Three Women and a Suitcase (1930s)

From the Charles “Teenie” Harris Collection (via Omega418’s photostream again – a wonderful resource)

Doesn’t this picture just make you wish you were going wherever these three women were going? Love the hat on the seated one, too. In fact, have those styles come back into fashion yet? If not, they  should.

What an amazing archive of work. Here is one collection of Harris’ photos – each picture a part of telling our stories. In his work he didn’t just photograph celebs but also working-class/blue collar people, the poor, the middle class, and children. In other words, a full-spectrum of lived lives – more than just a single story.

Don’t speak too soon: I’ve been reading this clown for months now and this is probably the only time he doesn’t soak a discussion about Civil War history with melodrama about slavery.

Dog forbid one should clog up discussions of Civil War history with “melodrama” about slavery.

No link. I did some looking around the forum where I found this (following a link from a link to something I was interested in) and it’s not a place I would send either of my two readers to, or anyone else.

Oh, the “clown” he is talking about is Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who has been having some amazing discussions on his blog about Civil War history, the characters… and what I think makes these folks hopping mad – the primary cause.

Disney, in the planning and making of the movie featuring their first Black princess, tried to please the wrong demographic. The story would have made a good second, or maybe third, Black princess movie, but for the first? No. For the first film, they needed a real, capital “P” Princess (said, in my mind, with the British pronunciation. Which sounds far more official.)

This isn’t a review of a year old film, though. In fact, before I sat down to write I had no intentions of mentioning anything at all about frogs, princesses or films. I just wanted to highlight what I think is a really nice photo of a young Black girl.

Except. The photo, on the flickr site where I found it, is titled “Boogie Woogie Girl”, maybe because of the hair. I don’t think the person meant anything by it; this photo set seems to be lovingly made up of vintage photos of Black women in all their variety. Still, this title rubbed me the wrong way. The effort to tease out just why sent my mind whirring off to mainstream cultural views of young (and old) Black women, Snow White, and then on a beeline straight to the Princess and the Frog. Simple, no, when you see the progression?

She’s lovely, isn’t she, the girl in the photo. Sweet smile, bright eyes and that hair! It was picture day and we all know what that means. Momma probably sat her down on the kitchen chair and dragged the sides up into the clip or rubber band, teasing the front then working each curl to make it lie perfectly against the next, before making sure the cascading curls in the back were just fluffy enough – but not too much. I think the lipstick was the addition of whoever tinted the photo – either the original photographer or someone in later years, but it looks good.

She just looks like a nice young girl. And that, I think, is why the photo title hit the wrong nerve. Because, in traditional U.S. and colonial culture, young Black girls (and boys) are barely allowed childhood, let alone niceness and innocence -,even when they are small children.

For instance, not long after Katrina I was reading a post, I think about how the recovery was going, on one of the White feminist blogs. One nice, liberal White woman commented, saying she was a resident of New Orleans and that the schools would be starting back up soon. Because of where she lived and how the school system had been jerry rigged together, she was going to have to send her children – kindergarteners – to a kindergarten that had almost all Black children in it. She was worried, you see, for her children’s safety because her little snowflakes would be surrounded by all these children who were – not to be racist or anything – Black! What should she do? And, she asked, was it racist even to worry and to wonder? 

Many of the other commenters gave her advice and consoled her and stuff (mainly about being a victim of the storm), but not one said “Yes, that IS racist to worry that these Black babies are all violent criminals or something.” I finally signed on and said so… I would point you to the comment but the site had some issues and lost all their comments. When they were finally restored mine was not among them. A glitch, I’m sure.

Anyway, back to the young girl and Snow White and the Princess Frog. Snow White really has little to do with anything except that the film came out in 1937 and it’s entirely possible that this young girl saw it and instead of a hoochie momma or a boogie woogie girl, imagines herself a princess. Well, sure, she doesn’t resemble Snow White at all, except for maybe the hair but, particularly back in those days, if one is Black and is going to identify with a Disney character, it will likely be a princess and not one of Disney’s racist caricatures of Black people.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if, even today, if a young Black girl (or boy) is going to identify with a Disney princess that it won’t be Cinderella or Snow White or someone, instead of Tiana or whatever her name was (I liked the name they were originally going to use, Maddy, better, personally.) Why? Because they were real princesses. And yes, looking at Disney movies from a feminist prospective the princess movies are dreadful, dreadful things, which must be placed within their sexist context and all that. But, as I’ve mentioned before, little Black girls have no such context, in the mainstream consciousness, of being pampered and coddled and innocent and protected. Of course many had those things within their own family circles, where to momma and daddy and all the extended family, they have always been princesses. But you know how things go – few things are real (growing up) unless everyone else knows it.

After all, many feminists are not kicking back against the actuality of all those things in their lives but at the perception of (White) women as helpless and needing protection and extra care for their feelings and all that. This is not something that Black girl children have had to fight against in popular consciousness because they are not portrayed as any of those things. This is why, in my view, the Princess and the Frog was targeted toward the wrong demographic. Whoever it was targeted to – and I suspect I know – it wasn’t to an ignored young girl who had hoped to finally have her place on the pedestal.

STOP WHAT YOU”RE DOING AND APPLY FOR —>PBS Diversity & Innovation Fund

Didn’t I tell you to stop what you are doing? I meant it. Stop what you’re doing and sit down and get to writing. In fact, we might just shut down this blog from August 15th through September so that each and every one of my readers or group of readers will have time to submit their proposals to the PBS Diversity & Innovation Fund. They are handing out $375,000 an episode to develop a new prime time series for PBS and I want Black women all up under and THROUGH these proposals. Every time they open a new proposal I want a Black woman’s name attached.

So quit yer yapping about how crappy Debra Lee’s content is over there at Black Exploitation Television and get ta drafting you application. I’ll be submitting at least a half dozen ideas. Did I mention they are going to hand out over a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS PER EPISODE? So no more bootstrapping. No more being camera operator, lighting crew audio crew, editor, craft services et al. I could actually HIRE PEOPLE! HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!!!!!

Sounds exciting! There is more there, including offers to help find partners to work with and such. Are you going to try for it? Am I?

Tumblr! I’ve discovered that a lot of people I know but who haven’t been updating their sites have apparently moved over to Tumblr. I have a page there, too… but since the service is not intuitive for me there is nothing on it. Plus, I am shy. Anyway, though… some stuff friends have found.

When I first started reading/chatting with feminists online, I noticed that some would often use book titles and authors as shorthand for a set of beliefs or theory or whatever – mention Suzie Bright and right away those in-the-know have an idea of where you stand on this or that; a mention of Gloria Anzuldua leaves a completely different impression. Anyway, all of that, of course, leaves non Women’s Studies people (like me) scrambling to figure out what folks are talking about.

Well, no excuses now not to become familiar with this famous text, at least, as it is available for download, woo hoo! Via Donna, from The Silence of Our Friends :
Book: This Bridge Called My Back

First published in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back has been out of print since the expiration of its contract with Third Woman Press in 2008. Hopefully the digital copy will find its way to those who will circulate it and possibly build up pressure to have it printed again.

URL Set:

Introduction: http://www.mediafire.com/?e2taou2lzzl

Children Passing In the Streets: http://www.mediafire.com/?metyjnzwmji

Entering the Lives of Others: http://www.mediafire.com/?immkmkzzyzz

And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You: http://www.mediafire.com/?hn4fuom1q1b

Between The Lines: http://www.mediafire.com/?wn3x3zl4zau

Speaking In Tongues: http://www.mediafire.com/?zgtlrycmjyn

El Mundo Zurdo: http://www.mediafire.com/?mwdd2wz2oyh

Biographies: http://www.mediafire.com/?j5mymwunezy

Front/Back Cover: http://www.mediafire.com/?zumnmytgkgt

enjoy,

chris

I have more cool stuff but they’ll have to wait for another post. I need time to write thoughts about them and I have none now. No time, that is, not no thoughts – got too many of those.

No, it’s more the question I’ve been asking myself lately as I sit here looking at the blank screen day after day, realizing I feel I have nothing of worth to write about. “They” say to write what you know – and I wonder, yeah… but what is that? What do I know? Except that’s not really what is being asked, though, is it.

Everyone who has lived, loved, worked, thought knows something. Very few get through life completely untouched by some sort of knowledge – no matter how debatable that fact seems when you come across certain people.

What I am really asking myself is “How much are you willing/have been willing to share of what you know?” And the answer to that, if I am being honest, is often “very little”. There are people who I’ve known for years – friends! -  who know virtually nothing about me beyond what is in the present because other than cute little reminisces of this and that, I don’t talk about myself (even though it seems like that’s all I do, sometimes).

And why is that, I wonder? Is it that I fear being cast out of some community of people who’ve lived “normal” lives with storybook childhoods? I don’t think so. I’ve lived long enough, and listened and read enough to know that storybook’s are often incomplete. And my life, my world, compared to some has been downright boring. So, it’s not that.

I think it’s habit. Mental illness is much more understood these days, but as a child with a mentally ill mother I learned early not to talk about myself, to keep my own counsel, to protect and deflect, to seemingly answer questions and then immediately turn the focus back on the questioner. This is not hard to do, as most people love to talk about themselves, to be understood, and I love listening to other’s stories (most times). This trait would make me a pretty good chronicler of someone else’s life, but it makes for being a crappy witness to my own past.

So, what to do. My mother said something the other day – just one word, which I don’t think she realized she said and which I plan to write about later, that made me realize how much of my reticence is about appearances, about race, expectations and just plain old habit. And how important it is, for me as a growing writer, to get out the crowbar and start prying open the vaults – filled with little enough though they may be.

And yes, I know I’ve said before, in one way or another, that I was going to do this, to open up, but I think I had to get to a place of understanding, first, why everything was closed in the first place.

Now that I’m starting to do that, to understand the why’s of silence, I think I’m about ready to begin to tell tales.

[image at top is my mother, me and one of my brothers. Where my other brother was during this photo is a whole ‘nother story to tell.]

Who was she? The credits say “Mulatto ex-slave in her house near Greensboro, Alabama, May 1941”, and I’m not sure why they have told us that she is mulatto, but then this “colorism” business that still grips and poisons didn’t come breeding alone out of the earth, more like it was cultivated, nurtured with far more attention and care than the lives it crushed underneath as if they were the weeds.

Did she make the quilts? Crabbed and scarred hands pulling the threaded needle through scraps of this and that, I’ve seen these old women (and young) place each piece with meaning, and some with none at all beyond that the shape or the colors fit. No bright hues here in the photo that became a work of art as soon as she sat her old bones down in the rocking chair and competed for focal point with the bright, insulating newspapers with the little blond boy front and off-center.

Who put them there? Did she paste them one on top of the other whenever she got some to keep out the cold that was always finding a new way in, is that how it works? or did she or someone spruce up the walls for the photo shoot and whose idea was that, anyway?

She’s looking to the side or maybe just not at the camera, almost not there except that of course she is, she is, but it reminds me of that look we get sometimes when we’re in a situation that we don’t want to be in but have to endure for whatever reason, maybe because of a power that might have nothing to do with us or little for us that decides for us whether we want whatever they are offering or not.

I don’t know but did you notice the dingy patch up on the wall toward the ceiling? Maybe it couldn’t be reached or paper ran out or time like when someone comes to the door when you are not quite ready to let them in. But sometimes they come in anyway.

She is beautiful and as art it works, this mulatto woman who was an ex-slave sitting in her bedroom and sitting room with the bright new contrast to her old wood slat bed and old quilts and old body and old chair – oh,  is that dingy patch on the wall maybe a small, stubborn rebellion? – a picture taken in 1941 when she had a designation and a color but apparently still no name, it’s a shame I can’t just enjoy it, I wanted to do that, but I can’t help it I just have questions, questions, questions.

Like – in this carefully cleaned and appointed room, why is there a padlock sitting on the empty chair?

Not surprisingly, there has been a bit of controversy over the name from the beginning, with both white and Black people objecting to it for one reason or another. Right at the top of his blog page he has an explanation – “Why The Name” – with a video of Malcolm X giving his explanation of the difference between a field negro and a house negro, in today’s world. He also expands a bit on his thinking and who he designates as which, and why,  in this post he wrote a couple of years ago, Field-Negro 101.

So. I’ve never had much of a problem with the name or the explanation; I don’t really now, in fact, it’s just that… well, I’ve had cause to wonder lately if the entire field vs house negro bit didn’t come from the same poisoned well as “Mammy” and “Sapphire” and “Uncle Tom” and so on.

So much of our history that we were taught, Black history in particular, has turned out to be just lies. Some that perhaps based on a kernel of truth – after all, I imagine that at some point in time, and in some place, there was a slave or few who did fit the Mammy stereotype. Those same types exist today in all cultures, and I imagine they existed then. And some who embodied what we now call “Uncle Tom’s” (apparently the Uncle Tom in Beecher Snow’s book does not exactly resemble what the stereotype has grown to be known as), because they too exist today, across the board.

So, too, I’m sure there were “house negroes” who were more concerned with the master’s comfort and welfare, and the house and what measure of comfort and safety it brought the enslaved person, than they were with the welfare of their fellow captives – but,  well… did it hold true in great numbers?

I have no real idea. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research and reading about Black folks in the pre-Civil war south, and the lives of slaves and so on. Absolutely fascinating reading, some of it; no matter how dry the words that chronicled some of these lives, the just unimaginable spirit and determination forces its way through. So much I didn’t know; so much I have yet to learn.

What got me started on this research – because, shamefully, I really wasn’t all that interested before, it all seemed so one dimensional and boring, the way it was often presented – was a couple of paragraphs in the family tree book about my great-great-great (maybe another great) Uncle Louis. I’d read these paragraphs a few times – three of them, no more than 30 words altogether, that told a terrible, tragic, triumphant story, no less compelling for all that it was so short.  Whenever I’d go through the book to look up dates or to get the name of someone else that maybe I could Google, I’d glance over those words and wince a bit, but then move on to someone more modern.

If you had asked me, I would have said that of course I knew what those three paragraphs said – after all, had I not read them many (or at least a few) times? Any missing details my mind could supply, for this is a story often told, of the horrors of slavery and its effects.

His story in brief (because that is all I have is brief) is that of one of the youngest of maybe 17 children, some of whom were sold away, Louis was born into slavery and grew up in captivity. He was, apparently – and understandably – adamantly opposed to being in bondage and attempted to escape almost continuously. Each time he was either captured and brought back, or returned on his own. After his twelfth escape, he was captured and beaten so severely that he was bedridden for weeks, unable to move for part of the time. After he recovered he was finally as meek and mild as the slaveholder could have wished. A completely broken man, it was felt – until his escaped a thirteenth time and this time made it to Canada.

Terrible, fascinating story that I thought I knew the whole of. I could imagine him trudging through the fields, despairing, burdened, working from sun up to sun down, day by day, until it finally got to be too much and he just took off. Over and over again.

Except there was one part of his story that I kept missing, each time I read it, because (I guess) it didn’t fit in with my world view, with my preconceptions of both slaves and slavery. It wasn’t till I went to write it up for a family tree site that I finally noticed what I had been missing.

See,  Louis escaped the last time by making friends with some sort of clerk’s daughter, gaining access to blank passes, and then he forged himself a pass of some sort, that somehow got him into Canada, or at least to a place where he could initiate the journey there (maybe the Underground Railroad).

Anyway, he could forge this pass because he could read and write. And he could read and write, and do it well, because he was …. a secretary. The slaveholder’s secretary, in fact. A pencil pusher in the big house. A house Negro if ever there was one, I’d say. And yet he escaped, time and time again.

This completely upended my worldview. I had, it seems, accepted it as a given (were we not taught this?) that slaves who worked in the house – while they may have had a few discomforts just by virtue of being slaves and being at the beck and call of everyone in the house and liable to be hit by any white person in the house, including small children – were happy to stay there in relative comfort and looked down on the field workers. Oh, some may have helped by stealing food for those in the field shacks or something, but for the most part they valued their place and would do little to jeopardize it.

But how do we know that any of that is true? Again, I’m sure that there is at least a kernel of truth there, but how do we know it was not the other way around? That the majority of those in the house preferred not to be there, or to be in bondage anywhere, and it’s the few that were wedded to the house, the comfort and the masters? Could this not too be a lie, meant, like so many, to make us feel bad about our Blackness, our history and those who peopled it? I’d like to find out.

As I said, I don’t have any problem with Field Negro’s name, or why he uses it, or anything like that, in general, but I think it may possibly be unfair to the people it references. Sure my uncle’s story is just one story, but I’m just one random person wandering through her family tree who has found an unlikely hero; I think there are many, many more out there.

homework by Harry Herman Roseland

I wonder if anyone has invented, yet, a screen lock for writers and others who may need it. I know there is various software that mimics a typewriter (some with no backspace) and others like jdarkroom and such that claim to eliminate distractions (I tried that for a bit, hated it) but what I need – and I’m sure I’m not the only one – is something where I can voluntarily lock myself in, so to speak. Open the writing thing (Word, blog, whatever) and click something to lock the screen there. Maybe for a set period before one can opt out. No wandering off to check email, or to google this or that or to read blogs or news pages or anything, just for that period of time, until the lock releases (or, if you’ve gone past times up, you release it yourself).

I think it could work, but those little netbooks are so small and light, I think more people would be tempted to throw them across the room in frustration, after being locked in, so maybe not.

Besides, there is still nothing (beyond willpower! yes) to stop one from wandering into the kitchen for a snack or checking the tv and watching some insipid show for “just a few minutes” or deciding the cat looks lonely all curled up there napping by herself or a gazillion other things. Sigh.

It’s the vein thing I have the most problems with, I think. You know -

“ There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
- Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

(Whozzat?)

I am notoriously closed mouthed, keeping my own counsel and not really letting go. There’s nothing wrong with that (says I) but well, veins carry life’s blood and to get to where I need to be to do what I need to do, I need to let loose of a little of that. Maybe I can start with pricking a finger, then work up to the whole wrist slitting thing.

Okay, here’s a drop – though I am fascinated with this era and can’t wait to read more and more, I started on this journey down histories pathways very reluctantly. Very reluctantly. I wanted to start reading/writing about what I knew about my family anywhere but here. It’s just that my Uncle Louis kept bugging me; for months, he just would not leave me alone, telling me over and over that if I wanted to understand this particular person or thing and their actions, I first needed to understand him. And more.

Now, we all have importunate relatives who want to direct our lives and our work but, see, Uncle Louis is just a tad different, seeing how he has been dead for over 200 years and really, how may have relatives like that? I sure didn’t, before this.

There’s a story there, this should be written but have I done it? Well, sort of – one of my many, many “drafts” which never get finished. I’m tempted to delete them all and start fresh. Might keep the titles and make notes to remember what it was I wanted to write about in the first place, like index cards, but there are always new ideas and things that want writing about.

Like stories of growing up, something Amy Tan (and others) recommended to do. I wonder if it’s an easier subject when one is younger and thus closer to the time period? There are some memories that have stuck with me over time – others are completely lost, though some may return if I do start writing the stories down.

We’ll see.

*And, of course, the “blank page” part is no longer true either, because, well… I have written.

Reading lately about the underground railroad (great stuff!) and other things dealing with the antebellum South, and I got to wondering…  when enslaved persons ran away, how did people recognize them?

For instance:

advertisement for runaway slave (click to enlarge)

This says, in part- $150 REWARD

Ranaway from the subscriber, on the night of Monday the 11th July, a negro man named TOM, about 30 years of age, heavy in the chest, several of his jaw teeth out; and upon his body are several old marks of the whip, one of them straight down his back. He took with him a quantity of clothing and several hats.

And here’s one for a woman:

advertisement for emily (click to enlarge)

Says, in part:

100 Dollars REWARD!

Ranaway from the subscriber on the 27th of July, my Black Woman named EMILY, seventeen years of age, well grown, black color, has a whining voice. She took with her one dark calico and one blue and white dress, a red corded gingham bonnet, a striped shawl and slippers.

So what I’m wondering is… would you recognize your own mother or father, brother or sister from these descriptions? How in the world did the kidnappers (perfect strangers, mostly)  find black people – sometimes halfway across the country, living in communities with many other black people – from descriptions like this?

I doubt I would. Yet slave holders and kidnappers trusted and depended on advertisements like this (very rarely were there sketches appended, so far as I know) and sometimes people who had been living free for years were kidnapped and returned into bondage because someone recognized them from the descriptions. Or thought they did, at least.

I hope Tom and Emily made it into Canada or somewhere else safe. If they (at their separate times) made it across the Ohio river into Ohio, from Kentucky, at least they had a small chance.

Some of the stories are amazing. The people are amazing. I’ll be writing about them in one way or another this month and probably beyond. There is a lot of material and my hope is that writing it out will help to settle it in my mind, particularly since there are other books to get through. I still don’t have the sense that I need of  knowing, of being able to walk the paths that my ancestors walked, or to even envision what the paths looked like. So, more to go. More to read.

Actually, I think maybe I am going about this all wrong. Well, not *all* wrong, but wrong enough. I have a few books on slavery and such checked out at the moment, some of them I’ve even renewed – after three weeks already of not reading them. One, Blassingame’s “The Slave Community” I rushed through this weekend – interrupting my reading of Bound for Canaan -because someone had it on request so I couldn’t renew it, but reading at that speed doesn’t allow for reflection and greater absorbsion. I do recall most of it, but it feels incomplete so I may have to check it out again in a few weeks.

Anyway, instead of just reading one right after another, probably it would be best to just read one, absorb it, write about it, look up related things and get to know *that* topic well, before moving on to the next. It might help me also imagine and write out or plot out scenes or chapters and such, too, so that I keep the book writing goal in mind.