controlling images of black women, speak at length about the nature of female sexuality, and protest ill treatment of the poor and of blacks in general. Using a mixture of distinctly female protest fiction, Judeo-Christian-influenced Victorianism, and sustained critique of the modern culture of commodification and consumerism, black female writers would write themselves--and by extension, all black women--into the interwar narrative of the nation. The four novels which I discuss here are particularly solid examples of black female social cautionism. It is important to note that these works have had to be reclaimed from the historico-literary nebula into which they were earlier consigned. Written by black women and about black women (even when they are about white women), these novels have existed mainly on the periphery of scholarly and historical awareness, largely due to the hegemonic force of the black male narrative during the time period in which they were written and published. Barbara Christian has written that from the “late forties to the sixties the plight of the black male was the dominant subject of the black novel,” and that as a result, “[t]he works of [Richard] Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Ralph W. Ellison created controversy and comment not only in their own circles, or even in America, but all over the world” (68). According to Christian, while the novel was celebrated as the domain of black male writers, the black female literati distinguished its voice during this time 165 in the genre of poetry, most notably represented by Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker (68). However, with the success of black women novelists beginning in the seventies, and the growing and sustained efforts of scholars to reclaim and reevaluate the contributions of the black women who wrote novels pre- seventies, these works have begun to garner worthy attention which was largely denied them at their first appearance. The interwar novels discussed here pick up, expound upon, and transform the themes of the modernist short stories of Marita Bonner, who retired from writing in the early World War II years. I. The Sexual Proxy: Petry’s Country Place and Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee How does it happen that two black women writers working in late 1940’s North America, within one year of each other, write and publish two altogether different novels on heterosexual female sexuality using white heroines? It is a coincidence of far too startling and remarkable effect to be explained away by simple happenstance. There is little to suggest that the two women, Ann Petry and Zora Neale Hurston (twenty-two years Petry’s senior), knew each other personally, and it is doubtful that they traveled in the same circles, so personal contact between them and the possibility of their having mutual friends seem rather improbable, as well. Furthermore, by the late 1930’s, when Petry arrived in Harlem from her native Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hurston was no longer in residence there. In fact, according to most of Hurston’s extant letters from the period, during Petry’s 166 time in New York, Hurston was living mostly in Maitland, Florida, with only occasional, short visits to her old Northern stomping grounds (Kaplan 412-418). Because coincidence is far too easy, and intimacy far too unlikely, the next best place to look for answers is the historical and cultural moment in which both women were working. It is only logical to believe that the unique pressures of the interwar, pre-Civil Rights moment worked in similar ways upon these two very different women and intellectuals. I will attempt to show the circumlocutory nature of their narratives as historically necessary, demanded by the social cautionism needed by blacks of the time to navigate the swirling racial tensions of the pre-Civil Rights moment. In fact, I argue that Petry and Hurston hit upon a curious but decidedly North American way of tackling the uncomfortable subject of black female subjectivity and sexuality during a period of intense racial scrutiny. Though “anomalous,” in their transgressions against the “protocols of black textuality” as Claudia Tate discusses in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (3, 7), these novels are uniquely and positively black novels; I therefore defy common characterizations of them as “raceless” or “white” because of their utilization of white characters. Country Place and Seraph on the Suwanee are also notable companion pieces because the novels capture each writer on her home turf. These books offer readers an experience with each writer’s expert handling of race, class, sex, and sexuality within the geographical regions they know most intimately. Country Place is set in small-town Connecticut, while Seraph on the Suwanee takes place in 167 rural Florida of the early twentieth century. Using to full advantage the settings, dialects, and geographical dispositions unique to their respective regions, these novel form an intriguing black female North-South congress on pressing contemporary U.S. issues. A. Petry Ann Petry, who wrote novels in the social realist, or naturalist, style, was born in 1912 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Nellie McKay, in her forward to the Petry novel The Narrows, reports that Petry’s family members were “the only Afro- Americans in the conservative New England town” where her grandfather had worked as a chemist and her father as a pharmacist. In 1938, Petry traveled to Harlem to pursue a career in journalism, writing for The Amsterdam News and The People’s Voice (ix). As an urban reporter, she became acquainted with the problems of poverty and violence which plagued the city. In her activism and intellectualism, a chief concern of Petry’s was how these and other negative influences mar the lives of those who struggle to survive in such hostile environments, particularly youths. Her first novel, The Street, was published in 1946, and was a direct result of her exploration of the impact of urbanization on black Americans (Christian 63). This novel was the first written by an American black woman to sell over a million copies (McKay vii). Another of Petry’s interests was how race and class impacted geographical regions that usually failed to register on the national barometers of race and class. Set outside of the South, and away from hot-spot urban centers like Harlem, 168 Chicago, and Detroit, Petry’s novels, Country Place and The Narrows (1953) focus these issues within small towns in Connecticut. Petry also wrote short stories and children’s books until 1971. She died in 1997. Country Place Petry’s Country Place is the story of Glory Roane, a straying young wife in mostly white, small-town Lennox, Connecticut. Glory has become restless in her marriage to the homespun, all-American returning soldier and would-be artist, Johnnie Roane. Although the story is told from the nearly omniscient vantage point of George “Doc” Fraser, the town’s pharmacist and a keen observer of its inhabitants, and focuses centrally on the adulterous Glory, it encompasses the lives of several compelling and sharply drawn characters. Among them are the august, elderly Bertha Gramby; her mewling, ineffectual son Mearns; his cold-hearted, calculating, social climbing wife Lil, who is also Glory’s mother; Neola, Mrs. Gramby’s maid and caretaker, the only black female in the book; the Portuguese gardener to the Grambys, Portalucca, who is deeply in love with Neola; Ed Barrell, the town’s hulking, middle-aged filling station owner and ladies’ man; and most entertaining, and perhaps most disturbing of all, Tom “The Weasel” Walker, the town’s cabbie, gossip, and disreputable trickster figure. I will examine the novel’s point-of-view of female sexuality as it exists in tension with the false notions of female sexuality which have often been transmitted from generation to generation to both women and men in West. I will look at the 169 spectacular aspect of desirability and desire, as presented in the novel. Finally, I will examine how female desire and desirability, and the notion of the “lady” are brought together in the book in the character of the black Neola, whom Petry uses strategically to confound, shame, and counteract the unhinged sexuality and moral degradation of Glory. On Allegory and Swift Transition Written just at the end of the Second War, this novel’s allegorical significances are quite prominent. Petry’s Johnnie, is a fictional parallel to actual fighting men who were returning home to “Old Glory,” the American flag, or more specifically, the American shores over which it waved. Returning home, however, was, for many returning soldiers, fraught with the discomfort of confronting the unexpected change in the once-familiar which had occurred in their absences. Depicting the reality of this experience, Johnnie, after having breathed a premature sigh of relief to find that the Lennox station house “still bore a great resemblance to the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel,” confronts change after change in his hometown. The Catholic Church was once “whiter than that,” and he cannot recall, without assistance, if it has “always been there.” Later in the novel, his thoughts find an echo in words from the narrator, conveyed through a direct conversation between the two men. Doc Fraser tells Johnnie that the town is “just about the same. The changes are buried deep, way under the surface, and it takes a long time for them to crack the crust” (72). 170 The notion of change suffuses the novel and other characters remark upon its inevitability. Having just witnessed, along with Mrs. Roane, Johnny’s mother, an embarrassing scene involving Glory, Mrs. Gramby tries to take Mrs. Roane’s mind off the shock she has just suffered by making gentle conversation: “The town changes, doesn’t it? I can remember when there more trees, fewer people, no cars. It was a simpler life in those days. People knew each other better, trusted each other more” (60). Later, Mrs. Gramby thinks to herself: During the course of the years—not all at once, but slowly and surely—the line between good and evil had been rubbed out. It was once so sharp and clear one did not cross it no matter what the push and pull of one’s emotions. . . .Instead of a sharp line of demarcation between right and wrong, Gloria and her generation had found only the vague blur made by erasures—it was all that remained of a moral code after two world wars. (63) This emphasis on the inescapability of change within the novel recalls the preoccupation with change of earlier, modernist writers who were contending with change as the chief effect of impending, current, and past World War. The Second War, it seems, redoubled the American experience of the phenomenon of seemingly sudden and irreversible change. This novel joins others which had appeared in the years before it in suggesting that the resultant changes of a world at war went deeper than music, clothing, and hairstyles; they went to the very core of the human experience, how humans governed themselves in relation to others, daring to do the once unfathomable with alarming regularity. 171 Johnnie’s thinking of change as both perceptible and imperceptible, helped along by the skillful influence of The Weasel, leads Johnnie to wonder if he will find his wife Glory much changed. This thought is made the more pressing as the car passes the Town Hall, and the figure of Ed Barrell, with his dark clothes, thick shoulders, and bowed legs, appears at the top of the steps. “Good old Ed,” the Weasel remarks, and asks, “You remember him?” (14). Johnnie is sent hurtling headlong into an old pre-war memory of Ed “kissing somebody else’s wife with a kind of male powerfulness, a drive and an urge that Johnnie could see and feel and understand just in the glimpse of the forward thrust of Ed’s shoulders” (15). The Weasel, effortlessly sizing up Johnnie’s state of mind, applies sly pressure, cutting into the soldier’s reverie with, “Good old Ed. He’s still screwing all the women in town” (15). The Weasel’s summation plunges Johnnie right back into his doubts: “How did [Johnnie] know the same thing hadn’t happened to Glory? God knows you couldn’t prove anything by her letters; because if you looked at them sharply, trying to analyze them, they didn’t say anything. She never said anything really personal” (16). Unable to shake his doubts about the security of his marriage, Johnnie returns to his parents’ home, into which Glory has moved in his absence. There he must confront the reality which has been planted in foreshadow by Barrell and the Weasel. What should be a long-awaited, late night scene of mutual seduction between his bride and himself turns out instead to be one of unmistakable rejection and outright violence. 172 Glory and the Lies of the Feminine Construct Petry’s Glory, while ultimately a symbol of the unsavory, is not without her usefulness as a solid representation of twentieth century U.S. women’s desire for a way out of the untenable and therefore unbearable lie of mid-century femininity. Because Country Place uses a white female character and but was written by a black woman, it functions ably as a go-between for two communities of women who were each facing multiple, albeit differing, societal oppressions. These oppressions which were working on the lives of women in the forties and the fifties are perhaps seen most clearly by in works by white and black feminists, such as Betty Freidan’s classic 1963 The Feminine Mystique and Frances Beale’s 1970 “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” That later critical works would be wholly devoted to exploring the themes Petry addressed years earlier in a novel reveals Petry’s nimble sensitivity to issues which would grow gravely important to U.S. women in the coming years. In the famous first chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan examines the fifties as a time of deep, unnamable unrest and unhappiness for most white, middle- class, North American women despite the ongoing overproduction of images to the contrary. She writes: The problem lay unburied, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the U.S. …But those who faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality….It 173 is no longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women….I don’t accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness or cold….It may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb often discover it gets worse. (15) On the other side of this particular reality for middle-class white women held hostage by endlessly happy, beautiful, suburban, domestic images of themselves gladly reduced only to their roles as wives and mothers was that of black women, who also suffered from the power of those very images, and from continuing racial and sexual oppressions all their own. Beale writes: …[I]t is idle dreaming to think of black women simply caring for their homes and children like the middle-class white model. Most black women have to work to help house, feed, and clothe their families. Black women make up a substantial percentage of the black working force, and this is true for the poorest black family as well as the so-called middle-class family. Black women were never afforded any such phony luxuries. Though we have been browbeaten with this white image, the reality of the degrading and dehumanizing jobs that were relegated to us quickly dissipated this mirage of womanhood….Let me state here and now that the black woman in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.” By reducing the black man in America to such abject oppression, the black woman had no protector and was used, and is still being used in some cases, as the scapegoat for the evils that this horrendous system has perpetrated on black men. Her physical image has been maligned; she has been sexually molested and abused by the white colonizer; she has suffered the worst kind of economic exploitation….It is the depth of degradation to be socially manipulated, physically raped, used to undermine your own household, and to be powerless to reverse this syndrome. (147, 148) 174 Petry, as both a relatively privileged middle-class woman who had grown up in a white town much like Lennox, and a black woman who had witnessed close up the lives and troubles of poor black women, was well-equipped to reveal the profound pain and frustration in the lives of North American women. Although possessed of a literary imagination intimate with a broad view of women’s situations on the continent, Petry fashioned a context for Glory’s suffering which reflected the materially comfortable, seemingly self-contained context in which her white, middle-class historical counterparts also suffered. This is evident in the way that Glory’s dissatisfaction plays itself out on a sexual field although her problem is not chiefly sexual. It is chiefly ontological. Having exhausted the limits of her existence as a housewife—even as the housewife of a war hero in absentia for much of their marriage—Glory has grown weary of her small life to a man that she does not truly know or care to know. Thus Petry raises important questions about the attractiveness of wifehood, as it was constructed at the near mid-mark twentieth century. Readers learn that six months after marrying Johnnie, Glory “was fed up. . . and that [a]t the end of the year she was so bored it frightened her.” Back then, she had sometimes picked fights with Johnnie just to break the routinism of her days (35). Johnnie’s enlistment is the beginning of a liberation Glory has never known. Like many actual American women of the period, Glory gets a wartime job. She loves the job at Perkins’ Store for its purchase of her economic freedom from 175 Lil, her greedy mother, who had taken the lion’s share of Glory’s earnings from a previous job, and from Johnnie, “who had bottled her up in the little white house, with dishes and laundry and cooking.” Her new job is fast-paced, and full of activity and adoring male customers, who call her “Morning Glory and Angel Face and Glory Hallelujah” and respond to her attractiveness by lingering to “touch her hand and smile into her eyes” (35). As a working woman, for the first time, she lives the life of a free, self-supporting, fully adult woman with a life outside of the home. Her taste of freedom and excitement in her wartime job has only increased her longing for another kind of life, a life which becomes all the more urgent once her husband returns. Ed Barrell, the man with whom she eventually has an affair, signifies, more than the elusive sexual fulfillment Glory desperately desires, the excitement and danger and adventure that are foreign in her small, quiet existence in the home of her in-laws. Johnnie’s sudden return to Lennox forces Glory to face her own rock and hard place, for it is clear to her that she “do[esn’t] want Johnnie” ,but she “ha[sn’t] got Ed and may never have him” (36). On her day off, which is the day after Johnnie returns, she thinks to herself that life has robbed her for “too long,” and that if she is not careful to “hurry up and get” what she wants, she will miss the opportunity altogether (56). Her utmost desire at this point is to experience the sexual passion she believes will cure her lonely, unfulfilled life. Johnnie’s long absence has given Glory the time and the space necessary to realize that the happiness she wants lies outside of her marriage. However, she 176 lacks the moral courage necessary to tell her newly-returned husband her truest desires, and immediately starts on a path of mendacious frigidity in order to keep him at bay. This is chiefly where the perversity in Glory as a character is manifest. Trapped in the lie of the mid-century construct of femininity, she herself becomes a skilled liar. On the first night of Johnnie’s return, Glory’s stereotypical, white, blond, female beauty entices Johnny to touch her. When he tries, she rescinds the invitation by pushing him away, telling him, “Don’t. You’re hurting me.” It is an untruth meant to release her from an obligation she has no desire to fulfill. When he apologizes and begins again to initiate intimate contact with her, Glory lies beneath him, “motionless, not speaking.” He flirts briefly with the notion of raping her, but decides instead to see if she will talk to him. When he asks what the problem is, Glory responds, “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I can’t bear to have you touch me anymore” (25). Her answer here could indeed be a representation of the unnamable distress which plagued the white middle-class women she represents, or it could simply be another lie that she cannot stop herself from telling. Glory’s evasive response to Johnnie’s pointed question of whether she has another lover infuriates him, and he grabs her by the throat and shakes her. The choked sound of her scream breaks the spell of his anger, and he lets her go. Her anguished cry brings his concerned parents to the door. Johnnie is amazed at the speed and believability with which his wife is able to lie. Smiling apologetically, she explains through the cracked door that she accidentally let the window down on 177 her hand, and that she screamed because she thought that she was bleeding. Knowing how “she was terrified at the sight of blood,” Mr. and Mrs. Roane make sure that she is unharmed and return to their own bedroom, despite their fears that something worse has occurred. Once his parents are safely out of hearing distance, Glory recants her rejection of Johnnie’s physical advances, falsely claiming that she had been tired, and assuring him that no one else has taken his place. In an act designed to seduce, she place her “warm, soft” body in close proximity to his own, and complements him on his height, which she had forgotten, and the broadness of his shoulders, which has bloomed in his four-year absence (29). He invokes the name of Ed Barrell as a test of her honesty; she passes the test by applying deliberate effort to keep her breathing from going shallow, and calmly asking, “Yes?” After a short conversation, during which he notes her snobbery and spite toward other townspeople, he makes another physical advance. Noting her “quick withdrawal” from his touch, he understands that “she had been telling the truth when she said that she could not bear to have him touch her anymore” (30). In explanation of her cold response to his touch this time, Glory explains, in perhaps the biggest lie of all, “Women aren’t made the same as men. They don’t enjoy sexual intercourse” (31). This bit of folk knowledge had long been used to explain women’s, and particularly wives’, dutiful but passionless response to their men. Although by this time in the narrative the reader heartily suspects, and will soon know for certain, that she will not always be as frigid in her response to the 178 suggestion of sex, Glory can wield this old explanation in defense of her libidinal modesty, in outright denial of the very pleasure which she senses exists and which she desires to know in the arms of another man. Petry raises questions here, not only of the duplicitous Glory, but also of the false, popular, longstanding conceptions of female sexual desire, response, and pleasure. Glory as Female Desire & Desirability, and Female Desire & Desirability as Spectacle It is quite remarkable how the character of Glory travels almost exclusively within an orbit of spectacle. There are times when she consciously makes a spectacle of herself, such as when she specially dresses and makes herself up for Ed Barrell, but there are also times when she is spied by others from a distance in moments which should be private and un-witnessed by others. Much in the way of a prisoner in Foucault’s Panopticon, Glory is frequently framed by the narration in shots that are both visually stimulating and deeply invasive, so that Glory is often made to feel paranoid, annoyed, and further trapped within her life by the gaze of others. However, given the particular malaise from which she suffers—namely invisibility and inconsequentiality—readers may wonder if there is not some pleasure for Glory even under the searching, penetrating gaze of those who visually consume her. The most consistent tool which Petry uses to fix and frame Glory is a kind of narration which approximates the Hollywood movie camera. In fact, Glory is often imaged much the way that the glamorous movie vixens are in Hollywood films of 179 the thirties and forties: glowing as though mysteriously lighted from within—blonde hair here does not hurt--and framed tightly to increase the notion of the singularity of the beauty they are thought to possess. The influence of film on the novel is unmistakable, and for good reason. Laura Dubek opens her critical essay on Country Place with a discussion of Petry’s personal love of film. Not only did Petry admit to being “addicted” to movies—“good ones, bad ones, indifferent ones”—but in the years following the publication of Country Place, Petry sold the rights to her 1953 novel The Narrows (the interracial love story was never made into a film), and was hired three years later by Columbia Pictures in 1956. In Columbia’s employ, Petry penned a script entitled “That Hill Girl,” featuring a role for, as Dubek calls her, “Hollywood glamour girl Kim Novak” (1). These facts broaden what we know of Petry to include film lover and screenwriter as well as novelist. We thus obtain key insight on the pronounced cinematographic narrative style she utilizes in Country Place. One of the first interactions which Johnnie has with Glory upon his return home is intensely gazing upon her. The narrator explains: He couldn’t help staring at her. He had been doing it ever since she came home from work. She had run up the back steps; her footsteps light, quick. When she entered the kitchen, she brought a rush of sweet, cold air in with her; and it seemed to him that early fall dusk was wrapped about her, enveloping her with a soft, mysterious glow that shimmered deep down in her eyes and clung to the edges of her hair. (22) That Petry is making full use of the techniques of Hollywood movies to frame, light, and make a heroine of Glory is obvious. In so doing, she plays novelistically with 180 the highly racialized technologies of photography and film. In White, Richard Dyer discusses the primary and continuing preeminence of the white face in these media: Photography and film are media of light. . . .The photographic media and, a fortiori, movie lighting assume, privilege, and construct whiteness. The apparatus was developed with white people in mind and habitual use and instruction continue in the same vein….All technologies work within material parameters that cannot be wished away….The very early [photographic] experimenters did not take the face as subject as all, but once they and their followers turned to portraits…the issue of the ‘right’ technology…focused on the face and, given the clientele, the white face….By the time of film (some sixty years after the first photographs), technologies and practices were already firmly established. Film borrowed these, gradually and selectively, carrying forward the assumptions that had gone into them. In turn, film history involves many refinements, variations and innovations, always keeping the white face central as a touchstone and occasionally revealing this quite explicitly, when it is not implicit within such terms as ‘beauty,’ ‘glamour’ and ‘truthfulness.’ (84, 85, 90, 91) With such narrative framing shots, Petry sets up Glory as a well-historicized representation of the white female as beautiful, glamorous, and true. Later that night, as Johnnie continues to visually consume his wife’s appearance, Petry’s readers-as-viewers continue to consume it, as well. As she enters their bedroom from the bathroom, where she has insisted on undressing, Johnny is at once taken in again by Glory’s presence: The housecoat she wore was made of taffeta. It was a pale blue-green in color—the color of the sea, he thought; and her hair, long, the ends of it touching her shoulders, is as bright as the sun against that bluish-green material. The hem of the housecoat swept across the wide floor boards, making a faint, rustling sound as she walked toward him. And he thought of many things all at once…that Glory at that moment of 181 entering the room appeared taller than she really was; and he wished she had not put on this long trailing thing called a housecoat; and at the same time he was glad that she was wearing it because its color made her as tantalizing as she had been in his dreams of her. She slipped out of the housecoat and he saw that her breasts, her small waist, the long lovely legs, were partially revealed, partially concealed, by the thin material of the nightgown. (24) While Glory could not possibly care less about her husband’s helplessness to gaze upon her, she does revel in Ed Barrell’s very similar response. In the period before their affair is physically consummated, Glory takes careful note of the way in which Barrell’s “eyes lingered on her face—bold, hot, calculating—as though he were estimating her, conjecturing about her” (34). Such scenes of Glory objectify her and make her the focus of male and masculinized readerly/viewerly desire. They recall similar scenes in movies of the 1940’s like The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was released in 1946, one year before Petry’s novel was published, and To Have and Have Not, Double Indemnity, and Laura—all released earlier, in 1944. As many scholars have noted, filmic media work to expose and intensify female desirability through objectification based upon manipulation of the image. Martin Heidegger has written, “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (Murray 154). When the subject of the picture— still or moving—is female, the implications of woman as both artificial image and as sexual conquest are clear, as scholars and critics have discussed. Donald Kupsit writes: The photograph is the perfect vehicle for woman, for like woman it seems natural but it is completely artificial and 182 constructed; both are deceptions—stylized version of a reality that may or may not exist. Laura Mulvey writes: The magic of Hollywood style at its best…arose, not exclusively but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of the visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. (586, 587) The fact that Glory’s desirability, in being seen by others, marks her as a visual and sexual conquest is compounded by the fact that they also see her desire. The added actuality that her desire operates outside of the bounds created by her marriage is problematic because it reveals a trashy commonness and unredeemed fallen-ness about her that is most unbefitting the traditional filmic heroine Petry has purposely and purposefully set her up to be through the manipulation of the image. The bearer of the gaze that is by far the most troubling to Glory is that of her mother-in-law Mrs. Roane, whom she calls Mother Roane. The source of Glory’s discomfort in her mother-in-law’s presence is that she perceives that her mother-in- law has intuited the true nature of her relationship with Ed Barrell, and she is perturbed to no end that Mother Roane will participate in this state-of-affairs primarily as a mute witness, and secondarily as a communicator of gentle reminders to Glory of her marriage vows. Because Mother Roane will not engage Glory as a bold, fiery protector of her son’s honor in his absence, the guilt heaped upon Glory is doubly tortuous: For the last month or so [Barrell] had been bringing her home from work, three or four nights a week. The first time Mother 183 Roane saw her getting out of Ed’s car there was a faint astonishment in her face and then a wave of hot red color suffused her neck, her cheeks. After that, whenever Ed brought her home, Mother Roane was always hovering near the front gate. Her face was expressionless, her eyes calm, friendly. “Hello, Ed,” she’d say. “Nice of you to bring Glory home. Save her that long walk.” Mother Roane’s easy acceptance of Glory’s presence in Ed’s car managed to destroy the feeling of intimacy she and Ed had built up…Glory began to feel as though she were being spied on, as though Johnnie himself were leaning over the front gate, just behind his mother, watching her step out of Ed’s car. It made her uncomfortable. (34) Mother Roane’s watchful knowing also casts shadows over Glory’s enjoyment of her new habit of dressing especially for Barrell. The elder woman’s quite unambiguous corrections of Glory’s dangerous flirtations are just mild and tactful enough to play havoc with Glory’s rather dim mind: Mother Roane would glance at the new hairstyle or the new dress or the high-heeled sandals and say, “I like to see a girl keep herself pretty for her husband.” Or, “Johnnie would love to see you in that new brown suit.” She couldn’t decide whether or not these comments of Mother Roane’s were a deliberate and pointed way of reminding her that she was still married to Johnnie. (36) When Glory is finally being kissed and held by Barrell in his parked car after Johnnie’s return, she experiences immediate physical and emotional response: “I’m alive now at this moment for the first time. She wanted to cry, to sing, to laugh. This was what she had been waiting for and wanting, without knowing it” (58). Unfortunately, for the young adulteress, she is seen in Barrell’s passionate embrace by both Mother Roane and Mrs. Gramby, as well as by the Weasel, who is taking 184 the two women for an afternoon drive in his taxi and has probably purposely created this moment of spectacle. Replaying the scene in her mind, Glory is deeply disturbed by what she knows the three witnesses in the other car must have seen: Why hadn’t they heard the wheeze of the town taxi climbing the hill? For it was there behind them. And the Weasel had the look of a squirrel busily hoarding nuts for the winter. He was grinning at her, at Ed, his sly little eyes moving back and forth. Mother Roane and Mrs. Gramby were in the back seat. And she stared at them, dismayed; thinking, I must have looked like a dog dragging itself along the ground, so filled with desire I was crazy, and had to be satisfied, rubbing myself against Ed, burying myself into him. (58) This scene makes Glory a consumer of her own image with a depth that she has previously only provoked in others. In the faces of her witnesses—the Weasel’s lurid glee and the older women’s terrible shock and discomfort—she sees herself as she had been a moment before, wild with desire and pleasure, most unfit for public consumption. For the first time, because of the witnesses she now has, she is afraid of what might happen because of her ever-deepening involvement with Barrell. The older women, as paragons of social decorum and discretion, do not spread abroad news of Glory’s tryst, but when Johnnie returns home from a day of wandering in the rain, he is puzzled by his family strange and strained behavior. He does not know what to make of it all: his father’s extended blessing at dinner, his mother’s nonstop, nervous chatter, Glory’s eagerness to help revive and sustain the chatter when his mother finally falls silent (87, 90, 91). Soon enough, however, Johnnie receives his opportunity to gaze upon Glory in another private scene gone awry. 185 At the end of a long, difficult journey to locate his wife one stormy night, Johnnie arrives at a cabin in the woods just in time to catch a window-framed glimpse of an after-dinner scene, which involves Glory’s happily bringing forth from the kitchen two cups of coffee, and proceeding to sit on Barrell’s lap as his hands quickly find their way beneath her attire of a “man’s wool shirt and nothing else” (137). What begins as a chiefly visual experience for Johnnie expands into a tactile and an olfactory one, as well, for once inside the cabin, Johnnie is at once confronted by a warm room full of the commingled scents of bacon, kerosene, tobacco, and the more primitive scents of “man, woman.” A fight ensues between the two men, which Glory watches, wholly enraptured by the drama of it all. Finally, Johnnie lands a right punch to Barrell’s chin and the older man is knocked out cold. This scene effectively ends the marriage of Glory and Johnnie, as her husband ultimately decides to walk off into another life without her. Presenting herself as a longsuffering wife to the unwitting Perkins, Glory is able to keep her job, secure new living quarters, and keep her name pristine in the minds of most people in Lennox, while besmirching Johnnie as a crazed war veteran who is no longer fit for cohabitation with a fragile beauty. Mrs. Gramby, Mrs. Roane, and the Weasel—her witnesses--all know better, however. The Weasel, as always, knows even more than the other two. An ever watchful witness, he tells Glory just after her triumphant moment of winning over Perkins with her story, “I seen you this afternoon, climbing over that tree with that blocks Ed’s road. You didn’t know that was me in that car, did you?” (148-150). 186 Glory is both fixed and undone by framing narrative shots which announce her desirability and her desire. The first, constructed on the Hollywood film vamp, is necessarily public, and is, in fact, designed for public consumption. The latter, however, is intended to be private, reserved for an intimate of Glory’s own choosing. That she cannot contain either of these is a source of great distress for Glory throughout the novel: she cannot stop her husband whom she does not want from gazing upon her because of her desirability, and she cannot stop him and others from looking upon her illicit desire which is unintended for them. She is therefore continually trapped by images of herself which she is wholly complicit in creating; she is a small-town celebrity perpetually dogged by paparazzi of both intended and unintended witnesses. Neola, the Anti-Glory In “Ordinary Women: The Tone of the Commonplace,” Barbara Christian studies Ann Petry’s tendency to “set up characters with particular physical characteristics that match specific stereotypes and then proceed to show how they are not quite what they seem” (65). This certainly holds true for Glory, who altogether lacks the moral purity and courage which are supposed to characterize a worthy, white, beautiful, middle-class heroine. Petry uses this narrative approach for her black female characters, as well. Christian reveals how Lutie Johnson, heroine of Petry’s first novel The Street both embodies and defies stereotypical images of black women. She writes: Lutie Johnson…is a good-looking, brown-skinned girl…[who] has come to believe fervently that if you are a 187 good girl, and if you work hard and live right, you can make it. The Street, a devastating account of the falseness of this myth, strikes a heavy blow at one of the major tenets of many Renaissance writers—that you can make it if you try. To make her point as unassailable as possible, Petry creates an impeccable heroine. Although she is brown-skinned, Lutie fits the stereotype of the tragic mulatta. She seems to be cut off from any community, and although she is a beautiful woman, she refuses to use her charms to further her advancement. Petry presents Lutie Johnson as having the soul of Iola LeRoy to counteract the prevailing image that lower-class black women are whores. But since Lutie Johnson is black and poor, no one else relates to her as a decent woman….Her beauty, in the final analysis, helps, as much as any other factor, to defeat her. (65) Christian also notes the way in which Lutie “works as a domestic” but does not “fit the stereotype of the mammy either physically or psychologically” (65). It seems that The Street’s Lutie may have served as a characterological precursor for Country Place’s Neola. Neola is also “good” and “impeccable.” Despite her blackness and her status as a maid, Neola is the consummate lady. No raucous whore, she is self-contained, but warm, giving, and genuine. Neither is she is an asexual mammy; she is quite attractive and highly desireable, as is revealed when Glory spies Portalucca “studying Neoloa’s rear with an intensity that was laughable.” Glory thinks to herself in that moment, Even with that bulky brown raincoat around her, you could see that Neola’s legs and bottom were very shapely. If Neola was white and didn’t have that dead-pan expression on her face, she wouldn’t be bad-looking. Not anything to rave about, but, she’d get by in a crowd (47). To put these thoughts in the mind of a white character, particularly the white female character who is so often the subject of filmic frames of visual desire, is to play with 188 and upset longstanding racial and gender conventions. Quite obviously, Neola is intended to be Glory’s feminine foil. Neola represents the highest aspects of the feminine, while Glory represents the lowest. Glory’s feelings of insecurity as fueled by the very attractiveness and lady- ness of Neola are not left for the reader to infer. The narrator reveals plainly that Glory thinks ahead to the day when Mrs. Gramby will die and Glory’s mother, as the wife of Mrs. Gramby’s son, comes into ownership of the Gramby estate: “The first thing Momma should do after Mrs. Gramby died was to fire Neola” (48). This is actually the second time Glory has expressed a desire to be rid of Neola. Previously, she has planned up to the moment of her own mother’s death, when she would presumably be in line to take over the estate. First on Glory’s agenda is a change in personnel: “She’d change a good many things, for she wouldn’t have any surly help like The Portugee and Neola” (43). Glory’s envy could be based imaginatively on Neola’s very real ability to unseat her as heroine. Most interesting is the way in which the dark Neola is frequently associated with light in the novel. She has the mysterious “glow” typically reserved for white heroines; at one point, Neola’s face is “alight with laughter” (47). Furthermore, she is several times throughout the novel associated with fire and candlelight and their attendant warmth and attractiveness, particularly where Portalucca is concerned. Such use of “warmer” light to help frame Neola coincides perfectly with how Ernest Dickerson, cinematographer for Spike Lee, typically overcomes the difficulty of filming black subjects using technology developed to film white ones. He advises perplexed cinematographers to “use 189 ‘warmer’ light, with ‘bastard amber’ gels, tungsten lights on dimmers ‘so they can be dialed down to warmer temperatures’, and gold instead of silver reflectors.” Dyer analyzes Dickerson’s point of view: Dickerson is explaining his choices against his observation that ‘many cinematographers cite problems photographing black people because of the need to use more light on them’. Much of his language indicates that he is involved in correcting a white bias in the most widely available and used technology….The whiteness implied here is not just a norm (silver not gold) but also redolent of aspects of the conceptualization of whiteness….coldness and the absence of colour. (Dyer 98) In Neola, Petry gives readers the dawning of an innovative black female narrative and filmic subject. She is literally “neo”-“la”--a “ new” black “feminine,” who contrasts most obviously with the white heroine whose story, for the time being, overwhelms her own, but cannot outshine it, and also, crucially, with stereotypical constructions of black women. Historically, Neola arrives just as Hedda Hopper and her Hollywood conservatives are championing roles for black actresses which fit neatly into those stereotypical constructions of black women. In December of 1947, Hopper passionately defended Hattie McDaniel’s highly criticized roles as Mammy characters in 1939’s Gone with the Wind and in 1946’s Song of the South, committing an “entire Sunday article to a defense of McDaniel and a condemnation and red-baiting of her critics, including leaders and members of the NAACP” (Frost 47). Hopper also “recruited actress Louise Beavers, an important figure in black Hollywood who gained fame playing sweet, sentimental servants in films such as Imitation of Life (1934), to appear in a “Women for Nixon” 190 radio commercial during” the future President’s “victorious 1950 Senate campaign” (37). Neither mammy nor whore nor evil Sapphire, Neola prepares readers and viewers for possibilities for the presentation of black women who are sexy and sexual and morally grounded human beings. I will even go as far as to argue that Petry fully intends Neola to be the heroine of Country Place, but must relegate her to a place where she will be safest. Lutie, Neola’s predecessor, did not fare well in a racist and sexist world doggedly devoted to old, unjust notions of black female sexuality. As proof of Petry’s utilization of a re-tooled “politics of respectability,” the character of Neola can be understood as a modernization of the heroines of black post-Reconstruction novels. Tate, in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, explains how the heroines of these late nineteenth-century novels functioned: As agents of racial desire, the heroines of post-Reconstruction novels affirm civil rights as their rightful claim to middle- class domestic rewards, rewards from industry, frugality, and piety. The heroines do not emphasize racial prejudice or argue for racial parity like their male counterparts, who routinely confront racial hostility. The domestic texts usually focus on depicting feminine ideals. Their characters live in fictive domestic spheres where racial identity does not automatically preclude social mobility. Hence these novels present the discourse of racial protest as a story about virtuous female…character development, and the characters are engaged in productive middle-class family enterprise. In this way these female texts maintain reticence about racism while appropriating gender prescripts to demonstrate the high moral fiber and disciplined productivity of the characters as well as their eagerness to endorse middle-class values. The novels repudiate racial prejudice and discrimination by marginalizing or erasing their presence in a recontextualized domestic setting where racial obstacles are often recast as improvident behavior such as vanity, avarice, indolence, stealing, lying, and intemperance. (121) 191 Petry uses a number of these defining characteristics of the post- Reconstruction heroine in shaping Neola. First, Neola never mentions or complains about racial oppression. Presumably, Mrs. Gramby, for whom Neola works, is fine and wise enough of a human being to have rendered such social problems, though unfortunate for the rest of the world, absolutely moot within the four walls of her home. Neola is childless; she does not have to confront on her children’s behalf, or worry about them confronting, the reality of a racially divided society. Furthermore, Portalucca is certainly enamored of Neola’s brown-skinned beauty, although he never attaches race to his attraction to her. This works to elevate the morality and excellence of Neola’s person above any racial category to which she might belong. Outside the Gramby home, the only person with whom Neola is seen in interaction is Doc Fraser, who is also too fine and wise a human being to see Neola in racial or racially gendered terms. There is a moment, however, in which Doc does not know how to classify Neola, who has come rushing to his pharmacy one night in the middle of a storm. In a moment which Dubek calls a “sort of existential crisis for Doc” (7), Neola very briefly embodies for him the notion of black as the unknown, nameless, and terrifying: Neola’s skin is dark brown, and she had on a dark coat. Even after she was inside and moving toward me, I could not identify who or what she was. I saw a hurrying figure coming at me so fast that I instinctively moved back, away from the counter, close to the shelves behind me. (160) 192 The only people who resent Neola’s race in any obvious way are Glory and her mother Lil; however, their race-born resentments of her are thinly veiled as hatred of the fact that the maid continuously outclasses them and makes them look like grasping, materialistic social climbers without even trying. In terms of the “fictive domestic sphere” Tate describes, Petry hides Neola, protects her in a number of ways. First, she makes her the understudy of a role occupied by a white heroine, so that even though she is the true heroine of the story, she does not have to bear the weight of what that means in pre-Civil Rights North America. Also, by 1947, most of Neola’s black female contemporaries were attempting to make lives for themselves and their families in large Northern cities, not in Connecticut hamlets. Petry, however, keeps Neola in small-town Lennox, away from the dangers of urban living. Neola also lives—and works--in a stately old mansion which is not hers, but which is so fine as to inspire at least two other women in the novel to desire it desperately for themselves. Their visions of ownership involve the explicit dismissal of Neola. Furthermore, Petry also imagines for Neola a man who loves and honors her for her internal and external beauty, which creates the context of an impending marriage, a further insulation from the ravages suffered by the divorced Lutie. The racial obstacles reconfigured as “improvident behavior” are also present in the novel but do not characterize Neola or any other person of color, but rather are attached quite boldly to Glory, to her mother Lil, to Ed Barrell, and to the Weasel—all white. Glory is an adulteress and a liar. Lil is cold-hearted, avaricious, 193 and malicious—even murderous. Ed Barrell is a sexually incontinent cuckolder of his fellow townsmen and therefore a poor citizen. The Weasel is a gossip who traffics shamelessly in the messes of other people’s private lives, despite his own impregnation of a mentally retarded teenager named Rose Marie. Petry’s application of old post-Reconstruction-era and turn-of-the-century- era political and literary devices, as well as her use of Glory as sexual proxy reveal her estimation of the world as not yet ready to embrace a black female subject as the focus of narratological framing shots which announce and intensify her as a sexual presence, and which also announce and intensify her as a humane and moral one, as the experience of Lutie attests. However, Petry ensures that when the time comes, Neola will be ready. Lighting, at least, will not be a problem. Further Political Implications of Sex in the Novel At the end of the novel, Glory’s victory is a hollow one at best. She has laid hold of some of what she desired to know, but has lost what would appear to be so much more—her marriage to a fundamentally decent man, her esteem in the eyes of the two mother figures who represent modesty and decency in the novel, and the freedom of virtue. Furthermore, her triumph is forever a precarious one. Should ever her unwilling allies change their minds about the uneasy détente, should ever the Weasel grow tired of keeping her secret, or Mrs. Roane weary of having her son’s reputation tarnished, Glory stands to lose all, a state of affairs through which Petry makes a noteworthy allusion to the delicate relationships among the nations of the world. It is a well-documented fact that the First World War had been caused 194 largely by secret treaties and pacts among world nations. Seemingly self-contained skirmishes between two nations drew other nations into the melee which ultimately resulted in a full-blown war. In the years following the Second World War, Petry warns a war-weary nation about the treacherous nature of secrets—personal and political. Ed Barrell who has bedded not only Glory (and many other women in the town) but her mother, as well, finds that Glory is unlike her mother in one crucial way. Whereas Lil’s cold calculating nature has frozen her ability to respond to a man with passion, her daughter, in Barrell’s estimation, is a “born tramp if ever there was one” (144). Fittingly, a crisis of the heart ends Barrell’s life. Shortly before he dies on the sidewalk in front of the Town Hall, not far from where readers first make his acquaintance, he tells the Weasel, “The old pump isn’t so good. Had a lot of trouble with it lately” (179). When his demise is finally upon him, curiously, he thinks of sex with Glory: He began to think that this fast, whirling, downward plunging was like making love to Glory. It was like reaching for the very heart of the world, the heart he sought inside a woman’s body, a never-ending forward thrusting which could not cease until he found respite, surcease. He never had found it, but. . .Glory had come closer to quieting the urge than any of the others. (183) It is important to note that Barrell, a representation of the colonial worldview of mindless expansion of territory and influence, dies at the same moment as Mrs. 195 Gramby, who represents small-town seclusionism. In an act of gallantry, Barrell takes the arm of the older woman as she prepares to maneuver the long descent down the stairs. In sudden revolt against his physical nearness to her with his promiscuous, life-ruining lechery, Mrs. Gramby pulls away from Barrell at the top of the Town Hall stairs, throwing them both off balance. They fall to their respective deaths on the sidewalk in front of the seat of power and governance. In Petry’s vision for the U.S., neither seclusionism nor global dominance will do. She kills them both, hoping perhaps for a North America that is a more responsible, respectful participant in the arena of world affair. B. Hurston Zora Neale Hurston has been a high-interest figure in black and women’s literary and cultural studies in the Academy for the last thirty years—for good reason. A more complicated, courageous, outrageous, and boundary-pushing personality can scarce be found. I include here only the briefest overview of all that is known of her life. According to Carla Kaplan’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, playwright, anthropologist, folklorist, would- be voodooienne, world traveler, and ardent letter writer, was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891. Shortly after her birth, the Hurston family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where her father John became pastor of a local church and, within five years of the family’s arrival, was elected mayor. Hurston lost her mother, Lucy, early, in 1904. With her father’s continuing political career and his remarriage to a 196 woman not much older than his teenage daughter crowding out hopes for a desirable family life, Hurston began the life-on-the-go pattern which would characterize her from that point onward. She bounced around among the homes of various family members until 1916, when she struck out on her own. In 1925, Hurston moved to New York, where she became a central figure in the black Modernist movement, or as it is commonly known, the Harlem Renaissance. Over the course of her life, Hurston would often conduct several simultaneous large-scale personal and professional projects—courses of study in English, French, and linguistics; anthropological and historical fieldwork; theatrical ventures; and poetry and novel writing--making countless friends and enemies along the way. The end of her life was touched heavily by misfortune, poverty, and illness. After a series of strokes, Hurston died in 1960 of congestive heart failure (Kaplan 773-784). Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee was published in 1948. Seraph on the Suwanne Set in the early twentieth century, Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee is the extended coming-of-age story of Arvay Henson. Married to Jim Meserve in her youth—although not as early in her youth as some in her Sawley community would have liked--Arvay, unlike Glory, acquires physical and emotional experience and develops sexual depth within the bounds of her marriage. Complicated by the partners’ equally strong wills and frequent lack of communication, it is not an easy, untroubled marriage. Yet it serves through the years as a source of security and personal growth for both Arvay and Jim. Unlike the Roanes of Petry’s Country 197 Place, the Meserves find a way to live together in a love that is not always placid or even pleasant at all points, but is ultimately true and lasting. In her psychoanalytic criticism of the novel, Tate argues that it “critiques the sadomasochistic tendencies of romantic love and the essentialized constructions of race by encoding these issues in a story about female self-discovery and romantic fulfillment” (12, 20). True though Tate’s assessment is, it undercuts the “female self-discovery and romantic fulfillment” aspect of the text, which cannot be overlooked. This aspect very importantly rests on Arvay’s development of the self- awareness and the strength necessary to embrace a vulnerability which allows rather than cuts off intimacy. In this way, the novel speaks foremost to the unique historical situation of black women and their helplessness to confront the dangers related to their multiple—racial, social, sexual, psychical, and economic— vulnerabilities. To the Mulberry Tree, the Site of Conversion At twenty-one, Arvay is a remarkable young woman in her small, white, poor, overwhelmingly Baptist town. As a single woman well past her prime marrying years, and as a young woman undeniably firm in her religious convictions, Arvay incites plenty of raised eyebrows and wagging tongues. Five years prior, during her sixteenth year, just after the marriage of her older sister Larraine to Reverend Carl Middleton, the town’s new pastor, Arvay, in an emotional act better suited to singing and shouting Negroes, tearfully “announce[s] that she was through with the world and its sinful and deceitful ways.” Her plan is “to be a 198 missionary. . .sent off away somewhere to take the Word to the heathens.” She ends her spirited announcement by asking of the congregation “their earnest prayers that she might hold out and never, never turn back but go on and on to greater grace.” Her obvious commitment at such a young age to such a worthy and spiritual cause initially earns her the heartfelt esteem of her fellow worshippers (3-5). However, Arvay’s seemingly straightforward motives for renouncing the world and its ways are quickly called into question under the revealing light of the back story which the narrator provides. It is more than likely that Arvay’s missionary hopes have been inspired more by the pain of a broken heart than by a sudden call to world evangelism. Readers learn that Arvay had been in love with the Reverend Middleton before his marriage to her sister, and that he had at one point shown signs of sharing her feelings. Just before a formal courtship between them budded, Arvay suffered the loss of his affections when her gregarious, voluptuous, jealous older sister Larraine decided to steal to steal him for herself (11). Taking Arvay’s boyfriend is a rather easy feat for “Raine” to accomplish, as she encounters little if any resistance from Arvay. Arvay, having grown up in the constant shadow of her older sister’s forceful, outgoing personality and full, shapely body, is ill-equipped by this time to vocalize her anger or her anguish, and is accustomed to not mattering much. The narrator explains that the “general preference for Larraine. . .had done something to Arvay’s soul across the years.” As a result, she is “timid from feeling unsafe inside.” Blindsided by her sister’s actions, and deeply hurt by the loss of her first love, Arvay keeps her feelings of 199 shock and confusion to herself. Not long after this, Arvay decides to give “her whole heart and her life to the work of God” (4). She is true to her word for the most part, for though she never travels to distant lands as a minister of the gospel, Arvay involves herself only in playing the organ for the Sunday school and other church work. She has no social life of which to speak, and keeps “strictly to herself.” Her hermit-like lifestyle soon causes her neighbors to consider her “queer, if not a little ‘teched’” (6). The general consensus on her mental instability is given further credence by her frequent “fits” or “hysterical seizures” which tended to come upon her “in church right after the sermon, but more often. . .right after she got home from the service, and usually when some brash young gallant had forced himself upon her to the extent of seeing her home.” In the community of Sawley, fits such as Arvay’s are associated with the sexual frustration of maidenhood, and girls who suffer with the seizures are euphemistically referred to as “being highstrung.” According to popular belief, this state is best remedied by marriage (6). The narrator notes that Maria Henson, Arvay’s mother, had also suffered such fits in the days of her youth. A reading of Arvay as sexually frustrated during the very moment when she is supposed to be unfettered by the things of the flesh is further supported by the narrator’s revelation of the night dreams that made her body plague her in miserable strange ways. For instance, what got the matter with her every time that Larraine got pregnant? Some imp of Satan seemed to grab hold of her and drag her right into the darkened bedroom where Carl and ‘Raine were, and made her look and see and 200 hear from beginning to the end. It was right after ‘Raine’s second announcement that Arvay felt her spasms coming on. (12) With her sexuality burgeoning despite her singular commitment to all things spiritual, it is no wonder that her fits often take place just after the sermon, when the man she still loves has just exerted himself in a powerful way. Though he is too weak of a man to do little beyond give her “a kind of look. . .from the pulpit” sometimes, she no doubt swoons under the burden of her lingering desire for him. Her desire becomes such that the physical proximity of any man overwhelms her, and simple escorts home from church by local suitors send her into dead faints. Thus, Arvay is at once a deeply spiritual, highly reclusive near-mystic and an increasingly sensual creature on the cusp of sexual knowledge. Into the life of this walking contradiction swaggers Jim Meserve. New to Sawley, Jim is a high spirited young man, full of talk and laughter, and possessing great good looks, with a “thick head of curly black hair, deep blue eyes with long black lashes. . .dimples in his lean cheeks, [and] white strong teeth set in a chaffing mouth” (7-8). Though his present financial situation is quite modest, Jim is nonetheless distinguished from Arvay, her family, and most other Sawley residents because in a town of poor white turpentine and lumber mill workers, few can claim the heritage of plantation-owning prosperity which the Meserves had known ante bellum. Despite his humble purse, “Jim ha[s] a flavor about him” (7), and has determinedly set his sights on the “lean-made” girl Arvay, of the “extremely small waist,” skinny legs, “long light yellow hair” and “Gulf-blue eyes” (4). 201 It soon gets around the small town that “Arvay Henson ha[s] met her match,” and “was being courted in spite of all she could do and say” (7). With the “nerve of a brass monkey,” he talks himself into a job at the “teppentime” mill, under the sponsorship of Brock Henson, Arvay’s father, who is “known for a hard man to handle.” Jim laughs in the face of Arvay’s asceticism, and “ma[kes] no bones about the fact that he was really stuck on [her].” It is a feeling that she “just suit[s] him. . .and was worth the trouble of breaking in.” (8). He ignores her passionate pleas for him to leave her alone. “You leave me be!” she tells him at one point, following the command with a reminder to the heedless Jim of her earlier wishes: “I told you to quit bothering me!” (17). While Arvay’s strange ways and determination to be free of male accompaniment has been enough to teach her other suitors quickly enough that she means to remain single, Jim finds himself unable to give up as easily. He responds: No, Miss Arvay, that I can’t do at all. You need my help and my protection too bad for that, I see. With a solemn kind of soberness, Jim drew the shrinking Arvay to him. “You have made me see into something that I don’t reckon you understand your ownself. I have to stay with you and stand by you and give you my protection to keep you from hurting your ownself too much. No, I can’t leave you be, not until you and me can both see further. (17) Though his words are a bit pretentious and full of his overblown sense of himself, Jim nevertheless comprehends the confusion, the loneliness, and the hurt that have crippled Arvay. Her protestation is a weak one. Addressing him formally as Mister Meserve, she tells him he need not be bothered to make her his personal project. 202 His response is typical of his paternalism and dogged determination where she is concerned: Oh, but I do! I have to because you don’t understand your ownself, Miss Arvay, and somebody stronger than you, and that can see further than you, and somebody that feels your care, will have to be on hand to look after you. . . .” And Jim let go of Arvay’s shoulders and took her companionably by her hand and faced up the road. “You’ll get more used to me before long and see into things. (17) When she asks what things, he tells her knowingly, “Oh, a lot of things, Miss Arvay, that you ain’t got the right ideas about as yet. It’s bound to come to you in time. I’ll be around to look out for you and point out things. . . ” (17). Within a few weeks of their formal courtship, Arvay surprises herself by forgetting “all about the man she had thought that she had loved so hard and so hopelessly for six long years” (21). With Jim in her life, the Dimmesdale-like Reverend Middleton becomes of rapidly decreasing consequence. Though it is difficult for Arvay to bear up under the intense scrutiny of her relationship from the community, and particularly from her old flame, Middleton, who can afford only to shoot her peculiar looks from the pulpit in church on Sundays, and her disapproving, undoubtedly jealous sister Larraine, she does so, and is soon engaged to marry Jim. Their betrothal ends abruptly with their first sexual encounter under a mulberry tree on the Henson property. It is a torrid scene of high passion that will continue to play in both their minds over the years. Consummated with Arvay prostrate on the ground beneath the tree, awaiting the reality of the desire that has 203 dogged her night and day, the mulberry tree scene becomes the touchstone of their relationship. Even with Jim above her finally, Arvay is “not satisfied. Somehow, she seemed not to be able to get close enough to him. Never, never, close enough.” Conveyed in the language of consumption which has often been used to relate the experience of the sex act, the passage expresses the depth of Arvay’s desire this way: “She [felt she] must eat him up, and absorb him within herself” (54). When the act is complete, Jim suddenly spirits Arvay away from the house, without a word to her parents who have witnessed their emergence from the mulberry tree. With her bloomers yet waving in the wind from a branch of the tree, the place of her induction into the experiential knowledge of the sex act, she knows that she is on her way to a new life: “Where this man was hurrying her off to, she had no idea, but she was going, and leaving her old life behind her. Left behind, but not forgotten, to be picked up another time, perhaps” (54). In his high-handed, magnific way, Jim reveals to Arvay that she has at last “caught [her] heathen,” and that they are on their way to the courthouse to make their mulberry tree marriage official. Carrying on his church imagery, Jim testifies to the power of her love, telling her that she has “brought him through religion and absolutely converted his soul. . .sav[ing] him from a burning hell” (57). Despite her recent premarital sexual experience, an outright indulgence in the sin of fornication, Jim’s description of the wonder of her power over him restores her in a very specific sense to her evangelistic ministry. His language is so hyperbolic to that effect, that 204 for a long moment, Arvay cannot tell whether or not she should take offense at his words. Her first instinct is to feel put down: So after what went on under the mulberry tree, Jim figgers that I ain’t fitten no more to tote the Word. . .No getting away from what had happened. Her drawers hung on the mulberry tree, waving in the wind. Who was she now, to be telling folks how to live. (56) Feeling vulnerable and more than a little hypocritical after her lapse in Christian judgment, she clings to the remains of her innocence by accusing Jim of raping her, a charge to which he readily pleads guilty, with the intentions of continuing such violence, as she is a “married woman now” (56). It is a while before she realizes that her fall from grace will not be her undoing as she is half expecting, and that Jim is serious in his talk about her fulfilling her mission to bring the heathen to salvation. Once she is sure of his meaning and intentions, his benedictory words work to lift the burden of her “secret sin” of sexually desiring another for so long; she interprets his statements as a sign that she is forgiven, having “paid under the mulberry tree” (57). How the more recent sin of fornication with Jim would have the power to redeem Arvay from the past sin of desiring her brother-in-law remains a mystery, but it does show the potency of her feelings for Jim. Over the course their marriage, he comes very near in her esteem to the God she has so faithfully served up to this point in his status in her eyes as protector, teacher, forgiver, and life-giver. In her view of things, “What God neglected, Jim Meserve took care of. 205 Between the two, God and Jim, all things came to pass. They had charge of things” (152). Sex and religion are wholly intertwined throughout the entire courtship of Arvay and Jim, as can be first noted in the fact that he speaks to her of sex in the language of Southern Baptist Christianity. Although the characters are white, they represent what C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya identify as the “black sacred cosmos,” which is derived from an African envisagement of all things as bearing the essence of the sacred (2). Arvay’s first response to Jim’s sex talk is a decidedly Western or European one, to think that Jim’s lighthearted discussion of their intimacy in the diction of religious conversion is a joke castigating her failure as a Christian and as a minister of the gospel. However, he wins her over with his constancy which revels in—rather than shuns—the notion of physical intimacy as equal in importance to the saving of one’s soul. Arvay in the Ministry of Intimacy Married officially that very day, the Meserves set off on a lifelong odyssey that is full of the excitement and risk of entrepreneurship, the triumph of economic and social overcoming, the joy and pride of parenting their beautiful, healthy children, Kenny and Evangeline, and the great sorrow of losing their firstborn Earl, who, according to Arvay, becomes a type of sacrificial lamb for the redemption of the Henson bloodline. There are also, through the years, the misunderstandings and terrible squabbles that cast the shadow of death over their marriage. However, 206 Arvay and Jim’s love and mutual need for one another seal the bond of marriage between them and keep them locked safe within it. The one constant for Arvay and Jim is the physicality of their marriage. No matter the point of contention—whether Arvay’s lingering inferiority complex and seeming need to feel undervalued at every turn, or whether Jim’s bullheaded bossiness and need to be elevated in the eyes of all at all times—the power of their physical intimacy binds all wounds and mends every tear. The mulberry tree introduces Arvay to sex, but it is over the life of her marriage to Jim that she is fully immersed in sex as the ministry Jim only half-teased her about from the beginning. By “ministry” here, I mean to encompass both the word’s religious overtones, which are in line with Arvay’s early aspirations, and its secular ones of “tending to,” “caring for,” and “looking after.” Sex in this way becomes a means by which intimates may move beyond themselves to express their mutual care of one another. The novel is full of passionate scenes of intimacy between the couple, usually following some awful rift, such as this after a careless joke of Jim’s goes awry and leaves Arvay in expectation of his quitting the marriage: In the kitchen, Jim found Arvay switching around as fast as she could to finish his supper. And right away he became the loving and protecting husband, the ardent lover. He seized Arvay midway in a passage from the table to the stove and held her tight and kissed her and murmured sweet soothing things until that mysterious green light appeared in Arvay’s blue eyes. Arvay’s eyes had some strange power to change like that when she was stirred for him. Each time that she succumbed to his love making, Arvay’s eyes gradually changed from that placid blue to a misty greenish-blue like the waters of the sea at times and places. It warmed him, it burned him, it bound him. (106) 207 The tragic death of Earl causes the deeply grieved Arvay to withdraw physically from Jim. A month after the burial of the boy, Arvay suddenly becomes overwhelmed one evening with the memories of times she has shared with Jim who is across the table from her, and is spurred to invite him to closeness again: Arvay saw Jim’s head come up and felt his searching gaze. The blood of her body began to climb to her head. She felt her ears getting hot and knew that her face was flushed. She lowered her face and began to poke at tiny fragment of ginger bread on her plate like a maiden. Passionate pictures formed on her eyelids and faded and were instantly replaced by others. . . .That first time she had seen Jim Meserve, his broad felt hat shoved back from his tumbling curls and white teeth flashing in a laugh. . .Their first visit to the mulberry tree. . . .The moment that she knew that she was pregnant for her Jim…. “You, you won’t let them men keep you off from home too late tonight, will you please, Jim?” Arvay murmured without looking at Jim directly. “No chance of that,” Jim answered heartily. “I can attend to what little I got to do in no time, then I’ll rattle my hocks on home.” (168-169) Furious with Arvay one night because of her insistence on leaving a party where the young woman who led poor Earl to his demise is in attendance, Jim drives like a madman all the way home to Arvay’s sheer terror. Once home, he retains the cold, commanding persona he has adopted, and, in a scene that plays with the classic rape fantasy, instructs Arvay to undress and kiss him. After going on for a while in this manner, Arvay’s response changes from trembling obedience to passion: Jim could feel Arvay’s skin changing temperature, and the change in her breathing. The change became more and more pronounced. She kissed him violently and hungrily for a minute, then braced her hands against his shoulders and did all that she could to shove him away from her. . . .Jim said nothing. Resting on his elbows, he took Arvay’s face 208 between his hands and looked down in her eyes which were running over with tears. Gradually, the features of her face relaxed and that calm Buddha mask that she always wore came over her face. But Jim was concentrating on her eyes. Once again he saw that greenish infusion creep in and mingle with the sky blue in her eyes. . . .It was an eternal and compelling mystery how Arvay’s face could stay as stiff as a false-face on Halloween while that something crept up like a tiger in the jungle peeping out through shielding leaves at its prey. . . . (219) Intimacy Beyond Sex While these moments of passion populate the entire arc of the plot line, it becomes clear that so much of this coupling occurs between lovers who are yet in large measure strangers to one another. Arvay’s growth then becomes measured, not only by her participation in passionate and meaningful trysts with her husband, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to the extent to which she comes to know both herself and her husband in truth and depth. For this is where real intimacy and vulnerability lie. At the end of the novel, Arvay returns to Jim after a lengthy separation. To her surprise, she finds him relieved and grateful to have her back. His expression of the worry he has experienced in the wake of her leaving sparks an epiphany for Arvay: She got a glimpse of something which she would never have believed possible before. Jim, Jim Meserve, Lord, had his doubts about holding her as she had hers about him. She was not the only one who trembled. All these years and time, Jim had been feeling his ways towards her and grasping at her as she had been towards him. . . .It was funny that she had never known Jim in full until this night. Jim was not the-powering general that she had took him for. . . .Inside he was nothing but a little boy to take care of, and he hungered for her 209 hovering. . . .Arvay felt such a swelling to protect him and comfort Jim that tears came up in her eyes. So helpless sleeping there in her arms and trusting himself to her. (348, 351) The power of the epiphany about Jim is accompanied by one about herself: “And just like she had not known Jim, she had known her own self even less. What she had considered her cross, she now saw as her glory” (351). Arvay concludes that the lack and inferiority that she had claimed as her birthrights all her life were really her bounty and blessedness dressed in strange clothing. Surveying the length of her life, she sees that she has so often functioned as a prop and as a source of stability in the lives of all she ever knew, not because she had so little, but rather because she had so much to give. What used to be her shame is now her value. For despite being “poor and unlearnt too,” Arvay has operated all her life in a calling no less honorable than the one she claimed in the beginning of her story. Though she never makes it to strange lands to preach the gospel, she has been commissioned nonetheless as a source of life, and has saved many from various hells in her roles as woman, wife, and mother. While the passion of physical wanting and getting are fully explored and experienced by Arvay, unlike her Country Place counterpart, Glory, she matures past the point of being driven by the need to have them. Unlike the impetuous, perpetual girl Glory made cold by the consuming self-centeredness of her vision, Arvay radiates a warmth by the end of the novel. In coming to terms with her unique relation to all the other selves in her world, she grows to a point of self-love and self-knowledge of which Glory never becomes capable. 210 C. Black Female Sexual Danger and Playing in the Light As previously stated, to avoid the re-inscription and reinforcement of negative images of black women, black women authors have frequently and consciously attempted to undo them by creating black female characters which embody characteristics not typically associated with them in Western racial mythology. Black women writers’ sustained and collective attempt to undo such images points to their deeply imbedded sense of anxiety about the representation of the black female, and particularly representations of her sexuality. Mary Helen Washington offers illuminating discussion of this literary anxiety: The anxiety of black women writers over the representation of sexuality goes back to the nineteenth century and the prescription for womanly “virtues” which made slave women automatically immoral and less “feminine than white women,” but that anxiety is evident even in contemporary texts, many of which avoid any kind of sexual vulnerability or project the most extreme forms of sexual vulnerability onto children and poor women. Once again the issue is control, and control is bought by cordoning off those aspects of sexuality that threaten to make women feel powerless. If pleasure and danger are concomitant aspects of sexuality, it seems clear to me that black women writers have, out of historical necessity, registered far more of the latter than the former. (38) In registering far more danger than pleasure in representing black female sexuality, Petry and Hurston sought a way out of this distinctly North American problem by utilizing a distinctly North American literary device. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison explains what she calls American Africanism, which is the creation of a “nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) 211 presence or persona… constructed in the United States,” and put to “imaginative uses” because of its “strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego- reinforcing, and pervasive” influence (6, 7). She writes: . . .I use [Africanism] as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. . . .As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has served, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both as a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. (7) In Morrison’s view, American Africanism is a distinctly American elaborate way of saying and yet not saying. Early in the nation’s history, the “process of organizing American coherence through” the racially and psychologically “distancing” vehicle of “Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony” (8). According to Morrison, this presence makes American literature fundamentally American. She writes that it is no exaggeration to say that the field of American letters owes its distinguishing marks in the body of world literature to this very Africanist presence. With the help of Morrison’s incisive and insightful study on the myriad ways in which blackness and images of blackness have been serviceable to white, usually male, writers, modern readers and viewers have become experts at locating such historical and contemporary instances in the literature we read, the films we watch, and the political and intellectual debates we follow. We are aware of how handy blackness has been when the white, usually but not always male, psyche has 212 required assistance in working out, or shutting down, questions of race, humanity, injustice, passion, taboo, and crime. The Africanist trope in all shades and types has served white authors in the examination and the simultaneous avoidance of troubling issues. The Africanist presence is always most needed and most serviceable when whiteness has a call to go where it dare not tread, namely into the passions and into the body. After all, as Richard Dyer explains in White, the European has been associated historically with reason, intellect, and civilized accomplishment, while the world’s darker peoples have been largely imprisoned, ideologically speaking, within their brown bodies (23). Retaining one’s whiteness, not only as racial category but as ideology and principle, requires safe distance from all that is considered un-white, even and especially when white people are the origin of the non-white thinking, speaking, and doing. Morrison, running her finger down the American literary canon, traces the Africanist presence in the works of masters Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway. How is it then that a literary device that has been largely the domain of the writing white male playing in the dark becomes a tool for the writing black female to play in the light? What would cause such a shift? Within the context of the distinctly American way of saying without saying, it makes all the sense in the world that at a moment in which the nation was poised on the brink of a movement which would bring to the fore as never before all the 213 insult and injury which had been heaped upon blacks in the New World for centuries, black women writers would seek a substitutionary literary device which would afford them the same safe distance from which to probe matters which were of the utmost psychological and social significance to them in the same way in which white and usually male intellectuals had often craved and found in the Africanist presence. Keeping in mind that much of the derogatory mythology surrounding black women was bound up in the black female body and its reputed gross sexuality aids us in figuring out why Petry and Hurston had to construct a white female stand-in to help them explore female sexuality and the challenges of the modern heterosexual union. To do so through black female characters when negative stereotypes of black women’s sexuality were yet in effect and when racial tensions were on the rise would have doubly bound black women in the continual muck and mire of their so- called inescapable physicality. To avoid this double bind, Petry and Hurston created white women characters to act in the stead of black women who needed not to be further implicated in their reputed carnality. Just as Poe needed his Nu-Nu, Cather her Nancy, and Hemingway his Wesley, Petry needs her Glory, and Hurston needs her Arvay. Glory is Petry’s Melanctha, selfish, sensual, and forever searching. Arvay is Hurston’s mute, feeling persona, which peoples the works of Eliot, Faulkner and others. These white female characters, as creations of the black female literary imagination, thus serve as “sexual proxies” through which the authors may touch 214 without touching and say without saying, which is perhaps the truest legacy of American letters. Morrison argues that in white novels, the avoided blackness hovers at the edges of the text, steadily and persistently announcing itself through its distracting muteness and potent impotence. Likewise, there are clues within these two novels that the proxy is afoot. Country Place, for example, is full of imagery which traffics in light, dark, and shadow. There is the black cat which The Weasel runs over in the first chapter (17), the Roanes’ white house (18), the “black and gloomy” bed in the young couple’s bedroom, the headboard of which is a “high black wall, unscalable because the darkness. . .discouraged you” (23), the day after Johnnie’s return which brings a “a day so dark, so dominated by wind and rain” (41), the cove which, in the storm, is “black, sullen, bordered by a ripple of white foam that gnawed restlessly at the edges of the marsh” (42), the “pale, undecided sunlight” that “was not strong enough to cast shadows from the buildings, to give a look of glowing life” (43), Portalucca’s “swarthy face” and “fierce mustachios” (43), dark Neola in her “dark uniform” and “ruffled cap” (44), Mrs. Gramby who, in her black cape, was “like a monstrous bird, flapping its big black wings” (46), the “black macadam road” that “led to Ed’s filling station” (54), Johnnie Roane’s “quality of gloom, so deep, so dark, that it was contagious” (72), the “black violence of the night” (129), a “road in the dark, a country road, a narrow dirt-brown road” (135), and the “darkness ahead of [Johnnie as he is searching for Glory that took on] a deeper quality, seemed to bulk more solidly” (136). 215 It is as though Petry’s writer’s imagination compensates for the lack of central black characters by drenching the major part of the novel in darkness. For though the heroine is “Glory,” a name which connotes light that is overpowering in its brightness, the images of dark easily conquer this light for most of the book. When light is in the image, it is often pushed to the ineffectual margins of the image, or rendered moot in its existence. Petry is assisted in this by creating a furious storm which envelops the town in raging darkness for the better part of the narrative. Light does not gain a foothold in the novel until the nineteenth of twenty- five total chapters. As has been noted, often dark brown Neola is the bearer of such light. Further evidence of Petry’s saying without saying is conveyed through the character of Neola, the only black woman in the novel. As has been discussed, she is gentle and genuine, respectable, discreet, and intelligent. Most of all, she is chaste and temperate, and therefore, wholly deserving of the love and devotion of Portalucca, who eventually works up the nerve to ask her hand in marriage. Even then, Neola is no eager schoolgirl, in a hurry to experience what has been so long denied her. She does not immediately respond. Rather, she withholds her answer, and takes a long walk alone to mull over the proposal in a well-advised, wholly adult manner. At all points, she is the exact opposite of Glory, and is thus a political as well as literary response to the degradation of black womanhood. Seraph on the Suwanne does not use light and dark to reveal its use of the proxy so much as it does language, which approximates a type of ventriloquism of black speech in white mouths. Readers over the decades have remarked upon how 216 close in diction, turn of phrase, and sentence construction these white Southern characters are to Hurston’s black characters. Found in their speech are elements of black speech which Hurston identified in “Characteristics of Negro Expression”: heavy dependence on metaphor and simile, the double descriptive, verbal nouns, and tall tales. These poor whites are, in Hurston’s treatment of them, the linguistic equals in nearly every way of poor blacks of the same era, which does something to mitigate the prevailing North American belief in the notion that race is also class. Whites and blacks in Seraph on the Suwanee are united in the language of the Southern poor. Arvay thus becomes ever more the perfect proxy because linguistically she is as near as possible to black, and is therefore closer to the black female character whom Hurston was not at liberty to use in the historical moment in which the novel was published. Religion is also a tell-tale sign of the proxy in this novel. Arvay belongs to a Baptist church community which expresses religious fervor in the fundamentally black, African-derived ecstatic practice of shouting. Elsewhere in this project, I discuss shouting as black female spiritual sensuality. Arvay’s embrace of such a practice—particularly in the days of her youth during the burgeoning of her sexual awareness—is further proof of her design as a stand-in for a black female character. 217 II. Chocolate Victorians: Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha The above section discusses the first of two ways in which black women engaged in battle against destructive and dehumanizing images of the black female in U.S. society in the tender years preceding the Civil Rights era. The sexual proxy, seen clearly in Country Place and Seraph on the Suwanee, functions as a reversal of the classic American literary device known as the Africanist presence, wherein a white character stands in for an avoided black one. In this reversal, the sexuality of the black woman is projected onto the white woman, allowing the writers open discussion of female sexuality which might have been deemed unseemly or even politically detrimental in relation to the growing demand for black social equality. In this section, I will discuss and provide examples of the second way in which black women writers trod carefully upon the trembling ground of race and sex in pre-Civil Rights-era North America, the black Victorianesque lady. A. Dorothy West Like Hurston, Dorothy West first found fame among writers and other artists during the black modernist period. Born the daughter of black businessman Isaac West and his wife Rachel in 1912, Dorothy was a young writer who arrived in Harlem when the light of the Harlem Renaissance was waning, in 1928. West charmed the older Renaissance artists with her Bostonian accent and talent. Called “the Kid” by Langston Hughes, and adored by Countee Cullen, Dorothy West was 218 already an author of several published short stories when she traveled to New York as a seventeen year old (Cromwell 352). Representative of the restlessness and movement which so characterized the Modernist period, West’s first stay in New York was short. Hired as an extra in the cast of Porgy and Bess, she traveled to London, Europe, and was set to go with the cast to China when news arrived of the death of her father, Isaac. She returned to Boston to be close to her family, but found she had to wriggle away from her mother when she desired to be back in Harlem (353). Once again in New York, she learned that many of her old friends had vanished; “Harlem was no longer fashionable.” She was dismayed by the relative quiet of her comrades, and by the seeming lack of new talent to fill the void. She became the “sole editor and apparently only financial backer” of Challenge, a publication which sought to serve as a clarion call to “newer Negroes,” new poets and short story writers and novelists in the wings who were needed to come out and make good on the “fine promise” which the “old New Negroes,” the vanguard of the black Modernist movement, had left largely unfulfilled (353, 354). Though West’s charge was bold, she surprisingly “managed to get contributions. . .from James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Frank Y. Yerby,” all of whom comprised the “old New Negroes.” Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps admired West’s fire and boldness in attempting to stoke the fires of the black literati, which had been dampened by the onset of the Depression, but took issue with the idea that “all the old timers were dead.” They welcomed the joust, however. Bontemps wrote,” If the ‘younger 219 writers’ can take our crowns, here is their chance and here is our challenge.” White patron and supporter of the black Modernists, “Inspectin’” Carl Van Vechten heartily supported her first issue, sending a check for several copies (354). However, not all of the old Harlem writers were as supportive. Wallace Thurman wrote unsparingly to West from his death bed, “Despite your belated knowledge of life you [are] as naïve as ever. . . .Challenge lacks significance and personality—it is too pink tea and la de da. . .too high schoolish.” Thurman’s failure to be thrilled by the publication notwithstanding, West published five issues in the first year (355). In 1937, Challenge became the New Challenge, whose mission was different from the original. With a staff of new editors of which West was one, this publication was designed primarily to be an instrument of “writers opposed to fascism, war, and general reactionary policies,” and to “provide a basis for the clear recognition of and solution to the problems which face contemporary writers.” These sentiments reveal West’s Communist leanings during this period. Many black writers during this time saw promise in the Communist agenda of evenly distributed wealth in a classless and stateless society. Relations between the Communist party and many blacks would grow strained over time. West herself came to resent the party’s attempted usurpation of the New Challenge as a platform from which to influence black people. Weary of the constant pressures of the Party, West decided to dismantle the publication permanently, and went on to support herself by working for the New Deal-era WPA Writers Project. She eventually settled in Martha’s Vineyard, where she lived until she died in 1998. 220 There she wrote The Living Is Easy, which is loosely based on her own family and acquaintances. The Living Is Easy Set in the period just after the turn of the century, the novel is the story of Cleo Judson, who is a rabid classist, born liar, relentless schemer, and skilled swindler who learns early to perceive weakness and attack it precisely to her own advantage. Despite her stunning beauty and her care of the slightest details in her dress and in the running of her home, Cleo represents the dark side of the Victorian mindset, edged with the mercenariness of industrial capitalism. In this, Cleo simultaneously embodies and defies the Victorian lady, whose place was solely within the house, not in the business world, the world of men. Beautiful and stylish to a fault, and as mentally sharp as any robber baron of her day, Cleo is motivated by domination through the expansion of her influence, and by gain—material and otherwise. The narrator describes Cleo as one who “never had to be taught. . .how to hold her head high, how to scorn sin with men, and how to keep her left hand from knowing what her right hand was doing” (25). As a thirteen year-old of “sultry loveliness,” Cleo catches the eye of Miss Peterson, a Northerner “seeking sun for her sciatica” in the South. Miss Peterson becomes “entranced by Cleo’s beauty [spied each day as Cleo] returned from work, her hair flying free, the color still staining her cheeks from the heat of the cookstove and the fire in her heart.” Miss Peterson is a “strict-looking spinster,” whose pointed interest in Cleo may offer insight into her own unmarried state (24). 221 Fearing for Cleo’s moral development in the “amoral South,” Miss Peterson asks Cleo’s mother to allow her to take her back to the North with her. Mama receives the offer as an “answer to prayer” (24). For years now, she has worried over the future of her oldest and wildest child whose abilities to scheme and to stick to a lie confound the strongest whippings. In Cleo’s earlier days, “Mama couldn’t keep track of the times she had tanned Cleo’s hide, trying to bring her up a Christian,” with the devil “trying just as hard in the other direction” (15). Desiring to prevent her headstrong, manipulative child from becoming a wayward young woman, she agrees to let Cleo go. Northern Cleo: Killing the South and Working the Image Once in the North, Cleo works diligently to lose her Southern accent and to tame her wild, country ways. Through the efforts of her businessman husband, Bart Judson, she comes to know enough material and social affluence to complain in years to come about poor black Southerners and their “little knotty-head niggers” (5), who are beginning to crowd into what used to be her nice Bostonian neighborhood. Once upon a time, the “nicer colored people,” in whose number she certainly includes herself, inhabited the same neighborhoods as whites and lived in the “pride of proximity.” Now, these former neighbors, followed by their black counterparts, were being forced out of South End by these newcomers, these “cotton belters” whose “accents prickled her scalp” and whose “raucous laughter soured the sweet New England air” (5). 222 In this aspect, Cleo symbolizes actual black Northerners who were repulsed by the waves of Great Migrants. Michael W. Harris reports, Almost upon arrival, a southerner…was confronted by merciless reminders that he was the less fortunate, unsophisticated inferior of the northern black, that he came from “filth and uncleanliness,” that his ways were crude, and that to be tolerated meant to “keep your mouth shut.” In addition, he faced deep resentment that the “price” of his northern presence was increased racial discrimination for all blacks where formerly it had been thought to be nearly absent. (119) In reality, these migrants remind Cleo too much of her own Southern roots— as may have been the case with many of the historical Northern blacks she represents. The “r’aring-tearing” and “whooping and hollering” of the little children take her back to the games she and her sisters once played, and to the times when the girl Cleo proudly and un-selfconsciously boasted to her sisters of her speed in running, “Nobody can’t never catch me” (5, 13). Such double negative-bound speech and countrified ways are an offense to the woman Cleo. The Cleo of today is no Southern pickaninny, as is evidenced in the remarkable, sophisticated figure she cuts as she walks down the street with Judy, her five year old daughter: Cleo swished down the spit-spattered street with her head in the air and her sailor aslant pompadour. Her French heels rapped the sidewalk smartly, and her starched skirt swayed briskly from her slender buttocks. Through the thin stuff of her shirtwaist her golden shoulders gleamed, and were tied to the rest of her torso with the immaculate straps of her camisole, chemise, and summer shirt, which were banded together with tiny gold-plated safety pins. One gloved hand gave ballast to Judy, the other gripped her pocketbook. (3) 223 The contents of that pocketbook are especially revealing. Readers are told that inside that pocketbook lay “letters of obligation” from her sisters, which thanked her for “her latest distribution of money and prodigal advice.” At this point in the narrative, Cleo’s sisters are still back home in “Carolina.” In her determined way, she will soon amend this, according to the fancy of her own desires that they relocate to Boston. Also in the purse, in direct affront to the image of the pulled-together picture she projects, are her “credit books, showing various aliases and unfinished payments, and her pawnshop tickets, the dates of which had mostly come and gone. . . .” The “lesser items” in the purse which Cleo guards with her life are: a piece of chamois, lightly sprinkled with talcum powder, and only to be used in extreme necessity if there was no eye to observe this public immodesty, a lollipop for Judy in case she got tiresome, an Irish-linen handkerchief for elegance, a cotton square if Judy stuck up her mouth, and a change purse with silver, half of which Cleo, clandestinely and without conscience, had shaken out of Judy’s pig bank. (4) The contents of her purse reveal Cleo as one who gives in large measure, only to keep the recipients of her largesse beholden to her. She also shamelessly, but secretly for propriety’s sake, regularly pawns her possessions to smooth over her constant overspending and mismanagement of money. To boot, she steals from her child’s piggy bank. Cleo Judson is thus early on exposed to the reader as a skilled manipulator of an image which belies the truth of her unsavory ways. Image, in fact, is all Cleo lives for; it is always uppermost in her mind. She is, for example, highly aware of the effect which her stylish manner of dressing will have upon those 224 who see her. The use of small, nearly invisible safety pins to hold the straps of her outfit in place reveals her expectation of being inspected closely as she moves through town. Cleo fancies herself a real Bostonian by this time and is insistent upon Judy being one, as well. To go with her own thorough conformation to the “Massachusetts pattern,” and to ensure that Judy will have the benefit of perfect Northern speech and the manners of a true Bostonian, Cleo pays a teacher, Althea Binney, to come to the house “four mornings weekly to give Judy the benefit of her accent and genteel breeding” (5). In this way, Cleo hopes to stamp out the ghost of the South, with its sharecropping poverty and rough manners, before it can possess her daughter in any way. She will dare any manipulation to see that this legacy is extracted whole from her own speech and comportment and that it is kept from infecting those of her child. The Birth of a Strategy: Coppers, Not Kisses Cleo’s manipulative ways are seen in no better place than in her relationship with her husband Bart Judson. Bart is many years her senior and is a conscientious, upstanding Christian businessman. Down through the years, he is unfalteringly devoted as a husband and father. As early as the first chapter, readers watch as Cleo dupes Bart into renting a ten-room house for ten dollars above what it will cost in actuality. (She initially tries for $15 above its actual cost.) Readers figure out that she will undoubtedly shop with the ten-dollar overage that her husband will faithfully pay for rent each month, even though she owes Althea, Judy’s elocution 225 teacher, sorely needed back pay. By the time Cleo is done with her elaborate snow job, Bart is proud of himself, thinking that his ten-dollar swindle is actually a bargain. In many ways, the relationship between Cleo and Bart echoes the one between Cleo and her father, who was always a soft-touch where Cleo was concerned. A sharecropper, Pa could barely afford to support the family, but he could never say no to Cleo. She was the apple of his eye, as “a man who loved his wife couldn’t help loving his first-born best, the child of his fiercest passion. When that child was a girl, she could trample on his heart, and he would swear on a stack of Bibles that it didn’t hurt” (18). Unfortunately, Cleo tramples his heart she every chance she gets. Having wondered one day about the supposed inherent value of maleness, she concludes that “men just worked” which “was easier than what women did.” In Cleo’s estimation, the burden of a household fell to women almost exclusively. Women were the ones who had to do the “lying awake, the planning, the sorrowing, the scheming to stretch a dollar,” which she identifies as the “hard part, the head part.” She sees women as having to “think all the time,” for a “woman had to be smart” (21). While yet a girl, Cleo tests her smarts on Pa. Disgusted with the way in which her mother gladly receives Pa’s sweaty kisses when he comes home from work every evening, she makes up her mind early on to be a different kind of woman where men are concerned. She decides that “kisses [are] silly” (21), and that money and things far outstrip them in usefulness and desirability. It is a 226 surprise only to Pa when Cleo refuses his kiss one day, telling him, “I don’t want a kiss, I want a copper.” She skillfully uses his love and her beauty to demand “coppers” to spend on candy when she is fully aware of the financial strain of the family. Though she knows how hard Pa must work to get those coppers, Cleo is adamant. Her younger sisters, who from their youngest days are firmly in the power of Cleo, “shamefacedly” demand the same. Pa loses this battle and many afterward. These victories over Pa whets Cleo’s appetite for the power a woman can wield if she applies herself as a thinker and schemer (18). The way to success is thus forever inscribed on her mind: coppers, not kisses. Her disdain for physical intimacy between men and women will be heightened all the more by Ma’s eventual death in childbirth, for “Pa had just as good as killed her” (30). The Difficulty of Vulnerability Cleo marries Bart Judson primarily to get out of the clutches of a young white man who desires her so fiercely that he has come to understand with perfect clarity the rumors about the animalistic sexuality of black women. Not knowing Cleo well enough to know that she is not the least bit interested in sex with him or with any other man, he believes that Cleo’s black female sexuality is working like a charm, for “desire was growing in his loins and there was nothing he could do to stop it” (29). Needing protection from this man, she turns to Bart for aid. Cleo has already been surprised by the fact that he is in business for himself and is not the stock boy for whom she mistakes him initially. He proposes marriage, and she is glad to use the nuptials as an excuse to quit her job and the presence of the 227 infatuated young man. However, once married, Cleo refuses Bart sex, “let[ting] him know straightaway that she had no intention of renouncing her maidenhood for one man if she had married to preserve it from another” (35). Bart is not put off by Cleo’s distance; he has “expected that he would have to lead her to love with patience.” In the meantime, he finds a certain sensual delight in the fruit he sells which correlates well with his marital experience: “There was rich satisfaction in seeing it ripen, seeing the downiness in it, the blush on it, feeling the firmness of its flesh” (35). For five years, Cleo refuses to respond to Bart’s attempts to introduce physical intimacy into their marriage. One night, however, “her body’s hunger br[eaks] down her controlled resistance,” and she succumbs to her desire, becoming pregnant through the encounter. The narrator explains that “there [is] no real abhorrence of sex in her,” just a “perverseness” that causes her to resist all vulnerability and to avoid her fundamental need of another. Cleo is thus a representation of black women’s historical anxiety over control of their sexuality. For in sexuality lay vulnerability, and in vulnerability lay danger. Cleo, though she is a character, can be viewed as one of the black woman writers Mary Helen Washington discusses because of the way in which she also “cordons off those aspects of sexuality that threaten to make [her] feel powerless” (38). It is not until the end of the narrative that Cleo is humbled enough to recognize the very need of another, which she has sought to deny all her life. Bart’s business suffers horribly during the war years. Instead of moving with the turning tides that have come with the War, Bart, once the Black Banana King, ends up in 228 financial ruin. He fails to enter into partnership with his young protégée, Chris Christianson, when such a step would have proven golden. His decision to stay his own course is one he comes to rue. His failing business is compounded by the skeletal state of his marriage: He who had once seemed ageless sounded old. There had been nothing to sustain him during the hard years of war. There had only been Cleo urging him to turn water into wine. When he came home with hollow eyes, she had turned her back on his need for comfort, seeking escape from knowing things were not the same. (325) Finally, neither of them can run from the dire state of things. Bart, an old man by this time, decides to leave Cleo and Judy behind to try his hand at building a new business in New York. At his departure, he is provident in leaving a week’s supply of food for the entire household, which now includes Cleo’s sisters and their children, and approximately three hundred dollars for the upkeep of the house and the support of Judy. Cleo, more vulnerable than she is at any other time in the narrative, is nearly beside herself with sadness at the departure of this good man, and the fear of her own impending loneliness, for “you could get used to anything in time, and you got used to having a husband. It was no use denying that nothing would seem the same if you couldn’t hear his key in the lock and his voice calling up, “I’m home” (343). She is moved to the point of pulling out her own secret stash of money, hoping that its addition to the money he has given her will enable Bart to stay in Boston and rebuild his business. He smiles and explains that Boston is a closed chapter in his life, and that he needs to hurry on before Judy comes home, as he 229 would not be able to “stand shutting the door on her tears” (346). His one request is for Cleo to “look out for” Judy, the love of his life. Cleo embraces Bart and is not repelled by the scent of his daily work with “fruit and earth and sweat” the way she once was with her father years ago. Careful to honor her dislike of being kissed on the mouth, Bart kisses her softly on the cheek and leaves the house. Left to grapple with her sudden “manlessness,” Cleo wonders with real fear, “Who is there now to love me best? Who?” (347). It is a question well worth considering, for Judy and her cousins regard Cleo mostly with disdain, her sisters have finally become determined to begin living their own lives, and she has few friends. Not even gathering the money that has fallen to the floor comforts Cleo. Her mind finally falls to her young nephew Tim, who has idolized Bart, and whom she knows will do his utmost to become the man of the house. Cleo prays fervently in her heart, “Make Tim love me best of all the world. Of all the world” (347). At the end of her story, Cleo has gained experience in being rebuffed by life and by the people she seeks to dominate, but one cannot say that she changes in the way that other heroines do in black women’s novels of this time period. Cleo represents New England steel filtered through a quintessential black woman’s narrative: a daughter of the poor, black, sharecropping South risen to status and affluence in the North. She never manages, however, to become Neola of Petry’s Country Place--not that Cleo would see the point in emulating a maid—for too much remains broken within her for her to be the black Northern lady she desires to 230 be. In her determined grasping and inherent selfishness, Cleo remains an infant, and is thus more closely aligned with Neola’s foil, Glory, and even more so with Lil, Glory’s mother. B. Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 to David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and his wife, Keziah, who had at one time been an elementary school teacher. The Brooks’ neighborhood was located on Chicago’s South Side, which makes Brooks the only writer in this study of an “economically deprived” background. Despite growing up in a family of humble means, Brooks thrived on her parents’ ongoing interests in education and culture. Both parents had a hand in shaping Brooks’ sensitivity to the power of language. Her mother made up stories and songs for her daughter’s enjoyment, and her father read to his children everyday. A “brooding,” pensive child, Brooks remembered being “ill-adjusted,” with underdeveloped social skills which caused her to spend most of her time thinking about her “relations with other children” rather than perfecting them, or applying herself to her schoolwork (Turner 1, 2). As a teenager, she became a published poet. As a young woman, she hoped to become a reporter for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. She was not hired, and took a job as a maid before working as a typist for a spiritualist minister, who sold good luck charms from his storefront church. In the late 1930’s, Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council and became its director of publicity. In her involvement with the group, she would meet and eventually marry young writer, 231 Henry L. Blakely. The couple would become the parents of two children, Henry, Jr. and Nora. Brooks became a high-profile poet, who used for her material the everyday lives of ordinary black people. Her works elicited great critical and popular acclaim (Turner 2, 3). Maud Martha Brooks’ Maud Martha, one of the few prose pieces for which she is known, is now almost universally regarded among black literary scholars as a text of immense importance and depth, although its critical reception upon publication would lead one to think otherwise. Noting the reviewers’ “resistance to the deeper meaning in Maud Martha [and] their absolute refusal to see Brooks’s novel as part of any tradition in Afro-American or mainstream American literature,” Mary Helen Washington has written that if the novel “had been written by a man about a man’s experience, it would have been considered a brilliant modernist text” (443). However, written by a black woman when black male writers dominated the field, about a black woman when the black male narrative singularly captured the notice of readers and critics, the book was often dismissed as cute and quirky, and was quickly and easily surpassed in popularity by Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was published a year after Brooks’ novel was. In an essay entitled “‘Taming All that Anger Down’: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha,” Washington was the first to write about how critics, in thoroughly ignoring the novel’s modernist brilliance, also completely missed the explosive rage within the relatively quiet narrative. Harry B. Shaw, in “War with Beauty,” wrote, as well, about the fierce and gut-wrenching battle with 232 confining and soul-killing standards of beauty and colorism within and outside of black culture that Maud Martha must wage in order to lay claim to a view of herself as worthy and “fine.” Most recently, Valerie Frazier has extended Washington and Shaw’s arguments about anger in the narrative, writing: [T]he conflicts and turmoil that encapsulate Maud Martha's life coalesce into a comprehensive pattern of domestic epic warfare. This domestic epic warfare extends beyond Shaw's "war on beauty" and incorporates all areas of household and familial ties. Domestic warfare precisely describes Maud Martha's struggles to obtain and maintain her home and relationships with family members as she strives to retain a sense of identity within this confining structure. (1) The anger, the battling, and the warfare within Maud Martha make clear that the text is not the fluff critics originally made it out to be. While this highly important work is worthy of critical discussion for many reasons, I, too, am most interested in the violence in the text. My main interest lies in Maud Martha as a model of respectability and propriety who must struggle mightily with the meaning of respectability and propriety in order to love herself and her life, in all freedom, without apology. For a Flower of Ordinary Allurements, Goodness Maud Martha is not the light-skinned heroine of striking beauty of earlier black novels. Barbara Christian has noted that she is not Harper’s Iola Leroy. Nor is she Hurston’s Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God or Larsen’s Helga of Quicksand. She is not even West’s Cleo. She is dark and plain. Though she has 233 long, thick hair which she must press straight, she knows that she is a flower of “ordinary allurements.” Her early understanding of her outward appearance causes her to wonder if such a flower is “as easy to love as a thing of heart-catching beauty [s]uch as her sister Helen” (6). A lonesome, deep thinker even as a little child, Maud Martha grows up in a family that is close-knit, but flawed and therefore, like all families, wounding. Her mother especially seems to be unable to keep mothering in balance with being a wife. The narrator, working through Maud Martha’s childhood stream of consciousness, paints the picture of regular quarrels between her parents, during which “Mama was so terrible sweet and good to her” (11). However, once the fighting is over and her parents reconcile, Maud Martha can no longer count on her mother’s attention or even her kindness. Calling out from her bed for her mother on one such night, Maud Martha is told to “shut up” by her mother who cannot be bothered now that Daddy has returned home. Understandably, the girl almost looks forward to the times of “loud hate or silent cold,” when she is cherished by her mother (11). Perhaps because of her sister’s winning looks and outgoing personality and her mother’s emotional inconsistency, Maud Martha learns to value a rich inner life which she is determined to keep private. As a teen, she marvels with disgust at entertainers, for she “had never understood how people could parade themselves on a stage like that, exhibit their precious private identities; shake themselves about, be very foolish for a thousand eyes. She was going to keep herself to herself” (18). 234 Placing primacy on self-ownership and self-containment, she decides that she will never be an artist. She cannot muster the abandon necessary to pour herself out in a public manifestation for the general population to see. Instead, her goal is “to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that” (19). Let others throw themselves before a crowd, exposing the very core of who they were. In Maud Martha’s mind, to do so is common and vulgar; the worthier goal is to develop a proper self that is easily consumable by others because of its inherent goodness. Later, the issue of goodness arises again when, by showing mercy to a mouse she has trapped, Maud Martha feels that she has overcome all hindrances to achieving her ideal: Suddenly, she was conscious of a new cleanness in her. A wide air walked in her. A life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed. In the center of that simple restraint was – creation. She had created a piece of life. “Why,” she thought, as her height doubled, “why, I’m good! I am good.” (54) Maud Martha’s misapplication of the notion of “creation” here reveals her exaltation of self-containment and her Victorianist ideas about “cleanness.” Tellingly, the feeling of accomplishment she expresses in this instance has oddly resulted from her doing nothing. By doing nothing here and remaining “clean,” she believes that she has earned the right to exclaim, “I’m good!” Readers later witness her dread of participation in acts which require her to do something, to engage an 235 Other on a much more intimate level. She is particularly uninterested in the one act which actually has the power to result in “creation.” This critique of Maud Martha is not reflective of a wish to set at nought her preoccupation with goodness, which reveals her desire to live by a moral code which honors care, restraint, mercy. Maud Martha has decided that people should concentrate on being good citizens committed to the communal good. Though simply stated and drawn small in the life one ordinary woman, these are powerful comments during a historical moment of war and racial antagonism. Goodness is such a focus for Maud Martha perhaps because so little of it prevails in her world. However, her approach to goodness is superficial, clinical, and ultimately inoperable, as the narrative makes plain. The Commodification of Culture & Class and the Triumph of Plain Goodness As a young woman of eighteen, Maud Martha is a studious observer of high culture and cultivates a knowledge of expensive goods by reading heady magazines which discuss New York as a center of culture and quality things, with its “wonderful people” and its “fine talk” and its “bristling,” “creamy,” or “tactfully shimmering ways of life” (37). These magazines precipitate an overwhelming “hunger” in her to possess the “Chinese boxes,” the “Italian plates,” the “antique French bisque figurines,” and the “dresses that were plain but whose prices were not” (37, 38). Maud Martha, of the plain looks and black middle class background, is one who desires to be a true cosmopolitan, worldly and sophisticated with a lust for material goods that is only mitigated by the quality and fineness of the things. 236 She is around this age when she begins dating Paul Phillips. She knows as he looks at her one day that he considers her looks only middling at best. She knows also that while he thinks that she is “sweet” and will eventually marry her after some serious thought, he will always be able to say that “any day out of the week he can do better than this black gal.” She decides that to his eternal puzzlement, she will subdue his lingering doubts about whether or not he should settle for so plain a wife (42). Embodying Goodness Once married, Maud Martha continues her prim and proper ways. In a chapter entitled “The Young Couple at Home,” the narrator reveals their rather staid, boring life at home. It is clear, however, that Paul would that it were more passionate. Coming to join her in bed, he invites her to “snuggle up.” She declines the offer, saying that she intends to “read awhile.” With his wife so inclined, he decides to read also. Tellingly, he pores over his copy of Sex in the Married Life while she reads Of Human Bondage. Obviously inspired by his reading, he pinches her on the backside and tells her that he wants to start her on a regimen of reading one chapter of his book each night. In reply, she stands up and offers to “make some cocoa” and “some toast sandwiches,” which temporarily distracts him (51). Her avoidance of sex reveals her firm Victorianism and enslavement to its sterile conception of goodness, even behind closed doors with her husband. This mild sex life, quite obviously approached by Maud Martha more as duty than as pleasure, nevertheless produces a pregnancy, which culminates in the 237 sudden onset of labor. Her labor is in fact so sudden that she has no time to make it to a hospital, but ends up giving birth in her own bed. It is arresting to watch as the prim heroine experiences the overwhelming physicality of birthing a child. Cramping legs that immobilize her, “a tremendous desire to eliminate,” and contractions that force her to scream out in agony all buffet Maud Martha terribly, but even in the throes of labor, she is as careful as she can be of her image and behavior. At the appearance of Belva Brown, her mother, who has been summoned to the apartment, Maud Martha “tighten[s] her lips” and tells her mother immediately, “Listen. If you’re going to make a fuss, go on out. I’m having enough trouble without you making a fuss over everything” (69, 71). Receiving from her mother both a gentle promise not to fuss over what is a natural act which made Maud Martha “like millions of other women,” and an encouragement for Maud Martha to use her “privilege” of screaming in response to the agony of her present circumstances, Maud Martha gives full voice to her pain, though she apologizes between contractions (71). Before long, the baby is born. In the moments following, Maud Martha regains her composure and chooses to think about “how well she felt.” She tells Mrs. Barksdale, a young woman who lives in the building, that she feels “strong enough to go out and shovel coal! Having a baby is nothing, Mrs. Barksdale. Nothing at all.” This plain spoken neighbor quickly reintroduces the reality of the labor into Maud Martha’s decidedly revisionist relation of it: “Aw, yeah? Well, from what I heard back there a while ago, didn’t seem like nothing. Girl, I didn’t know anybody could scream that loud” (73). 238 Maud Martha, who has dedicated her life to privacy and self-containment, is surprised by the helpfulness and encouragement of Mrs. Cray, a neighbor who attends her from the start of her labor, and of Mrs. Barksdale. She recalls that she has only greeted them in passing before, and marvels at their willingness to be a help to her in her time of need. She is encouraged by their demonstration of concern for her. “People are sweet,” she thinks (73). Beyond this, she has finally experienced “creation” in a real sense. The baby who now lies in her arms is the product of intimate relations and her actual laboring body and mind, a far cry from the mouse which she chose to let live. In giving birth, Maud Martha connects powerfully for the first time with her body as source of the goodness she idealizes, and not an estrangement from it. The narrative ends on a similar note of hope for Maud Martha, with the end of the War which has been raging in the world, and the one in Maud Martha’s own thinking. For despite the paucity of goodness, and racial hatred evidenced by the continued lynchings reported in the black press, and the fact that there is little place for dark, plain women in a world which adores the “pale and pompadoured,” Maud Martha rejoices in the lovely weather of the day, the company of her young daughter, the safe return of her brother Harry from the War, and the ongoing surge of life itself, which she literally embodies in the form of a second pregnancy (126-128). 239 “Just” Fine Much like Hurston’s Arvay, Maud Martha evolves to a point of self- acceptance, even in the face of the unchanging facts of the beauty and popularity of an older sister. Stepping out from the shadows of her assumed inferiority, Maud Martha can see the bounty and blessings of her life. She tells her mother shortly before the book’s end that she may not have the glamour and wealth that Helen desires to purchase with her charm and her beauty, but she is happy to have “a husband, a nice little girl, and a clean home of [her] own.” Her mother quickly points out that Maud Martha’s “home” is an efficiency apartment “without even a private bathroom” (120). Maud Martha, refusing to be defeated, muses aloud to her mother about the beautiful Helen: “It’s funny how some people and just charming, just pretty, and others, born of the same parents, are just not.” Her mother responds sympathetically that Maud Martha has “always been just wonderful” (121). Because of the ambiguity conveyed in Maud Martha’s words, it is easy for her mother, a misguided reader, to miss the self-satisfaction that is quietly present in her statement. Maud Martha’s use of the word “just” at key points, points both to the undiagnosed poverty of those who are “just charming” and “just pretty” and to the unrecognized wealth of those who are “just not.” Conclusion Cleo and Maud Martha both embody the Victorian ideal and simultaneously critique it. Maud Martha, even in her exaltation of privacy, self-containment, 240 goodness, and intellect, finds that she cannot do away with the body after all, or with other people. Cleo is all Victorian beauty and propriety on the surface, but underneath is the cold, sneering face of cutthroat capitalism. The fact that West in 1948 and Brooks in 1951 cannot create characters which fully and uncritically embody the Victorian feminine ideals which their mothers and grandmothers had held so dear and used as tools to combat defining depictions of black women is quite telling. These characters, like those involved in the sexual proxy, speak of this pre- Civil Rights era as a new moment which could draw on the political and literary strategies of the past—even quite heavily--but which could never replicate them in full. The unique demands and the pressures of the day required of the black female intellectual new thoughts, modernized responses, and innovative actions. The sexual proxy and the chocolate Victorian were two ways in which black women writers of the interwar period took up arms in the fight against historical and continuing racist mythologies of black womanhood while exploring the issues which were of vital importance to them and making contributions to the conversation between the spiritual and the sensual. 241 Chapter Three References Beale, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. New York: Harper & Row, 1953. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport: Greenwood, 1980. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Politics of Empowerment. 2 nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Cromwell, Adelaide. Afterword. The Living Is Easy. By Dorothy West. 1948. New York, Feminist, 1982. Dubek, Laura. “White Family Values in Ann Petry’s Country Place.” MELUS. 29.2 (Summer 2004): 55(22). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009. <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=ITOF&docid=A121647124&source=ga e&userGroup ame=lapl&version=1.0>. Dyer, Richard. White. 1997. London: Routledge, 1999. Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge, 2001. Frazier, Valerie. "Domestic Epic Warfare in Maud Martha. " African American Review. 39.1 2 (SpringSummer 2005): 133(9). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A137098 96&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl Friedan, Betty. The Feminist Mystique. 5 th ed. New York: Norton, 2001. Frost, Jennifer. “Hedda Hopper, Hollywood Gossip, and the Politics of Racial Representation in Film, 1946-1948. The Journal of African American History. 93.1 (Winter 2008): 36 (24). Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1984. 1985. 1986. New York: Bantam, 1988. 242 Harris, Michael W. The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford, 1992. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. 1994. 7 th ed. Cambridge: Harvard, 2003. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. Hurston, Zora Neale. Seraph on the Suwanee. 1948. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. ---. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kuspit, Donald. “The Unempathic Eye.” Artnet.com Magazine. 11 Aug. 2008. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit10-19-01.asp7. Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham: Duke, 2001 Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. McKay, Nellie. Introduction. The Narrows. By Ann Petry. Boston: Mariner, 1999. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage,1993. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 585-595. Murray, Timothy. “Facing the Camera’s Eye: Black and White Terrain in Women’s Drama.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Petry, Ann. Country Place. New York: Signet, 1950. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroines Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford, 1996. 243 ---. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford, 1998. Turner, Nathaniel. “A Bio-Literary Sketch.” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African American Themes. 15 Aug. 2007. http://www.nathanielturner.com.gwenbrooksbio.htm. Washington, Mary Helen. “The Darkened Eye Restored: Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism From the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke, 1994. West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy. 1948. New York: Feminist, 1982. 244 Chapter Four “You Don’t Have to Worry ‘Bout the Way I’ll Fare”: The Intellectual Contribution of Women as Black Church Bohemians on the Gospel Highway, 1940-1968 My sisters, we all worked in the Liberty Street houses, all my cousins on my mother’s side. You could stick your black hands, stick your black hands in their dough for bread, you could lay your black body in their beds to nap with their children, but you couldn’t walk through the front door. I did that for almost two years and then I said I’m going to Chicago. They couldn’t stop me. They tried but I was going to Chicago. —Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days I want a song to sing ‘Til the heavenly joy bells ring (While I travel) Through this barren land, I want Jesus to hold my hand I want a prayer to pray Lord, give me the words to say As I journey up this King’s highway…. --Dorothy Love Coates and Original Gospel Harmonettes “Sula?” she whispered, gazing the tops of trees. “Sula?”…And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. --Toni Morrison, Sula Clara and the Mink With his landmark 1971 text The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times, gospel scholar and enthusiast Anthony Heilbut gave the world one of the most important in-depth studies of twentieth century black church culture and African American sacred music. In it, he traces gospel’s artistic developments, and lays bare the specific contributions, motivations, and personalities of its major participants. Written while many of gospel’s first- and second-generation superstars were yet living, the book is energized by an abundance of direct quotes, illuminating 245 anecdotes, and firsthand observances and critiques which are characteristically witty, respectful, and always deeply moving. While all gospel performers suffered deeply and often tragically the effects of the societal ills of race-, class-, and gender-based strife, it can be fairly easily understood that the women of this community suffered in ways unique to their status in American society. Whether one chooses to view them as Americans “positioned…on the fulcrum of race and sex,” á la Paula Giddings (246), or as those who were forced to withstand the “intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality” á la Patricia Hill Collins (69), black women occupied a social sphere which perfectly positioned them to catch it from all sides. Heilbut shares a story which hints at the deep impact of these forces on the lives of the workaday black U.S. women who transformed themselves into national and international gospel stars. He reports that when “Queen of Gospel,” Mahalia Jackson died in January of 1972, she went out in unbeatable grande dame style, with two funerals. One took place in Chicago, where she had resided for many years, and the second was held in her native New Orleans. At the wake which preceded the first funeral, fellow gospel singer and Jackson’s closest rival for the top spot in the hearts of gospel fans, Clara Ward, outdid herself, according to Heilbut. “Moaning and growling” her way through the ominous lyrics of C.A. Tindley’s “Beams of Heaven,” Ward sang, “I do not know how long it will be/Or what the future holds for me….” Heilbut writes that she sang it “beautifully.” The drama, however, did not end with the song, as Ward, in returning to her seat after 246 her solo’s end, “walked a few steps, then tore off her mink wrap and tossed it at Mahalia’s coffin” (304, 305). The high theatrical value of Ward’s performance and its mink-tossing aftershock moves Heilbut to briefly but pointedly entertain the obvious: whether or not Ward’s intention was to “tear up in a final battle of the queens.” After all, Jackson and Ward were each considered the reigning queen of gospel music, depending upon who was judging. Moreover, the Wards did have a history of commercialized, flashy, even outrageous gospel performances, so this flamboyant gesture would not have been at all out of step with them. It therefore would not be outlandish to suspect Ward of trying to provide a final bit of spectacle to settle the matter of who reigned supreme for once and for all. By this time, however, Clara Ward had suffered two strokes herself and was in quite delicate health. The specter of her own death no doubt took on flesh as she looked upon Jackson’s lifeless body. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that some bond of sorority connected the two women, as Ward had traveled the same Gospel Highway as Jackson for nearly three decades. In fact, Willa Ward, Clara’s elder sister and groupmate, in her memoir How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World- Famous Ward Singers, recalls fairly warm interactions between the Wards and the elder Jackson. Willa remembers Jackson, who was also at one time a hair stylist with her own hair salon on the South Side of Chicago, styling the Wards’ hair in the early days whenever they were in town performing. Willa writes that Jackson’s secret technique of deep-waving the hair, called “croconoling,” made the styles last 247 “three times longer than when anyone else did them.” Willa also recalls that she and her sister “thoroughly enjoyed” the “excellent cuisine” of the Lousiana-born Jackson, “which included a “fantastic Creole gumbo” (67). However market pressures and public opinion may have drawn Jackson and Ward into competition, on a personal level, it seems that genuine warmth and fond memories existed between the two gospel stars and went back years. Within this context then, Ward’s gesture, perfectly postmodern in its capacity to encompass multiple interpretations, was perhaps more than anything else, “a…private statement from Clara to Mahalia, beyond words but fully comprehensible to those who knew them” (305). Just short of one year from this performance at Jackson’s wake, Ward herself would be dead. Ward’s mink toss stands as a historical, gospel version of the famous “girlgirlgirl” moment novelist Toni Morrison depicts between the living Nel and her recently departed best friend Sula. What dangers and disappointments; what joys, triumphs, and achievements would have given rise to the need for such an enigmatic “private statement” to pass between gospel queens? Who were the gospel women, and what was the world they inhabited as traveling singers, musicians, and composers? Most importantly for this project, in what ways can Ward, Jackson, and their contemporaries be considered intellectuals worthy of academic study, and what can we mark as their contribution to modern black female intellectualism? 248 “I Thought, I Wondered, and I Said”: Extending the Parameters, Clarifying the Tradition In a live recording of a Los Angeles concert of gospel all-stars entitled The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, Odessa Edwards tells of a car accident which nearly took her life and the lives of her singers, the Original Gospel Harmonettes, among them the group’s dynamic lead, Dorothy Love Coates. As the Harmonettes continue to sing their opening number softly in the background—interestingly enough about “journeying up the King’s highway”—Edwards, known for her speaking and preaching, addresses the crowd: We want to thank God tonight for our presence, and thank Him for letting us be able to give service and praise to His name….The Harmonettes truly mean today that we’re glad to be here. Coming to Oakland, California last Thursday, we suffered a vey serious accident…Tore up our car. Bystanders that were standing there when we finally crawled out said it was just a miracle. They just knew that the people in the car were dead. But I turned around and looked at the car as it sat on its head after flipping in the air five feet, and I said, ‘Well, God is real.’ And then I wondered after then, after taking most of us to the hospital, I thought and I said, ‘Well, He left us here, and He left us here for a purpose. Maybe we don’t know what the purpose is’, I said, ‘but, Girls, let’s sing and sing and keep on singing. So we came here—baggage and bag on the bus, but we’re here. And as Peter said on the mountain with Jesus during the Transfiguration, ‘Lord, it’s good to be here!’ ‘cause you never know what day or hour it’ll be when God shall call your name, and it’s best to be ready…. (Track 4) Edwards’ narrative is particularly poignant in its decidedly matter-of-fact acceptance of the group’s near-death experience. Standing there on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium, the women sang as sojourners home from a (not-so) distant 249 land—death. It is a journey which they very nearly did not make; their performance reveals the extent to which they realize it. I find furthermore that this very resignation to the nearness of death propels Edwards to make three intersecting and powerful triangulations: (1) among herself, the group, and the audience; (2) among herself and the “girls,” a living God working out His divine purpose, and the future; and (3) among herself and her singers, Jesus, and Peter. The narrative is therefore marked by a pattern of repeated and shifting triangulations, which together with Edwards’ clear assertion of herself as a thinking/speaking respondent—“I wondered,” “I thought,” and “I said”—define her as an intellectual, and her speech as a product of that intellection. These characteristics illustrate compellingly the nature and function of the gospel women’s intellectualism, which is always a speaking or sharing of the self in relation to other “selves.” As though offered in testament to this fact, one of the Harmonettes is moved at one point to call out her own response to a point Edwards is making: “Say that, child.” My point in this chapter is to claim space for the women of gospel’s Golden Age as intellectuals. While their personal style, artistry, and musical influence have been lauded, the degree to which these women were sources of thought or intellectual statements, query, and response has largely not been. To this end, my main argument within this project is that the racialized, gendered, and classed notion of the intellectual enters the discursive field of African American studies as an always already pre-deconstructed concept. Because of the vexed history of black education in the context of the New World, my feeling is that 250 academic intellectuals must always be ready to look outside of the Academy in order to produce a reliable record and worthy analysis of black intellection. My approach, therefore, is one which contests the intellectual as the exclusive domain of the nation’s universities, or of those who have passed through them, or of those who are currently in such locations. In this line of thinking, I follow sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who articulates similar ideas in her now classic text, Black Feminist Thought. There, Collins leads a charge to resist the thought that “highly educated Black women, especially those who work in U.S. colleges and universities, are automatically intellectuals.” Referencing black women’s tradition of non-academic intellectuals like Sojourner Truth, Collins reminds readers that “[n]ot all Black women intellectuals are educated,” and “[n]ot all Black women intellectuals work in academia” (15). Therefore, according to Collins, doing meaningful work which affirms the intellection of black women sometimes “involves searching for [intellectualism] in alternative locations and among women who are not commonly perceived as intellectuals” (14). I find an equally provocative mandate in the work of womanist scholar Linda E. Thomas, who reminds us that the “knowledge we acquire from formal institutions derives from the ideas, philosophies, and histories of the privileged; more specifically, it is information about people who wrote their histories and ideas….Thus the knowledge that we have gained is knowledge by and about the privileged” (paragraph 21). 251 While academic elitism obscures the intellectualism of all non-elites of all races and ethnic groups, studies of black women become especially impoverished by the tendency toward the traditionally literate and highly educated. The majority of black women’s lives are left out of academic scholarship, and black female non- academic intellectualism is rarely acknowledged. Collins defines black female intellectualism as the “process of self-conscious struggle on behalf of Black women, regardless of the actual social location where that work occurs” (15). In emphatic agreement with Collins’ extra-academic scope of the intellectual, I have made a similar extension of the word’s meaning. The term intellectualism in this project is defined, therefore, not as an academic pursuit or development--although it may take that form—but rather as an interactive enterprise which involves the speaking of the self in relation to some Other, which may be people (including one’s self or one’s God), events in one’s own life, historical moments and movements, natural and social environments and conditions, texts, songs, or other works of art. For me, intellectualism, then, is essentially a call-and- response, always produced collaboratively, and oftentimes, communally. Because of its distinguishing call-and-response nature, African American culture is already inherently deeply intellectual. It does not become so by its members’ participation in spheres of higher learning. My embrace and extension of the intellectual here is not an attempt to sneak “field hands” into the “big house” by cheating on behalf of the gospel women. This may appear to be the case to those who remain wed to traditional ideas of 252 intellectualism’s exclusive relationship to the Academy. Rather, it is a genuine attempt to engender a welcoming and respectful approach to these non-academic intellectuals who were more often than not the working class victims of class, race, and gender oppression, hindered in their pursuit of formal education. Hazel Carby, in “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues” (1998), and Angela Y. Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999) have done similar work with the blues women of the 1920’s, unearthing and articulating the profoundly ironic wisdom and stances of resistance which abound in their songs and prefigure by decades the high point of modern black feminism. Other scholars like Layli Phillips, Kerri Reddick Morgan, and Dionne Patricia Stephens have produced similarly significant work on the women of hip hop, such as in their critical essay, “Oppositional Consciousness Within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976-2004.” Here Phillips el al. pay special attention to a site in which women’s participation in a frequently misogynistic art form has often been perceived as particularly defeating to womanist and feminist interests and gains. Their work, however, uncovers how “women in rap have maintained a dually oppositional stance within Hip Hop culture,” which has on one hand, enabled “African American and Latino women to critique men of their same race or ethnicity,” and on the other, enabled these women to “express solidarity with” these men “in their critique of and 253 struggle against mainstream society’s racism, classism, and raced sexism (which affects both women and men of color” (2). Because blues, hip hop, and gospel are folk art forms, produced and connected to non-elite communities outside of the Academy, what these art forms have to contribute to various modes of social critique must be harvested and brought into academic discourse, which would otherwise ignore them, exploit them, or bury them under “superficial, prescribed commentaries of conquest and apologetics” (Cannon et al. 4). One way out from under the imposed prescriptions and silences which are enacted against studies of black women’s cultures is to embrace the polyglossia—many languages—of black women. Thomas writes, There are a variety of discourses deployed by African American women based on their social location within the black community. Some black women are economically disadvantaged and suppressed by macro-structures in society. Other African American women are workers whose voices are ignored by the production needs of the capitalist world order. Some other voices are dramatically presented in the faith speech of black women preachers. And still some other articulations are penned in the annals of the academy….This language of black women is understood by black women; it accentuates intra-group talk. It is a language of compassion, and yet it is no-nonsense. The words and actions of this language oppose sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and abuse to any of God’s creation. (2) This chapter spotlights the women of gospel whose multi-layered, complex engagement with the forces of spirituality and sensuality helped formed the basis of modern black female intellectualism. In this chapter, I argue that the gospel women operated within two worlds—a larger society which exploited them physically, psychologically, socially, and economically, and the smaller gospel microcosm, 254 which often worked similar kinds of exploitation even as it offered various kinds of respites from the larger society. Moreover, I argue that the community of traveling gospel artists to which these women belonged as a wholly unexamined bohemian extension of the black church. With the exception of studies within the last fifteen years which examine the Harlem Renaissance as black modernist bohemianism, little work has been done on sites of bohemian activity in African American culture. This chapter seeks to help redress this critical void. I will also discuss the specific contributions of three of the most influential and remarkable women of this black bohemian gospel culture: Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis of the Davis Sisters, Clara Ward of the famed Ward Singers, and Dorothy Love Coates of the Original Gospel Harmonettes. It is my argument that each of these gospel pioneers, in her own way, withstood the interconnecting oppressions facing black women, and in so doing, advanced black women’s multiple causes, particularly in the church. The gospel performers included here represent the working-class, Christian woman’s response to questions of what it meant in the twentieth century to be black, female, socially and economically at risk, and hard- pressed on every side, particularly during the crucial years of the Civil Rights Movement. Researching Gospel in the Information Age Conducting research on gospel music forces two realities into crystal-like clarity. The first is the size, scope, and diversity of the gospel scholarly community. 255 Recent scholarly work on gospel focuses on gospel’s reach into locations and cultures outside of the U.S. There is Kevin Simmonds’ 2005 study of gospel culture in Japan, “The Gospel Truth about Japan,” which exposes how the embrace of gospel music by native Japanese eviscerates cultural stereotypes of Japanese stoicism and avoidance of public emotion. Timothy Rommen has done recent work on gospel culture in the Caribbean: a 2006 critical essay “Protestant Vibrations?: Reggae, Rastafari, and Conscious Evangelicals,” which considers how the globalization of reggae has created the context for the convergence of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies, and produced the genre of gospel reggae, and a book Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and Ethics of Style in Trinidad (2008). There is also continuing scholarship on gospel’s influence on secular musical forms, such as Craig Mosher’s “Ecstatic Sounds: The Influence of Pentecostalism on Rock & Roll (2008). Critical works focusing on terrain closer to gospel’s home bases of the U.S. and gospel music itself are just as plentiful, however, and women scholars seem to be major contributors in this area. Melinda E. Weekes, Sandra L. Barnes, and Sharon Young all published pieces on gospel in 2005—“This House, This Music: Exploring the Interdependent Interpretive Relationship Between the Contemporary Black Church and Contemporary Gospel Music,” “Black Church Culture and Community Action,” and “Purposes of Gospel Choirs and Ensembles in State Supported Colleges and Universities” respectively. Tammy L. Kernodle published “Work the Works: The Role of African American Women in the Development of 256 Contemporary Gospel” in 2006, which was followed by Carrie Allen’s 2007 publication, “When We Send Up the Praises: Race, Identity, and Gospel Music in Augusta, Georgia.” DoVeanna S. Fulton has a forthcoming piece entitled “‘Come through the water, come through the flood’: Black Women Creating Representative Gospel to Remember the Mississippi Flood of 1927,” which considers the long shadow cast by the natural disaster on black culture and black women’s intellectual response to it in their sacred musical art. These critical studies of gospel provide evidence of the continuing expansion of the foundational works of people like Heilbut, James Cone, Horace Boyer, Rev. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, and Bernice Johnson Reagon in new and provocative ways. The fact that women scholars are carving out abundant space as analysts of the field of gospel ensures, at least for the time being, that women’s voices play a key role in the academic representation of gospel. The other surprise is the way in which gospel—particularly classic gospel, gospel produced in yesteryear—has taken the Internet age by storm. Densely populated with sites dedicated to the genre, the Internet is perhaps the greatest and most accurate gauge of the passion and fanaticism this genre of gospel inspires. The best of these offerings are perhaps found on Youtube where hundreds of videos show a full range of gospel performances—from the most mediocre and horrendously bad amateur acts of today to the most obscure performances of some of the world’s greatest gospel singers. Posters enthusiastically share with one another gospel carefully preserved or re-released audio recordings from the forties and fifties, and visual recordings from the sixties. 257 The space for text posting in response to the songs and clips reveals the true classic gospel community—its high standards, its zeal, its humor, and its great knowledge, whenever such knowledge is possible. For example, one may go to the Youtube posts and learn from the only people who care enough to know that the group known as the Gospel Challengers of Jamaica, New York, and the gospel backup group known as the Andrewettes (named for Inez Andrews, an ex-Caravans singer, who left the group in the sixties to go solo) are actually one and the same. Youtube classic gospel fans exclaim over performances, evaluate voices and musicianship, clarify lyrics for one another, trade anecdotes and bits of history, bitterly argue and sometimes curse each other out, gratefully thank one another for posting rare footage of their old favorites, enter into friendly competitions to see who will post the next exciting, hard-to-find audio or video, and generally celebrate gospel, often posting texts that cheer on their favorites in the present tense, no matter the time lapse between the posting and the actual performance. In response to a video featuring the 1960’s group, the Jewel Gospel Singers, “PurpleSnowman29” writes, forty years after the captured performance took place, “Sing Jewels!!! Yall sho ‘nough got it!!!” (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PFfwhT4mXDU). Youtube has become a major transmitter of knowledge about gospel history and classic artists to young gospel fans who were born much too late to have such knowledge a priori. Posts one young viewer after watching a clip of the Little 258 Rock-based female group, the Loving Sisters, “Man…these sisters are TOUGH!!! I’ve never heard of this gospel group before” (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NP3dGgc0SY). Another new fan is won over to group after hearing an audio posting of their song “God’s Eagle.” The hard Arkansas rock, the inimitable command of lead singer Gladys McFadden, and the perfectly harmonized swing of the background singers have done their work: “MMOOOORRREEEEEEEEEEEE PLZ,” begs the new convert (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6ljaSdmStzU). Youtube has also become an established site on which the relatives of classic gospel stars explain their very personal connections to the performers in the videos. One viewer, “thenicevoice,” having watched a video of her mother leading a song with the Gospel Challengers, showed the clip to the singer herself. The exhilarated daughter posts: “OMG! That’s my mom singing lead on this song! Her name is Elaine Davis. I showed her this today and she cracked up! Amazing! Thank you SO much for posting this!” Another poster, “Harodugan,” responds to her: “YOUR MOTHER CAN REALLY SING” (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=T_0AEFmid0). The online classic gospel community also thrives in places other than Youtube. Music blogger Scott Soriano of http://crudcrud.blogspot.com writes of his relief one day in discovering that a young woman whom he thought had beaten him to all the good records at a yard sale had instead collected what amounted to, in his blunt estimation, “a pile of shit,” leaving the way clear for him make the real finds: 259 So, while this lady is gobbling up poop, I flip through a box of records and the first good record I find is The Famous Davis Sisters! Dig some more and my five minute detour has netted me five terrific Black gospel records, all in pretty good condition. I used to get annoyed by trendies, but not if they are gonna leave fantastic records like this one laying around. Indeed, there are gospel fans the world over, as is evidenced by such websites as the German www.gospelszene.de, on which one can look up the Historie of black sacred music, and learn that “In den Vereinigten Staaten trafen die ersten schwarzen Sklaven in Jamestown, Virginia, ein. Aus afrikanischer Gesangstradition entstehen in der Folge Slave Songs: Spirituals und Work Songs.” (Translation: “In the United States, the first black slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. From African singing tradition, slave songs developed, along with mirror-image ritual and work songs.”) From hardcore churchies raised on North American gospel music to young, manifestly Caucasian bloggers to European websites proclaiming that the Davis Sisters “waren eine der Topp-Gospelgruppen der 50er und 60er Jahre,” (Translation: “were one of the top gospel groups of the 50s and 60s”), classic gospel has woven a web around the world. Devotees—even those who dearly love other genres--will proclaim that there is no music like it on earth, and some will argue for its consideration as the best music on earth. It seems then that the poorest-paid, most under-acknowledged, most stolen-from musicians in the North American musical tradition perhaps have not done so badly for themselves after all. 260 The Beginning: A Man Named Dorsey Although sacred singing and music forms among Africans and African Americans go back millennia as they do among all peoples, African American gospel music, which has been defined by DoVeanna Fulton as the “sacred music created by African Americans that grow out of Judeo-Christian tenets, the continuity of African aesthetic traditions, and Black experience in America” (2) is a surprisingly young art form. Less than a century old, gospel—originally called “evangelistic songs”—dates back only to the 1920’s. Much like intellectualism itself which springs from a collision of disparate ideas, as discussed in Ross Posnock’s The Color of Culture, gospel was more or less “created” when one “Georgia Tom,” originally a pianist and lyricist for blues queen Ma Rainey, set to blues music a gospel lyric. Many contemporary studies of gospel have grown past settling on Dorsey as the single creator of gospel, acknowledging instead the many contributors to the genre, contemporary with Dorsey, who came out of the thriving black church communities in the U.S. Within the last twenty years, historical work on gospel has set about recovering the importance of such early foundational composers as Charles Albert Tindley, Lucie E. Campbell, William Herbert Brewster, Sr., Roberta Martin, and Kenneth Morris. An example of a text taking the multiple-founders approach to gospel history is We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers, edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon. I find, for my purposes, however, that Dorsey’s creatorship and background are extremely 261 helpful in illuminating certain of the art form’s hybrid characteristics I will be discussing. According to Michael Harris, author of The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church, Thomas Andrew Dorsey, a native Georgian and Great Migrant to Chicago, underwent three different Christian conversion experiences--in 1921, 1928, and 1932. Each time, he pledged to use his musical abilities in Christian service only. The first time, he took on an accompanist job in a church, but still he faltered, going back to blues. After his second conversion in 1928, Dorsey “began to write songs. Not the blues and double-meaning songs that we played for the Saturday night parties, but songs of hope and faith, spiritual songs and hymns” (Harris 126). During this time, he even published his decidedly bluesy gospel tunes in the National Baptist Convention annual songbook, Gospel Pearls. Harris explains, “For all that his God required him to discard or alter fundamentally, Dorsey was able to hold fast to the blues as the stylistic medium for the text of his songs” (126). Seizing this as the “turning point of [his] life,” he promised specifically to compose and arrange only spiritual songs, and was yet again largely unsuccessful in the attempt. He was too skilled, experienced, and popular a bluesman to keep from being railroaded by the “opportunity to earn [the] quick dollar” which blues represented. The fact that his first royalty check alone for one blues song during this period made him a noteworthy $2400 richer (Harris 148) makes plain one reason for Dorsey’s equivocations. The much humbler returns of selling gospel 262 tunes were hardly comparable. He also wanted to be in a position to more comfortably support himself and his beloved wife Nettie. As a result, although he had begun more than once his enterprise of combining the religious and the blues musical traditions, Dorsey found himself much more engaged in blues-making than in gospel-blues making. This would be the case until the death of his wife Nettie in 1932, which brought about his final rededication to spiritual things. African American gospel in its incarnation as Dorsey’s musical merger of blues music and religious sentiment is not to be confused with the gospel singing— black and otherwise--which predates it. Harris writes that the “practice of promoting the gospel through a musical medium was somewhat widespread before Dorsey adopted it” (151). Dorsey himself was upfront about his limited claims on the term. He, however, did point out why his music tended to carry the weight of the category, which hinged on the distinct stylistic innovations he brought to the genre: “…I took the word, took a group of singers, or one singer…and I embellished [gospel], made it beautiful, more noticeable, more susceptible with runs and trills and moans in it” (151). Early in his sacred music career, Dorsey, now the revered composer of beloved gospel classics such as If You See My Savior; Precious Lord, Take My Hand; and There Will Be Peace in the Valley, was hotly despised among traditional members of the black church for mixing the devil’s music with church sentiment. In fact, in the early days, singers who sang his music in the pronounced blues style it required—like Mahalia Jackson--were likely to be put out of traditional, or 263 mainline, churches, which considered the music common and blasphemous. With time, however, the same Dorsey who lay to his credit such risqué blues tunes as It’s Tight Like That, Pat That Bread, You Got That Stuff, Where Did You Stay Last Night?, It’s All Worn Out, and Somebody’s Been Using That Thing (Harris 149), would become universally venerated as the “father of gospel music,” and his creation would become the dominant musical form of the black church. The Golden Age By the mid-1940’s, the art form had crested to the start of its Golden Age. It is no accident that the beginning of the Golden Age coincides with the second wave of the Great Migration, as large numbers of blacks left the South to settle in the nation’s big cities. Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles—all became gospel meccas as black church transplants from the South poured in, searching for better opportunities in the North. The music they created there, though “citified,” was shot through with rhythms, lyrics, and concerns that ministered to them as members of a growing Southern diaspora battling poverty and various oppressions. Gospel is therefore the product of the big city, with small- town, Southern roots. As is the case with many artistic and cultural eras, scholars and fans debate the moment of the Golden Age’s ending. Some argue that it had definitely ended by 1960; others feel sure that it continued well into the sixties. An age divide between the judges appears to be the primary reason behind the differences of opinion. Those gospel fans old enough to have witnessed the early period of the Golden Age 264 firsthand intuited a shift or a definite waning in the field toward the end of the 1950’s, which for them signified the passing of an era. One Youtube poster by the name of “Vancoscellos” wrote in response to an obviously much younger poster, [B]aby, [I] hate to disagree with you, but by the early 60s, whatever magic that had [been in the music] was long gone[.] [N]ow, they continued to sing, but those of us who witnessed first hand, we knew that the 50s was the best for gospel singing. [N]ever to be seen again. (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PBB6US3wbck&feature=rel ate) Another first-hander on a different website holds the same opinion, writing, [Y]es the 60s gave us some memorable moments in gospel[;] this I admit but…let no one fool you[:] the golden age of gospel came to a close in 1960. [W]hile good material continued to [be] recorded, it just appeared that the vision and feel was different. (http://www.gospelszene.de/gospel/Davis%20Sisters) Horace Clarence Boyer, classic gospel singer, music scholar, and author of How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel, agrees for the most part with these posters. His assessment is in fact even stricter than theirs; he limits the era to a tight ten-year span of 1945 to 1955. Quite revealingly, he presents the successive period, from 1955 to 1965, under the heading, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down.” On the other hand, those gospel fans who were born too late to have been firsthand witnesses, and who are grievously unimpressed by most contemporary gospel music, which is so often “embarrassingly banal, lyrically maladroit, and theologically suspect” (Heilbut 348), tend to see the Golden Age as a lengthy three- 265 decade span. The late fifties death toll which older gospel scholars and fans clearly hear remains largely inaudible to the Johnny-Come-Latelies. For these gospel fans, the gospel music of the 1960’s is just as enthralling as any which was produced in the two decades before. On Youtube, postings from the sixties are routinely labeled, no doubt by young fans, “Gospel from the Golden Age.” Given the quality of artists who were still making, recording, and traveling to perform gospel music even well into the sixties, I stand with those who feel that the Golden Age lasted well into a third decade. This choice betrays me as one who was born well after the Golden Age, no matter its actual ending point. However, in listening to my own respectable collection of classic gospel music and from watching a goodly share of classic gospel footage, I sense in performances from the 1960’s a certain “seasoning” in those who had been on the road in the previous decades, not a decline. I am aware that for gospel, live performances trump recordings every time; this necessarily puts me and others born too late to have actually attended the Golden Age concerts at a profound disadvantage, with an unconquerable blind spot in judging. I am also aware that certain changes in the personnel of many groups in the late fifties did alter the sound which gospel fans were used to hearing. During this time, many gospel singers struck out on their own away from their groups in pursuit of solo success, crossed over to secular music, or retired from singing altogether. For those who stayed in gospel, and particularly for those who stayed with their groups, I see the 1960’s as a time in which they were able to showcase the 266 way in which their years in the business had allowed them to smooth, perfect, and elevate their craft. Young artists coming aboard during this third and last decade of gospel’s Golden Age were stepping into deep waters indeed. I would therefore place the close of the Golden Era in the mid-to-late sixties, its life span closely paralleling that of the Civil Rights Movement. Over the decades of the Golden Age, the gospel music arena would be populated by its best groups, soloists, musicians, and composers. There were the all-male quartets such as the Soul Stirrers, whom many credit with the essential sound of modern black music, a sound that would cross over as “soul,” with heavy emphasis on polyrhythm, close harmony, and highly emotive vocal and instrumental expressiveness. Tellingly, out of this group would emerge two highly celebrated soul singers, Sam Cooke, who first found fame as the “greatest sex symbol in gospel history” (Heilbut 76), and his temporary replacement in the Soul Stirrers, bluesman Johnny Taylor. Other top male gospel quartets were the Fairfield Four, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Pilgrim Travelers, the Sensational Nightingales, the Highway QCs, and many others still. There were the quartets’ female counterparts, the all-female groups like Clara Ward and the Ward Singers, the Caravans, the Argo Singers, Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel Harmonettes, the Davis Sisters, the Gospel Challengers, and the Meditation Singers, and the mixed-sex groups like the Roberta Martin Singers, the Robert Anderson Singers, the Raymond Raspberry Singers, and the Alex Bradford Specials. 267 There were soloists like Mother Willie Mae Ford, the Georgia Peach, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Brother Joe May, Sister Wynona Carr, Edna Gallmon Cooke, Mahalia Jackson, Bessie Griffin, Marion Williams, and Reverend Cleophus Robinson, as well as family acts like the Staples Singers, the Loving Sisters, the Barrett Sisters, and the Drinkard Singers, where Emily Drinkard, later known to the world as Cissy Houston, Whitney’s mother, sang with her siblings. There were also those who hopped from group to group in the early days, doing a bit of everything— composing, singing, playing, arranging—like James Cleveland, who eventually became “the most important figure in modern gospel” (Heilbut 206). By no means an exhaustive list, the names above simply bestow upon one proper license to suggest that the talent on the road and in the recording studios during this period was more than abundant; it was purely staggering. Furthermore, many of these performers, aside from making covers of old Negro spirituals, traditional Christian hymns, and pop songs of the day, composed their own original material as a matter of fact. In those days, however, few black songwriters in any field received recognition and pay commensurate with their work; this is most definitely the case in gospel. Gospel was, after all, like the blues, primarily a poor folks’ genre. Because what little pay there was was attached to performance, emphasis in gospel has typically been on performance, with little attention going to composers. This notwithstanding, in the gospel field alone, there is a vastly rich legacy of African American musical composition to which women 268 contributed just as much as men, a fact which only augments the accomplishments of the Golden Age artists. Moreover, this traveling cadre of artists, in its travels from church-to-church and from community-to-community, was greatly responsible for the consolidation of black church culture. This activity on the part of gospel singers may have very well acted as a unifying element in the days of Civil Rights, when the black church was often ground zero in the fight for black legal and social equality. One thing black people could be assured of in those days was fairly widespread idiomatic cohesion: nearly everyone spoke “gospel” and nearly everyone spoke “church”— even the non-churchgoers. Traveling gospel artists were probably largely responsible for the establishment of what I will call a religious-based “semglossia”—“same tongue” or “common language”—among blacks of the era. The Gospel Highway African American secular artists during this time period are known for their association with the “chitlin circuit,” a soul food-associated reference to the network of people, venues, and opportunities which allowed black performers to ply their trades for exposure and revenue. For artists working on the sacred side, it was not the “chitlin circuit” on which they labored, but rather the “gospel highway.” On the gospel highway, singers and musicians criss-crossed the country most often by car to make engagements in the nation’s churches, tent revivals, performance halls, television and radio stations, music festivals, and sometimes, to the abject horror of many in the black church, even nightclubs. With more than its fair share of “small 269 crowds, swindling promoters, and broken contracts” (Heilbut 13), transportation costs (41), and major car trouble, which included the hazards of riding around on “‘maypop’ tires [as in] may pop any moment” (135), life on the road for gospel artists was notoriously perilous. Heilbut writes that “year after year, the gospel highway seems both the toughest and most dangerous route in show business” (256). In a cuttingly insightful chapter on the highly precarious position of performers on the gospel highway called “You May Never Go to Prison,” Heilbut names the converging factors which customarily left performers on the gospel highway “broke, sick, and disillusioned.” They included dismally low pay--“gospel pays like unskilled labor” (257)—and “cheap soul food…clotted with grease,” and “soft drinks, sodas and lemonades…sweet unto syrup,” which contributed to a predominance among singers of heart ailments, liver and kidney trouble, diabetes, and high blood pressure (260). Unsurprisingly, untended illnesses caused many deaths, such as that of a Davis Sister yet in the bloom of her youth, and one Ward Singer (256), both of untreated pneumonia. These menances were further compounded by the seemingly inescapable violence of the nation’s inner-cities, by which the lives of more than a few gospel stars—Sam Cooke among them—were ended prematurely (262), and the ever-present danger of automobile accidents. An apt parallel for U.S. life, the road for black sacred singers was treacherous, tending for most to promise much more than it ever paid out. 270 Working-Class Women at Work: Risky Business Heilbut opines that the “greatest individual artists produced by gospel [have been], with a few exceptions, women” (xxv). Many of the women to whom he and gospel fans the world over attach this praise ascended to the height of their careers during the decades of gospel’s Golden Age. Their accomplishments and lasting influences are nothing less than remarkable given the fact that they went forth in a time when the majority of black women lived lives tightly circumscribed not only by race in a racist society, but also by gender roles in a sexist one. Class also most definitely has its place in the story of the gospel women. Elsewhere in this project, I discuss the forties and fifties as a time when black women saw unprecedented growth in the white collar labor market as well as extraordinary college admission rates, as reported by historian Paula Giddings. This in part explains the gains of the educated women of the black literati class during this time period. One, however, should not be so enthusiastic or naïve about these advancements by black women as to believe that they applied evenly across all segments of the black population. The truth is that most black women, and certainly most gospel singers, were solidly poor and working class, descending from a long line of solidly poor and working class North Americans. Giddings, in fact, makes clear that most black women of the period were laboring in the blue collar work force, and not walking around tree-lined campuses wearing sorority sweaters: 271 By 1940 one Black woman in three over the age of fourteen was in the work force, compared to one in five for Whites. Sixty percent of the former were in service and domestic occupations, with another large percent in agriculture. (232) These were people for whom the realities of life demanded constant labor from their childhood years up, rarely accommodating the luxury of consistent formal education on any level, let alone college. The “greatest gospel singers were Depression children” who, as they often expressed it, “never had nothing but a hard way to go” (Heilbut 255). However, rather than continue toiling as maids, nannies, washerwomen, and field workers— “all the standard Negro jobs,” as singer Dorothy Love Coates called them (161)--the women of the gospel’s Golden Age decided to take a chance on the gospel highway, which was a risky proposition rife with the potential not only to bring them fame and monetary gain, but also to inflict upon them great financial, psychological, and physical harm. Singer Bessie Griffin liked to tell the story of the night on which she and the group with whom she was singing at the time, the Southern Harps, were stopped on the road by a “cracker sheriff”: We were driving in Mississippi on these maypop tires….It was real late and our car was stopped by this cracker sheriff. He ask the boy who’s driving, “Where you taking these girls?” He told him we were gospel singers. So the cracker says, “Oh good, I just loves to hear niggers sing. Wake ‘em up, girl.” So I tell them, “Wake up, Alberta, wake up, Helen, wake up, Lucille, this man wants to hear us sing.” “Oh, shoot,” says Lucille, “go back to sleep.” “You better wake up, he’s got a gun. (Heilbut 135, 136) 272 It is a humorous story which ends well, with the Harps snapping out of slumber to perform an impromptu “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” for the white officer. But just beneath the surface of this narrative lurk the various vulnerabilites of these performers: the implicit threat of legally-sanctioned racially-motivated violence, and the extreme power differential which existed at the time between whites and blacks—evident in the fact that not only could a perfect, white stranger demand sleeping black singers be woken to sing for his own good pleasure, but also that he could expect to be obeyed without resistance. Over fifty years after Odessa Edwards related the Harmonettes’ near-death experience to the Shrine Auditorium crowd, another powerful gospel narrative would sum up retrospectively in broad terms the dangers of the gospel highway. The 2006 reunion concert and live recording of the legendary all-female gospel group, the Caravans, brought together most of the group’s surviving members. (Shirley Caesar, still a highly popular recording artist, and a pastor in Raleigh, North Carolina, did not participate in this recording.) Now ranging in age from their late sixties to late seventies, these women were young performers on the “gospel highway” back when gospel was in its heyday. Most of the members, which include group founder Albertina Walker, Inez Andrews, Shirley Caesar, Dorothy Norwood, and Cassietta George (now deceased), have enjoyed solid, and some would say stellar, careers as solo artists since the days when they were a much-coveted group act. All have been seated among venerated elders of the field. Befitting their longevity as artists of an art form whose history 273 traverses the most menacing race, class, and gender minefields in Civil Rights-era America, they begin their reunion recording with a disclosure of a particular quality of life faced by gospel performers on the road. Over a saucy, yet dignified blues vamp of the type black Baptists traditionally favor, singer Dorothy Norwood asserts her voice in the trademark narrative style for which she has become known. She begins with an authoritative declaration: “As we stand here today, we don’t look like what we been through.” A purposefully provocative statement, it begs the question she is all too able to answer. To eloquent dramatic effect, Norwood frames the story again: “This is the Caravans’ story.” Taking her time over the patient but determined instrumental vamp, she begins in earnest: Over five decades ago, we traveled through the South, through segregation, through Jim Crow, through Ku Klux Klan country…Paving the way. We slept in colored hotels and rooming houses, but look at us today. He brought us out the colored hotels, and we can go in the five-star Mariotts and Hiltons. We used to go around to the back door to get a sandwich in a restaurant, but now we can lay up in the hotel and play [like] millionaire[s] and order room service…Paved the way. Six of us traveled in one car for fifteen hours to get to New York City--listen at me now: Now, we can step up on a jet plane and get there in a hour and a half…Paved the way. Uh-huh, uh-huh…Sometime while we was singing, the promoter would run out the back door with the money, but let me tell you where we’ve come from now. Now, we can demand our money before we sing ‘cause we paved the way…. (Track 1) 274 As much as this narrative celebrates the group members’ efficacy as stalwart trailblazers who “paved the way” for the success, recognition, and respect which they and contemporary gospel acts now enjoy, it also revives in a visceral way the racial, political, and economic realities and dangers met with by gospel highway performers. The myriad threats and humiliations of racial apartheid, the well-known larceny of crooked concert promoters, personal health crises, dogging poverty, and the unavoidable prospect of death, among still other trials, help explain “why lyrics that to [those unfamiliar with the gospel idiom] seem abstract and corny are [for the gospel performers and their audiences] charged with a specific, resonant meaning.” Heilbut writes, “If the gospel world is dreadful, it merely reflects the inescapable conditions of black life. At home or traveling, the poor gospel singer is always in or near some kind of danger” (262). This view of the gospel highway as a road fraught with danger and disappointment makes that final “private statement” from Clara Ward to Mahalia Jackson seem all the more understandable. This view also opens up for consideration a new understanding of the underlying grit and toughness which had to be a part of the traveling gospel singer’s mindset in order to survive the ravages of the road for any length of time. Bessie Griffin remembered the moment when Mahalia Jackson offered her both praise and a warning: “She told me, You’re a great singer, but you’re never going to get anywhere because you’re too easy and you’re too soft” (Heilbut 136). As one of the shrewdest business women in gospel and one of the richest, Jackson obviously knew 275 what she was talking about. She was not above faking a shout to get off stage to make sure that her purse was safe (66, 67), and her agility with figures was well- known. In her old New Orleans diction, she told a crowd once, “I’m a mathematics. I can look out and tell just how many of you are here” (60). Of course she could; payday was dependent upon such numbers, and she had the skill and the fortitude to ensure satisfactory compensation for her work. As it turns out, Jackson was both a queen and a prophet: Bessie Griffin, one of the best gospel singers of the Golden Age, never did come close to Jackson’s fame, and most assuredly, never anywhere near her fortune. Traveling Black Church Culture as Bohemianism “Bohemian,” as a descriptive, has the power to speak doubly at once of one as both “traveler” or “wanderer,” and as “nonconformist.” It is my argument that the women who helped to forge the establishment of both the gospel sound and its performance aesthetic on the gospel highway were part of a largely unacknowledged and therefore unstudied culture of black church bohemianism. This argument initially appears troubled by the fact that “bohemian” is a term that is deeply wedded to various white artistic and political movements and sensibilities on the European and North American continents. The romantic and modernist literary, musical, and artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the artist communes and co-op communities of 1960’s antiestablishmentarians, and the environmentalist movements of the 1990’s and the 276 present day all immediately spring to mind in connection with the bohemian, and all are overwhelmingly white movements and ideologies. However, few words and the concepts they connote can belong exclusively to any one group, as words and their suggested meanings are generally larger than any single context to which they are applied. For this reason, several seemingly very different groups can claim space under the same term and be sufficiently covered by its heading. Using descriptives in various, and perhaps even contradictory, ways purchases for us an ever deepening sense of the degree to which we live as “‘mixed-up sel[ves] in a mixed-up world’ where ancestral”—or ideological—“imperatives do not exert a preordained authority” (Posnock 3). Fortunately, the work of broadening the application of the term “bohemian” is greatly facilitated by the history of the word itself, which shows the word’s meaning to have been distinctively open-ended from the first. Laren Stover, author of Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, marks the entry of the word “bohemian” into the language in 1849 when French playwright Henry Murger used it in his play La Vie de Bohème. Stover writes that Murger used it as a label for the “eccentric and socially unorthodox. Poets, painters, absinthe drinkers, dandies on the fringe—any oddball qualified” (13). Stover herself also defines it quite loosely; for her, bohemianism is “living beyond convention…an atmosphere, a way of living, a state of mind” (12). Virginia Nicholson, as well, points up the broad membership which has historically belonged to the category of bohemianism. In Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939, she writes: 277 A closer look reveals that the natives of Bohemia are not just painters and poets, but must also include vegetarian nature- lovers living in caravans, poseurs in velvet jackets drinking absinthe in Café Royal, earnest lesbians in men’s suits and monocles, kohl-eyed beauties in chiffon and emeralds. If there is a definition of Bohemia it has, somehow, to accommodate all these, for all have travelled in their own minds to that notional country; each has made some corner of it their own. (xvi) The wide-ranging “outsider” membership of bohemianism no doubt led Albert Parry to surmise in his Garretts & Pretenders, which first appeared in 1933, that the “desire to escape from the painful reality of an uncertain social position has been, in all lands and times, one of the chief reasons for Bohemianism” (5). This suspicion is deepened by Stover, who writes, “There’s just something about the freedom, recklessness, scandal, artistic vision and spiritual splendor that makes it tantalizingly worthy of membership” (13). People of “uncertain social position” have perhaps been drawn to bohemianism as a lifestyle because within it, their apositionality becomes a defined position, and wandering itself becomes a site from which a feeling of stability may be produced. The black working-class artists—of painful dubious social position to be sure--who criss-crossed the nation on the gospel highway were plainly bohemian, comprising a collective of wayfaring nonconformists. Among them were women who had postponed or altogether foregone marriage and childbearing to more easily accommodate the brutal work and travel schedules which allowed them to support themselves and often the parents and siblings they had left back home; women who were married to, or in relationships with, their male counterparts on the gospel 278 highway, and those who regularly left husbands at home to travel; women who were divorced; women who were parents—single or otherwise; women who were openly, secretly, or situationally lesbian; gay men; single and married heterosexual men in various involvements with the opposite sex; and those in this number who regularly smoked, drank, gambled, partied, and used profanity. In some way or another, the overwhelming number of gospel highway performers failed to conform to the conventions of their time, even the ones they regularly espoused, or at the very least represented in their singing, preaching, and performing. In How Sweet the Sound, Horace Boyer documents the inherently earthy element present in Golden Age gospel by sharing the early forties “Bylaws of the Fairfield Four.” The Fairfielders were a male quartet on the rise in the Golden Age. Their utilization of the bylaws helped them oversee matters of unseemly behavior and public consumption. Some of their policies were as follows: 2. All discussions be made in meeting and not in public. Anyone caught arguing with anyone in public--$2.00. 4. For members caught drinking within 8 hours of program— be fined $5.00. 5. When in church any time during program no member should look at others, argue on stage or appear to look angry. Stage etiquette—no unnecessary talk, sitting out of order—if any clause be disobeyed—fined $1.50. 6. Any member caught with alcohol on breath while on duty—be fined $5.00. 9. Any member accepting drinks from any strangers—be fined $5.00. 10. Any member that doesn’t respect members of group or any outside person—saints or sinners—be fined $5.00. 15. Each member fined $2.50 for the word G.D. and $1.00 for each offense. 16. Any member that argues when fine is presented to be fined double. (148, 149) 279 Though contemporary readers may see humor in these bylaws, these rules were not written for tongue-in-cheek purposes. Rather, they reveal how resolute Golden Age singers were about conducting themselves as professionally and properly as possible for public consumption. In so doing, they also highlight the ways in which individuals were known to falter by drinking, fighting, using profanity, and rebelling against established group norms. Transgression itself is written upon the laws. In her account of those days, Willa Ward is perhaps one of the most willing to be publicly forthright about the offstage behavior of some gospel performers. In her memoir, she vividly recreates the behind-the-scenes revelries of gospel artists which she and sister Clara Ward witnessed firsthand: Clara and I were invited to several parties after the first night’s program. We didn’t know till later why Mom was not asked….The first party we hit was in the same hotel where we were staying. Two adjoining rooms on the next floor up…were stocked for either a huge mob or a long- and hard- partying few. We helped ourselves to some delicious food and sat down on the bed to enjoy it, but soon after the odor of burning marijuana took our appetites away. We got out of there in a hurry. A few days later, two gay fellows took us to a party at the home of one of the others in their singing group. Boy, that was a revelation! Three of the preachers who had inspired the people to holy dancing and shouting were now doing their own inspired thing—with other men. As dark as it was, you couldn’t miss the activity going on in the two bedrooms, the doors left open for easy access or turn-on. Downstairs, folks were eating, dancing, drinking, telling jokes, enjoying themselves. But of about thirty people there were only seven women, and the other five were obviously lesbians. We had met plenty of gays and usually had great fun in their company…but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Clara and I had been invited to such a party. (68) 280 By identifying the traveling gospel culture of the middle twentieth century as a bohemian one and by privileging the women of this bohemian black church culture, I hope to achieve the goal of helping increase scholarly awareness of and response to these performers as a community of religious musical artists, people who were highly conscious of their gifts and used them to multiple purposes, and were not stock by-products of the black church in North America. Secondly, by critically discussing the traveling black church culture and closely examining its nonconventional aspects, as well as its sensual and sometimes sexual content, I hope to join others who have sought to balance the general perception and understanding of the black church. Distracted and often intimidated by the stern, restrictive “thou shalt not” rhetoric that is often the vehicle of black church expression, scholars and others have historically tended to pit an asexual, pristine black church and its culture against black secular spaces and art forms. These secular spaces and art forms are regularly credited as “the site[s] for alternative narratives or counternarratives to the liberal bourgeois narratives of the black church” (Neal 15). This view, however, simply reduces black culture to an uncomplicated, uninspired, and ultimately false binary of spiritual and sensual. Composer Adrian York has written, “The tension between the sacred and the secular is a defining characteristic of African American society but once we move away from the machinations of church politics and examine the process of cultural exchange,” what is most often found is a relationship between the two that is marked by “symbiosis and not…conflict” (134). 281 Furthermore, in its overemphasis on the black church’s associations with middle class uplift ideologies, the traditional scholarly approach to the black sacred and secular empties the black church of its earthier elements. Doveanna Fulton’s view of the middle ground on which the gospel women stood, suspended between the blues women with their open celebrations of carnal indulgence and excess, and the relatively repressed women of the Talented Tenth, is closest to my own. She writes that gospel’s working class women “neither wholly identified with the values of middle-class Black women of the Talented Tenth whose restrained religious practices were too confining, or the mores of Blues women whose practices of drinking, smoking and sexual freedom were too “worldly” (3-4). I am for my part, however, perhaps more interested than Fulton in the degree to which even these rather clear divisions among these three segments of the black female population become difficult to make. While it may be true that the black church has offered counternarratives to those dominating the rural jook and the urban nightclub on the one hand and the stuffy religious services of the Talented Tenth crowd on the other, it is just as important to take note of the ways in which the black church has ably produced and supplied ways of thinking and being that run counter to its own most cherished narratives. The Gospel Aesthetic One major way in which the black church has accomplished the counternarrativizing of its own narratives is through the very aesthetic of twentieth century gospel music itself, which, paradoxical as it may seem to some, is 282 fundamentally and deeply rooted in the sexy. Remembering the blues foundations of the gospel genre immediately throws the issue into proper perspective. Buoyed by the music itself, no doubt, which in earlier days was identifiably blues-based, many gospel singers caught the eye as well as the ear of their audiences. Heilbut writes that one of the greatest distinctions of gospel is the “obvious, if not overwhelming, sexual presence of its performers” (73). Because of this, gospel offers perhaps the richest musical lens through which to explore the conversation between the spiritual and the sensual essential to black women’s intellectualism. There is within it an organic tension between the two that must be constantly gotten around, suspended, temporarily jettisoned, and yet exploited all the while to its full advantage. The Heilbut text is particularly adept at capturing the highly sensual, very sexual essence of twentieth century gospel. It presents a clear picture of the extent to which male gospel singers had their effects upon the women in their audiences. In a chapter on the influence of the male quartet the Soul Stirrers entitled “The Women Had Fits,” Heilbut talks about the night in 1947 that lead R.H. Harris sang with such power that “a woman suffered a laughing seizure,” and how a young Sam Cooke, a gospel “bobby sox idol” in the early days of his tenure with the Stirrers, inspired young women to form a line around 125 th Street in Harlem just for chance to lay eyes on the young star (75, 76). Later in the book, he speaks practically about the “special friends in every town” quartet singers counted on not only to ease the loneliness of the road, but also to relieve the financial strain in which underpaid singers constantly found themselves (261). 283 However, the women of gospel were not without their own effects. He quotes Kennedy Center Award recipient and one-time Ward Singer Marion Williams as saying, “The folks always said I sing sexy” (222), and he attributes to the highly influential Mother Willie Mae Ford, “I’ve always sung with my whole body” (328). In a description that flies in the face of the image of the choir robe- clad mammy-like figure that she became in crossover performances for white American audiences, Heilbut quotes a gospel fan as calling Mahalia Jackson gospel’s “original belly dancer” (58). Clara Ward allegedly expressed envy of Jackson’s full-figured agility, writing, “I wish I could roll my skinny belly the way she does” (Ward 192). Elsewhere in Heilbut text, someone sums up Jackson as “always the sexiest thing out there” (62). Heilbut describes the voice of singer Imogene Greene as a “sensuous, husky contralto, the sexiest in gospel” and describes Inez Andrews, then of the Caravans, as a “coffee-colored woman with high Indian cheekbones and an intense, almost drugged stare” (207, 239). Richer still for pointing up the dialogue between the spiritual and the sensual is this comment made by a male admirer to ex-Caravans singer Shirley Caesar: “Girl, if you work in the bed like you move on the floor, you’d be something else” (242). The fact that women were on the forefront of such a sexy, spiritual art form suggests something about the intellectual stance that black women were taking in the composition, singing, and playing of such music—principally that sense and spirit are essentially indivisible from one another, existing only in interconnection. Of course, it is a stance always under attack from myriad quarters—some within 284 gospel itself—and even quite a subversive one given the hypersensitivities circulating around black womanhood and public consumption in Civil Rights era North America. It is not likely that many of the gospel women of the Golden Age would have expressed their stance in just this way. Nor am I saying that they consciously set out to fight for the intellectualism of black women as based on a conversation between the sensual and the spiritual. I am arguing, however, that such was the result of the part of their actions which were conscious. By consciously resisting the “standard Negro jobs,” by quietly or not so quietly rejecting gender conventions of their time, by being creative in their approach to earning a living, and by enlivening and energizing the call-and-response that is endemic in black and gospel culture, they also troubled, shaped, and contributed to black women’s intellectualism in profoundly important and deeply meaningful ways. Three Women of Gospel While poor, and from history’s standpoint unknown, black women cried, jumped, and danced crucial parts of the conversation between the sensual and the spiritual in the shout, and while educated, middle-class black women wrote and published other parts of the conversation in social cautionist fiction, Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates and their gospel peers were on the road, in the studio, and on stage composing and singing still other portions in gospel music. 285 No monolithic grouping, these three women were quite different from one another. Davis, for example, was the only U.S. veteran. Coates was the only Southerner, married woman and mother, and public Civil Rights activist. Ward was by far the richest and the most famous of the three with a large white fan base. She was also the only one among them to routinely perform in nightclubs, and to spend the entire arc of her career traveling with her mother. They also had much in common. They all fronted extremely successful, highly venerated gospel groups, and were each distinguished by unmistakably unique singing voices. All of them composed and arranged songs, and all of them played the piano—although Davis and Coates never did on stage. Finally, although I attach notions like innovation, sacrifice, and a spirit of overcoming to the women individually, in truth, such characterizations marked them all. Each was formidable in her own way and created a proud legacy of survival and artistry which can be claimed by several cultural and discursive communities. A. Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis, The Innovator: “You Don’t Know Like I Know” The very first thing any listener must do when initially confronted by the voice of Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis is begin coming to terms with its sheer size and power. Marked by such vocal techniques as squalls, growls, and prolonged notes off of which she liked to fall in beautiful melismas, this voice utterly enthralled listeners and congregations. Although she was perfectly capable of singing sweetly with great restraint and skill in an altogether pleasing alto voice, as she does on the 286 beginning of “(Jesus) He’s My Precious King,” and on “Jesus Gave Me Water,” Ruth Davis rarely built up to a climax. Instead, she usually started off in full command of the song, singing hard in her unreservedly big blues style. One wonders if she perhaps felt that she was not really singing until she was going full throttle. With an instrument of such immensity, it would not be difficult to understand why. With the possible exception of the late Liz Dargan of the Gospel Challengers, who can easily be mistaken for Davis on some late sixties recordings, no one on the national gospel scene has come close to the huge, bluesy magnificence of Ruth “Baby Sis” Davis. The only U.S. veteran discussed in this entire project, Ruth Davis founded the Davis Sisters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, following her early discharge from the Women’s Air Corp., or WACs, in 1945, just before Germany’s defeat and FDR’s death. Young—by some accounts just seventeen years old--unmarried, black, and newly unemployed, Davis was an adventurous girl obviously unsuited for the “standard Negro jobs.” She found herself at loose ends until a mystical experience gave her a renewed sense of purpose. A slip on a rain-wet trolley track in front of an approaching trolley car wound up being her deliverance. Lifted to safety just in time and carried to the shelter provided by a store awning, Ruth Davis turned to thank the Good Samaritan who had saved her life and found no one there. She interpreted this event as an intervention of supernatural origins, and began to see her early discharge from the army as a blessing. It was part of a powerful prompt to parlay the musical 287 talent she and her sisters possessed into a functioning ministry and a new career (The Davis Sisters, “Origin”). Excited, Davis went home and immediately marshaled her sisters, Thelma, Audrey, and Alfreda, into a singing group, despite the fact that Alfreda, the real baby sister of the group, was just ten years old. Other singers would join the group throughout its forty-year history, such as Imogene Greene of the legendarily smoky, seductive gospel vocals, who stayed with them until 1955, and Greene’s replacement, Jackie Verdell, who possessed a clear, sassy second soprano, which perfectly counterbalanced Davis’ immense alto. The group’s main accompanist for many years was Curtis Dublin, who joined the group when he was nineteen. Dublin was a pianist whose upbeat, jazz- and ragtime-influenced style inspired countless gospel musicians (“History”). Boyer records Dublin as a cousin of the Davises (115). By 1947, the group had signed their first recording contract with the Apex Label. Over the years, they would make records on the Gotham, Savoy, and RCA labels, as well. Some of their hits include “In the Morning When I Rise,” “Jesus Steps Right In,” “Shine On Me,” “Twelve Gates To the City,” and “On the Right Road.” Throughout their career, the group received tutelage and business advice from Mother Gertrude Ward, classic stage mother and founder and manager of the Ward Singers. Whenever Mother Ward found a new label on which to record the Wards, she usually brokered a deal for the Davises, as well (“Recording Career”). 288 By all accounts, while the recordings of The Davis Sisters--later the “Famous” Davis Sisters--are wonderful, their real power was witnessed in live performances. They became known for wrecking houses and “tearing up” programs. From their earliest days, they cultivated a habit of arriving late, doubtlessly giving their audiences time to settle in and swell with anticipation (“History”). In these days, they usually donned simple choir robes, as did most female gospel singers. It was a wardrobe choice that was intended to project modesty, a means of keeping the attention on Jesus, and away from the distractions of female form. It was also a practical choice—a simple, cost-efficient means of coordinating outfits, regardless of the size and shape of the singers. Thusly garbed, Davis and the group would show up to their packed houses, ready to slay. The sudden appearance of Alfreda Davis, who always led the group’s procession onstage, signaled to audience that the Davis Sisters were in residence, and that the program would begin in earnest (“History”). The House That Ruth Built Ruth Davis is generally revered as the creative genius behind the Davis Sisters. Although the group would face stormy times along its life as a top gospel act--one of which was a 1962 quarrel among the sisters so unpleasant that it would prompt Davis to relocate to New York for a time and start another group altogether, the Ruth Davis Specials--her first love was always the Davis Sisters (“Members” Bullet 1). 289 She brought her adventurous, risk-taking attitude to musical arrangements, and was not afraid to bring clearly secular touches into the Davis Sisters’ gospel music. Even today, listeners smile at her cover of the 1961 pop song “Tossin’ and Turnin,” which she turned into “Earnestly Praying” (“Members” Bullet 1). Another song, “Bye and Bye,” is a slow, lyrically and musically sensual reflection on the ephemerality of life. The original recording of the song features Imogene Greene on lead. A later remake features Thelma Davis at her bluesy best. On this version of the song, Davis can be heard not only humming powerfully in the background as Thelma sings, but also bringing in a line from her favorite jazz and blues hero Dinah Washington. Waiting until after Thelma hits the line “And what a day,” Davis enters each time with, “Oh, what a day,” sung note-for-note as Washington sings it in her famous hit, “What a Difference A Day Makes” (The Best of the Davis Sisters of Philadelphia, PA, Track 16). It is a daring and clever homage that makes no bones about its derivation. In so doing, it deepens the listening experience for fans of both genres, sanctifying the secular and popularizing the sanctified. Al Green would reverse the traffic of influence when he incorporated a Ruth Davis verse in his song “I’m Glad You’re Mine.” Her arrangement of the group’s background vocals often kept abreast with developments in the secular music world. Her up-to-the-moment experimentation with musical sounds and arrangements prompted Ray Charles to model his backup singers, the Raelettes, partially on the Davis Sisters’ sound (“History” Paragraph 3). Whether called upon to provide the tight doo-wop of the street corners, as on 290 “Sinner Man Where You Gonna Run To,” or the congregational singing found in the nation’s black churches, as on the immensely churchy and bluesy “Blessed Quietness,” the Davis Sisters hit a hundred every time. The result is classic, “flat- footed” gospel with strong, full-voiced harmonies still in demand today. The Davis Sisters were known for singing “hard”; their performances required all they had to give and then some. Aretha Franklin remembered Jackie Verdell talking about actually urinating a little while on stage, a result of pushing notes out with great force. Davis, however, found a way to further magnify their volume by using the limitations of the old microphones to the group’s advantage. She found that if she positioned the group around one microphone, standing several feet from it, the distortion of the voices would result in a much bigger sound. Audiences were amazed at how four people could sound like an entire choir. While this should not be misinterpreted in any way as an argument that their power came simply from exploiting the microphone, this manipulation of technology further cemented the reputation of the Davis Sisters as some of the premier female singers of “hard gospel,” typically the domain of the hard-driving male quartets, like Ira Tucker and the Dixie Hummingbirds, also greatly admired by Davis (“History”). As a former soldier and a level-headed businesswoman, Davis, it seems, gave everyone a part to play in the success of the group. For instance, in addition to being one of the most prolific of all the members in composing material for the group to sing and heading their procession into performances, youngest sister Alfreda also carried the responsibility of collecting the group’s fee from the 291 promoter before the performance began (“Members” Bullet 2). Groups like the Caravans who tried to take the ladylike course of action of waiting until after the performance in those days were likely to be robbed outright by absconding concert promoters. Onstage Davis was tall, dark-skinned, and broad-shouldered, not quite fat, but of powerful build. In a time when most female gospel singers wore either their own hair pressed straight and curled, or huge wigs fashionably styled, she wore her hair cropped close in a style popularly called a D.A., usually associated with men. Not typically pretty, although handsome in her youth, she possessed an essential magnetic charm that made her attractive as she sang. This was owed partially to her smiling, self-assured charisma onstage that seemed to communicate that she was just going to be herself no matter, and to the undeniable conviction with which she sang. A video clip of the group singing “On the Right Road” circa the mid-60’s illustrates this. The Davis Sisters are not in choir robes here, but in matching dark colored dresses. Alfreda Davis and Jackie Verdell stand on the bottom-most row; Audrey Davis and another group member stand a level above them. Davis stands at the top of the riser, above the four group members, with her hands on the shoulders of Audrey and the other group member. A large choir that will provide additional 292 background vocals throughout the performance has been arranged to stand on either side of the group. As she begins the song, Davis descends the stairs proceeding through the middle of the group, placing her hand on Alfreda’s arm to gently push her aside as she comes through. Taking center stage on the floor, Davis is clearly at home in a performance that is simultaneously fun and earnest. The song conveys the joy of knowing that one is “on the right road,” defined here as obeying the golden rule of treating others “right.” Above all, it expresses relief that one who is on the right road can expect God to keep His promise of making one’s enemies leave one alone, a powerful statement during the racial antagonism of the 1960’s. There are several things which work in tandem to make this performance stellar. One is Davis’ rendering of the ostinato: “I heard Him, I heard Him, I heard Him when He said….” The repetition here is so sonically and rhythmically pleasing as to make the listener crave its iteration. It helps that this line is accompanied by a gesture in which Davis stands still, shrugs her shoulders, and throws her hands up, as if to convey her absolute confidence in what she has heard God say. There are other key gestures in this performance, which include smiles, a syncopated step forward on the word “walk,” a tight fist that jabs the air for emphasis, a baseball pitcher’s-like, one-arm wind up, which always accompanies a scale-ascending ad-lib of “Hey!”, and intermittent powerful handclaps which often punctuate the beat between words, as in the line, “He said He would make my 293 (clap!) enemies leave me alone.” Perhaps most charming here are her frequent looks behind her to the choir and to the group members as she sings. These glances are a reminder that live gospel is always about community; in the television studio, there is probably no audience before her with whom she can connect. She needs someone who knows what she is talking about; she finds that response in the faces of the choir and her group members singing behind her, who are momentarily suspended in the same moment of performance as she. This performance provides evidence of the magnetism and force of Ruth Davis as a performer. She is simply formidable, and the stage is a world all her own. Code for Lesbian? To this day, rumors swirl around the sexual identity of Ruth Davis, who never married and bore no children. There are local rumors here in Los Angeles about how, when in town performing, she never failed to frequent the house of a particular local who was known to be lesbian. In fact, the story goes that this local woman’s heterosexual marriage had ended because her husband came home one day to find her in bed with another woman. The rumors relate that when the Davis Sisters were in town and staying in the home of this local woman, lesbians from across the black Los Angeles gospel community would also gather at the house. If this is the case, the house would have functioned as a sanctuary for black Christian lesbians of the era. It is quite possible that there was such a house in every town, where these women, normally forced to 294 the margins of marginalized society, could come together in unashamed community with one another, taking respite from a hetero-dominant world. Heilbut himself dances around this issue with respect to Davis. On one hand, he points up Davis’ commanding physical presence, her choice of hairstyle, and her unparalleled ability to squall with the best of the men: Ruth was the hardest female belter in gospel, “scared of no man” when it came to squalling. At home she’d enthrall friends with her blues, and all the singers insist she could have been another Dinah Washington or Big Maybelle. She certainly looked the part of a hard blues shouter. When in good health, she loomed like a football halfback, her hair cropped in a fifties d.a. In private, she was retiring, basically innocent and vulnerable, a tomboy who never grew up. (256) On the other hand, he never calls her lesbian. Earlier in his text, however, he has briefly discussed an unnamed singer, who “is at her best when betrayed by her girlfriends, giving her a reason to ‘take it to Jesus’ and to wail with the ferocity of old country women calling on the only man they can trust” (185). There is, of course, no conclusive evidence that the unnamed singer of the earlier chapter is Ruth Davis, and she surely was not the only possible lesbian on the gospel highway. Still, certain synonymous and near-synonymous terms circulate between the two passages which cause making a connection between the two difficult to resist, such as “squall” and “wail,” and “hardest,” and “hard,” and “ferocity.” There is also the description of her as a “tomboy,” which has historically often been code for “lesbian.” Another point which may link the two is the fact that the reference to the 295 unnamed singer is found in a chapter on the Holiness church, and although Ruth Davis’ singing style is identifiably Baptist through and through, she and her sisters did grow up in a Holiness church: Fire-Baptized Holiness Church in the city of Philadelphia. If Ruth Davis is both the “basically innocent and vulnerable” tomboy and the unnamed singer of occasional lesbian misery, Heilbut might have been right to conceal it—first, out of respect for her privacy, and, secondly, as an expression of his sensitivity to the particular prejudice and oppression heaped upon poor, black gays even in the church. As he states it, “To be poor, black and noticeably strange in a community where deviance is both casually accepted and cruelly derided, that’s a bundle of crosses” (184, 185). As though loath to add onto the bundle of crosses black Christian gays must bear, Heilbut acknowledges the prevalence of homosexuality in the black church and on the gospel highway, supplying insightful and authentic studies of black gay church culture, but he is careful not to out anyone directly. Instead, he gently applies what read as code words such as “flamboyant” to certain men like “Professor” Alex Bradford, and perhaps “tomboy,” as in the case of Ruth Davis. Love, Ruth Ultimately, like so many other gospel highway performers, Ruth Davis died tragically far before her time. Preceding in death both gospel queens Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward, Davis died in 1970, the victim of a long painful bout of 296 “high blood pressure, diabetes, liver, and kidney trouble” (256). Alfreda Davis recalled her sister’s last days: Ruth took sick around Christmas…We asked her to go to the hospital but she said, “Let me stay with you and the children for New Year, ‘cause I know when I go to that place, I won’t be coming back.” (256) Like Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward after her, Davis died in the first month of the year. Her death served as a cautionary tale for some about the treachery of the gospel highway. Heilbut includes the sentiments of one singer: “If Baby Sis, strong as she was, couldn’t stand it, I know this life will kill me; I’m staying home” (257). Another clip of the group is obviously from the late sixties, and must be very shortly before Davis’ death. In the space of just a few years from the “On the Right Road” performance, she has aged a great deal. She looks tired and just the slightest bit out of sorts, and stands in one spot during the performance. The song is a jazzed-up version of their early hit “Twelve Gates to the City.” The Sisters still sound good; they clap and sing with verve, and one of them beats the life out of a tambourine. Davis’ voice is still powerful, but it seems as though she cannot muster the strength to use it as she once has. She soldiers through, and the spirited performance is actually quite satisfying, but is a long way from past years, a harbinger, no doubt, of the approaching end. Sadly, she was not the first member of the group to die. Thelma Davis, who was 15 at the group’s start, and became a contributing composer along with Davis 297 and Alfreda, died very early. Conflicting reports circulate as to the exact year of her death. The Wikipedia article, The Davis Sisters, based on information from the “Precious Memories” radio program, gives the year of Thelma’s death as 1955, and her age at the time of death as twenty-six. Horace Boyer, however, writes that she died in 1963, at the age of thirty-three. In any event, she died tragically young, leaving behind three small children, including an infant, and a husband, James Blassingame. According to the online article, she had developed post-partum pneumonia, and overly eager to be a support to the group—and perhaps because of financial need--she left childbed too soon to return to the touring schedule (“Members” Bullet 3). The rigors of traveling, singing as powerfully as the Davis Sisters did, and battling respiratory disease were simply too much for any one body. In 1965, the group had suffered another withering loss with the death by car accident of group accompanist and cousin to the Davises, Curtis Dublin (Boyer 115). Dublin, whom some even now consider the world’s greatest gospel pianist, had been with the Davis Sisters since the beginning and was partially responsible for the group’s success, playing, composing, and at times singing lead, as on “Twelve Gates to the City” and “Rain In Jerusalem.” He was not forty years old at the time of his death. All of the remaining Davis Sisters singers, the actual sisters and the other group members, have since died, albeit after Davis’ death. One singer, Leila, died tragically in a house fire in the 1980’s when she accidentally lit a match near some spilled kerosene (Heilbut 262). Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, the singers 298 continued to go, usually succumbing to health issues. The last death was that of Jackie Verdell, occurring in 2002 as a result of ovarian cancer, according to most sources. The best benediction is the lasting influence of these artists, and the fans who are still cropping up the world over in devotion to Davis and her singers. However, it takes first-handers to make the gospel Golden Age of Ruth Davis and the Davis Sisters come alive once more. Youtube’s “Vanoscellos” relates: I wish the younger children could have seen these very talented sisters as they took to the stage. Ruth was a dear friend of min[e], and she was just a very down to earth girl [;] she just loved sharing her gift of singing with others. [A]t times when we had get-togethers, she would thrill us all with her show-stopping blues!!!!!...[B]aby, it was something to hear! (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jpZMKVf0MHS) B. Clara, Queen of the Hymns The video clips capture raucous, clownish performances that hit upon an unseemliness few secular acts of the period could have hoped to reach. Five hugely bewigged women stand abreast, clapping and singing to upbeat music. The two on either end play tambourines with wild, over-the-top panache. A sixth woman, sporting an ample wig herself, acts as ringleader and chief jester in this appearance on the Flip Wilson Show, circa early 1970’s. These are none other than Clara Ward and her Ward Singers. 299 There is nothing gospel, or spiritual, or even particularly dignified about their appearance. It is the lack of dignity of this nominally gospel performance that is the most disturbing. Gospel is in its essence the convergence of freedom and dignity. Heilbut explains, “The sanctified mothers who strut and shout in the spirit are also models of social decorum” (328). However, in the Wards Singers’ updated rendering of the old minstrel song “Dem Bones,” Ward stands with the rest of the singers and shouts encouragement from the background as the singer who leads the song throws her arms above her head and does a shocking move that is more South Side hoky-poky than Holy Ghost, and soon after, does a dance which much more closely resembles the funky chicken than shouting. In another song, the Singers break out in clearly rehearsed holy dances, all stepping forward to showcase the rapid-fire footwork of their pre-planned shouting free-for-all. Ward has them all beat by a long shot, however. A short, impish figure of highly nasal intonation, displaying a seemingly shameless flair for downright foolishness, she parades around the stage in time to the beat using a Napoleonic march. She often stops to strike commanding poses which approach the comic. At one point, she moves down into the audience, where she sings briefly from an audience member’s lap, looking into the woman’s face for an instant while flashing the professional, toothy grin of a 1970’s used Cadillac dealer. Presenting gospel at its most garish and sold out, the Ward Singers’ television appearance is uncut, naked show business. 300 With Clara Ward, one must be careful not to be fooled by all the folly. Underneath all the commercialized inanity, Clara Ward had genuine talent and an even truer spirituality, which were often seen only at odd intervals throughout her four decades in the limelight. Check for the composer or arranger’s name on many well-beloved gospel classics, and find that her name appears with notable frequency. Listen to the introduction of Ward Singers songs like “Something Got a Hold of Me” or “Getting Nearer To My Home,” and learn that she was a first-class gospel pianist. Play a classic Clara Ward hymn, such as “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” and witness a “hymnody” so “intense” (Heilbut 361) and simple—heartfelt, even--as to make her the undisputed gospel favorite of many, her goddaughter Aretha Franklin among them. Though she seemed quite at home in the land of gospel glitz, in actuality, she was “herself only when singing and moaning the old [g]ospel [p]earls” (106). In later years, she spoke of her one true musical love: “I let the rest of [the Wards Singers] carry on with that boom-de-de-boom-boom mess; you know I’ll live and die a hymn singer” (309). Ward’s readiness to categorize the majority of the material which the group was singing by this time as “mess” suggests that she was always in on the joke no matter how bad it was, never confusing show biz with real gospel. As Heilbut explains it, “She, at least, could always tell a dime-store marble from a gospel pearl” (310). Over the course of her forty-year career, this “hymn singer” from Philadelphia would become a star—perhaps the brightest in twentieth century gospel. She certainly was the wealthiest; while other Golden Age gospel stars were 301 barely getting by, Clara Ward and her mother, Gertrude Ward, were making a mint. To reach such a height, Clara Ward would make all kinds of sacrifices, both professional and deeply personal. I will present Ward’s career in three distinct phases: the early days of 1931-1947; the Wards’ most successful period of 1947- 1958; and the years of decadence and descent, 1958-1973. The Early Days, 1931-1947 Any discussion of Clara Ward and the Ward Singers must begin with “Mother” Gertrude Ward. Gertrude Ward is one of the strongest characters in all of Golden Age gospel. Depending upon the memoirist or scholar, she appears either admirably brazen and tough or oppressively insensitive and abusive, with a personality which may have been perhaps the slightest bit unhinged. Nick Salvatore, author of Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America, writes that Gertrude Ward’s “reputation as a controlling, even devious presence extended well beyond her family” (207). In the Heilbut text, she appears as “phenomenal,” “driven,” “spunky,” and “determined” (105, 106). However, she is remembered by her elder daughter Willa as a master manipulator who relied on guilt trips, superstition, flat-footed daring, and a “caustic” personality to get what she wanted. Willa’s inside, if at times melodramatic, account presents her as dictatorial and given to violence and nervous breakdowns, prone to beating both girls when they were children, and Clara, even in to her adulthood. According to Willa, Gertrude was a domineering force who 302 brooked no opposition, and often attempted to keep the two sisters at odds with each other in order to better maintain control over Clara. Every coin has two sides. What is most probable is that Getrude Ward was indeed an audacious trailblazer worthy of praise who was also deeply troubled in her personal relationships with her children and other intimates. In this prolonged era of celebrity pop-psychoanalysis, the simultaneous appeal and difficulties of her personality allow her to fit in, in an almost cliché fashion, with the Bing Crosbys, the Joan Crawfords, the Joe Jacksons, and so many other parents in the entertainment industry. Gertrude Ward was born into a large, poor family in South Carolina, but moved during the twenties to Philadelphia with her husband, George who, by some accounts, was “the stabilizing force” for the family in all of Gertrude’s chaos and drama (Ward 219). Though the family was extremely poor, the couple had two daughters, Willarene, most often called Willa, and Clara. (Prior to Willa’s birth, Gertrude had suffered a miscarriage; prior to Clara’s birth, an infant boy named George, had died of pneumonia [Ward 10, 11].) Desperately in need of work, Gertrude often carried her small girls with her as she looked for day jobs cleaning houses for white families. During these years, the family was often so destitute that cardboard had to be stuffed into the soles of their worn shoes, as Gertrude later enjoyed sharing in dramatic testimonies (Heilbut 106). In 1931, she had a “vision” which urged her to “go and sing.” Boyer shares the dramatic testimony Gertrude used to include in the Ward Singers’ concert programs: 303 The year was 1931 when standing before a steaming tub at work, I heard the Master’s voice say, “Gertrude, leave this place and go sing the gospel.” The rest is history. (105) In obedience, she began singing on church programs, standing out among the hard gospel belters with her much sweeter sound. Willa Ward writes, “Mom was the only one with a soft voice, but when she got to humming and moaning in that mournful way of hers, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house” (23). Gertrude eventually enlisted the talents of her two daughters, creating a family group, which would in time be called the Ward Trio (Boyer 105). She herself was a second soprano, who had been raised in the South singing the old Dr. Watts hymns, which she taught to Clara. Willa and Clara both sang and accompanied her on piano. Almost immediately, however, it became clear who the real star was. The youngest Ward’s bounce on the piano, which she played with “long, skinny fingers,” and her penchant for singing the most recent gospel songs made her a church and a National Baptist Convention favorite. The architect of gospel music himself, Thomas Dorsey, traveled to Philadelphia to see the new sensation (Heilbut 106, 107). As the original “momager” and archetypal “stage mother,” Gertrude Ward was extremely covetous of her daughters’ time and attentions. She kept extremely close watch over the girls and limited their activities out of her sight. Clara the star, naturally received the brunt of her mother’s control, and was at least partially motivated by rebellion against the restrictions of her life with her mother, when she married as a teenager. The union did not long survive, and from the demise of the 304 ill-fated marriage to the day she died, Ward never again lived apart from her mother (108). Willa, however, was able to break free, at least somewhat. In 1947, tired of being micromanaged by Gertrude and suffering humiliating whippings at the hands of both her parents, she enacted a plan to become pregnant by her beau John, in effect forcing her gossip-conscious parents into allowing her to marry quickly. Beginning a family made consistent touring difficult for Willa. Sometimes she sang with the group, and sometimes she did not (59); her marriage and family obligations introduced great and lasting changes into the group. The Ward’s Own Golden Years, 1947-1958 As a replacement for Willa and as a means of continuing the steady ascent of the Wards, Gertrude Ward added not one but two outside members to the group, which then became the “Ward Singers.” Henrietta Waddy was a middle-aged bluesy contralto, and Marion Williams was a teenager hailing from Miami, Florida. Williams had a range that could hit a “growling quartet bottom” and the “airiest, most floating high soprano.” It is a widely held opinion that Marion Williams was the “best singer Miss Ward ever had,” and the sound of her voice became the emblematic sound of the Ward Singers (Heilbut 107). In addition to creating a fuller sound for the group, Waddy and Williams helped Gertrude to incorporate into the Wards a “much-needed physicality.” The Wards were thought to be spirited but somewhat brittle, sterile, “too stiff” for a gospel group. This changed with Waddy, who “would move throughout the audience as she sang, accenting the rhythm of songs with arm gestures,” and 305 Williams, who stood out as a big, brown beauty queen and who became known for fully embodying her song, freely doing whatever it moved her to do (Boyer 105). The effect was remarkable, as fellow gospel singer “Professor” Alex Bradford remembered: Child, the Ward Singers used to do “I Heard the Voice,” and Marion get to the line, “I came to Jesus as I was,” she’d play with the words, make those awful faces, and baby, they’d be carrying them out by the forties and fifties. (Heilbut 108) Audiences never tired of watching her. Over the years, Gertrude would select other immensely talented singers to pass through the group--Martha Bass, Frances Steadman, and Kitty Parham among them—but Williams always stood out as the prize. Marion Williams sang lead on two of the Wards’ biggest hits, “Surely God Is Able” and “Packin’ Up,” and she would do the most to purchase the Wards’ entrée into the Chicago gospel world, a dazzling feat to say the least. Clearly, Marion Williams was Gertrude Ward’s wisest business decision ever (Santelli paragraph 13; Heilbut 107, 108). Under Mother Ward’s administration, the Wards entered into a golden age of their own, wherein they “had more hits, earned more shouts, packed more houses, and charged more money than any group in gospel history” ( Heilbut 109). This golden age began in 1947 with the additions of Waddy and Williams, and the start of the Wards’ recording career. Although they were huge Philadelphia favorites and darlings of the National Baptist Convention, they would not have a radio hit until Clara Ward’s rearrangement of a Gospel Harmonettes song written by Reverend 306 W.H. Brewster entitled “Our God Is Able. In her hands, it became “Surely God Is Able,” a lead she shared with newcomer Marion Williams. It was magic. Williams’ passionate repetition of “surely,” which she famously pronounced as “sho-lay” helped the song to become wildly popular throughout black gospel America (Heilbut 101). Still, Mother Ward had her eye on becoming part of the gospel elite of Chicago. Then the undisputed seat of gospel power, it was notoriously difficult for outside gospel acts to penetrate. Characteristically undaunted, in 1950, Gertrude Ward booked the Ward Singers for a six-week run performing at Chicago churches, a move many considered quite bold. Gertrude, however, “saw it as confidence.” The gospel community of Chicago was prepared to be just as undaunted, as a “hit gospel recording was one thing” and a “hit gospel performance another.” Robert Santelli describes the breakthrough moment: The air was heated that evening in church when the Ward Singers began their set. The group worked its audience without pause, steadily raising the temperature in the pews and setting the stage for "Surely God Is Able," the song that everyone in the audience was poised to hear and the one that the Wards believed would turn their set into triumph. Clara opened the song and prepared to turn it over to Williams. No one, perhaps not even Marion, knew what would happen next. Singing as if what came out of her mouth might turn the tide of the great earthly battle between good and evil, God and the Devil, Williams hit notes, created phrases and carried on with awesome power. And then suddenly she "got happy." Unable to control herself, she left the group's fold and raced down the aisle, singing and shouting as she went. It was the ultimate demonstration of 307 what happens when the body and the soul become so electrified with music and joy and Jesus that the only thing to do is run. As Marion ran down the aisle, first one woman and then another threw their pocketbooks, as if to say, "You're singing your all, we're giving our all." The church was in glorious chaos. Pronouncing "surely" as "showly," Marion kept singing, kept counting her blessings, kept sanctifying everyone in that church and maybe in all of Chicago, for that matter. She wailed, she screeched, she shouted, she searched her soul for the strength to send out a message from God Almighty. (Paragraphs 9-12). With this dazzling performance from Marion Williams, the Wards effectively infiltrated one of the most selective gospel towns, and were thus catapulted to gospel superstardom. The Beginning of the End, 1958-1973 From 1947 until 1958, Gertrude Ward’s juggernaut reigned supreme in gospel. The Wards were simply untouchable, but all golden moments eventually end. In 1958, Marion Williams and the other members at the time, Frances Steadman and Kitty Parham, quit the group. It was common knowledge how small their salaries were (Heilbut 110); Willa claims to have been the recipient of equally low pay (74). While paying Williams and the others wages on par with those of most other gospel singers of the day, Gertrude “was by all accounts notoriously tightfisted with the receipts, funneling most of the money to her own accounts” (Darden 208). Furthermore, Williams, Steadman, and Parham lived in an apartment building which Gertrude owned, so a goodly portion of the little they were paid fell 308 back into Gertrude’s purse in the form of rent. Having had enough of being exploited in such an obvious and demeaning way, they quit, and the Wards’ “popularity nosedived.” Although Mother Ward, ever the business shark, replaced them with other “first-rate” singers, “now when the Wards left their massive eight- door limousine, they’d face half-empty churches.” Accordingly, Gertrude’s tried- and-true methods for raising offerings—“Won’t you help with the offering? I need fifty dollars; I’m asking for five”—fell flat, as well (Heilbut 110). Three years later, in a move no doubt brokered by her mother, Clara Ward signed a contract that would pay her a queenly sum of $5000 per week for forty weeks of performances in the Las Vegas nightclubs. This 1961 decision was a scandal throughout the gospel community. She and her singers would also eventually add regular stints at Disneyland to their engagements; Gertrude would be able to boast about a chair given to her by Walt Disney himself. After the death of George Ward, mother and daughter relocated from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to be closer to the West Coast work at Disneyland and Las Vegas nightclubs which paid the bills. Additionally, the Wards would taste international stardom few gospel singers knew while living, with great success in Europe and Japan (Heilbut 110). With incontestable fame and unquestionable wealth, the Wards Singers post- Williams et al. seemingly had everything--except for the dignity which always marks true gospel. To the absolute shame of gospel lovers, Clara Ward and the Ward Singers were soon transformed into unabashed sellouts and clowns of the highest order. The fact that Ward only made one gospel album from 1963 to 1970 309 reveals much about the musical and artistic no man’s land in which she found herself. Instead of songs like “Surely God Is Able” and “How I Got Over,” Ward sang “rock arrangements of “Zippety Doo-Dah” and “Born Free.” The only thing which kept her from complete secularization during this time was that she “never cut a love song.” From time to time, most often for a funeral of a Golden Age gospel star, such as that of Ruth Davis, Gertrude and Clara Ward would make it back to real church, sometimes reuniting briefly with ex-Wards Singers, but to the end of Clara’s life, things were never quite the same (Heilbut 110, 111). What Clara Gave With abject poverty in their past, Gertrude and Clara Ward worked with a maniacal passion emanating from Gertrude which would eventually carry them far from their roots, and far from gospel, even into the tasteless and the bizarre. Whatever her many faults, Mother Gertrude Ward can be understood as the primary and most consistent catalyst for her daughter’s fame and material success. Ward would often say on church programs, “Behind every great man there stands a great woman. And I don’t know where I’d be without my mother, Mrs. Gertrude Mae Murphy Ward.” Heilbut agrees: “Clara [was] right; Mrs. Ward made the Ward Singers. Clara had the talent, but Mrs. Ward had the spunk and drive and determination.” Fittingly, Gertrude Ward, determination personified, would outlive her famous daughter by a decade (106, 313). With so much of the credit for the Wards’ success going to her mother, one might wonder what exactly Ward herself contributed to the world of gospel and to 310 her own fame and fortune. Aside from the frenetic and downright embarrassing performances such as the ones referenced at the beginning of this section, she often affected a distracted malaise which sometimes earned her descriptions such as “lazy” from close observers like Heilbut (108). In a letter to Clara after Clara’s death, Willa Ward wrote that much like her small-framed body, “even [Clara’s] initiative was far from robust” (218). A cursory glance might therefore lead one to mischaracterize her as a spoiled, middle-century BAP of sorts: “mama’s spoiled darling” sitting always in the lap of luxury, the catered-to daughter in unsettling juxtaposition with the oft mistreated Willa, Williams, and other “stepsisters.” However, interrogation at a less superficial level reveals an artist who perhaps actually longed for a much simpler, more honest existence, but who, in responding to social, economic, and family pressures, was often forced to move in a direction opposite her desires. The resulting frustration abounds in her work, and is more than likely responsible for her very early demise. The voice of Clara Ward is, to this day, one of the most unique in gospel. Standing out in its distinctive nasal quality, her voice distinguishes her from every other singer in the field. Heilbut writes that “[a]t her peak, Clara’s voice was an exceptionally beautiful alto, a clearer and firmer version of Aretha [Franklin’s].” As is the case with the voices of many singers, her voice deepened over the years but maintained, and perhaps even enlarged, its most arresting qualities: The voice is no longer so high, but it remains freakishly resonant. Her nasality, almost Middle Eastern in its 311 penetration, makes her a peerless moaner, and her solo records of the hymns “The Day Is Past and Gone,” “The Fountain,” “At the Cross,” and Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” were so brilliant in phrasing and so compelling in spirit that she outranked Mahalia Jackson in a newspaper poll as best gospel singer. (108) Throughout her entire career, these old hymns would remain the “only songs she enjoyed performing,” and her skill with them was reflected in the admiration of her listeners (309). The hymns were the cornerstone of the Clara Ward repertoire; they contained the pulse points at which she became most engaged with her art as a performer. In truth, from the time that Williams and the others joined the group, Ward, it seems, was always willing to simply to play behind the group, offering her “superb piano,” directing performances, as during a live recording of the group singing “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” on which she instructs the group, “Y’all clap,” and occasionally leading one of her up-tempo arrangements of classics like “The Old Landmark” or “How I Got Over,” and, of course, soloing on the hymns. While she sang the fast songs with great dash and spirit to satisfactory effect, Ward’s only truly “great moments” as a performer took place when she sang the hymns. Her innate ability to convey the deepest meanings of the songs which tend to be the stateliest and the purest expressions of the Christian experience actually elevated her into, and some would argue past, Mahalia Jackson’s rarefied gospel air. Ward would “live and die a hymn singer” indeed. 312 Quite obviously, no one knew her strengths and her weaknesses better than she, which could very well explain her perfect willingness to let the other singers take the lead on most other types of songs. It is most remarkable that she was so willing to share the certain success “Surely God Is Able” with the newcomer Williams, who joined the group and was immediately handed the hit song. There was seemingly no “probationary period,” during which the new girl was consigned to sing the “oohs and aahs,” while Ward the star basked in the spotlight. Instead, on “Surely,” Ward did what she knew she did best; she sang the beginning of the song, which is measured and poetic--quite hymn-like in its construction. She then graciously stepped aside to let Williams do what she did best, which was, as members of the black church say, to “put her weight on it”—a reference to way powerful gospel singers enliven and elevate a song by singing it with bravura and inventiveness. An honest discussion of Ward’s limitations is not an implication that she had been wrongly made a star. She fully deserved her praises; she was simply aware of what she deserved them for. While the other singers—her mother, who never tired of the limelight, and Williams and the others—were around to do the things that she was least equipped to do, Ward, it appears, was perfectly happy doing the vitally important, often invisible work which aided in their execution. Onstage, Ward may have had her specialties, but behind the scenes, her artistic vision and abilities veritably glowed. 313 She wrote many songs, and was an even greater arranger. Over her career, Ward would compose or arrange over eighty gospel songs (Ward 242-244), which earned her posthumous induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1974. In the early days, the Wards’ success is understood to have been the result of a combination of “brilliant soloists,” “exceptional” material from gospel composer extraordinaire Reverend W.H. Brewster, and Ward’s “consistently inventive arrangements” (Heilbut 108). In an elaborate and artistic version of call-of- response, Ward was able to take Brewster’s very fine, dignified compositions, old church standards, religious songs from her childhood, as well as fairly new recordings by other groups and rework them until they were like nothing else being sung in the churches or on the stages. Of otherwise slow, draggy tunes, she would make catchy, gospel waltzes; of the old standards, she would create slow, soulful renditions of the main part of the song, and then transition into fast call-and- response shouts for the end, made all the spicier for the enthusiastic beating and jangling of the gospel tambourine. Her arrangement of the live performance of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on Meetin’ Tonight actually adds a powerful kick drum towards the middle of the song, which thoroughly transforms it. So often a sentimental piece of gospel fluff, the song becomes, in Ward’s hands, a powerful and thoroughly enjoyable uptown, hard-driving gospel-jazz tune. Moreover, Ward’s arrangements of background vocals were peerless. Classic Ward vocals feature the full range of the female voice—from the most delicate, highest, most tremulous soprano at the top to the richest contralto at the 314 bottom. Buoyed by a rich groove set by the piano and its accomplice the organ, Ward’s background vocals have a way of perfectly supporting the story being told by the lead singer, and yet adding great interest to what the background is doing, as well. The cadenced combination of “mmh-hmm!”-“oh, yes!” on “Surely God Is Able” is an excellent example of this. The almost insidious “great day, great day” background vocals on “Great Day” is also perfect in its illustration of Ward’s talent for knowing how to layer richness into a song by utilizing the background to its fullest effect (Meetin’ Tonight Track 19). Ward’s mastery of musical arrangement would be another huge influence on Aretha Franklin. Franklin would model her background parts and the sound of her singers—who were none other than her biological sisters and cousins who had grown up on the same Golden Age gospel as she-- closely on the sound of the Ward Singers. Ward’s approach to fashion was also proof of her excellence behind the scenes; she could be called gospel’s first fashionista. Although the group early on shed “the old homespun choir robes” most female gospel singers wore during performances, Heilbut explains as early as the fifties, Ward began “designing fancy outfits of elaborate and, for gospel, peculiar materials.” Also, by the mid-fifties, she had made wigs, usually hairpieces in the form of ponytails, a Ward Singers trademark (109). The photograph on the cover of the Boyer text captures Ward and Williams singing side-by-side into the same microphone. Ward wears what looks like a lined, light-colored, sheer organza dress, while Williams dons a dark-colored brocade dress with silver or gold threading. Photographs on pages 104 and 106 of 315 the text further reveal the stylishness of the Wards Singers’ costuming. In deviation from the classic approach of female gospel singers, Ward called attention to the femaleness of her singers, accentuating their physicality and beauty, with the help of dramatic clothing, hair choices, and makeup, as well. Clara and the Lonesome Valley With so much to offer—lead vocals, compositions, arrangements, and trendsetting fashion design—how did Clara Ward, clearly a genius of gospel go so wrong? How did a woman of such immense talent end up playing Disneyland regularly and clowning on the Flip Wilson Show in the “Church of What’s Happening Now”? What circumstances are responsible for her branding with the dubious honor of the “embodiment of commercialized gospel,” and of all singers, how did hers become “the cartoons of gospel” (Heilbut 110)? It is clear to me that the great walkout of 1958 holds the answers to these questions. The sudden end of the golden years created a seismic shift not only in personnel, but also in terms of what Clara Ward was forced to give in her public service to the group. The years after 1958 would have created a pressure for Ward that she had not felt perhaps since the days of the Ward Trio, and perhaps not even then, as Gertrude was yet singing well enough to stay often enough in the spotlight. The bitter exit of Williams, Steadman, and Parham, and the steady decline of her mother’s singing voice after the removal of a goiter (Heilbut 106), together created a situation in which Clara, as the most famous singer in the group, and definitely the most talented Ward in the group, was forced into the foreground all 316 the time. The stresses of constant visibility and the need to keep delivering the knockout showmanship on which the Wards had built their careers pushed Ward past the extent of her natural abilities, into the realm of the surreal. Because no else could bring to the group the awesome physicality that the strutting, shouting, dancing Williams did, Ward—a simple, though extraordinarily gifted, hymn singer, musician, and behind-the-scenes genius—found herself with the impossible task of filling the void. Firmly yet in the command of her mother, who was not about to risk a decrease or an end to the income, there was no question of Ward’s stopping the performing, as so many artists do today, in favor composing, producing, or managing other acts. In fact, to handle all the requests for Ward Singers performances, Gertrude would effectively created three different groups bearing the Ward name. She and her two daughters each headed Ward Singers groups in order to capitalize on the popularity of the group. It is obvious that, forced to carry on with the show, despite fatigue and depression, Ward created an alternate persona who specialized in the “dime store marbles” Heilbut referenced—cheap, gaudy gospel baubles devoid of any real value. What she could not do naturally, she compensated for with eye-catching theatrics. What often came off as shameless clowning toward the end of her life and career was more likely the sublimated frustration of an artist forced to perform beyond the pale of her talent, desire, and personal excellence. 317 In the years after 1958, the performances were not the only thing garish about the Wards. The once unique and trendsetting outfits and hair became overblown often to the point of tastelessness. By the early seventies, some of the hairpieces Clara and the new singers sported in their nightclub acts literally “grazed the ceiling.” After her death, her consistently outré looks for the group earned this praise from a fan: “The Ward Singers were like a psychedelic light show, and the other groups looked like an old silent movie” (Heilbut 109). While this fan and others may have been delighted with the way-out look and stage comportment of the Ward Singers, it is likely evidence of Ward’s search for an outlet up to the task of making her life interesting to her, and therefore, livable. While the extreme outfits and the hairpieces could very well have been the manifestation of an artistic mind testing boundaries, and actively deconstructing the look of the twentieth-century gospel singer in the process, there is much more evidence to suggest that her daring fashions were proof of intellectual desperation and an abiding sense of unhappiness which was growing all the time. For many gospel fans, the change in Ward’s public persona was tragic and painful to witness. Robert Darden writes in his People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music that “[m]ost of Clara Ward’s admirers prefer even now to remember the lovely young lady with the towering hair of the 1950s rather than the haggard self- parody playing Vegas in the late 1960s” (209). Her decision to go into the overwhelmingly secular space of the nightclubs as a gospel singer during the 1960's and 1970's could be said to reveal a boldness 318 and a willingness to take risks in the face of unmitigated criticism; however, Ward was aware of, and had to be emotionally affected by the gravely disapproving reactions of others. For most in the gospel community, the decision was a scandalous disregard for the sacredness of the art form in favor of the lure of money. For blacks outside the gospel community, the decision represented a race- based crisis of public consumption in the tender years of Civil Rights. Heilbut quotes one angry militant’s reaction: “You know folks don’t come to clubs to get saved. They go to see Negroes make damn fools of themselves” (105). While Ward and her mother answered all naysayers with claims that they were only following the Christian mandate to "go into the highways and hedges as well" (105), it must have hurt Ward deeply to be considered a sell-out from both a religious and a racial perspective. Her decision effectively divorced her from the two communities with which she most identified—Christians of the black gospel church and black Americans waging a war for equality and freedom. The sizable pay she received for her nightclub performances may have done something to bind Ward’s wounds, but it is highly unlikely that they were completely mended by money—especially given the fact Gertrude was notoriously poor at managing cash, according to her elder daughter. Several passages throughout Willa’s memoir depict Mother Ward as an inveterate spendthrift from even before the days of fame and fortune. She reveals that her mother’s mismanagement of household finances during the girls’ childhood was usually responsible for the Wards’ constant relocation from residence to residence and the girls’ move from school to school. 319 She also reports Ward’s growing distress over having to continue to work so doggedly to cover Gertrude’s lavish spending during the post-Williams years. Ward’s artistic frustration and social isolation of later years were only continuations of the deeply personal sacrifices she had been forced to make for the sake of stardom and success from the earliest days. Unsurprisingly, it seems that her mother was greatly instrumental in the collapse of her brief teen marriage to one Richard Bowman, which Gertrude had resented from the first. Willa reports that, upon hearing of the marriage of her younger daughter, Gertrude was purely irate: All hell broke loose. Mom’s mouth was agape for just a second, then filled with shouts and curses directed at me. “You’re the cause of this. Clara wouldn’t have done this if you hadn’t encouraged it. Damn you! You’re only good for having babies; now you want Clara to be the same. I’ll break your neck if you don’t get the hell out of here now.” She took a swing at me which my husband blocked. My father held her back as we …made a speedy exit. (65) According to Willa, after a week of giving both daughters and their husbands the silent treatment, Gertrude changed both her tactic with the newlyweds and her attitude towards Willa: But soon Mom went to see Clara and Richard with a totally civil attitude. We concluded that she had realized just how much everything she was building rested on us. It became evident, though, that she considered me a threat, and from that time on she systematically worked to separate me from Clara. Richard was also on the hit list. When we were home, Mom practically camped at the Bowman apartment. Instead of Clara having more freedom, Richard was slowly but surely losing his. They were subject to interference and demands at every turn. Mom was driving them crazy—but then, that was the plan. (65) 320 Willa also lays partial blame at Gertrude’s feet for the miscarriage Ward suffered during that time, writing that Ward’s early pregnancy difficulties were exacerbated by the insensitive manner in which Gertrude began to “accelerate the frequency and number of programs.” She recalls moments when pregnancy sickness would overtake her sister during performances, making her leave off singing mid-song, hurriedly exiting the stage. During this time, money was not a pressing issue for the group, but Gertrude drove them still at a punishing pace, despite Ward’s obvious need for a more relaxed schedule. According to Willa, the pregnant Ward became “extremely tired and so ill that when [they] arrived in Philadelphia [from a string of performances in Newark], she couldn’t make the short distance from Mom’s apartment to hers.” A neighbor who lived in the same building as Gertrude reported having had to “pick Clara up off the floor and put her on the couch.” Ward begged the neighbor not to tell Gertrude of the incident. Six weeks later, during a rehearsal at her parents’ apartment, Clara miscarried in the bathroom. Willa writes, “That was the closest Clara ever came to motherhood. My sister’s hurt and sorrow cut into my heart like a saber” (66). The Bowmans marked their one year wedding anniversary with a “big dinner party at their apartment.” The happy occasion would turn sour, however, when Ward and Bowman had an argument that evening which Mom got into. “You should not have gotten married in the first place—following that Willa,” she yelled. “God put you here for bigger things. You’re being punished.” Clara went home with Mom and 321 Daddy that night, never to return to Richard. They were quickly divorced. At eighteen and a half, she was once again a forlorn little girl named Clara Ward. (66) The very personal sacrifices of marriage and motherhood which Ward was essentially forced to make function as proof of her perverted value to her mother— as a breadwinner. While Willa both married and raised a family, Ward would be restricted from doing so, her attempts at both effectively undone—perhaps by fate, but with a healthy amount of help from her mother. In simple capitalist language, from Gertrude’s perspective, Willa could be spared—even replaced; Clara could not. Not even the formidable Mother Ward bested her daughter when it came to singing, a fact she knew well. If Clara Ward had had the drive, she could have been a perfectly successful solo artist. On the other hand, whatever Gertrude's talents as a singer in the days of the Ward Trio, she would not have been nearly as successful without Clara. With her pluck on the piano, amazingly clear voice, and her boundless artistic vision, Ward was the star, and as such the meal ticket. Gertrude’s vice-like hold on the life of her daughter and Ward’s determination to suffer in silence, living a life of “quiet desperation,” call attention to the ways in which black women can be ample sources of oppression for other black women. Philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about the distribution of power within a given society, illustrating how even among the least powerful in society, extreme power differentials can exist, as is obvious in the relationship between Ward and her mother. To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, black women can 322 represent for each other both the “mule of the world” and the oppressive world itself. If there were men in the days of Clara’s youth other than her poor, doomed husband, the record is largely silent. Given Gertrude’s absolute control and unrelenting domination of her life, such affairs would have been very rare, extremely secret, and destined for certain dissolution. Willa, however, discusses two important men who would come along later in Ward’s life. Some time in the early fifties, however, Clara became involved romantically with Aretha Franklin’s father, famed Baptist minister of Detroit, C.L. Franklin. Heilbut rather discreetly reports that Franklin “became Clara’s constant consort” (109). Willa offers much more detailed account: We had first met C.L. Franklin in Detroit after he entered the ministry, and our paths had often crossed since then. This time, however, the Reverend and Clara seemed to share the Holy Spirit intermingled with the human spirit. It was the start of my sister’s one and only heart, soul, and flesh real romance. (100) The couple for whom “budding romance…rapidly developed into flower,” according to Willa, “found loving easy—the difficult part was keeping the sweet aroma of amour from Mom’s sensitive nose.” As a cover for their wish to have “some quality and continuous time together,” Ward would claim that she was needed to help Franklin to care for his young children. Franklin’s wife, Barbara Siggers Franklin, by all reports, was one of the greatest gospel singers of her time. 323 Although she continued to keep in contact with her children, she had left the marriage reportedly because of Franklin’s numerous infidelities; she died of a heart attack in the early fifties (Salvatore 123, 109). Gertrude, although “jealous of Clara’s closeness to C.L.,” begrudgingly agreed. However, as Ward’s “’babysitting’ trips” increased in frequency, Gertrude became “more and more perturbed and was bent on turning things around.” Classically, she approached the situation from an economic point-of-view, telling Ward, “Franklin just wants you to build his congregation up. You’ve come too far and worked too hard to be singing there for free.” Willa points out that with a “healthy membership of 4,600,” Franklin’s church “was hardly in need of a parishioner drive” (118). In the mid-fifties, Ward and Franklin would secretly plan a trip together to Europe and to Jerusalem. Ward was sick with worry for weeks over how they would manage to tell her mother. Franklin offered Ward support and strength when the anxiety over the impending fury from her mother threatened to overwhelm her. When the time came, Gertrude’s “opposition was obvious but not to the extent [everyone] had…anticipated.” Willa explains, “I guess she recognized that it was time to bend a little or lose Clara completely to the rest of the world—C.L. Franklin’s world” (119). Obviously, by this time, with the Wards right in the middle of their golden years, they had reached a level of fame and wealth that caused Gertrude to feel comfortable in allowing her daughter to have intimate involvement with someone 324 other than herself. There was also the major draw of Franklin’s established star stature in the black church, in the recording industry—recordings of his sermons were bonafide hits—and on the national scene. For Gertrude, ever the determined social climber, this relationship, no matter how seemingly illicit for a gospel singer and a preacher, would sanctify itself in its payoff—further inclusion into the upper echelon of black church and American society. Perhaps while the affair lasted, it gave Ward a small sense of personal fulfillment on the two fronts which had been so decisively denied her: love and motherhood. Of the relationship between Franklin’s children and Ward, Willa offers, “They loved being together, talking, laughing, and singing. Those times provided all of them with a feeling of being a complete family” (118). Of Franklin’s children, it seems that Aretha, who had been just six years old when her biological mother left the household, drew the closest to Ward, adoring her and adopting her as godmother. Everything, however, has its limitations: even this relationship—with the dominant black preacher of the era no less--was never made official with marriage, a decision which was more than likely influenced by Gertrude. By the late fifties, it seems that the affair had cooled considerably. In 1957, Ward told an interviewer for Ebony magazine about her near marriage to “prominent…western minister” just a couple of years prior. She blamed the breakup on the fact that the couple had dated too long, saying, “We were going steady for about six years, which I believe is what was wrong with our courtship. I think a long courtship is just no good. You get to 325 learn too much about a person” (Darden 208). Perhaps Franklin got too know too much about the relationship between his intended and her domineering mother. Although Ward and Franklin seemed to have broken up officially, Willa records a bedside visit paid by Franklin to the ailing Ward quite some years later, wherein he reportedly made mention of a future with her (169). Only one other man is mentioned by name in intimate connection with Ward. Sometime in the late 1960’s, Ward, according to Willa, carried on a brief affair with Puerto Rican-born baseball player Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Other than physical intimacy, the two reportedly shared mutual concerns over the racial discrimination suffered by people of color (163, 164). Willa also relates that during the isolated, lonely years between her brief teenage marriage to Richard Bowman and her relationship with C.L. Franklin, Ward would occasionally have affairs with women. Whether affairs of this type continued throughout Ward’s life is unknown. Willa shares that she became privy to this part of Ward’s life quite by accident one evening at one of the gospel scene parties. Although she was initially ignorant regarding the reason that she and Ward consistently received invitations to the wild soirees, Willa writes that she “soon got [her] explanation”: …[O]ne of the young men we had come with bounced down the stairs in a T-shirt and a towel, on his way to get some ice. In passing he excused himself for not entertaining us but offered, “Honey, I’m on a mission. When Mother gets back upstairs, she’s gonna dive right in the middle of all that flesh. Clara, if I’d have thought about it, I could have invited someone for you. I know this sharp young child who’d just love you, she’s a [s]tone man, Honey.” The guy probably 326 thought I knew, but until then, I had no idea that my sister had dabbled in homosexual activities.” She was really embarrassed that I had heard, and we were both so uncomfortable that we left. (69) Without money for a cab, however, the sisters had to wait until the friends with whom they had ridden to the party were ready to leave. Out on the porch, Ward confided in her sister that she “had engaged in a clandestine affair with someone [they] had worked with” (69). When Willa pressed Ward to provide further specifics of her involvement with women, she found her sister to be somewhat forthcoming but mostly evasive, preferring to keep much to herself: She said, “There’s not a lot to tell. When you get real close just close your eyes tight and put your mind on somebody you really like a lot. Willa, you know my thing is men, but Mom gets between me and any man I decide to get tight with.” I prodded my sister to tell me more, but she kept drifting off to other subjects. Never again did we approach that topic, and never again did I ask her about her involvement with lesbianism. (69) Ward’s situational lesbianism provides further evidence of the deep personal frustrations Ward suffered for the sake of gospel stardom and economic advancement. Her affairs with women, it seems, were not a function of her express love and desire for women, but rather of the loneliness which seemed to be her lot in life, and the secrecy in which she had to shroud intimate relationships in order to protect them from her mother’s absolute control. Willa understood her sister’s lesbianism to be symptomatic of the “abstinence and loneliness” Gertrude had 327 “imposed upon her.” Willa saw her sister as extremely “vulnerable and open to anything that filled the void in her life” (69). As Gertrude Ward’s golden goose, Ward could not be allowed to have a full, healthy sexual life or deep, romantic attachments—especially during the years of the Wards’ professional and economic ascent--because they were laden with risks, which if realized, would have threatened the travel and performance schedules that secured their financial independence. As a result of the deep, abiding senses of fatigue, overwork, resentment, and personal emptiness, Ward periodically fell into bouts of depression and alcoholism, according to Willa. The punishing schedule got so bad at times that Willa “sometimes skipped a show….Poor Clara was beat, too,” she writes, “but dared not miss a performance. She dipped heavily into the bottle to make it through.” Willa admits to enabling her sister’s dependence, acting as Ward’s “‘bag lady,’ carrying Clara’s booze in [her] handbag to keep [Gertrude] from finding it in hers” (107). Willa records Ward as telling her once, “The only way I can survive is to drink. If I didn’t, Mom would drive me crazy or give me a heart attack. God help me” (123). The frustrations and pressures only grew worse after her move into the nightclubs, and ultimately wreaked havoc on her body. In the mid-sixties, during a nightclub performance in Miami Beach, Ward suffered her first stroke. Her apparent recovery prompted her mother to publicly proclaim her “God’s miracle girl” (Heilbut 111). Willa writes that her mother “milked the Miracle Girl” theme to a fare-thee-well,” using it to promote shows and sell tickets (171). 328 A series of strokes seemingly resulting from non-stop stress and fatigue, however, would follow in succeeding years. Willa reports that on the night of her last stroke, Clara had gone to visit the sick father of a friend. She returned home and “went right to bed.” Later, her sleep was broken by the sound of Gertrude “coughing and gasping” on a cough drop. Dutiful to the end, she rose and “slapped [her mother] on the back several times to dislodge the cough drop, then stepped back saying, “I’m so tired.” She fell to floor and slipped into a coma from which she never recovered. She would die in January of 1973. Like Mahalia Jackson one year prior, Clara Ward was twice memorialized before being laid to rest. “Making even death an event,” Mother Ward spared no expense; instead she luxuriated in making the two services—a “Service of Triumph” in Philadelphia and a “Going Home Service of Praise and Thanksgiving” in Los Angeles—as overdone as possible. She rationalized the grandness by saying, “I won’t give my child…the world’s greatest gospel singer…a pitiful funeral. Clara gave me everything I wanted. I’m saying, ‘Thank you, Clara’” (Heilbut 311). Willa provides the confounding circumstances and the staggering figures involved in this “thanks”-motivated overspending: Unfortunately, the question of money was a jarring note at Clara’s death, as it had been during her life. Mom told us that she didn’t have enough for the funeral repast, so—as in Philadelphia—that expense fell on Harry [Willa’s second husband] and me in California, though Marion Williams helped, too. Of Clara’s $30,000 insurance policy, Mom spent $20,000 on funeral arrangements and flowers. The remaining $10,000, she said, was used for “incidentals.” (189) 329 One must wonder how much these final gestures towards her daughter were prompted by guilt. The life of Clara Ward, with its wide-ranging beauty, vision, and intellection, and its great compromises and costs, is the perfect representation of the intellectual, social, and economic advancement of many twentieth century black women. Rising from a background of destitution and poverty was possible, but as Ward’s life demonstrates, one had to work unceasingly and perhaps to one’s own demise, to do so. Ward in fact would reach the greatest heights of any gospel singer of the period. None was richer or more famous than Clara Ward, but perhaps none was sadder or lonelier. When she sang, “You got to walk that lonesome valley for yourself/ There’s nobody here can walk it for you,” she knew on intimate terms the implacable truth the lyrics communicated. For riding in counterpoint with the highs of her life—radio hits, sold-out concerts, riches, new Cadillacs and limousines, multi-faceted talent, and worldwide fame--were devastating, profoundly painful lows. For the sake of professional advancement and economic security, she endured the repeated closing off of options from her early life onward. Clara Ward would suffer abiding loneliness, depression, a descent into artistic caricature, alcoholism, and failing health. In the life of Clara Ward, we find the conversation between the sensual and the spiritual at its most poignant, bitter, and costly. 330 C. Dorothy Love Coates: “Help Yourself, Dot” On “The Harmonettes Live Medley” recorded on The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, group spokeswoman Odessa Edwards very skillfully tailors a transition from the car accident narrative to the Gospel Harmonettes’ version of “Get Away Jordan.” Having reminded the audience that they never know when they will meet death, so “it’s best to be ready,” she describes her own readiness in the vivid imagery of black Christianity, which reaches back far into the days of slavery on the North American continent. She speaks: I’m ready to walk that last mile; I’m gon walk it ‘cause Jesus gon walk it with me. When I get there, I know He’ll be standing there saying, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant…Come unto Me and rest.’ Then I’m take off this course that I’ve worn down through the years and stick my sword in the sandy banks of time to study war no more. I’m gonna look around me, but I won’t have to look for Jesus ‘cause I know that He’s gonna be there. Then I’m gonna stand and put one foot on the chilly banks of Jordan and say, “Get away, Jordan, now. I wanna cross over to see my Lord. (Track 4) Her final words cue both the piano, played masterfully by yet another unsung gospel great, Evelyn Starks, and the concert attendants, as well, who call out recognition of the slaying force simply called “Dot” who is about to step forward. Over the warming piano and the audience’s sounds of delight, Edwards can be heard offering encouragement to the singer: “Sing, Dot.” Many classic gospel fans proclaim this as the best treatment of the old slave song to date. It, like so many of the arrangements and compositions of Dorothy 331 Love Coates, can be said justly to “swing.” Anchored by the bass notes on the piano, the swing sets in immediately, giving Coates the opportunity to display her ample talent for riding its groove to the point of transcendence, a talent Heilbut notes: “What Dorothy doesn’t know about phrasing and swing can’t be learned” (159). She starts off the song with rhyming couplets. Corporately owned by the gospel community, they, in various incarnations, travel the universe of gospel and are bound to show up in any gospel song at any time: You know I promised the Lord if He would set me free I’m going to find out what the end might be. One day, one day, I was walking along You know I heard a Voice, but I saw no one. You know the Voice I heard sounded so sweet It came down from my head to the soles of my feet. After the chorus, there is another round: You know one of these mornings, it won’t be long You gonna look for me, Child, and I’ll be gone. A few more risings, settings of the sun This ol’ battle be fought, the vict’ry won. You know the friends that I used to love so dear They done gone on to Glory, left me down here. The breaking point comes about midway through the song, when in her own original verse containing lines of rhythm so strong, they often do not need rhyme, Coates vividly imagines her own lifeless body in the repose of death: 332 When my feet get cold, My eyes shut, Body been chilled by the hands of death Tongue glued to the roof of my mouth Hands, they’re folded across my breast, You don’t have to worry ‘bout the way I’ll fare God Almighty done told me He’ll be right there. Lifting on His mighty grace, a dove Carries my soul to the Heavens up above. Jordan may be deep and wide But I told Mother I’d see her on the other side. Her famously hoarse voice hits the word “side,” just as the piano surges in a change that signals a promise to the ear: there is more. The Harmonettes kick the background vocals into high gear, singing with power. The piano, the only accompaniment, is a rushing, mighty wind. Coates, in full abandonment to the song, continues to call ad libs here and there which frees her to engage in the awe- inspiring athleticism which marked her performances. Because this is an audio recording, not visual, the vocal response of the audience is the only signal that Dot is being herself. The attendees are overwhelmed; calls, shouts, and claps come from the floor. The effect is gripping gospel that compels the listener to attend to every word, note, key change, and audience response. Coates stands out as particularly masterful in her consistent achievement of such gospel moments. Dot, Singularly Dorothy Love Coates was born Dorothy McGriff in 1928 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, by some accounts a minister, left the family, which included his wife, Lillar, and their seven children. Coates later remembered her mother as a “beautiful woman [who] could have had all kinds of men” after the departure of her 333 husband. However, in line with her principles as a Christian woman, Lillar elected to “ke[ep] her home clean for her children.” “Clean” here connotes “morally pure” and “exemplary.” As a result of her mother’s lasting influence of Christian commitment, Coates herself would earn a reputation for “living the life,” meaning being identifiably Christian offstage and away from church. This pervading sense of morality was evident even in her youth, when, out of step with her peers who sang jazz and blues standards on amateur talent nights, teenaged Coates sang “God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat From the Tares” in a homemade choir robe. Heilbut writes that even then, “she was already a special presence, alert, earthy, but morally committed, a mini-prophet, a child of the Old Landmark” (161, 160). Later, it would seem that she was made for stardom, to stand out from the crowd. Taller than most women on the gospel highway, she possessed an unaffected natural beauty that mellowed over the length of her life into a stately handsomeness. Though she dressed simply and her hair was always her own, worn in a style which remained the same for years, it would be this very unadorned-ness which made her special in a time when most of her colleagues would “sport fancy clothes and wigs” (160). Her personal style would fall in line perfectly with that of the Harmonettes, who would perform in “pastel robes, and when they otherwise appeared in public…were always clad in fashionably styled, tailored suits…without the artificial pride they could have assumed” (Boyer 217). When the need to help support the family encroached upon her high school years, Coates quit school to work, mostly in the domestic service industry, as did 334 most wage-earning black women of the period. In the early days, she learned to split her life, working days as a maid or washerwoman, and working nights in church, where she sang with unparalleled energy and power (Heilbut 162). Her habit of working past the point of exhaustion, no doubt partly fueled by economic need, resulted in her pneumonic collapse just before the birth of her first child, who was born with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. She soon had to forgo the singing—even though it meant missing out on an RCA Victor recording contract with the Harmonettes—to seek help for her infant daughter, Cassandra. Coates’ privileging of motherhood above a career in music was primarily responsible for the recovery of her daughter, who would grow into a “competent young woman” (Heilbut 162). This daughter was the result of Coates’ short-lived marriage to Willie Love, a lead singer with famous gospel quartet the Fairfield Four. A later union with Carl Coates, bass singer, guitarist, and manager of the Sensational Nightingales, another gospel quartet, was much more successful (162, 165). The marriage lasted until Carl Coates’ death in 1999 (New York Times). In the early forties, Coates had joined the Gospel Harmonettes, then called the Gospel Harmoneers, who were Birmingham’s most famous gospel group. The group had been formed after the 1940 National Baptist Convention, which had been held that year in Birmingham. Local musician Evelyn Starks had been asked to play for the Convention choir. Several of her friends sang in the choir. Among Starks’ friends were soprano Vera Kolb, who would become an inspiration for many gospel sopranos—Ward Singer Marion Williams among them; second soprano Mildred 335 Madison Miller, later Howard, whose idea it was to start the group; and contraltos Willie Mae Newberry and Odessa Edwards, who would become known for her fiery preaching (Boyer 212). As mostly “middle-class girls,” some of whom were even “schoolteachers,” they were often “confounded” by the sense of urgency and individuality Coates exhibited. Although their vocal support was “dignified and technically fine,” they many times did not know quite what to do with Coates’ vigor and her ever- burgeoning compulsion towards highly original compositional and performance expression. She often adlibbed new choruses to old songs, an early sign of the prolific composer she would become. The unrelenting uniqueness of her ideas and ways of doing things often prompted her groupmates to tell her, “Girl, you’re ahead of your time” (Heilbut 162). Her troubled pregnancy, recovery from pneumonia, and the successive need to travel North to seek treatment for her infant daughter temporarily imposed on her career. Experiencing life in the North as a young, broke divorcée and mother of an ill child, she would often call home to her mother Lillar with her worries. She related to Northern audiences her mother’s words in those conversations: “You go on…and sing your song…We’re telling God, and God is fighting our battles” (Heilbut 163). Encouraged by the message of faith and hope in her mother’s words, she continued to make her way in the world. 336 Scarifying In 1951, she was able to rejoin the group, taking part in their Specialty Records contract, which had been brokered by Art Rupp. She soon took her place among them once more as “spiritual dynamo,” which refashioned the group as her “dignified accompanists.” Coates’ dynamism would be the primary cause of the popularity the Harmonettes enjoyed. With her arrangements and original compositions behind them, and with her unforgettable performances out front, the Gospel Harmonettes ranked second only to the Ward Singers. As a performer, Coates was truly a force to be reckoned with. Heilbut calls her presence in these days “scarifying,” meaning powerful to the point of eeriness. He remembers that her facial expressions could “bring a church to its feet,” and her “reach for a Bible” could cause “grown men [to] fall out” (163, 164). Horace Clarence Boyer agrees, writing: …[A]s the supreme hard gospel singer, Coates could “take a house” and have everybody standing up, swaying, shouting, crying, or fainting like no one else, including her near-equal, Ruth Davis of the Davis Sisters…When the Harmonettes made their first appearances with Coates, the audience was unprepared for what they eventually came to love. (217) Like the other Golden Age stars discussed in this project, Coates' vocal instrument was truly singular in sound and quality. Often garnering such descriptions as "shabby," "frayed," "weak," “hoarse,” and by her own admission, "raggedy," Coates’ voice retained a beauty and power of its own. One fan no doubt expressed the feelings of many: “The worse Dot sounds, the more I like it” (169). 337 Because of the peculiarities of her voice, she was hesitant to call herself a "recording artist," but Coates’ recordings "indicate otherwise," showcasing a voice of "vibrant and supple" texture, along with perfectly and naturally placed "hums, grunts, falsetto whoops, chuckles, hollers, and moans" (166). Against all odds, she stretched her gift, resulting in an instrument that "encompassed a range from deep contralto to vigorous falsetto," and which relied on meticulous phrasing and ad libs to convey her message. To this day, no one sounds like Coates; no one--not even the jazziest of today's contemporary gospel artists, with all their scats and scale- bending--has her innate sense of timing, unbeatable phrasing, and pervasive swing. Few on the gospel highway had Coates’ awesome physicality. Characterized by "savagely graceful leaps," "physical contortions," and "extravagant gestures [which] could be called erotic" (163, 168), Coates’ performances stunned audience members and her fellow singers. She physically embodied the gospel message and used her body in a manner which ultimately "transcend[ed] sexual barriers." Boyer writes that “[w]hen overcome by the spirit, Coates’ eyes would open wide and remain open without blinking for minutes on end” and that “as she “sang, jerked, jumped, shouted, waved her arms, and moved through an audience, the lyrics of the song she was singing sprang to life” (217). Abandoning all to the music and the message, Coates spent herself with each performance, “invariably conclud[ing] her performances seated, her legs shivering uncontrollably beneath her choir robe.” Her Golden Age peers learned from her "implicit summons to sing with the body" (169). A lesser singer trying to follow 338 Coates in this usage of the body, who was not empowered by the message of gospel and by a strong sense of moral purpose, would have soon become mired in common, vulgar displays, becoming little more than a gospel hooch dancer. For Coates, the body in gospel performance was an instrument not of sexual titillation, but of the reality of God and her singular expression of her personal connection with Him. In 1958, the Harmonettes would retire—temporarily. In 1961, Coates would reorganize the group as the Dorothy Love Coates Singers, employing original members Mildred Miller Howard and Willie Mae Newberry Garth, along with new members, soprano Cleo Kennedy, and Coates’ younger sister, Lillian McGriff, as contralto (Heilbut 165). Spurred by Coates’ original compositions, impassioned singing, fiery preaching, and political commentary, the group was soon on top again and would continue to be so for years, making “several tours of Europe” and appearing in concert at Harvard University in the late 1960’s (Boyer 218). Coates and the Theology of Convergence Dorothy Love Coates was probably the most outspoken critic of race and class oppression in the gospel industry. Empowered by what I will a “theology of convergence,” Coates throughout her life and career downplayed her own specialness, emphasized her oneness with the people, and boldly called out the racist and classist structures and practices which kept blacks disproportionately poor and struggling, and therefore one with poor and struggling people all over the world. Coates’ theology of convergence resembles various liberationist theologies, which are usually marked by the belief in the innate equality of all humankind, a 339 conviction that the principle of justice should apply evenly to all, and a feeling that practical compassion should be extended to all people. If ever Coates’ message was marked by urgency, it certainly was after the reorganization of the Harmonettes. She worked in alliance with Martin Luther King, Jr., attended demonstration marches on the streets of Birmingham—a hotbed of racial oppression and Civil Rights resistance—and did stints in jail as a participant in non-violent protests. She felt that she could not afford to “play” or water down her message, which was both a call to holiness and a cry for social justice. She felt especially compelled to “give [the people] the truth, wake ‘em up to the mess going down.” As she saw it, there was nothing abstract about the relationship between the mortality rates and the social tribulations of blacks on the North American continent: “The pressure’s so bad now,” she explained, “people are dying from heart attacks and strokes every day” (159, 160). Coates’ theology of convergence is present in the way in which she often denied singularity or specialness in favor of connection to a greater human experience. This is not to say that she was oblivious to her own unique talents and gifts; she complained about the ways in which the less creative and the less scrupulous of her fellow gospel artists made a living using her songs and sayings without crediting her as the source. Nor was she unbothered by the persistent exploitation she personally experienced in dealing with concert promoters; she was livid about a promoter who expected her to travel from Birmingham to New York with six other group members, and accept two hundred and fifty dollars as payment (168). 340 Still, Coates more often than not chose to side with the larger community, the underdog, the suffering, and to take up the position which would best enable her to run through poorly reasoned, illogical, or unfair arguments with searing truth. For example, in stark contrast with many of her Golden Age compatriots, Coates— except for her brief stay in the North--would maintain residence in the South throughout her life. When asked about her decision to live in the turbulent, downright frightening South, she answered in her characteristic straight-shooting manner, “Why not? I’ve stayed in the North. It’s the same everywhere, if you look like me” (Heilbut 160). As long as racism permeated the nation as a whole, there was no real difference between North and South, as far as she was concerned. Until the entire nation was liberated, for Coates, it was ludicrous to behave as though the grass were any greener on the other side. Likewise, though the abandonment of the family by her father must have been a traumatic experience for a six year-old little girl, a grown Coates downplayed it as “the same old thing” (161), shrinking her individual story to fit within the collection of fairly common narratives of growing up without a father shared by many. In defiance of the effects of hard physical labor on her individual body and soul as a young woman, she summed up her early domestic work simply as the “standard Negro jobs” (161). Rather than lament her personal struggles, she chose to stand in community with working-class black women of her generation. 341 One day, after a thorough wooing by white producers, she diffused the envy of the others singers who witnessed it by saying, “Don’t bother about me. The white man don’t love any of us. When he quits making his change off me, he’ll drop me in a minute” (168). In this situation, Coates could have easily taken a moment to bask in the attention of the rich white men who controlled the recording industry, and in the envy of her colleagues, as well. Typically, she chose instead to link arms with her fellows, and to help keep them focused on the greed-based exploitation of black artists which kept them in the same boat, no matter who currently had favor with those in power. At a Newport Jazz Festival in the early sixties, she prefaced the Harmonettes’ version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” with a statement of unity with the young, overwhelmingly white, secular crowd by telling them, “We don’t feel a bit out of place because we feel that everyone here is a little part of God and at one time or another has had an experience with God.” As a true ambassador of the Christian church to these young, mostly un-churched people, she speaks in a stately, measured manner, quaintly rolling her r’s, as did many preachers of the time in order to effect an elevated persona. The musical number from this festival appearance which most conveys Coates’ theology of convergence is “Trouble in the Land Will Soon Be Over (All Over This World).” The key to this song of globalist vision and hope is conveyed in her prefatory remarks: We hope you enjoy the song we have planned for you now ‘cause it reminds us of the present and the things that’s 342 happening in the world. Right now, there’s hardly any place you can go to get away from trouble. We read about the needless killing, the crime in the streets…and war in Vietnam, [and] a nation trying to survive under racial oppression….” (Newport Gospel, Track 8) The song specifies Coates’ vision of a world in great turmoil and her prophetic perception of an approaching future in which the troubles would pass. While the chorus is notable for its patient insistence that trouble, suffering, and fighting “in the land will soon be over, soon be over, soon be over,” the verses fully express the intellection of composer Coates: Trouble on land and trouble on sea Nobody knows the trouble I see Trouble in the East, North, and West Nowhere to find peace nor rest All these things will pass away If we only get down on our knees and pray, This world is filled with trouble and strife Trouble by day and terror by night This terrible war is taking fathers and sons Many I know will never return We’re blind with sin, filled with hate If we open up our eyes before it’s too late, Children, fighting in the land will soon be over. (Track 8) As the background continues to repeat the chorus, Coates calls out adlibs which circle the globe’s trouble spots, linking their people together in their common suffering and urgent need, and blessing them, as it were, with a promise of relief. Her home state of Alabama is linked with Mississippi, California, and New York City, which are in turn chained together transatlantically with Russia and France, and transpacifically with “Red” China, and Vietnam. 343 I Met That Same Man Another song which exemplifies Coates’ theology of convergence is “Strange Man.” The song casts Jesus as a mysterious Drifter of sorts, making His way, unnamed, through Jerusalem towns. Coates’ drifter-Jesus has very pointed, intimate interludes with women which utterly change their lives. His first encounter is with the Woman at the Well, who had been married more than once and is currently living with a man to whom she is not married. In accordance with the Scriptures, Coates’ Woman is moved by Jesus’ unprompted relation to her of her circumstances and the lack of condemnation which marks his interaction with her. She goes “running through the city to talk about the man she saw,” Who knew all about her and yet extended love and unqualified acceptance of her. Coates’ Jesus is “next seen in a city, standing off an angry mob,” in behalf of a woman “who had been caught in the very act of adultery,” and is thus in peril of death by stoning. Jesus, still unnamed, protects the woman, moves her with His compassion, and enigmatically “g[ives] her a smile, wave[s] farewell and is gone.” The song is surprisingly sensual. Coates’ Woman at the Well testifies to her friends in town, “When He spoke, my soul caught on fire/And I’ll remember this day until I die/He stopped by, blessed my soul and gone.” The woman saved from stoning explains to witnesses, “When He touched me, I felt the power from His arms, and I don’t plan again to do no wrong/I’m just glad He stopped by, saved my life and gone.” Here, Coates does not deny the sensual, but opens up its possibilities 344 as a healing, liberating force that is necessarily intimate. It encompasses the sexual, but is ultimately so much larger than it. Coates’ Jesus is presented as the greatest Lover, the unparalleled Romancer of women, not because of sexual interaction, but because He takes the time to listen to them, to speak to them, to respect them, to heal their hurts, and to free them from the social and personal stigma of their mistakes and the mistakes of others. He cures them of invisibility and gender- and race-based oppressions. The Woman at the Well is actually worthy of disdain by the Jew Jesus according to social standards of the time. Samaritans were viewed by Jews as culturally and racially impure, and therefore usually dismissed as mongrels and consigned by Jewish society to a lower social caste. Gender-based and racial-oppression were issues about which Coates knew more than a little, and were obviously the points at which she connected as a female composer to these stories. The final point of convergence comes near the end of the song. After taking listeners through her version of the experiences of the two Biblical women, she links her own experience with Jesus with theirs, completing the chain: I met that same Man, I met that, Lord, same Man, When I turned away from sin He opened up His arms and took me in I felt that same power My soul caught on fire I’m just glad He stopped by In Alabama, the Lord stopped by One Tuesday evening, I’m glad He stopped by Blessed my soul and gone. (The Essential Gospel Sampler Track 20) 345 Her experience with Jesus is just as intimate and specific as theirs, although her Jesus is no longer in the flesh as He was with her Biblical counterparts. Still drifting, however, Jesus has found His way to Alabama on a Tuesday evening to have the most intimate contact with Coates, who rejoices in the result of their union- -being held in His arms, feeling His power, and carrying what is now an ignited, illuminated, utterly transformed soul. The song invites listeners to follow suit, linking their stories of personal contact with Jesus into the chain Coates has begun. The Theology of Convergence in Practice Because she lived constantly seeking the common ground, Coates “engendered a special loyalty in her colleagues” (164) and her fans, as well. She was steadfastly fair and common sense in her approach to all people. Pious persecutors who stood in judgment of some wrongdoers, while blind to the wrong of others were derided by Coates for the innate injustice of their approach: We’re always picking on the addict and the drunk. They never advertise those other addicts. If you’re gonna persecute one for one he does, you ought to get them all. We got some lying addicts, can’t get through a day without telling a lie on somebody. We’ve got some church-going addicts, but going to a church will not get you into heaven—just trying to straighten you out. And we got some home-wrecking addicts. They say, ‘If can’t have peace in my home, I’m sure gonna make hell out of yours.’ I’m gonna step on all your toes tonight.” (160) Coates’ commitment to convergence is perhaps best witnessed in her friendship with Joe Washington whom she employed as often as she could as a 346 pianist in the late fifties. Heilbut euphemistically describes Washington as a “sweet-natured, skinny, nervous boy, not manly, and disposed toward the bottle.” He was often beset by depression, wondering at the justice of God in taking his mother while sparing his “no-good father.” Coates was a source of compassion, wisdom, and strength for the musician. Because she offered “respect where others had ridiculed,” Coates earned his lifelong love and allegiance. Washington declared, “I’ll always love Dorothy. She knows if she ever needs help, I can be anywhere—even in Europe. I’ll be there” (164). Facing severe financial problems, he continued to drink heavily, ruining his health. In 1969, he “suddenly, gratuitously rejoined the Harmonettes” full time, playing as Coates had “never heard nobody play.” Despite his furious display of skill, his health continued to fail rapidly. The group eventually elected to leave him, while they toured, with Mildred Howard’s aunt, who cared for him until Coates “recognized things were hopeless.” She related Washington’s last hours: “I got him to the hospital. He kept saying, ‘You won’t leave me, dear. You won’t leave me.’ And I told him, ‘No, dear. Have I ever left you?’” That night would be his last night (Heilbut 165). Ever a friend to the friendless and a champion of the downtrodden, Coates was with him to the end, a loving, nonjudgmental presence, easing him into the next life. 347 It’s Alright Now, Jesus Her dedication to service did not end with Civil Rights activism, preaching, singing, or befriending the outcast. In her everyday life, Coates was usually “tired” from “always carrying someone to the doctor or taking her kids to museums and shows” (169). Standing in solidarity with all who suffered unjustly, whether with her own people or those who suffered halfway the world, living a life of service to causes that were larger than she—whether they were the health and well-being of her own children, or those of some other mother’s child--all while experiencing some of life’s most difficult circumstances in her own life sometimes caused Coates to express dismay. Seeing people at their ugliest so clearly so much of the time seemed many times a curse. She lamented once, “Don’t nothing frighten me more today than people. People. They don’t feel any more” (168). The stage, however, was where she could go to be made whole again. She analyzed herself and her fellows on the gospel highway: “I guess singers like me, we’re only happy when we sing.” Heilbut further analyzed her: “When she skips through an audience, she can discover her own need for the music reflected in their faces” (168). Coates lived for the moments, when in total convergence with those who suffered as she did for the same reasons she did—blackness, poorness, femaleness—she could become a channel for the restoration of hope and healing both she and they desperately needed. One such moment is recorded and preserved for posterity on The Great 1955 Shrine Concert. After tearing up the house with “Get Away, Jordan,” the 348 Harmonettes were supposed to continue with their set, as planned. Odessa Edwards comes back to the microphone and begins the narration that will be the bridge to the next number. But in the background, Dot is having a hard time going on with the program. In a private conversation made public, she bursts out with, “It’s alright now, Jesus.” With her lead on the previous song, she has obviously worked herself up, past the point of good manners. After another seemingly uncontrollable outburst, she sets in on an old Baptist moan: “Fire keep on burnin.’” This slow, nearly rhythm-less chant is legendary in the traditional black Baptist church for its ability to sneak up on congregants with its quiet but awesome power; if the mood is right, the song invariably kills. This particular day in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium, the mood was right. The Harmonettes fall right in line behind her, in harmony, bearing her up. Reading the spirit and the intense need of the moment, Edwards graciously steps aside, with a “Help yourself, Dot.” It is clear that Dot, at the moment, is powerless to do anything else. As though in a trance, she launches into a slow burn testimony that is part moan, part sermon, and part prayer: It’s alright now, Jesus. I thank You for everything. You’ve been mighty good to me. [Sings: Fire keep on burnin’…] I don’t know about you, but I’ve been born again. He didn’t turn me loose until He finished it. He told me to go and He’d go with me; op’m my mouth and He’d speak for me. And You kept Your word, God. When I look back over the road from whence I came and what I been through--If you ‘scuse me while I say thank You, Jesus. [Sings: Thank You, Jesus…] You been so good. You been so good. You been so good...I say again thank You, Jesus. … (Track 4) 349 The entire congregation is caught up with her in this moment of absolute transcendence and convergence. There is no clear divisibility between Dot and the Harmonettes, or between Dot and the audience. They all have a “road from whence they came.” They all have circumstances, pains, and dangers which they have “been through.” Given the quality of that road and the ferociousness of those experiences, their very survival is nothing short of miraculous. When all has been set against them, when everywhere there has been conspiracy to utterly undo them, Jesus has been there, making a way out of no way. Her “I thank You, Jesus,” is as much theirs as it is hers. The release she seeks is as much for them as it is for herself. One woman in the audience begins to scream and shout in high-pitched shrieks. The shrieks are signs of the collective ease to come. Dot ably serves as both midwife and laboring mother, birthing and helping others to birth this intense, highly pleasurable, lingering moment of transcendence. This moment honors the confounding difficulty of their lives as black and overwhelmingly poor Americans, but somehow supersedes it, transforming it finally, if fleetingly, as church people often say, “from test to testimony, and from cross to crown.” Coates would be one of the longest living Golden Age stars. Before she died at the age of 74, she scored appearances in two movies. One was in the Civil Rights film Long Walk Home, starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. Detailing the Montgomery bus boycott, which eventually led to the abrogation of restricted seating for blacks on public transportation, the film led Coates back over familiar ground. The other silver screen appearance was in the film adaptation of the Toni 350 Morrison bestseller Beloved in a role that fit her well. Coates, stern-faced and intense, stands among the circle of praying “mothers” who join forces to stand against the evil Beloved has come to signify. Even in her seventies—even in a movie—Coates is still Dot, and Dot is still no joke. Survived by daughters Cassandra and Carletta, a brother Fred, a sister Naomi, and two granddaughters, Dorothy Love Coates, one-of-a-kind singer, dynamic performer, powerful composer, tireless activist, public servant, and wise citizen of the world, died on April 9, 2002. Conclusion The women of the Golden Age of gospel prove that black women’s intellection can take place wherever black women happen to be. By the very facts of who they were in a racist, sexist, classist society which sought to both dismiss and exploit them in every way imaginable, and because of the resourcefulness and courage with which they found ways to be the artists they were, the women of the Golden Age and the gospel highway deconstruct the notion of the intellectual as a construct of the Academy. Their abundant gifts, unmistakable artistry, transformative innovations--unique calls and responses to the world around them, calls and responses that call to us, prompting a response even today--and bold participation in the conversation between the spiritual and the sensual are reasons enough to honor these women as heroes of black church bohemianism and black female intellectualism. 351 Chapter Four References Boyer, Horace Clarence. How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel Music. Washington: Elliot & Clark, 1995. Cannon, Katie G., Alison P. Gise, and Angela D. Sims. “Womanist Works in Word.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 21.2 (Fall 2005): 135(12). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A13881233 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. The Caravans. “Paved the Way.” Paved the Way. Audio Compact Disc. Malaco, MAL 4542/CTDX 002332. The Clara Ward Singers. Meetin’ Tonight. Audio Compact Disc. Vanguard, B000000EDB, 1994. We’ll Soon Be Done. By the Clara Ward Singers. <http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o28024kQoA>. Added 08 December 2007. Performance. By the Clara Ward Singers. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qti5HHTeOc&feature=related. Added October 2007. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2 nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Coates, Dorothy Love. “Strange Man. The Essential Gospel Sampler. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Columbia, CK 57163/DIDP 080730, 1994. Coates, Dorothy Love and the Gospel Harmonettes. “Medley.” The Great 1955 Shrine Concert. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Specialty, SPCD 7045-2. ---. “Introduction to Swing Down, Sweet Chariot.” “Trouble in the Land Will Soon Be Over.” Gospel at Newport: 1959/63-66. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Vanguard, 77014-2, 1995. Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. Continuum: New York, 2006. 352 The Davis Sisters. The Best of the Famous Davis Sisters of Philadelphia, PA. Audio Compact Disc. Savoy, SCD-7017, 2001. “The Davis Sisters.” Wikipedia. 11 July 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Davis_Sisters.> “Dorothy Love Coates, Singer of Gospel Music, Dies at 74.” New York Times 12 Apr. 2002. 17 July 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E7DC173CF931A2 757A9649C8B63>. Fulton, DoVeanna S. “‘Come through the water, come through the flood’: Black Women Creating Representative Gospel to Remember the Mississippi River Flood of 1927.” Forthcoming in Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Disaster. Eds., Gary R. Webb and E.L. Quarantelli. Philadelphia: PA, XLibris. Harris, Michael W. The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford, 1992. Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. 25 th Anniversary Edition. New York: Limelight, 1997. Nicholson, Virginia. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. On the Right Road. By the Davis Sisters. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ecXHLe7qQq4. Added 31 January 2007. Parry, Albert. Garretts & Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Cosimo, 2003. Phillips, Layli, Kerri Reddick-Morgan, and Dionne Patricia Stephens. “Oppositional Consciousness Within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976-2004.” The Journal of African American History. 90.3 (Summer 2005): 253(25). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A1395717 7&source=ga &us GroupName=lapl&version=. Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005. 353 Santelli, Robert. “Marion Williams: The Genius of Gospel.” Gadfly Online. Nov./Dec/1999. 15 July 2008. <http:www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive marionwilliams.html>. Soriano, Scott. Blog. “The Davis Sisters: The Famous Davis Sisters”. 15 April 2007 <http://crudcrud.blogspot.com>. Stover, Lara. Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge. New York: Bulfinch, 2004. Thomas, Linda E. “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm.” Cross Currents: 48.4 (Winter 1998): 488 (1). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T004&prodld=ITOF&docid=A54086429 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Twelve Gates to the City. By the Davis Sisters. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpM8nYSO5Q&feature=related. Added 19 April 2008. Ward-Royster, Willa, as Told to Toni Rose. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers. Philadelphia: Temple, 1997. York, Adrian. “Keyboard Techniques.” The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music. Ed. Allan Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. 130-140. 354 Conclusion Understanding It Better By and By: Brief Notes on Sketching a Tradition Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you. --Toni Morrison, Sula But whatever [black intellectuals’] final fates, they all turned unreconciled strivings into a source of expressive energy and subject matter…. --Ross Posnock, Color and Culture God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ‘em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like. --Alice Walker, The Color Purple The tradition of modern black female intellectualism is a living body of thought and practice. Though a distinct and defined worldview, it is always under construction, revision, and expansion. This project represents my critical desire to bring together under serious examination in one project both the academic and non- academic strands of the tradition. My approach is one which I hope honors those before me who have done such work, and encourages other scholars and thinkers who may happen across these pages to embrace as wide and as historical a view and appreciation of the tradition as possible. This way, we continue to hone our skills of going back to get those women, who though hindered and often prevented from reading as we read and writing as we write and speaking as we speak, thought nonetheless, and considered life deeply, engaging it on numerous levels—using their very bodies and souls when there was nothing else. 355 I have sought here to trace the way in which black women from every class and segment of society have played a crucial role in the making of the tradition. I have attempted to draw out the way in which they poured their unanswered questions, their hard-won revelations, their overlooked knowledge, their unattended- to suffering, their profound and abiding anxieties, and their highly contested intelligence, beauty, and human value into the tradition. There are many layers, many facets, many aspects of modern black female intellectualism; this dissertation represents my effort to discuss a precious few of them. Although this project ends, for all intents and purposes with the late sixties, I am quite certain that the tradition as based upon the conversation between the spiritual and sensual lasted throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. In fact, to say that the conversation between the spiritual and sensual continued to drive the intellection of black women throughout the twentieth century is to state what is easily presumable. The intriguing part of the matter, therefore, is not that it continued, but rather how it continued. If there were one more chapter I would add to the project, it would be called “A Single Woman Needing to be Two, and Dynamic Duos Longing to Be One.” The “single woman needing to be two” is a reference to Aretha Franklin. In this chapter, I would offer discussion of Franklin as the single most important figure in the twentieth century black female musical canon. Soul was the offspring of gospel, and Franklin became its reigning queen, a coronation which was certainly due to her own status as a child of the gospel Golden Age and a product of the black 356 Baptist church. Franklin most embodies the sensual spirituality of the black female experience; it is in fact what makes Aretha Aretha. To demonstrate, I would point especially to her 1971 album Live at Fillmore West, which is both exceedingly sensual and overwhelmingly spiritual. On this album, Franklin sings her famous hit, “Dr. Feelgood,” a song all about powerful sexual attraction and gratification. In this live performance, she even renders a musical representation of a sexual climax; it is an “Ooh-Oh! Ooh- Oh!” which travels up the musical scale to hit its peak. The audience murmurs knowingly, guffaws, and calls out its immediate comprehension. Very interestingly, Franklin, without pause and without a noticeable transition from singing the praises of Dr. Feelgood, moves into an absolute church moment—complete with rousing talk which approaches a sermonette, Baptist moans, call-and-response interactions with the background singers, and accompaniment from the band which sounds an awful lot like the music of old- fashioned church. (This only makes sense when one considers that the band included gospel and soul legend Billy Preston, whose haunting, deeply affective organ on this record is nothing less than superb.) For all its unorthodoxy, however, Franklin’s church moment is not a tasteless rip-off or an exploitation of the black church culture she knows so well. Rather it is the full application of who she is as an artist and as a woman to the need of the moment. Later on the album she sings a curious little song called “Spirit in the Dark,” which places the common reference to shouting as “getting the spirit” in remarkably 357 close association with those particular pleasures associated with the “dark.” Ray Charles joins her on the reprise to this song, offering his notorious penchant for double entendre; his phrasing works to quite wicked effect. Franklin praises his efforts on this song by dubbing him the “right Reverend Ray Charles.” Like many other women in this project, Franklin has, from her early life, suffered a great deal of heartbreak and loss, and learned, as many black women have, to utilize secrecy and avoidance as a survival strategy. She joins those women whose lives attest to the extreme vulnerability of the black woman—even as they are consistently imaged as the picture of invincibility and fortitude. Over the span of her career, there have been many topics which Franklin simply will not discuss. Ever since a Time magazine article exposed some of the unhappiness in one of her marriages, Franklin has conducted a relationship with all press that is exceptionally guarded and often barely civil. Examined together, Franklin’s life, with its fantastic gifts and tragedies, mirrors that of her godmother Clara Ward to a frightening degree. The “dynamic duos longing to be one” refers to the other site I would investigate: black women’s literature of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The appearance of Toni Morrison’s Sula in 1973 announces the advent of a particular trend in black women’s fiction which would continue to the end of century, even spilling over into the twenty-first. Sula, and many texts which followed, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Shirley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986), April Sinclair’s Coffee 358 Will Make You Black (1995), Devorah Major’s An Open Weave (1995), Diane McKinney-Whetstone’s Tumbling (1996), Dawn Turner Trice’s Only Twice I’ve Wished For Heaven (1997), Bernice McFadden’s Sugar (2001), and Andrea Smith’s Friday Nights and Honeybee’s (2004), among still others, all employ a pairing device wherein two black female characters, who function as distillations of the spiritual and the sensual, are brought into life-changing relationship with each other. The list of black female literary duos which come from just these texts is a long one indeed: Sula and Nel, Celie and Shug, Mattie and Etta, Dessa and Rufel, Jean and Carla, Imani and Amanda, Noon and Ethel, Tempest and Valerie, Pearl and Sugar, and Forestine and Viola. The proliferation of novels in this tradition (within the black female literary and intellectual traditions) reveals the ongoing preoccupation of black women authors and readers with the relationship between the sensual and the spiritual. By writing and reading such novels, black women have revisited again and again an imaginary space in which spirit and sense, drawn as powerful and opposing forces, are brought into direct confrontation with each other, often battling for dominance in the life of the characters. The psychical wholeness of these fictional women predictably hinges on the degree to which they successfully fashion for themselves a way of being which embraces both the spiritual and the sensual. These novels can be said then to posit an ideal black self female self, which they collectively construct as an easeful embodiment of both the spiritual and the sensual. 359 Even beyond this projected extension of this dissertation, there is plenty good room for continued consideration of the conversation between the spiritual and the sensual through the examination of black women’s contributions to dance, photography, fashion, architecture, preaching and liturgy, stage production and performance, other genres of music: blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, soul, neo-soul, hip hop, other genres of literature: poetry, plays, screenplays, biography, autobiography, slave narratives, fiction as neo-slave narratives, and areas of black female intellectualism which lie beyond my solitary ability even to identify and flesh out. Such bounty is, after all, the mark of the tradition, and a very blessed thing indeed. 360 References “The African American Great Migration.” North by South/Great Migrations Page. 19 July 2008. http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/. Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Marita Bonner. New York: Garland, 1998. The Amplified Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random, 1970. ---. Singin’, Swingin’, and Getting Merry Like Christmas. New York: Random, 1976. Baraka, Amiri. “Dutchman.” The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thundermouth Press, 1991. 76-99. Beale, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995. Bonner, Marita. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Eds. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Boy Shouting Hard. By unknown parishioner. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uNku-8ztRos. Added 21 January 2008. Boyer, Horace Clarence. How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel Music. Washington: Elliot & Clark, 1995. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. New York: Harper & Row, 1953. 361 Cannon, Katie G. "Erotic Justice: Authority, Resistance, and Transformation.(Critical Essay)." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23.1 (Spring 2007): 22(4). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009. <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A192900 67&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. ---, Alison P. Gise, and Angela D. Sims. “Womanist Works in Word.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 21.2 (Fall 2005): 135(12). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A13881233 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. The Caravans. “Paved the Way.” Paved the Way. Audio Compact Disc. Malaco, MAL 4542/CTDX 002332. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Greenwood: Westport, 1980. The Clara Ward Singers. Meetin’ Tonight. Audio Compact Disc. Vanguard, B000000EDB, 1994. Performance. By the Clara Ward Singers. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Qti5HHTeOc&feature=related. Added October 2007. Coates, Dorothy Love. “Strange Man. The Essential Gospel Sampler. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Columbia, CK 57163/DIDP 080730, 1994. Coates, Dorothy Love and the Gospel Harmonettes. “Medley.” The Great 1955 Shrine Concert. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Specialty, SPCD 7045-2. ---. “Introduction to Swing Down, Sweet Chariot.” “Trouble in the Land Will Soon Be Over.” Gospel at Newport: 1959/63-66. Various Artists. Audio Compact Disc. Vanguard, 77014-2, 1995. 362 Coleman, Monica A. “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 22:1 (Spring 2006): 85(50). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A14583678 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0 Coleman, Will. “‘Amen’ and ‘Ashe’: African American Protestant Worship and Its West African Ancestor.” Cross Currents. 52.2 (Summer 2002): 158(8). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/informark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T004&prodld=ITOF&docid=A922850 &source=gal &userGroupName=lapl&version=1. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2 nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. ---. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Bevery Guy Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995. Cose, Ellis. “The Black Gender Gap.” Newsweek.com. 3 Mar. 2003. 27 Aug. 2008. http://www.newsweek.com/id/59790/page/1. Cromwell, Adelaide. Afterword. The Living Is Easy. By Dorothy West. 1948. New York, Feminist, 1982. Darden, Robert. People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. Continuum: New York, 2006. The Davis Sisters. The Best of the Famous Davis Sisters of Philadelphia, PA. Audio Compact Disc. Savoy, SCD-7017, 2001. “The Davis Sisters.” Wikipedia. 11 July 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Davis_Sisters.> “Dorothy Love Coates, Singer of Gospel Music, Dies at 74.” New York Times 12 Apr. 2002. 17 July 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A04E7DC173CF931A2 757A9649C8B63>. 363 Dubek, Laura. “White Family Values in Ann Petry’s Country Place.” MELUS. 29.2 (Summer 2004): 55(22). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009. <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=ITOF&docid=A121647124&source=ga e&userGroup ame=lapl&version=1.0>. Dyer, Richard. White. London, Routledge, 1997. Edwards, Korie L. "Race, Religion, and Worship: Are Contemporary African American Worship Practices Distinct?(Report). " The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 48.1 (March 2009): 30(23). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A194929 00&source=ga e&usGroupName=lapl. Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge, 2001. Flynn, Joyce. Introduction. Frye Street & Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner. Eds. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Legal Racing: The Simutexts of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” University of Southern California. Los Angeles, 12 Jun. 2003. Frazier, Valerie. "Domestic Epic Warfare in Maud Martha. " African American Review. 39.1 2 (SpringSummer 2005): 133(9). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A137098 96&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl Friedan, Betty. The Feminist Mystique. 5 th ed. New York: Norton, 2001. Frost, Jennifer. “Hedda Hopper, Hollywood Gossip, and the Politics of Racial Representation in Film, 1946-1948. The Journal of African American History. 93.1 (Winter 2008): 36 (24). Fulton, DoVeanna S. “‘Come through the water, come through the flood’: Black Women Creating Representative Gospel to Remember the Mississippi River 364 Flood of 1927.” Forthcoming in Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Disaster. Eds., Gary R. Webb and E.L. Quarantelli. Philadelphia: PA, XLibris. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1984. 1985. 1986. New York: Bantam, 1988. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 596-611. Grant, Jacquelyn. “Black Theology and the Black Woman.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 320-336. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Harris, Michael W. The Rise of the Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford, 1992. Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. New York: Limelight, 1997. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. 1994. 7 th ed. Cambridge: Harvard, 2003. Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 380-387. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1992. ---. Black Looks: Race & Representation. Boston:South End, 1992. Hurston, Zora Neale. Seraph on the Suwanee. 1948. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. ---. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. 365 James, Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1996. Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kuspit, Donald. “The Unempathic Eye.” Artnet.com Magazine. 11 Aug. 2008. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit10-19-01.asp7. Larsen, Nella. “Quickand.” Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah McDowell. New Jersey: Rutgers, 1998. Lincoln, Eric C. and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Church in the African American Experience. Durham: Duke, 2001. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. McKay, Nellie. Introduction. The Narrows. By Ann Petry. Boston: Mariner, 1999. Meltzer, Milton. “Folk Life in Black and White.” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African-American Themes. 8 Jun. 2005. http://www.nathanielturner.com/folklifeinblackandwhite.htm. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage,1993. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition. Minnesota: Minnesota, 2003. ---. "The Case of Blackness. " Criticism. 50.2 (Spring 2008): 177(42). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 20 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A194621 07&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Murray, Timothy. “Facing the Camera’s Eye: Black and White Terrain in Women’s Drama.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 366 Musser, Judith. “African American Women and Education: Marita Bonner’s Response to the Talented Tenth.” Studies in Short Fiction (Winter 1997). 23 March 2009. Nelson, Timothy J. "Sacrifice of Praise: Emotion and Collective Participation in an African American Worship Service. " Sociology of Religion. 57.n4 (Winter 1996): 379(1). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A191786 2&source=gal &use GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. Nicholson, Virginia. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Omolade, Barbara. “Hearts of Darkness.” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Norton, 1995. 362-378. On the Right Road. By the Davis Sisters. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ecXHLe7qQq4. Added 31 January 2007. Parry, Albert. Garretts & Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Cosimo, 2003. Petry, Ann. Country Place. New York: Signet, 1950. ---. The Street. New York: Mariner, 1991. “The Phallic Woman.” Dictionary of Psychology Online. 2001. 11 Aug. 2008. <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O87-phallicwoman.html>. Phillips, Layli, Kerri Reddick-Morgan, and Dionne Patricia Stephens. “Oppositional Consciousness Within an Oppositional Realm: The Case of Feminism and Womanism in Rap and Hip Hop, 1976-2004.” The Journal of African American History. 90.3 (Summer 2005): 253(25). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC 367 Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodld=ITOF&docid=A1395717 7&source=ga &us GroupName=lapl&version=. Posnock, Ross. Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard, 1998. Pryse, Marjorie. “Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the ‘Ancient Power’ of Black Women.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford, 2004. Reed, Roxanne R. "The Restorative Power of Sound: A Case for Communal Catharsis in Toni Morrison's Beloved.(Critical essay)." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23.1 (Spring 2007): 55(17). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 19 Mar. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=ITOF&docId=A192900 79&source=ga e&us GroupName=lapl&version=1.0>. Rose, Tricia. Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sex and Intimacy. New York: Picador, 2003. The Revised Standard Version Bible. New York: American Bible Society, 1973. Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005. Santelli, Robert. “Marion Williams: The Genius of Gospel.” Gadfly Online. Nov./Dec/1999. 15 July 2008. <http:www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive marionwilliams.html>. “Serena Williams.” The Blacklist: Volume One. Prod. Timothy Greenfield Sanders, Elvis Mitchell, and Michael Slap Sloane. HBO. 25 Aug. 2008. Smith, Barbara. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature & Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 168-185. 368 Smith, Hilda. “Women’s History as Intellectual History.” Journal of Women’s History. 20:1 (Spring 2008): 26-32. Soriano, Scott. Blog. “The Davis Sisters: The Famous Davis Sisters”. 15 April 2007 <http://crudcrud.blogspot.com>. Spillers, Hortense J. “Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. ---, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelley Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan. “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’—Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 99. Stover, Lara. Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge. New York: Bulfinch, 2004. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroines Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford, 1996. ---. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford, 1998. Thomas, Linda E. “Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm.” Cross Currents: 48.4 (Winter 1998): 488 (1). General OneFile. Gale. Los Angeles Public Library. 4 Mar. 2009 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet-IAC Documents&type=retrievetabID=T004&prodld=ITOF&docid=A54086429 &source=gale user GroupName=lapl&version=1.0. Turner, Nathaniel. “A Bio-Literary Sketch.” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African American Themes. 15 Aug. 2007. http://www.nathanielturner.com.gwenbrooksbio.htm. Twelve Gates to the City. By the Davis Sisters. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpM8nYSO5Q&feature=related. Added 19 April 2008. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983. Ward-Royster, Willa. As Told to Toni Rose. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers. Philadelphia: Temple, 1997. 369 Washington, Mary Helen. “The Darkened Eye Restored.” Reading Black, Reading Feminist. ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Penguin, 1990. We’ll Soon Be Done. By the Clara Ward Singers. <http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o28024kQoA>. Added 08 December 2007. West, Cornel. “On Black Sexuality.” The Cornel West Reader. New York: Civitas, 1999. 514-520. West, Dorothy. The Living Is Easy. 1948. New York: Feminist, 1982. Wray, Matt. “White Trash Religion.” White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz. New York: Routledge, 1997. York, Adrian. “Keyboard Techniques.” The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music. Ed. Allan Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. 130-140. 370 Appendix A: Letters from Willa These letters, written after the deaths of both Clara and Gertrude, appear in How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers by Willa Ward. To my sister and friend, Clara From as early as I can remember, the all of you was delicate and frail—even your initiative was far from robust. When you started to sing as a little girl, I was too close and too young to know how very special your talent was. But you inherently knew. When cruel jokes were made by your schoolmates about your “skinny legs and funny face,” you swore through tears and resolution that one day they would look up to you and proudly brag to folks what a great friend you were. Many of those with experience recognized your potential and ready talent as they sought you out for appearances (much to the chagrin of some seasoned singers and pianists who were passed by). In time, your face, spirit, and voice were known and easily recognized the world over…. My little Clara, my fragile little Clara, you boldly took on the world and won it with your glorious presentations of Gospel on musical wings. Between restful intervals, let your spirit soar and, now and then, sing “How I Got Over”—just for me. I miss you dearly. Always, Willa To my mother, Gertrude A.M. Ward I was told as a child that you had suffered a nervous breakdown. It was offered at a time when you were “acting out.” The explanation, I’m sure, was to rationalize your frequent spells of bizarre behavior. Through the years, I have pumped relatives about the intensity and devastation of the illness but never got any concrete information. There were times when the illness theory was easier to accept than just plain meanness. What prompted the wild mood swings will never be resolved; however, the solid facts of your remarkable accomplishments are indisputable. Whatever the force that drove you, it took you to regions and heights that many singers are still capitalizing on today. You took everything past the limits that society had set. You drew your own lines, created your own perimeters—which, from time to time, you yourself bounded over. The nature of genius is vastly misunderstood by the masses. The jump-started kick-in place for those so endowed is well beyond where most of us have already done our all and quit. Your cutting edge sliced open a path of acceptance of Gospel music that is ever widening, ever building on the foundation you laid down. No, Ma, you are not to be explained. In the final analysis, you are to be praised. Love, Willa 371 Appendix B: Correspondence with “Vanoscellos” To: Vanoscellos From: f**a****r******* Subject: Hello Date: 22 July 2008 Just wanted to thank you for your text postings, especially those concerning the Golden Age and the Davis Sisters. I am currently writing a dissertation chapter dedicated to women of the Golden Age--those who traveled on the "gospel highway." I focus in particular on Ruth "Baby Sis" Davis, Clara Ward, and Dorothy Love Coates. I have found your comments helpful and enlightening, and have quoted you, giving proper credit, of course!! It's good to have those firsthand witnesses to the Golden Age around so that those days can live again through your memories and experiences. Sincerely, f**a****r******* To: f**a****r******* From: Vanoscellos Subject: RE: Hello Date: 23 July 2008 lord child, you mean in the sunset of my life, i’m going to be famous! you young folks are going to cause me to have a coronary! (LOL)....but in all seriousness, the three women you focused on, you couldn't have chosen better candidates. the roads travelled by these gospel titans are legendary and groundbreaking! all three i had the pleasure of seeing perform in their prime and at the height of their careers. dorothy, only on a few occasions was i in her presence. clara, i saw numerous times on a social level, but we weren't considered close girlfriends, but she was very nice. mother ward kept a close hold on clara! how she got away long enough to tangle with CL Franklin, i’ll never know....and last but not least, Ruth was a dear personal friend that i knew and loved for nearly twenty years. IMO, Ruth was the best of the best! and that includes the FAMED MAHALIA JACKSON! of course i’m biased, but no one could move me as Ruth did!......now, i don't know if its true or not, but, i am told that just before she walked into the celestial arms of a welcoming saviour, while in the hospital, just days before she passed, legend has it that she mustered up enough strength to rise from her sick bed and belt out the immortal "HE’LL UNDERSTAND AND SAY WELL DONE” one last time……..how true? i’ll never know. but you gotta admit! it’s a damn good story! best wishes with your book.......mama van

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Marks of the fetish: twenty-first century (mis)performances of the black female body

PDF

Celestial bodies: Black women, Hollywood, and the fallacy of stardom

PDF

A peculiar paradise: tribal place, property and the peripatetic tradition in African American literature

PDF

Protest of the oppressed: a case study on Black female administrators’ experiences in K-12 education from student to leadership

PDF

Beyond commitments: a qualitative examination of the persistent disparities faced by Black women in executive leadership roles post the 2020 crisis and beyond

PDF

The underrepresentation of African Americans in information technology: an examination of social capital and its impact on African Americans’ career success

Asset Metadata

Creator Holt, Shakira C. (author)

Core Title On speaking terms: spirituality and sensuality in the tradition of modern black female intellectualism

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/29/2009

Defense Date 05/06/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American studies,African American women's literature and music,Ann Petry's Country Place,Black Bohemianism,black female intellectualism,Clara Ward,Dorothy Love Coates,Dorothy West's The Living is Easy,gospel music,Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha,Marita Bonner,OAI-PMH Harvest,Ruth "Baby Sis" Davis,shouting,Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kaplan, Carla (committee chair), Briggs, Sheila (committee member), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Roman, David (committee member)

Creator Email bluepapillon22@aol.com,shakira.holt@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2422

Unique identifier UC1496710

Identifier etd-Holt-3079 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-576869 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2422 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Holt-3079.pdf

Dmrecord 576869

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Holt, Shakira C.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu