Autobiography

By: Darlene Clark Hine

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Autobiography

Anna Julia Cooper, in what is considered the first black feminist text, A Voice from the South (1892), declared, “As our Caucasian barristers are not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man's place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the black Woman.” African American women have written autobiographies since the 1700s. Today, the many forms of autobiography—memoirs, essays, notes, diaries, advice, and self-help—constitute one of the most important genres in black writing.

Some of the most exciting and dynamic work written at the beginning of the twenty-first century focused attention on the social history of black women. These autobiographical writings, both outside and within the academy, occupied, in a sense, the frontier sites of public discourse concerning certain private-life issues and social policies that were important to the reconstruction of black community and family and to revisions of self.

Many Challenges

The tremendous outpouring of autobiographical writings presents a complex set of challenges, not the least of which concerns the difficulty of finding the volumes that they fill. Many are privately published, with limited print runs and strictly regional distribution. Yet autobiography, surely the most ancient genre of literature and memory, possesses profound implications for the creation of new conversations in black women's history, women's history, and African American studies. This article presents a small sampling of autobiographies and a preliminary typology.

Types of Black Women's Autobiographies

. There are perhaps five clusters, or types, of black women's written autobiography: (1)historical narratives,(2)memoirs written by and about women of celebrity,(3)reflections on the civil rights movement,(4)contemporary coming-of-age stories, and lastly,(5)the accounts of academic black women. Some of these command widespread popular attention. Others are problematic and stimulate questions about authorial motivation and the reception of intended and real audiences.

The most visible, and presumably profitable, autobiographies are those written by new and veteran celebrities such as Judith Jamison, Patti LaBelle, Ellen Holly, Nina Simone, Diana Ross, and Tina Turner. The heroes-of-their-own-lives autobiographies of public officials, political activists, and middle-class professionals include books by Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Jill Nelson, Patrice Gaines, Faye Wattleton, the late Shirley Chisholm, and the late Barbara Jordan. The least known and read are the autobiographies of mature black women at the jubilee stage of their lives. These women sometimes finance the publications of their autobiographies and generally work with small local presses.

A careful reading of the panorama of black women's current autobiographical writing suggests that the quest for freedom from racial, sexual, and class oppression, and indeed the very nature of those oppressions, has important repercussions in the ongoing construction of identities as gendered and racialized. The structure of families and communities and the dynamics of intimate relationships are all affected. If there are indeed major shifts under way in America, it serves us well to pay close attention to the black women writing at the autobiographical frontier.

The Earliest Autobiographies

The first autobiographical writing by a black woman that has been preserved is that of Jarena Lee, an itinerant preacher, and it set the tone for much of the work that would follow. As the English professor William L. Andrew points out in the edited volume Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (1986), Jarena Lee's The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady (1836), “launched black women's autobiography in America with an argument for women's spiritual authority that plainly challenged traditional female roles as defined in both the free and the slave states, among whites as well as blacks.”

Jarena Lee was born on 11 February 1783, in Cape May, New Jersey. She was converted to Christianity in 1804. After joining Richard Allen's church, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, she became aware of her calling. She petitioned Allen for permission to preach, but her request was refused. After the death of her husband, Lee renewed her efforts and, in 1818, Allen allowed her the privilege of holding prayer meetings in her own house. As her gifts became more and more apparent, Allen eventually endorsed her calling, although she was denied ordination. She thus embarked upon an itinerant preaching career. In 1836, she spent thirty-six dollars to print a thousand copies of her Life, which she then distributed at camp meetings and on the street. The focus of the work is her religious life and message, reflecting an intense spirituality that would be echoed in many future writings by black women. Given the place of the church and spirituality in the culture of black women, it is appropriate that this first autobiography should deal in such detail with this aspect of Lee's life.

A similar spiritual autobiography was written by Zilpha Elaw, a traveling evangelist who was, for a time, a preaching partner of Jarena Lee. However, not all autobiography was restricted to tales of burgeoning religiosity. An entrepreneur named Elleanor Eldridge wrote a memoir about her life as a free black woman in business. Yet another sort of autobiographical writing is found in the diaries of Charlotte Forten.

Charlotte Forten Grimké was a member of the fourth generation of free Fortens in Philadelphia. She grew up among wealth, education, and political activism. Tutored at home in her early years, she was sent to Salem, Massachusetts, when she was sixteen to get more formal education. Philadelphia schools were still segregated by race. When she was seventeen, Forten began keeping a journal.

"A wish to record the passing events of my life, which, even if quite unimportant to others, naturally possess great interest to myself, and of which it will be pleasant to have some remembrance, has induced me to commence this journal. I feel that keeping a diary will be a pleasant and profitable employment of my leisure hours, and will afford me much pleasure in other years, by recalling to my mind the memories of other days, thoughts of much-loved friends from whom I may then be separated, with whom I now pass many happy hours, in taking delightful walks, and holding “sweet converse”; the interesting books that I read; and the different people, places and things that I am permitted to see. Besides this, it will doubtless enable me to judge correctly of the growth and improvement of my mind from year to year"

(Journals of Charlotte L. Forten Grimké)

This first entry, dated May 1854, shows Forten to be a refined young woman, a typical product of Victorian mores. Like other young women of her time, she accepted the reigning Cult of True Womanhood with its emphasis on piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, and in which women were the keepers of the lamp of culture. As the years passed, however, and young Charlotte left the shelter of her parents' home, she discovered that this ideal view excluded black women, marked as they were by a heritage of sexualized slavery.

As outsiders to this white woman's cult, middle class black women, left with no recourse, crafted new ideological and structural responses, what might be referred to as the Cult of Noble Womanhood, with an emphasis on personal dignity, moral respectability, abiding spirituality, service to community, sacrifice for family, and sexual silence. Just how this construct of values burgeoned in the black community is clearly revealed by certain early entries in Charlotte Forten's journals, dealing with a fugitive slave:

"Did not intend to write this evening, but have just heard of something that is worth recording;—something which must ever rouse in the mind of every true friend of liberty and humanity, feelings of the deepest indignation and sorrow. Another fugitive [Anthony Burns] from bondage has been arrested; a poor man, who for two short months has trod the soil and breathed the air of the ‘Old Bay State,’ was arrested while a criminal in the streets of her capital, and is now kept strictly guarded…. I can only hope and pray most earnestly that Boston will not again disgrace herself by sending him back to a bondage worse than death; or rather that she will redeem herself from the disgrace which his arrest alone has brought upon her."

(Journals of Charlotte L. Forten Grimké)

Little more than a week later, another entry reveals that, “Our worst fears are realized, the decision was against poor Burns, and he has been sent back to a bondage worse, a thousand times worse than death.” Forten goes on to describe how soldiers surrounded the prisoner to prevent his rescue and then vents her anger on the state of Massachusetts. “With what scorn must that government be regarded which cowardly assembles thousands of soldiers to satisfy the demands of slaveholders.”

This sort of political awareness would have been strongly discouraged in a young woman of the white upper classes, but it was fostered in Charlotte Forten. While young white women focused all their ardor and capacity for devotion on love and family, young black women of the middle and upper classes saw another object—the race. This concentration is illustrated by Forten's decision to go, in 1862, to the sea islands off the coast of Georgia to teach recently freed African Americans in what was termed the Port Royal Experiment.

Forten's Victorian upbringing is apparent in her comments on the “military gentlemen,” whose racist language is deplored as unmannerly, and in her romantic descriptions of the beauty of nature. At the same time, she accepted the substandard housing with good humor and committed herself to her teaching with energy and dedication. In many of her entries, she articulates the ideals of young black women of her class and time, emphasizing the concept of nobility.

"Talked to the children a little while today about the noble Toussaint. They listened very attentively. It is well that they sh'ld know what one of their own color c'ld do for his race. I long to inspire them with courage and ambition (of a noble sort), and high purposes."

(Journals of Charlotte L. Forten Grimké)

Slave Narratives

The earliest narrative written by an enslaved black woman in the United States was Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In 1861, with editorial assistance from the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Childs, Jacobs published this first black woman's autobiography from the slave South. In so doing, she gave visibility to 2 million black women held in bondage. With her pen, she effectively liberated a written voice that would help to shatter the repressive power of silence. Ironically, Jacobs's claim to her own voice was challenged in the years after the book's publication and would have to wait 125 years before the literary critic Jean Fagan Yellin proved the authenticity of her work and rescued it from historical oblivion. The historian John Blassingame, in the meantime, dismissed the narrative on the grounds that “the story is too melodramatic; miscegenation and cruelty, outraged virtue, unrequited love, and plainer licentiousness appear on practically every page.” The criticism itself is a telling comment on the circumstances of an enslaved woman's life in the plantation South.

The real Harriet Jacobs, born in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, was only fifteen years old when her owner, Dr. James Norcom, began his relentless sexual harassment and efforts to seduce her into a “soul-destroying” concubinage. Finally, to escape complicity in her own sexual exploitation, she chose to have two children by a white neighbor. Later, in the course of her resistance and escape, she remained sequestered in her grandmother's garret for six years and eleven months before managing to flee to freedom in New York. She was later reunited with her daughter and son, whom she had been forced to leave behind.

A classic slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is notable for many reasons in addition to being the first of its kind. Jacobs's counter-hegemonic narrative introduced the theme of the sexual exploitation and oppression of black slave women and the modes of resistance it engendered. Through the painful recording of her own sexual history, Jacobs opened the way for serious consideration of the importance of sexual identity and autonomy in black women's construction of their own humanity.

The second major slave narrative by a black woman in the United States was that of Elizabeth Keckley, whose Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House was published in 1868. Keckley reveals that, unlike Jacobs, she was not fortunate enough to escape her owner's rape. She recalls that she was “regarded as fair-looking for one of my race” and that, as a result, her master pursued her for four years:

"I do not care to dwell upon this subject, for it is fraught with pain. Suffice it is to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I—I became a mother. The child of which he was the father was the only child I ever brought into the world. If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows that she did not wish to give him life, he must blame the edicts of that society which deemed it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my then position."

(Behind the Scenes)

The autobiographies of Jacobs and Keckley established a framework for black women's writings that exists, with some modifications, even today. In that model, five basic elements can be discerned: appeals to Christian and democratic values; affirmations of the sanctity of family and community; declarations concerning the importance of continuous struggle for racial and social justice; insistence on the responsibility of individuals to define themselves through service and sacrifice; and finally, a belief in the necessity of self-defense of virtuous black womanhood. These five elements reflect traditional values in the culture of black women and they provide a profound sense of continuity.

Freedom Stories

Freedom stories dominated the period following the Civil War, during the collapse of Reconstruction and throughout the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation. Charlotte Forten continued her diary, chronicling her experiences among the former slaves on the South Carolina sea islands, and published an account of her work in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. Susie Baker King Taylor wrote of her activities and service to the Union Army during the Civil War.

Elizabeth Keckley.  The memoir Behind the Scenes: or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House was controversial because the extent of Keckley's authorship was uncertain, and because of its revelations about President and Mrs. Lincoln.

Austin/Thompson Collection

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Taylor's memoirs, published as Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S. C. Volunteer[s], reveal a number of compelling characteristics of this remarkable woman. First, she had a strong sense of being part of a family of women:

"My great-great-grandmother was 120 years old when she died. She had seven children, and five of her boys were in the Revolutionary War. She was from Virginia, and was half Indian.

My great-grandmother, one of her daughters, named Susanna, was married to Peter Simons, and was one hundred years old when she died, from a stroke of paralysis in Savannah. She was the mother of twenty-four children, twenty-three being girls. She was one of the noted midwives of her day. In 1820 my grandmother was born, and named after her grandmother, Dolly, and in 1833 she married Fortune Lambert Reed. Two children blessed their union, James and Hagar Ann. James died at the age of twelve years.

My mother was born in 1834. She married Raymond Baker in 1847. Nine children were born to them, three dying in infancy. I was the first born."

(Reminiscences)

This recital of her lineage through the female side is done without explanation or apology. There is no exclusion of the male, but pride of family is clearly located in the female.

The second salient point revealed is that this family of women valued education sufficiently to see that young Susie Baker and her siblings were taught as much as possible, despite laws against educating slaves. The children first attended a secret school operated by a Mrs. Woodhouse. Living with their enslaved grandmother in Savannah, the children

"went every day about nine o'clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them. We went in, one at a time, through the gate, into the yard to the L kitchen, which was the schoolroom. She had twenty-five or thirty children whom she taught, assisted by her daughter, Mary Jane. The neighbors would see us going in sometimes, but they supposed we were there learning trades."

(Reminiscences)

After two years at Mrs. Woodhouse's, Susie went on to study with a Mrs. Beasley and then, when that lady had taught the girl all she could, the family took the risk of allowing a different, equally dangerous sort of tutelage:

"I had a white playmate about this time, named Katie O'Connor, who lived on the next corner of the street from my house, and who attended a convent. One day she told me, if I would promise not to tell her father, she would give me some lessons. On my promise not to do so, and getting her mother's consent, she gave me lessons about four months, every evening. At the end of this time she was put into the convent permanently, and I have never seen her since."

(Reminiscences)

After Katie O'Connor's departure for the convent, Susie Baker's grandmother sought and found another young white teacher for the child. James Blouis, their landlord's son, gave her lessons “until the middle of 1861, when the Savannah Volunteer Guards, to which he and his brother belonged, were ordered to the front under General Barton. In the first battle of Manassas, his brother Eugene was killed, and James deserted over to the Union side.”

The third striking characteristic revealed by Taylor's autobiographical writing is the self-confidence that seems to have been engendered by her upbringing. After her family was evacuated by Union troops to St. Simons island off the coast of Georgia, young Susie's literacy was discovered by an officer:

"After I had been on St. Simon's about three days, Commodore Goldsborough heard of me, and came to Gaston Bluff to see me. I found him very cordial. He said Captain Whitmore had spoken to him of me, and that he was pleased to hear of my being so capable, etc., and wished me to take charge of a school for the children on the island. I told him I would gladly do so, if I could have some books."

(Reminiscences)

Susie Baker was at the time fourteen years old. In the next three years, she would go from teaching to being nurse to an entire black regiment. She undertook that daunting task with the same confidence she had brought to the education of forty recently freed children and “a number of adults.” Early on, one of the young soldiers came down with smallpox and was placed in an isolated tent. The doctor, the camp steward, and young Susie Baker, who nursed him, were the only persons allowed to see him. “I was not in the least afraid of small-pox,” she wrote later. “I had been vaccinated, and I drank sassafras tea constantly.”

In her memoirs, Susie Baker King Taylor describes the sorts of situations in which she often worked, including the hideous wounds and terrible suffering. Her compassion is apparent. So, too, is the fact that she was not debilitated by softheartedness:

"Outside of the fort were many skulls lying about; I have often moved them one side out of the path. The comrades and I would have quite a debate as to which side the men fought on…. They were a gruesome sight, those fleshless heads and grinning jaws, but by this time I had become accustomed to worse things and did not feel as I might have earlier in my camp life."

(Reminiscences)

Any comparison of Susie Baker King Taylor's autobiographical writings with those of Charlotte Forten Grimké demands a recognition of class differences among black women of this time. Those differences are manifest not only in material circumstances but also in values and behavior. At the same time, there is a clear similarity in commitment to the black community.

Autobiographies of Migration and Race Uplift

In virtually every instance, for black Americans migration was a form of resistance. Violence—whether sexual harassment, the threat of rape at the hands of white men, or rape itself—was a spur to action, a call to agency. This underside of the history of migration has too long been ignored. The migration and urbanization experiences of black women as reflected in their autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs open a window on their concerns about sexuality and sexual vulnerability.

Escape from domestic abuse within their own families also propelled women out of the South. The autobiography of Sara Brooks is representative of this internal or personal motivation for migration. In You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks, edited by Thordis Simonsen, Brooks vividly recalls the events that led her to leave her husband for the third and final time. When she escaped, she didn't stop running until she reached Cleveland.

"When he hit me, I jumped outa the bed, and when I jumped outa the bed, I just ran…. I didn't have a gown to put on—I had on a slip and had on a short-sleeved sweater. I left the kids right there with him and I ran all the way to his father's house that night, barefeeted, with that on, on the twenty-fifth day of December. That was in the dark. It was two miles or more and it was rainin…I walked. And I didn't go back."

(You May Plow Here)

Jane Edna Harris Hunter of Cleveland, Ohio, was one of the many black women who helped other black women address these concerns as part of the movement toward racial uplift. A valuable collection of Hunter's personal correspondence with another leading black woman of the twentieth century, Nannie H. Burroughs, reveals the sustaining quality of a long friendship between kindred spirits. These poignant letters, written over a twenty-five year period, reflect the importance and texture of the interdependence forged woman to woman, and the extent to which successful black women relied upon each other.

Jane Edna Harris Hunter was born on 13 December 1882, in a two-room tenant farmhouse in Anderson County, South Carolina. When she was a teenager, her mother compelled her to marry a man forty years her senior, deeming it the best security against poverty. The marriage was a disaster, lasting only fifteen months. To support herself, Jane entered the Charleston Hospital and Nursing Training School and eventually matriculated, in 1904, at the Dixie Hospital and School for Nurses at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia. When things did not work out for her at Dixie, she joined the widespread black exodus to seek fame and fortune, or perhaps just a well-paying job, in the North. Hunter's dream of finding the promised land in Cleveland quickly evaporated. Black women and girls encountered great hostility and discrimination in their search for work. Most black women became domestics, forming a servant and laundress class, while a few with no alternative were trapped into prostitution, or “white slavery” as it was then called.

Jane Edna Hunter's autobiography, A Nickel and a Prayer, is revealing. Prostitution and exploitation by sexual predators remained a potent threat and reality. Hunter was painfully aware of the economic functions of, or motivations for, prostitution. She made a major contribution toward improving the well-being of black women's lives in Cleveland by establishing, in 1913, the Phillis Wheatley Home. In 1917, a $100,000 donation from John D. Rockefeller facilitated expansion of the home and the establishment of several branch associations in other large cities.

Hunter remarked about her own awakening:

"A few months on Central Avenue made me sharply aware of the great temptation that beset a young woman in a large city. At home on the plantation, I knew that some girls had been seduced. Their families had felt the disgrace keenly. The fallen ones had been wept and prayed over…until my arrival in Cleveland I was ignorant of the wholesale organized traffic in black flesh."

(A Nickel and a Prayer)

Other black women who worked for racial uplift included Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Margaret Murray Washington, and Anna Julia Cooper. Through their autobiographical writings, journalism, and organizational work, they self-consciously created a black woman's voice that offered a multilayered critique of gender roles within the black community, analyzed the relationship between lynching and rape, confronted head-on stereotypical assaults against black womanhood in the larger society, and contested the exclusionary definitions of citizenship.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black women could maintain and project positive sexual identity and better defend the dignity and respectability of black womanhood against white dominant culture—without disturbing overt gender conventions within their own families and community—if they joined their power together as a corporate entity. That some individuals may have found the politics and mission of black women's church and club culture oppressive is undeniable. Sometimes the survival skills and strategies forged in one context can outlive their usefulness and become in themselves a limiting and constricting force. Thus, for example, in the post–civil rights era a number of black women's autobiographies would abandon dissemblance and be pointedly disruptive and engage in disclosure.

Celebrity Autobiographies

Black women who have achieved positions of prominence in entertainment and the arts have also written autobiographies. Ethel Waters's His Eye Is on the Sparrow, written in the 1950s, is startlingly honest about the squalor of her early life and the obstacles she faced during her four-decade career as a singer and actress. In the same decade, the great contralto Marian Anderson published My Lord, What a Morning, a gentler, but still honest book about life as a celebrity and a black woman. The dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham and the athlete Althea Gibson wrote, respectively, A Touch of Innocence and I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. But the 1950s autobiography that captured the imagination like no other was that of Lady Day.

Billie Holiday, living from 1915 to 1959, one of the greatest jazz singers ever recorded, came into her own a generation after classic blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey had departed from the stage. Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 7 April 1915, she grew up in Baltimore. Her somewhat factually inaccurate autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), details the endless stress of having to deal with racism and sexism as well as her struggles to gain control over her own artistry.

Maya Angelou, at about the time Random House published All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986.

© Mary Ellen Mark

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The 1960s brought autobiographies from Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey, among others. Then, in the 1970s, Eartha Kitt, Gwendolyn Brooks, Barbara Jordan, Wilma Rudolph, and Margaret Walker told their stories in books that ranged from the startlingly personal to the largely professional. Black women's celebrity autobiographies in the 1980s and 1990s included Diahann Carroll's Diahann, and Wilma Rudolph's Wilma, as well as Faith Ringgold's We Flew Over the Bridge.

Civil Rights Memoirs

Black women, as Jo Ann Gibson Robinson reveals, were the ones who started the Montgomery bus boycott and in so doing formally launched the modern civil rights movement. It is only fitting therefore that, as that generation reflects on its accomplishments, black women's autobiographical writing should increase. Many of the mature autobiographies of black women are concerned with The Movement, its leaders, the relationships between men and women, blacks and whites, young and old, and the concept of community. They are determined to set the record straight. These autobiographies partake of the culture-wide shift toward greater disclosure and openness. They thus disrupt many of the dreams, romances, and long-voiced notions of what it means to be a black woman and part of a community.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman, through her work with the National Council of Churches, helped to mobilize 30,000 white Protestants to join the March on Washington. As Paula Pfeffer points out, about a third of the 250,000 marchers were white; some credit for that figure certainly belongs to Hedgeman. Before the march, she wrote to A. Philip Randolph to ask that women be included among the day's speakers. Hedgeman concluded the memo to Randolph pleading,

"I hope that this memorandum will receive careful consideration and submit it in the belief that my service to the “March Idea,” since you suggested it early in 1963 when you proposed the March For Jobs in October, has been of the quantity and quality which merits reasonable recognition of my proposal."

(The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership)

But her plea fell upon deaf ears.

The painful exclusion undoubtedly motivated Hedgeman to write and publish a political memoir entitled, The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership. She described the actual March with a thinly concealed bitterness:

"On the day of the March, the wives of the civil rights leaders and other Negro women were asked to sit on the dais and Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words. Mrs. Rosa Parks, the courageous woman who had refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, was presented, but most casually. We grinned, some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture."

(The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership)

On that memorable afternoon when Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of 250,000 people before the Lincoln Memorial, Anna Hedgeman wrote on her program, “I wished very much that Martin had said, ‘We have a dream.’”

This is one of many civil rights memoirs written by black women to contradict received wisdom about the role and the position of black women in the movement. Others have recounted the remarkable sacrifices and cultural resistance of black women in their private and public lives. Many autobiographies and memoirs of those involved in the civil rights movement mark the death of Emmett Till and his mother's momentous decision to release photographs documenting Till's murder at the hands of a white mob, a decision that marked the beginning of a crucial change in consciousness. Evelyn C. White described her childhood experience in Black Women and the Wilderness:

"The sense of vulnerability and exposure that I felt in the wake of the Birmingham bombing was compounded by feelings that I already had about Emmett Till….

During those summers in Oregon when I walked past the country store where thick-necked loggers drank beer while leaning on their big-rig trucks, it seemed like Emmett's fate had been a part of my identity from birth. Averting my eyes from those of the loggers, I'd remember the ghoulish photo of Emmett I had seen in Jet magazine with my childhood friends Tyrone and Lynette Henry. The Henrys subscribed to Jet, an inexpensive magazine for Blacks, and kept each issue neatly filed on the top shelf of a bookcase in their living room. Among black parents, the Jet with Emmett's story was always carefully handled and treated like one of the most valuable treasures on earth. For within its page rested an important lesson they felt duty-bound to teach their children: how little white society valued our lives …. As with thousands of black children from that era, Emmett's murder cast a nightmarish pall over my youth. In his pummeled and contorted face I saw a reflection of myself and the blood-chilling violence that would greet me if I ever dared to venture into the wilderness."

(Black Women and the Wilderness)

Twenty-First-Century Black Women's Autobiography

The large number of black women in their twenties and thirties writing autobiography at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a stark departure from the traditional notion of the genre as a vehicle for middle-aged, middle-class reflections on a life well-lived. The young, urban black women coming-of-age autobiographies wrestled with themes and issues of skin color, “good hair,” physical representation, professional development and rampant consumerism, all the while chronicling these women's migratory experiences from working-class to middle-class. Of particular interest are those contemporary writings unmediated by the high stakes and profit motives of the American publishing and media complexes. For historians and students of black Women's Studies, all of these works are, of course, important records deserving consideration as valuable documents that will one day constitute a collective memory of the present.

Contemporary black women who write autobiographies, whether from Cape Cod such as journalist Jill Nelson in Volunteer Slavery or from the projects such as journalist Charlise Lyles in Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?, usually told stories they hoped would inspire and foster the growth of a modern class of accomplished black professional women. Just as nineteenth-century black clubwomen constructed themselves as role models of hyper-respectability as a means to uplift the race and to counter demeaning stereotypes of their womanhood, so did the writers of “up from the projects” or “how I got over” narratives construct themselves as models of success in a hostile world.

These contemporary narratives can be read as manifestos of resistance and as self-help guides for modern black women who, as a consequence of their migrations, now have feet in both worlds. The implicit lesson is that success comes as a result of relentless hard work—“working like a slave”—acquisition of education and social skills, and the cultivation of a strong sense of self-worth. Poverty, as slavery was for Booker T. Washington, is something to be mastered, to overcome. Through this mastery of poverty, Bertice Berry, Charlise Lyles, Veronica Chalmers, and others became heroines of their own and of our lives. To be sure, while successful black women stories may challenge patriarchy, they inherently reinforced the efficacy of American values, beliefs, and customs that, in form, comprise the rules we must live by if we are to succeed.

The autobiographies of “the Oprah Winfrey generation” deal with a vast number of permutations of race, class, and gender constructions. Still, there exist resonant strands or chords that reverberate throughout these diverse texts. Mother-daughter relationships are especially dominant in the narrative discourses of contemporary black women. This is not surprising, especially considering that the majority of black children now live in single-parent households headed by their mothers or some other female relative or fictive kin. Moreover, within this group the majority of children live at or below poverty.

The performer Bertice provides a useful point of departure in her autobiography, Bertice: The World According to Me. Bertice Berry earned a PhD in sociology from Kent State University. An accomplished comedian, she starred in television situation comedies and hosted her own talk show. At the outset of her narrative, she performs a skillful and instructive dialogue between herself and the images that a lot of people in the world have of black women. She demonstrates how contemporary black women must define themselves against a script that plays endlessly in the minds of white and some black Americans:

"My mother was a single African-American woman raising seven kids with little income and even less opportunity. During my childhood, she became an abusive alcoholic.

Now stop right there, sugar. Up in your mind a tape is beginning to play that tells you, “Oh, yeah, I know what that means. She's black and she was poor. Swing low. She's gonna be angry, and she—”

But that's someone else's movie. There's more to my life than that. Yes, we did have a hard time, and, yes, I have a lot of anger. But you have to work hard at getting me angry. Or you have to be a politician and not work at all. Just watch out when I start to move my neck."

(Bertice: The World According to Me)

Not all black women become heroines of their lives. Many are casualties. One was the journalist Leanita McClain (1952–1984) who was the first black member of the Chicago Tribune. She committed suicide. McClain grew up in the housing project named for Ida B. Wells-Barnett and completed an MA degree in 1973 at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her first major article, published in Newsweek in 1980, addressed the responsibilities and burdens of the black middle class:

"I am burdened daily with showing whites that blacks are people. I am, in the old vernacular, a credit to my race. I am my brothers' keeper, and my sisters', though many of them have abandoned me because they think that I have abandoned them. I run a gauntlet between two worlds, and I am cursed and blessed by both. I travel, observe and take part in both; I can also be used by both. I am a rope in a tug of war. If I am a token in my downtown office, so am I at my cousin's church tea. I assuage white guilt. I disprove black inadequacy and prove to my parents' generation that their patience was indeed a virtue. I have a foot in each world, but I cannot fool myself about either."

Other autobiographies deal specifically with acts of violence. Charlotte Pierce-Baker's Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape collects the stories of ten African American women who were victims of rape and the conflicts they experienced in the aftermath. Issues of loyalty to black men and the black community clashed with personal feelings of loss and betrayal as they decided whether or not to prosecute their cases and whether or not to share their experiences. These, and the many other current autobiographies of black women, such as that of the photographer Carol Parrot Blue, are more than simply a record of one life or one event in a life. They are attempts to deal with complex cultural issues as they affect personal identities and that of society.

Two recent anthologies of contemporary black women's writings that blur distinctions between women inside and outside of the academy and across disciplines deserve special showcasing: Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991), edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Janet Sims-Wood, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, and Lucille P. Fultz, and Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women (1994), edited by Patricia Bell-Scott.

It is possible that the increasing number of academic black women's autobiographical writings indicates the need for a separate category, although in some instances the lines between the narratives of academic black women and celebrity or heroic black women are blurred. The recent autobiographies of professors Deborah McDowell, Judy Scales-Trent, Sonia Sanchez, Gloria Wade-Tayles, Patricia Williams, and bell hooks are significant interventions by scholars who have moved from studying the lives of other black women to crafting presentations of their own experiences. The vulnerable observers have turned their gaze inward and seemingly erased boundaries between Other and Self. Yet, like all autobiographies, especially those of black women, these books need to be read with caution and skill. The whole truth is still too dangerous to be told.

See also Cooper, Anna Julia; Davis, Angela; Grimké, Charlotte L. Forten; Holiday, Billie; Jacobs, Harriet Ann; Keckley, Elizabeth; Lee, Jarena; McClain, Leanita; Ringgold, Faith; Taylor, Susie Baker King; Walker, Margaret Abigail; and Waters, Ethel.

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