Why Black Girls Must Leave Home: an Argument for My Daughters

Ever read Gwendolyn Brooks' "Sadie and Maud?"  In the poem, published in 1963, Brooks presents Maud as a mouse of a woman who chooses to leave home to attend college.  Sadie, on the other hand, as full of vigor as her name suggests, stays home and pulls out some dichotomous mea culpa of adventure and pleasure, scraping life "with a fine toothed comb."  In the end, Sadie dies early willing her "fine-toothed" aesthetic to her children, while her sister Maud lives on, alone in her house, presumably with her dry old books and degree placards to keep her company.  (line 4)  Sadie and Maud both come to mind as I watch my daughters pack and plan out which way to go as the sun sets on their respite in childhood.  I watch them pack and plan and look back on my own leaving, and I think of that poem.        As I recall, the poem's absolute irony was lost, reading it the first time in 1988, in a Literary Forms course, on the second floor of Giles Hall.      There we sat, within a seminar construct, no more than twenty of us.  All women.  All African American; or some derivative thereof, reading an African American female author, being taught by an African-American female professor. And although this seminar never produced any predictable rhythm, no marked warmth or exploratory space, as some professors do not connect with students well,  it did somehow provide relevant fodder for future reflection (as is the case here).  Moreover, our analysis of "Sadie and Maud" warrants some discussion primarily because we stayed within the pages of our text, not actually appreciating the poem's applicability to our own reality.        The realization that arises now, that did not then, comes out of my experience as an African-American woman who, over twenty years later, understands clearly that she may never have read Gwendolyn Brooks had she not left home.      Amazingly, without even thinking I needed to protest in the least, I went through school, K through twelve, without being directed to read any authors of color.  Period.  My post-adolescent view of the world had been shaped by this actuality.   Today, as I explain their good fortune, my students find it unbelievable that in California schools through the seventies and eighties, I had rarely, if ever ( I can almost say never) been directed to read an African-American author.  And in retrospect, the one time I was,  in English 12H,  reading Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" (which at the time would have been great to know) our teacher never revealed the author as a black man.  Mr. ___ did not tell us this.  I now imagine my instructor, as talented an English teacher as I've seen,  believed sincerely in the universalization of textual meaning.   This strict, unwavering method of looking at texts makes sense when considering from whence the practice came:  my high school English professor came out of a traditional graduate program that taught him prior to the flourishing post-colonial criticism that blossomed in the final decades of the twentieth century.       He came from the school which, prompted by critics like Robert Penn Warren, A. I. Richards, and t.s. eliot,  began to wring analysis very strictly out of the words on the page;  sans biography, sans history, sans overall context.   They felt one could locate meaning on the page, not in the world:  the grand universalization of signs.      That self-same universalization,  Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison,  describes as a lobotomizing of texts.  She says that identifying matters of race in a text tends to inspire moves (on the part of the academy) toward universalization--ignoring and thereby minimizing the complications that arise when contemplating the West's racial history.   It is too much to handle.       For a student like myself, in desperate need of identifying myself outside the strictures of a what I experienced as a brutally racist education, universalization served to douse water onto the flickering little flame within me.  Lobotomize indeed.      Did my instructor realize that I assumed Hayden was just as white as everyone else we read, including Joseph Conrad, who in The Heart of Darkness, used Black, Negro, and "Nigger" with an interchangeable deftness which I to this day find offensively amazing?  In my English 12H class, we never discussed this glaring offense as we toyed with analysis of the imperialistic mind and African partition.      And because the education that I trudged through outside my home focused so consistently upon a culture that minimized my group's historical contribution to it, I found myself unaffixed and unintrigued within it.  I am certain now, that were I to follow Sadie's path, staying home and continuing in California as a post secondary choice, I may have never returned to the South to meet either Sadie or Maud, let alone that Grande Dame of African American poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks.   And oh!  How I did need to meet them all.        In her essay, "Saving the Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life,"  Alice Walker argues that a lack of relevant, concrete, visible models is deadly to an artist's life.  She cites Van Gough's struggles with models just before his suicide as evidence of a rudderless, untethered identity; then extends the analogy to herself as a black female artist.  Walker sought out her models feverishly, and found them through dogged, relentless searching.      Throughout In Search of Our Mother's Gardens Walker explores the relationship of the artist to the world in which he/she lives.  She names among her models Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer--all profoundly important American authors whom I had not read until I packed my trunk for college and headed out into a world I was not expecting to find.  And I knew I had to find something that reflected my cultural relevance to the world and its history, and that something had to reflect so brightly and so effectively as to quell and defeat a rising tide of cultural shame and ignorance warring inside me; warring against my innate desire for self-actualization.        The need to fight against shame and ignorance came out of my experiences in California public schools, which only now do I realize paper-cut my psyche in support of untruths and stereotypes which undermined my love for myself and my community.  So thorough and insidious a job had been done, that by the time I graduated high school, I, unlike Sadie, had to leave.  Had I not,  I believe I would have perished.        Like many of my age and circumstance, in direct opposition to its  true purpose, my public school education worked to alienate me racially, psychologically, and spiritually from  my Self.  I lost myself in school.  From the moment I stepped into my first class in kindergarten, Ms. Hoffmeister's, in a small Southern California city, I learned to practice the art of defense against psychic attack.  I was told by my classmates to believe that I was defective.  "What if you were Black?" they actually said to each other, in front of me, in an elementary school in third grade, in Monterey County.       I recall in first grade, proudly sharing with my classmates that my uncle was a police officer.  A boy in the group interrupted, "Oh, I know him."  My teacher cut him off, "You don't know her uncle."  He smiled, "I know he's a nigger."  My African-American teacher told him not to talk so filthily.  We were six.       I learned then, in spite of what may have been true or not about my assessment,  that no one in that class could be impressed by my family.  I learned that the decidedly impressive folks were Janet and Mark and their dog Spot, who lived around the corner.         What to make of school as I would then go home and hear my mother's adventures of working to change the South, in SNCC with Julian Bond, Ruby Doris, and a man I later came to know as Mukasa.  She told us about Reagan hunting for Angela Davis and pointed to pictures of the Soledad Brothers on the wall.  My dad's degrees and research on DuBois could not have impressed my classmates.  He was my black uncle's nephew.  I became confused.  I became angry.  Was this not what our folks wanted for us?  They told us that people worked hard, bravely, and many died so we could go where we pleased--so go.  I questioned why they would want this for us.  I could not tell them that this hurt us.      I resisted, fighting back, sometimes with my hands and sometimes with my words, but mostly with my hands.  And unfortunately, beside just a few years miraculously protected in Arkansas schools,  I matriculated all the way through to graduation in California.  With a keen immediacy, I feel Chris Rock's experience when he says he was attacked daily, and had to fight often, when he was bused out of his predominately black Brooklyn neighborhood.   .                     .                      .      Duplicity arose within us as we were told in public that we were one awful thing, then returned home listening to our parents who taught us of the beauty of our black selves: hair, skin, noses, and souls.  Often, I recall hearing people of my race (and other races of color) condemn themselves for being "too dark," or having "kinky" hair, or broad "big" noses.  I heard it, yet I did not understand how anyone would reject what we were taught was beautiful, even majestic.  Pretty and black did not fit together in my school experience.  One was more likely to hear pretty, even though dark.  And I knew something had to be wrong with this.  Yet the voices of those who believed in their own implicit ugliness prevailed, the voices of those who treated African Americans as monolithically defective was so overwhelming as to cause constant conflict for many of us, within and without.     My trouble could not resolve itself until I left California.  When I returned to Arkansas, my birth home, I found relief because I knew my cousin Yolanda, was the prettiest girl ever, black, black, and pretty pretty.  Benny W. was known as just pretty, Black Benny.  But maybe that was because I am from the South, and the proud South where we grew our own ideas about ourselves, wrought out of genuine, self-affirming, communal living.  Segregation crystallized the affirmations.        In the South we grew, we flourished, protected by that racial unself-consciousness Zora Neale Hurtson experienced while growing up in Eatonville, Florida.  We could be ourselves.  We colud breathe.  We could explore.  We could find who we were through ourselves, without interference from the outside world that insisted on racializing everything in order to dominate everything.      Because we lived communally and depended upon ourselves, we knew we could be what we wanted to be.  Young men could build houses like my grandfather and uncles.  They could own grocery stores like Alexander and Mr. White and the Lowdens.  They could own a car wash and sell bar-b-que like my cousin Marcus.  They could start a baseball league like my grandfather and his friends.  They could profess at the college like Mr. Haley.  Earn a "terminal" degree.  Found or pledge a sorority.  They could open their own nursery school like my aunt.  They could be a Fulbright Scholar or a librarian like my aunt Billie.  They could even paint the Black Belt and show in New York, like my grandma's cousin Archibald.        Mostly however, they could be in love and raise a family and find affirmation in the folks around them who expected them to be and do whatever they wanted because they were glad about their heritage, rooted in their culture, and certain of their own beauty.  They could laugh and cry.  They could be ugly if they so chose.  They could just be.       So I say to my daughters, who both have now finished high school: go.  Go far and look for yourself.  Go South.  Go anywhere.  Travel dusty roads.  Look for yourself in the dogwoods and magnolias of Arkansas or the deep red clay of Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama.  Be like Sadie.  Be like Maude.  Be whomever you choose.  But be sure to bring with you-- my girls, my Loves--your fine-toothed combs.

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