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“Children of those who chose to survive”:  
Neo-Slave Narrative Authors Create Women of Resistance

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by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu

As early as 1972 Alice Walker noted the significance of America’s slave past as a rich source of inspiration for black women:

. . . There is not simply a new world to be gained, there is an old world that must be reclaimed . . . [I]t is a great time to be a woman.  A wonderful time to be a black woman, for the world, I have found, is not simply rich because from day to day our lives are touched with new possibilities, but because the past is studded with sisters who, in their time, shone like gold. 

They give us hope, they have proved the splendor of our past, which should free us to lay claim to the fullness of the future.  (In Search 36-37)

It was not until more than a decade later, however, that black women writers embraced American slavery as a topic for their new fiction, and coinciding with the discovery of new subject matter came a new fictional form – the neo-slave narrative.¹  Although they employ conventions of the nineteenth-century slave narrative, many neo-slave narrative authors are breaking with tradition by according strong female characters a place alongside heroic males.  It has become the project particularly of black women writers working in the 1980s and 1990s to re-inscribe history from the point of view of the black woman, most specifically from the point of view of the nineteenth-century enslaved mother.  The new form is an important development in American literary history, a development with serious revisionist intent at its foundation.  The neo-slave narrative opens up a new way of reading and re-reading America’s slave past, as the perspective of the enslaved mother enriches our overall understanding of slavery.

The challenge of recognizing and liberating the enslaved mother’s voice may best be viewed not as a feminist enterprise, but rather as a womanist project.² Whereas feminism prioritizes gender above other marginalizing factors, womanism seeks to balance racial, gender, and class/social differences while recognizing and respecting individual difference; womanists, like the neo-slave narrative writers, emphasize wholeness.  The neo-slave narrative, as it is being crafted by writers such as Sherley Anne Williams (Dessa Rose, 1986), Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987), and J. California Cooper (Family, 1990) celebrates creative female energy and the sense of empowerment that comes with acknowledging a meaningful sense of self.  In Dessa Rose, a pregnant runaway kills white men “cause she can” (13) and discovers that fighting for her child allows the rediscovery of the human side of herself that slavery has sought to eradicate.  In Beloved, the mother who kills her child rather than see her remanded to slavery makes peace with the past and finally recognizes that she is her own “best thing” (272).  And in Family, Cooper deflects the violence which characterizes slavery (and, by extension, the neo-slave narrative) and focuses instead on family unity, repositioning our customary association between blood and violence by placing a new emphasis on “blood” as kin.  At first the notion of family implies the kinship shared between a mother and her daughter, but in the embracing final words of the narrative Cooper extends her message to include the entire human “family.”  These novels insist that we view slavery as dehumanizing, but they also insist that we not overlook the enslaved persons’ fundamental humanity and the triumph of reclaiming that humanity.

In her 1985 article, “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English,” Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi acknowledges the tremendous responsibility the black woman writer has shouldered: “In helping to liberate the black race through her writing she is aiding the black woman who has been and is still concerned with the ethics of surviving rather than with the aesthetics of living” (79).  According to Ogunyemi, the black woman writer deals with issues arising not only from her race and her gender but, in keeping with her goal of empowering the race, traditionally has incorporated cultural, national, economic, and political concerns into her work as well – in short, she dramatizes a fuller sense of humanity that is consonant with womanist philosophy.

Sherley Anne Williams, a self-professed womanist scholar, argues in her 1972 work Give Birth to Brightness that it is imperative for blacks to acknowledge their slave past as an integral part of themselves: “ . . . Black is an unyielding knot which ties them to the first Africans who stepped off the ship at Jamestown to become the first Black slaves in the United States” (216).  Contemporary black literature, Williams maintains, is a “continuing conversation with Black people . . . to communicate with, often to educate Black people, to interpret their common and individual experiences, to reveal the beauty and the pain, the ugliness and the joy of four hundred years of living in the New World, what this has done to Black people, and, most importantly, what it can and does mean to them” (18-19).  The political nature of Williams’ argument is obvious – that this literature has the power to effect change – but the means by which Williams suggests change is radical: the dramatization of the beauty and the pain, the ugliness and the joy will enable everyday blacks to search for and to find themselves – their pasts and their futures – in the literature they read.  The women writing neo-slave narratives, including Sherley Anne Williams, are indeed concerned both with the past and with the future; their special talent rests in their ability to use the past and the treasures they uncover there to evoke the promise of the future.

The neo-slave narrative, then, is a blueprint for love of self and love of struggle – two of the characteristics of womanism Alice Walker documents in her Preface to In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1984).  Walker admonishes a womanist to love both herself and others, she beseeches her to be “committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female,” and she demands that she be both inquisitive and brave (xi-xii).  These are indeed the hallmarks of the heroines of the neo-slave narratives.

That slavery has become a popular topic for late twentieth-century African American writers of both genders cannot be disputed; the past, always a rich source of subject matter for black artists, has recently presented itself in a new way – as an urgent, enigmatic puzzle holding tantalizing clues to identity for a people to whom self-definition has become increasingly important.  Black women writers working creatively with America’s slave past are actually repositioning American written history to ensure proper recognition of the enslaved woman as a vivid and viable figure who contributed significantly to the communities of which she was a member, including, and perhaps most importantly, the enslaved black family.  They have responded to Sherley Anne Williams’ call, in her 1990 essay “Some Implications of Womanist Theory,” to speak not only “sister to sister” but to become more inclusive, to enlarge the community and dialogue surrounding their work.  What I wish to speculate upon here is the impact, firstly, of contemporary African American writers, especially black women writers, who are breaking the silence which has previously characterized black literature with regard to the subject of slavery, and, secondly, of the neo-slave narrative itself.  In particular, I will address three questions: What contribution have late twentieth-century black women writers made to the overall literary achievement of black women writers?  What place does the neo-slave narrative occupy in the oeuvre of twentieth-century American literature?  And, finally, how does the perspective of the mother change our overall understanding of slavery and its impact on contemporary African American society?

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In “Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women’s Fiction,” Barbara Christian asserts that, “The extent to which Afro-American women writers in the seventies and eighties have been able to make a commitment to an exploration of self, as central rather than marginal, is a tribute to the insights they have culled in a century or so of literary activity (page).³  Beginning with a brief examination of early novels such as Iola Leroy (Frances E.W. Harper; 1892) and Contending Forces (Pauline Hopkins; 1900), Christian illustrates her contention that the primary impetus these writers and their contemporaries felt was to challenge negative stereotypes of black women rather than to understand themselves (and their characters) as women.  This tendency to concentrate on creating almost unrealistically positive images of black female characters persisted through the 1940s, although Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) may be regarded as exceptions.

Christian identifies the publication of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) as a significant achievement in African American women’s fiction.  She celebrates the novel as the first in which a black female author depicts a female character seen as living an ordinary life: “[w]hat Brooks emphasizes in the novel is Maud Martha’s awareness that she is seen as common (and therefore unimportant), and that there is so much more in her than her ‘little life’ will allow her to be” (176).  Perhaps most directly influenced by Maud Martha is Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), significant for its thoughtful presentation of a black woman as mother and for its sensitive portrayal of the intricacies of black mother/daughter relationships.  Together, these works may be viewed as being in the forefront of a new movement aimed at defining the black woman in her own right, a challenge black women novelists writing in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s fully embraced.

One work which Christian neglects to mention in her overview is Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), arguing instead that black writers were focusing their energies during the 1960s on poetry and drama.⁴  However, Jubilee is an invaluable work linking contemporary novels and the American slave narrative tradition.  Walker places history at the center of her narrative, thereby often obscuring the personal story of her foremother that she set out to write.  It is an odd irony – Walker in 1966 published a novel inspired by and fairly accurate in its depiction of her own family’s history in America; yet, the work itself retains the flavor of stock historical novels, epic in scope and inevitable in its personification of the heroine as having universal significance.  In spite of the novel’s shortcomings, Walker must be acknowledged for the contribution she made to black women’s literature – namely, the imagining of an enslaved female as speaking subject.

Having prepared for her analysis of contemporary black women writers, Christian differentiates between the literature produced in the 1970s and that produced in the early years of the 1980s, the time of Christian’s writing.  She asserts that as writers began to explore the themes of self-definition and female empowerment, they targeted black-perpetuated racism and sexism, suggesting that reform must begin from within the community and that reform would have a direct impact upon the quality of life black women were experiencing. 

Novels such as The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison; 1970), Corregidora (Gayl Jones; 1975), and The Salt Eaters (Toni Cade Bambara; 1980) illustrate black women writers’ increasing concern with self-love, survival, and women’s community – womanist themes previously unexplored but which beckoned invitingly, for they appeared to hold forth the promise of both personal and political change.

Even an analysis of the development of black women’s writing as a body of work as careful as Barbara Christian’s does not anticipate the gusto with which black women writers, as they moved into the 1980s, embraced these themes.  Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) received unprecedented attention and admiration, winning the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and selling over one million copies.  Additionally, the novel, with its epistolary form and heavy reliance on rural folk speech to tell the story of black sharecroppers, became an immediate box-office success when it was released as a film in 1985 and garnered eleven Oscar nominations; it soon became the most talked-about, controversial film of the 1985-86 season for the issues it brought before the American people.

Perhaps most significant about The Color Purple and works which followed it is the fact that they begin to explore the black woman’s past as the source of her future.  Over the course of the narrative, Celie must come to know herself by uncovering, acknowledging, and coming to terms with her past, a process which includes her growing knowledge of Africa⁵ and the twofold reconciliation she experiences – with the children she was forced to give up and with her own creative side.  The novel ends with Celie’s family reunion on the Fourth of July, Africans and African Americans celebrating together the privilege they share of being related and knowing each other.  “Matter of fact, I think this is the youngest us ever felt” (251), concludes Celie, giving testimony to the fact that by discovering the past and her own identity within the larger community, Celie has finally empowered herself to begin the process of living.

Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) are two other recent novels which indicate black women writers’ growing awareness of the past as vital to their characters’ development.  Marshall’s protagonist, Avey Johnson, flees the luxurious cruise ship on which she has been vacationing and finds herself in an unanticipated search for her heritage on the tiny island of Carriacou.  There she remembers her great-aunt Cuney’s tales of the African Ibos brought in chains to the New World as well as Cuney’s admonition never to forget her given name.  After participating in the Beg Pardon ceremony, Avey renews her relationship with herself and her past and returns to the United States determined to live her past honorably by educating others, hoping to touch at least a few lives as her own has been touched.  Likewise, Gloria Naylor creates in Mama Day a world removed from materialistic twentieth-century American society in which to place her protagonist.  Naylor is particularly careful to establish an entire mythology rooted in African tradition to govern Willow Springs and to imagine a strong female presence, in the figure of Mama Day, at the center of that world.  Like Marshall, Naylor also alludes to slavery’s defining influence (and the transcendence of that influence) on the territory, and she reinforces her  theme of the importance of tradition by creating a collective black voice.  What both of these novels share is the removal of their protagonists from the mainstream of American life to a place more remote and more connected to an Afrocentric past, a place where the protagonists can get in touch with sides of themselves they have long forgotten or repressed.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s attempt to imbue Maud Martha’s “little life” with significance directly inspired these works and many others.  With The Color Purple a distinct pattern begins to take shape; we see a conscious bridging of past and future, a development reflected in protagonists who are more open to a range of experiences, experiences which ultimately allow them to assume power over their own lives.  As the literature has developed, those experiences may result from political involvement, from nurturing and healing, even from lesbian relationships and acts of violence – all examples of the “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior” Alice Walker cites as one of the primary tenets of womanism (In Search xi).  The specific behaviors themselves are less important than the fact that black female characters are finally empowering themselves to choose the direction of their lives, and for many the key to this lies in reclaiming a past.  Emerging from the literature of the 1970s and particularly of the 1980s and 1990s is a direct connection between awareness of and connectedness with the past and self-knowledge, that which invests everyday life with meaning.  Such connectedness culminates in the neo-slave narratives and affords the works wide-reaching significance.

According to Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1991), “Reclaiming the Black women’s intellectual tradition involves examining the everyday ideas of Black women not previously considered intellectuals” (15).  One excellent source for this project is the enslaved mother.  Even a random perusal of contemporary neo-slave narratives reveals that their creators are not interested in writing in the tradition of Harper’s Iola Leroy, about light-skinned heroines of impeccable moral stature; nor are these the women whom contemporary writers and their characters seek when looking backwards for inspiration in the search for identity and heritage.⁶  Instead, these authors work like archaeologists, attempting to uncover the secrets of the past, sometimes to instruct heroines who are so confused about their present and unsure of their future, as in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (date), and other times to offer today’s readers more accurate models from which to draw strength and inspiration.  It is a cooperative venture: today’s black women writers are largely successful because they have formed a community characterized by conversation for and about the ordinary black woman.⁷   While we cannot pinpoint a precise date for the genesis of the conversation, its focus is readily apparent – to respond to, to question, to probe, and to further each other’s work in their shared efforts to reclaim and celebrate the “everyday ideas” and womanist actions of black women, perhaps the longest-neglected and most misrepresented Americans of all.

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The literature produced in recent decades as a result of the conversation among contemporary black women writers has inevitably contributed to the expansion and reshaping of the American literary canon.  As faculty seek to make their curricula more multicultural in an effort to reflect changing perceptions of what it means to be American and have a national literature, works by women writers of all races have become increasingly valued.  Voices long silent or silenced are now regularly included in surveys of American literature, and individuals who read for pleasure now find at local bookstores greater diversity of reading material.

Interest in greater historical accuracy is also on the rise; revisionary historical scholarship has contributed to increased awareness of and tolerance for alternative perspectives on the American landscape.  No longer is history narrated solely from the point of view of the white male.  Complementing the efforts scholars of American history are making are works of literature by authors who adopt as their primary subject matter the past; they, too, are scholars of American history.  The revival of the slave narrative as genre, freed from its rigid nineteenth-century conventions and its obligation to flatter white audiences, is perhaps the most significant development in late twentieth-century American literature.  Imaginative in ways its predecessors could not possibly be and yet factual in content and faithful to the spirit of the original slave narratives, the neo-slave narrative is responsible for adding a new voice into American literary discourse.

Although not referring to slavery specifically, Alice Walker has said that what she finds most interesting about American literature is “the way black writers and white writers seem . . . to be writing one immense story – the same story for the most part – with different parts of this immense story coming from a multitude of different perspectives.  Until this is generally recognized, literature will always be broken into bits, black and white” (In Search 5).  Prior to the emergence of the neo-slave narrative, the “immense story” that is American gave no voice to an entire segment of the population.  Revisionist historians, as well as Civil Rights activists and women's rights activists, all of whom gained prominence in the 1960s, are in great measure responsible for the groundbreaking work of each of these groups.  They prepared the way for the imaginative recreations later undertaken by black writers.

But why contemporary black women in particular became interested in America’s slave past as a rich source of subject matter remains unanswered.  As historians such as Angela Davis, Jacqueline Jones, and Deborah Gray White began to piece together definitive portraits of the lives of enslaved women,⁸ writers working creatively were complementing their revisionary scholarship.   I would like to suggest, however, that in addition to the development of a community of African American women actively engaged in searching out their maternal ancestors, two other events are responsible for renewed interest in the slave narrative: the celebration of America’s Bicentennial, and the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots and the subsequent miniseries.

Nineteen hundred and seventy-six was the year which Americans devoted to celebrating freedom.  Our nation’s Bicentennial, commemorating two hundred years of independence from England, was perhaps the epitome of the America-as-melting-pot mentality.  It did not seem to matter where a person’s ancestors had sailed from; what mattered in 1976 was the fact of American citizenship and its accompanying freedom.  However, it is understandable that black Americans may have felt a lesser part of the celebration, having been “free” for only one hundred years, and for much of that time only nominally so.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which sought to overturn “separate but equal” in favor of wholly equal treatment for African Americans, had been successful, but its success was only gradually being realized.  Indeed, the consciousness-raising efforts of the Black Power movement often seemed more tangible to blacks than the social and political reforms achieved as a result of sixties’ activism.  For many blacks, the celebration of America as truly their own country was an empty one.

Coinciding with America’s Bicentennial was the pinnacle of one man’s literary achievement, a birthday gift of sorts which resonated with significance for many Americans, black and white.  That work is Alex Haley’s Roots.  Published serially in 1974 in Reader’s Digest and then as a novel in 1976, Haley’s novel aired as a made-for-television miniseries in January, 1977.  The chicken-and-egg question is easily answered in the case of Roots; the book which graces best-sellers’ lists for months and sold more than one million copies in 1977 alone, swept into vogue on the coattails of the miniseries, and thus Roots cannot be considered merely a literary phenomenon.  Television critics estimated that approximately 130 million Americans watched at least part of the eight-day series, with 80 million viewers tuning in for the last episode.  In a matter of one week, millions of Americans became fascinated with genealogy, as people of all ethnicities began the search for their own “roots.”⁹

According to Haley, Roots was not directed solely at a black audience.  When asked to account for the enormous success of both the television miniseries and the novel, Haley responded that his work touched “some deep pulse that transcends racial things” and that Roots seemed “to hold out a particular hope that they [Americans] could fill in their own blanks, repair the broken continuity of their history” (Gelman 30).  Clearly he pinpointed something deep in the collective American consciousness as he pursued his personal interest in his family’s African heritage.  But the work was especially meaningful for blacks; many saw it as the first open acknowledgement of the brutality of slavery.  What was perhaps even more fulfilling than the fact that a work like Roots finally reached production was the enormous audience it drew, a signal to blacks that white America was responsive to the message of Roots – that Africans forced from their homeland and stripped of their culture were nevertheless people of dignity, people capable of incredible endurance, courage, and love.

Perhaps the time was right in the mid-1970s for such a message.  Unquestionably, the Bicentennial had evoked tremendous feelings of national pride, and Roots provided something of a reality check, reminding Americans that much of what this country has become directly resulted from the enslaved labor of African people.  Also at this time the American public was coming to terms with the legacy of the Vietnam War, recognizing that a terrible mistake had been made, and perhaps even acknowledging that, in spite of the wave of patriotism and melting-pot idealism fostered by Bicentennial celebrations, the country did have its share of blemishes; the realities of America’s slave past, as exposed by Alex Haley, certainly loomed large among them.

In spite of the fanfare both the novel and the miniseries received, Haley’s work did not escape scrutiny and criticism.  Russell L. Adams, in his article entitled “An Analysis of the Roots Phenomenon in the Context of American Racial Conservatism,” argues that “Roots touches the sentiments but fails to stretch the mind” (132).  Adams also accuses Haley of presenting an overly romanticized, nostalgic view of the past.  Although he praises the work as groundbreaking, Adams makes much of Haley’s style, which he evaluates as simplistic yet calculating, developed as a result of years of writing for popular magazines.  Likewise, in “Haley’s Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon,” David Gerber exposes flaws in Haley’s work, although his focus tends to be on inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies within the narrative.

It is my contention that many black writers also noted tremendous shortcomings in Haley’s work, especially in the areas of gender representation and relations.  From their perspective, Haley addressed the topics of African family life and African American slavery and its aftermath incompletely, neglecting to tell the whole story.  Although it is not my intention here to provide a close analysis of Roots as a whole, it is obvious from the opening pages of the novel that Haley’s purpose is to tell the story of village life, enslavement, and freedom from a male point of view.

The narrative begins with the birth of a “manchild” (11), Kunta Kinte, the distant relative who becomes for Haley the starting point of his saga.  The opening chapter outlines the naming and dedication rituals which accompany the birth of a male child in Haley’s ancestral village of Juffure, and Haley immediately establishes a tone of great pride.  Binta, Kunta’s mother, remains a shadowy figure, only significant for her role as child bearer.  The irony is immediately apparent – during American slavery, an African woman was valued only for her ability to breed and thus to increase her owner’s wealth.  Haley does nothing to dignify Binta’s role; she gives birth and returns to her job in the field.  The only definitive action we observe Binta taking in the opening pages of the narrative is her decision to wean Kunta at an early age.  However, she does so not for her own needs or for the needs of her child but rather to please her husband.    

Subtitled “The Saga of an American Family,” Haley’s “evocation of slave family and kinship is the strongest claim which Roots has to the attention of a critical audience” (Gerber 94).  However, Haley’s lack of interest in the dynamics of African family life is obvious, and the tale quickly becomes Kunta Kinte’s alone.  We witness his boyhood, his abduction by slave catchers, the perilous Middle Passage, and the establishment of his enslaved life in America, including his eventual marriage to Bell and the birth of their daughter Kizzy, who is sold away from the family when she is fifteen.  In the tradition of Frederick Douglass’ portrayal of himself, Haley portrays Kunta Kinte as a loner, enraged by his treatment at the hands of the toubob (his word for whites), determined to save himself, and willing to compromise with his fellow captives only if it means securing his own freedom.

Critics interested in how the novel depicts the American family under the yoke of slavery – previously unexplored subject matter in American literature – cannot help but be disappointed by Haley’s lopsided emphasis on the male experience of slavery.  Although Roots dramatizes and supports Herbert Gutman’s scholarly contention that enslaved African Americans were able to and very often did form strong nuclear families,¹⁰ Haley’s lack of attention to the role of women in these families is notable.  Kizzy is the most well-developed female character in the epic narrative.  In the violation she suffers at the hands of Tom Lea, the white man who buys her, in her spirit of endurance and survival, and in the eventual community-building she enjoys with the other enslaved men and women, Kizzy prefigures the enslaved mother figures celebrated by black women writers of neo-slave narratives.  As Gerber correctly points out, “It seems almost as if Afro-America’s roots begin with her rather than her father” (103).  Yet Haley’s overall treatment of Kizzy is problematic; he seldom allows her character to develop beyond the stock conventions of the suffering enslaved woman.  Ultimately, she functions in the narrative as George’s mother, not as a person in her own right.  Following the pattern he established in the opening chapter in delineating the Binta/Kunta relationship, Haley overtly chooses to prioritize George's story at the expense of Kizzy’s.

This glaring oversight indeed may have provided inspiration for contemporary black women writers.  The tremendous success of Roots – both book and miniseries – signalled that Americans were, in fact, interested in the past and were amenable to previously neglected viewpoints.  While Alex Haley may be perceived as a pioneer for the way in which he prepared the American public for slavery as a literary topic, black women writers are the true pioneers, giving voice to previously untold stories, and, in the process, revising both historical assumptions about black women during slavery and popular conceptions of black women today.  Their oppression becomes more real through the pages of the neo-slave narratives, but so, too, does their courage.  If a literature truly is to be the representation of its people, then American literature can be no true representation without the voice of the enslaved black female contributing to the conversation about what it means to be an American.  Her view – sad, marginalized, strong, triumphant – reflects her share in the human experience, yet has gone virtually unrecognized since the founding of this country.  The recognition and reclamation of this under-appreciated voice is one of the most powerful developments in contemporary American literature, making the literature more resonant, more diverse and more thought-provoking, while at the same time providing new stories that are incredibly rich in entertainment value.

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To be an enslaved woman meant almost inevitably to be an enslaved mother, and these stories are among the most moving to emerge from post-1960s revisionist scholarship.  The contradictions – biological, social, and legal – inherent in being an enslaved mother offer an excellent starting point for contemporary black women writers who began, with the neo-slave narrative, to problematize both slavery and motherhood by juxtaposing the two.  As Angela Y. Davis points out in Women, Race, & Class, “[Enslaved] women . . . were driven to defend their children by their passionate abhorrence of slavery.  The source of their strength was not some mystical power attached to motherhood, but rather their concrete experiences as slaves” (29).  Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, articulates most clearly the unique plight of the enslaved mother when she describes her relationship with her children after her escape from slavery:

It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before.  It felt good.  Good and right.  I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between.  I was that wide.  Look like I loved am more after I got here.  Or maybe I couldn’t  love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.  But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon – there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to.  You know what I mean?  (162)

“They wasn’t mine to love” – Sethe’s keen perception of her role in her children’s lives under the confines of slavery -- emphasizes her awareness of herself, in society’s eyes, as nothing more than a breeder for the white master.  According to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, when social conditions are unstable, gender may “come unstuck” from sexuality, and gender confusion may result for both men and women (187).¹¹  This problem was magnified for enslaved persons, because slavery denied men the right to define themselves in the eyes of society as men, husbands, and fathers.  As a result, enslaved women were unable to look to black men to form a satisfactory social identity for themselves as women (Fox-Genovese 188).  Instead, white males defined them as breeders, an identity which insisted on their reproductive capabilities but denied their status as social beings.

The women who are now choosing to write neo-slave narratives seem both fascinated and appalled by this dehumanization; their outrage is reflected in works which are designed not merely to reclaim their enslaved maternal ancestors’ stories and reposition their role in American history, but also to refute the stereotype of the enslaved woman as breeder by re-sharpening the focus on her gender.  Williams’, Morrison’s, and Cooper’s success in portraying the enslaved mother as fully human links them with the earliest African American women writers who consciously sought to eradicate nineteenth-century stereotypes of black women.  Patricia Hill Collins observes, “Portraying African American women as stereotypical mammies, matriarchs, welfare recipients, and hot mammas has been essential to the political economy of domination fostering Black women’s oppression.  Challenging these controlling images has long been a core theme in Black feminist thought” (67). 

The significance of the American neo-slave narrative is not merely literary.  I have argued that the voice of the enslaved woman contributes in an important way to broadening and enhancing the American literary canon, but the project to reclaim the enslaved women’s stories has ramifications which extend to popular culture as well.  In the view of Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews, co-authors of the article “Black Popular Culture and the Transcendence of Patriarchal Illusions” (1993), much of black popular culture is concerned with dilemmas specific to being a black male in today’s society, and both the means of expressing those problems and the “pseudo-solutions” offered “further marginalise and denigrate Black women” (57).  In particular, Ransby and Matthews analyze three phenomena of popular culture: the growing popularity of cultural and intellectual Afrocentrism, which they argue glorifies an African past unsuitable to the demands of today’s society; the revival of interest in Malcolm X and other black prophet-heroes, whom they assert are blindly accepted by today’s youth as role models in spite of the skewed message such hero worship sends that “only larger than life great men can make or change history” (62); and rap music, which they vilify for its suggestions of sexual promiscuity, female objectification, and violent behavior.  By focusing on black women in their narratives, contemporary African American women writers not only celebrate the black woman as she is today but articulate for their readers her rich and varied heritage, a heritage deserving of recognition and proud acknowledgement.

Many might argue here that there is no better time to be a black woman in America than today.   Indeed, the early years of the 1990s brought with them a burst of pride in Afrocentric culture.  Afrocentrism¹² has manifested itself in fashion; it is common to see African Americans wearing tee-shirts honoring black women and celebrating their ties to Africa, and once again clothing and accessories made of kente cloth are popular.  Oprah Winfrey was first on the list of Forbes magazine’s forty top-earning entertainers in 1993; that year she was worth $250 million, earning $5, 416 for every minute she appeared on television (Bly 375); in 1995 she again topped the list.  Audiences around the world widely recognize her – her show airs in sixty-four countries – and she addresses topics of particular interest to women and minorities.  She is certainly one of the country’s most prominent role models for young African Americans.  African American studies programs are increasing in popularity at colleges and universities across the country, and most bookstores now include well-stocked African American studies sections.  And Zebra, a medium-sized publishing company, has inaugurated a line of romance novels featuring ethnic characters and story lines.  After market research showed that one-third of all romance novel readers are nonwhite, Zebra took a chance at targeting minority audiences, and the first two titles, both by black authors and featuring black characters, were immediately successful, attracting both white and minority readers (Updike 3E).

Additionally, the black woman’s voice now contributes to the conversation that is rap music, once the exclusive domain of black male artists.¹³  Many black female artists currently enjoying success choose to rap about women’s issues, including sexism within the black community and the need for U-N-I-T-Y, the title of an enormously popular song by artist Queen Latifah.  Some male rappers in fact now celebrate, rather than disrespect, the black woman.  Artist Heavy D raps that he likes “black coffee – no sugar, no cream” and dreams of making love to an “African Queen,” clearly indicating his preference for dark-skinned black women and itself a repositioning of the false assumption that black men favor light-skinned women.

But for all the ways contemporary society affirms the black woman – her strength, her beauty, her ability to succeed – negative images persist.  Stuart Hall, in an article entitled “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” (1993) argues that “black popular culture is a contradictory space.  It is a site of strategic contestation” (108).  At the center of this tug of war stands the black mother.  The arena where this is most obvious is the film industry.  John Singleton and Spike Lee have achieved tremendous box office success with their films depicting contemporary urban African American life, and Lee’s X (date), the dramatization of the life of black revolutionary Malcolm X, touched off a wave of “Malcolmania,” introducing the black revolutionary to a generation of moviegoers who had not yet been born when Malcolm was at the height of his power in the 1960s.  Director Mario Van Peebles’ account of the Black Panther Movement, Panther (date), serves as another example.  Yet, as Michele Wallace points out in “Boyz in the Hood and Jungle Fever,” while many of these films are admirable for the ways in which they critically address black-on-black violence, black male homicide, and the statistics on black male incarceration, they simultaneously reinforce prevailing stereotypes of black women, especially black mothers.  Arguing that Boyz in the Hood (date) and Jungle Fever (date) -- and, by extension, other works by these now-influential black filmmakers – “demonize” black female sexuality (130) by securing all the female characters into predictable (and nearly invisible) roles, Wallace concludes that the message of the “New Jack black cinema” (qtd. In Goldstein 294) is formulaic: “The boys who don’t have fathers fail.  The boys who do have fathers succeed” (125).  In other words, the black mother and her role in the family is completely insignificant.

One is left wondering what black female filmmakers would contribute to the dialogue about contemporary African American life, but critics have long lamented their invisibility.¹⁴  One notable exception is Julie Dash, whose 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, an historical account of an extended black family living on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, embodies womanist philosophy as I have outlined it here and shares much thematically with contemporary literature by black women.  The words of the unborn child who narrates much of Daughters of the Dust apply both to Dash and to the black women writers and thinkers with whom she shares a kinship:  “We are the children of those who chose to survive.”  Of her purpose, Dash says, “I want to show black families, particularly black women, as we have never seen them before.  I want to touch something inside of each black person that sees it, some part of them that’s never been touched before” (Goldstein 295).

It is through their explorations of the subject of family that the writers of the neo-slave narratives contribute to popular culture.  Like Dash, they want to “show black families,” and to do so they have returned to the past to demonstrate that the black American family does have stable roots and that the black American family in slavery was no less a family.¹⁵  As observers of contemporary culture decry the loss of traditional family values and proclaim the death of the American family,¹⁶ particularly among minority cultures, writers such as Williams, Morrison, and Cooper are encouraging the contemporary black family by celebrating the heroic status of the enslaved mother, a model of inspiration for all black women today.

Certainly there is ample motivation for such an endeavor.  In addition to providing a counterbalance to Haley’s portrayal of American slavery as I have already illustrated, contemporary neo-slave narratives may also provide something of an antidote to the messages of controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.  Known for his advocacy of black solidarity, self-reliance, and independence, and his anti-welfare, pro-rehabilitation viewpoints,¹⁷ Farrakhan is perhaps most effective in tapping into the frustrated rage experienced by young inner-city black males looking for an outlet for their anger at white society.  To his critics, however, Farrakhan is a mouthpiece for dangerously divisive racism, a man whose favorite scapegoat is the Jewish American, and a leader who misrepresents, even distorts, historical circumstances to suit his purpose.  In one of his boldest declarations, he has alleged that contemporary African American society lacks family values because of the historical experience of slavery.  This argument, correlating the demise of family values and the institution of slavery, is one such instance of historical distortion; his conclusions are demeaning to all African Americans, but particularly so to the large segment of black female heads-of-household.

Indeed, the statistics representing the economic and social condition of the black family in America, particularly beginning in the 1980s, are grim,¹⁸ and they are especially relevant to this essay both because of black women’s long-entrenched role as bearers of tradition and because so many black families are headed by women.  There is every indication that poverty among black women has grown at an alarming rate.  According to research done by Patricia Hill Collins for Black Feminist Thought:

In 1985, 50% of Black families headed by women were below the official poverty line (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1986).  The situation is more extreme for young African American women.  In 1986, 86% of families headed by Black women between the ages of 15 and 24 lived below the poverty line.  (64)

Additionally, at this time black unemployment rates were double those of whites, one of every three blacks lived below the official poverty line, as compared to one of every ten whites, and median black family income represented 56% of median white family income (59).  Inextricably linked to such economic oppression is social stratification, resulting in substandard housing, fewer educational opportunities, and the least desirable jobs, jobs which pay minimum wage and which offer few benefits and little room for advancement.  Thus, trapped in a vicious cycle  of poverty and oppression, individuals may respond in one of two ways – they may choose either to succumb or to resist.¹⁹

Resistance has long been the key to survival for marginalized peoples.  In the African American community, this is best exemplified by the enslaved mother.  There is every indication that these women loved and nurtured their children, even those conceived by force, no less than free women.  The very attempt to mother under conditions of slavery, when the demand was merely to produce children to augment the master’s labor force and when the awareness that those children could be sold at the master’s whim was an everyday reality, was itself a heroic act.  Enslaved women resisted in other ways as well -- by learning to read and sometimes tutoring their children, by instilling in their children a sense of self-worth which served to contradict their enslaved condition, by trying to keep their families together, by serving as othermothers to slave children separated from their own mothers, be developing extended kin networks to provide and receive support, encouragement, and everyday assistance, and even sometimes by violence, as in the case of Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman upon whom Morrison loosely bases the story of Beloved.    

Many of the strategies contemporary black women writers have discovered or imagined are applicable in today’s society, particularly to lower-class single mothers.  Today’s black women can follow the lead of their enslaved foremothers and speak about their experiences in a racist and sexist society to their children, thus socializing them to the realities of life in America by providing an invaluable set of survival skills.  Also, Patricia Hill Collins notes with interest the rise in community-based child care in neighborhoods plagued by gang violence, crack cocaine, birth defects, child abuse, and parental neglect.  By assuming some share of responsibility for local children who currently have no stable home lives, othermothers both serve as role models for troubled mothers who may be willing to change their lives as a result of the examples before them and also ensure the survival of the community by taking care of its youngest members.

As bell hooks argues in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), “Oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story” (45).  In other words, the act of self-empowerment is an act of resistance, and this is precisely how contemporary black women writers have expanded on the tradition their foremothers began.  Whereas in Frances E.W. Harper’s day the mere act of penning the story of Iola Leroy may be viewed as an act of resistance, today’s authors are much more involved in active resistance, advocating the need for the black woman to allow her heritage to empower her.  In doing so, she then becomes an active agent in revising how society perceives her.  It must be acknowledged that many of those most in need of the rich source of inspiration that can come from recognizing the heroic stature of the nineteenth-century enslaved mother will never have the opportunity to read works like Dessa Rose and Beloved; however, I am arguing that the effect of the neo-slave narrative as it is being shaped by contemporary black women writers is web-like, reaching beyond the reading public to join with other positive depictions of black women to create a compelling sphere of influence.  Black women have been struggling towards that revolution since the time of their enslavement; contemporary black women writers indicate that the time of revolution is now, and the source of revolution is the powerful past which is finally being claimed.

* * * * * * * * *

It is Zora Neale Hurston, through the voice of Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), who has best articulated the black woman’s place in history: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world” (14).  Labor market victimization of black women is as old as slavery, and contemporary black women writers, who may well view the economic and social conditions affecting many of their sisters of color as a twentieth-century form of slavery, keenly perceived the appropriateness of resurrecting the slave narrative genre; the double oppression of racism and sexism remains today.  However, as Collins points out, “Fully human women are less easily exploited” (Black Feminist Thought 43).  The neo-slave narrative as shaped by black women writers who pay particular attention to the enslaved woman’s gender and her role in the family becomes, then, a powerful tool in assisting contemporary black women to resist marginalization.  bell hooks argues that “While novels like Dessa Rose or Beloved evoke the passion of trauma during slavery as it carries over into black life when that institution is long gone, these works don’t necessarily chart a healing journey that is immediately applicable to contemporary black life” (Yearning 226); nevertheless, they do provide alternatives to those negative images of black women presented to American society by the mass media and perpetuated by stereotypes.  When black women look to the past as a source of pride, they are able to recover a sense of wholeness both in themselves and their history.

Contemporary novelist and short story writer Barbara Neely identifies the significance of the neo-slave narrative when she says:  

I’ve always said that probably our major difficulty in this country as black people is not what is happening to us externally, but what is and is not happening to us internally, beginning with a serious emotional exploration of slavery and what it has meant in reference to our perception of the world – the ways in which we raise our children, the way we manage our relationships, all of that.  There is this huge and festering sore within all of us that we won’t even get near, let alone feel.  And then comes Beloved.   (In Carroll, Red Clay 182-83)

What Neely articulates is a sense of survivor guilt that twentieth-century blacks, particularly those who are knowledgeable about their history, carry with them as legacies of enslavement.²⁰   The neo-slave narrative writers are the first to make a conscious effort to break the silence of the past, to speak about the atrocities of slavery and to try to understand.  Possibly even, in the true spirit of black women’s creativity, they are trying to find something beautiful in it.

To conclude, I would like to borrow a metaphor from Gloria Naylor, a metaphor she uses to describe herself but one which applies to all contemporary African American women and particularly to those who are writing neo-slave narratives.  Naylor says, “There is a rock . . . a certain kind of quartz that when you break it open there are all these different edges and colors.  And they are all strong” (Carroll 165).  Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, and other neo-slave narrative authors have broke open the rock that is America’s slave past and their own; they have discovered the strength of their color and the strength of their womanhood.  These women are the rock – women of resistance who create women of resistance, both on the pages of their fiction and in the lives that their fiction touches.  These women are shaping America’s future, just as their maternal ancestors shaped America’s past. 

Notes

¹ Bernard Bell was among the first to issue a formal definition for the term, calling neo-slave narratives “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom” in his 1987 work The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (289).  He applies the term to Margaret Walker’s 1966 Jubilee and Ernest Gaines’s 1971 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.  My focus here will be on the contributions black women writers have made to the fledgling genre, but I wish to acknowledge that male writers are developing the genre as well; Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (date) and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (date) are superb examples of the neo-slave narrative.

  ²  For a recent examination of the dichotomy existing between the feminist and womanist movements, see Barbara McCaskill’s and Layli Philips’s “We Are All ‘Good Woman’! A Womanist Critique of the Current Feminist Conflict,” in “Bad Girls”/”Good Girls”: Woman, Sex, and Power in the Nineties (1996).

  ³  Christian’s essay is definitive in tracing the development of a tradition unique to black women writers, and it might be argued that there exists no finer treatment of black women’s literature as a body of work.

⁴  Christian does, however, devote a section of her book Black Women Novelists (1980) to a discussion of Margaret Walker and the significance of Jubilee.  See especially 71-73.  

⁵ In his overview of The Color Purple in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Bernard Bell is highly critical of Walker’s treatment of Africa, arguing that she “conjure[s] up neither the texture, the tone, nor the truth of the traditional lives of African peoples” (266).  However, for my purposes it is enough simply that Walker makes an attempt at incorporating into her work the importance of Africa and its influence on Celie’s evolving consciousness.  

⁶ Perhaps the best support for this point comes from Alice Walker who, in her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” sets the precedent for reclaiming the worth of everyday women – the mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers of contemporary African American women – as artists and valued sources of inspiration.  

⁷ Of course, not all black women writers acknowledge kinship in such a community; however, for an excellent example of the many ways black women writers speak about their importance  to each other, see Rebecca Carroll’s anthology I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like (1994), which includes interviews with numerous contemporary black women writers.  

⁸  See Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1983); Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985); and White’s Ar’n’t I A Woman? (1985).  

⁹ Both Newsweek and Time magazines devoted cover stories to the Roots phenomenon in 1977.  See “Why Roots Hit Home” by Lance Morrow (14 Feb. 1977) and “Everybody’s Search for Roots” by David Gelman et al. (4 July 1977) for further statistics and popular analyses.   

¹⁰  See The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976).  In this landmark study, Gutman was the first scholar to provide an in-depth assessment of the value of the black family in slave times.  

¹¹Julia T. Wood develops this point further in Gendered Lives (1994).  See especially 51-52. 

¹²  I am using the term here in the way that Paul Gilroy employs it, to mean “the reconstitution of individual consciousness rather than . . . the reconstruction of the black nation in exile or elsewhere” (305).  See his “It’s A Family Affair” in Gina Dent’s Black Popular Culture (1992; 303-16). 

¹³  Rap music, of course, has been surrounded by controversy almost since its inception, particularly with regard to the overt sexism of many rappers’ lyrics.  Sherley Anne Williams is one writer who has questioned rap music’s content.  In “Two Words on Music” (in Dent’s Black Popular Culture 164-72) she asks, “Why, given the way we are so ready to jump on Hollywood, the Man, the Media, and black women writers for negative and distorted portrayals of black people, have black academics, critics, and intellectuals been so willing to talk about the brilliant and innovative form of rap?”  (167).  In her conclusion, however, Williams takes pains to point out that she is not condemning all of rap music, but is merely probing the implications of some lyrics.  For an encompassing analysis of rap music and its implications for American society, see Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise (1994).  Her chapter entitled “Bad Sistas: Black Women Rappers and Sexual Politics in Rap Music,” is particularly applicable to my discussion here.   

¹⁴  See, for instance, John Williams’ article “Re-Creating Their Media Image: Two Generations of Black Women Filmmakers” in Cineaste.  Ultimately, Williams celebrates those African American women who have ventured into the male-dominated world of film production and direction. 

¹⁵  Both Bernard Bell, in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, and Patricia Hill Collins, in Black Feminist Thought, argue that the black family in slavery retained some of the hallmarks of African family life, which enabled them to re-establish and reinterpret traditions with which they were already familiar.  This is perhaps best demonstrated in what Bell and Collins term “extended kin networks,” groups of individuals not related through blood but who nevertheless enjoyed all the benefits of being in a family. 

¹⁶  What comes to mind immediately, although it is certainly not the only example, is then-Vice President Dan Quayle’s remarks following the airing of an episode of the television program Murphy Brown, in which the protagonist decides to conceive a child out of wedlock.  Quayle, while lamenting the overall loss of family values, was particularly concerned that the decision to air such subject matter on television would contribute to a poverty of values among poor minorities.  The Republican Party received much criticism for Quayle’s remarks, particularly in light of their poor track record in the areas of civil rights and social spending.  For discussions of the backlash following Quayle’s statement on family values, see especially David Whitman’s “The War Over ‘Family Values’ ” (8 June 1992) and Michael Kinsley’s “Happy Families” (15 June 1992).  

¹⁷  Much of what Farrakhan advocates is attractive to blacks; a Time magazine/CNN poll conducted in February 1994 revealed that two-thirds of 504 African Americans surveyed viewed Farrakhan favorably; 62% deemed him good for the black community; 67% judged him an effective leader; and more than half agreed that he is a good role model for black youth.  For a thorough interpretation of the data,  see William A. Henry III, “Pride and Prejudice” (28 Feb. 1994).  

¹⁸ The Reagan 1980s, characterized by previously unrivalled conspicuous consumption among middle- and upper-class Americans and simultaneously increased hardship for lower-class Americans, are generally looked upon as a period of setback both in terms of race relations and social opportunities for minorities.  For a thorough discussion of economic and social conditions in the 1980s, see Sleepwalking Through History by Haynes Johnson.  

¹⁹  In the face of such overwhelming hardship, many underclass blacks may, in fact, look upon contemporary American society as a reincarnation of slave society.

²⁰  bell hooks, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), likens the experience of slavery to a holocaust experience, “a tragedy of such ongoing magnitude that folk suffer, anguish it today” (216).  Interestingly, both Stanley Crouch, in his extremely negative review of Beloved (19 Oct. 1987), and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, in her article “Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women’s Individuation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (Spring 1992), compare Beloved to holocaust literature.  Demetrakopoulos says, “Beloved is, on an historical and sociological level, a Holocaust book, and like much Holocaust literature, it marvels at the indifferent and enduring beauty of nature as a frame for the worst human atrocities” (54).  Both mentions, however, are brief, and my research does not uncover much scholarship yoking Jewish survival literature and African American accounts of slavery.  

References

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---.  “Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women’s Fiction.”  In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition.  Ed.  Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.  233-48.

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---.  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.  New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984.

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Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University.  She is the author of Black Women Writers and the American Neo-slave Narrative (Greenwood, 1999).

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