Lessons from Shug Avery and Miss Celie: What to Do With This Rage

                       

                       

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God.But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don't want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. ~ Miss Celie

For twenty-five years I have returned to this scene from Alice Walker's The Color Purple for solace, particularly at times of low faith and pure despair. I read it when I find myself suffering spiritually, especially as it concerns humans hurting other humans -- often purposefully. The scene cuts to the heart of much of my grief over my powerlessness to save myself or anyone else from pain generated by oppressive acts of violence, violence perpetrated by Shug Avery's "Man", trauma defined as natural disaster, fire/explosion, transportation accident, work, home, or recreational accident, toxic substance exposure, physical assault, assault with a weapon, sexual assault, other unwanted sexual experience, combat or war exposure, captivity, illness or injury, severe human suffering, sudden accidental death, sudden violent death, injury, harm, or death [we] cause.

Not included in this list drawn from the article,
Trauma-Exposed Community-Dwelling Women and Men Respond Similarly to the DAR-5 Anger Scale: Factor Structure Invariance and Differential Item Functioning, is government response to and complicity in these traumas. Witnessing those ostensibly charged with protecting populations from human suffering initiate, profit from and callously turn a blind eye to the pain of those we love must qualify as another form of trauma. It feels like torture. But for American "Man" (and define him as you choose) torturing black women is not new. Neither is America initiating, profiting from or turning a blind eye to the pain of vast swaths of other humans. What is new, however, is the ubiquitous broadcast of a shameless exercise of violent power against populations who have historically been othered by American Man. Every two weeks a different group takes it turn at a whipping post. Disturbing images dominate the nation, and more importantly our minds. All of this is no less than traumatic for anyone with a conscience. It is everywhere and inescapable. No matter how expert our attempts to try to protect ourselves from obvious abuse through avoidance and selective engagement, there he is, invading our consciousnesses, as if he were God and we have no choice but to respond to his power.

For me, a black woman in America, the overt televised abuse began when Barack Obama presented as a possible winner of the 2008 Presidential election. It intensified as he took the reigns of power. Media mainstreamed racial and cultural insults. Radicalized peoples took hit after hit. Police lynchings of black men and boys increased in number but that Obama became President offered a bit of salve. We endured for the sake of progress. But then he began to disappoint, appearing to offer appeasement to our torturers and through compromising over health care, deportations and in the ways he spoke to and about us. And we realized the salve a false remedy that insulted our understanding of ourselves and our needs from our government. So, the abuse we endured profited us little. But we endured it nevertheless. Though proud we were, we became more angry, especially as we watched him turn flips to satisfy folks who despised him because he was born.

For years I failed to internalize Walker's last line, "Every time I conjure a up a rock, I throw it."

I imagine the state of relative innocence before the Nazis rose.

But that was yesterday, and today Shug and Celie instructs me through my vacillations between determination, surrender, and rage.

At this point in the novel Miss Celie has begun her rejection of the status quo. She's ready to respond to a life of beatings and rapes and verbal denigration and sudden loss and toil and fracture and alienation. Shug Avery has an answer for her -- it's in the trees -- but Celie's not ready to hear it. She has never fought; has been cowed all her life and at this point begins to resurrect the spirit with which she was born by picking up the imaginary -- a weapon generated by her own mind. She has to. She has no choice. Bubbling to surface is the anger within her -- a rage distilled not only by her experience in the world but also her own blindness to its systemization, her acquiesce to it , and her complicity in its operation. I think of her instructing Harpo to beat Miss Sophia.

No less than ten times this month I have listened to and watched friends and relatives and strangers break down in tears just before they describe a frightening state of rage. Rage I imagine rested dormant, but in thick layers, just below their skin's surface. I've heard accounts of explosive verbal exchanges and road rage and unyielding depression -- all from women, men and queer folk of color. Almost exclusively these behaviors are described shamefully as if they don't make sense. As if they are the result of some personal failing. But I have come to believe that the denial of one's abuse and one's genuine emotional response to it are and have been the most effective tools in the imperial arsenal. (I think of abuse survivors who speak of their perpetrator's gaslight: the abuser works endlessly to convince the abused of their complicity in their abuse, thereby guaranteeing silence and continued submission).

And those of us who have survived America have practiced this art masterfully. We have been made to do it and when we fail, are blamed for our circumstance. (I think about the "escape from the hood" mythos. Why is it acceptable for us to watch entire communities in America and over the world, suffer and then celebrate those who "made it out" while ignoring the failure to address the American policies that induce one to leave one's home?)

This trickery couples well with an American Puritanical mythology that insists that even with "Man's" foot on our necks, we pull ourselves up. Get on with it. This attitude is further girded by some religious interpretations that insist that if we truly believe, we cannot feel anger. Bypass the emotion--though psychology and various other spiritual interpretations teach us this is impossible. Instead of addressing the source of our grief with clarity and strength and resolve, the way Dr. King and Sojourner Truth did -- the way Delores Huerta continues to do, we internalize our emotionality as faulty and seek all sorts of means to correct what has been made our problem. We do have to deal with the problem, however, we must also address the offense. I believe more and more that this is all our responsibility if we truly intend to live in a more just world.  

Shug Avery, who walked through the fire early, seeking to connect profoundly with her right to a peace in the trees, drops a good preacher's wisdom onto Celie's head. The conversations continue over time-- while Celie daily returns to the fire and tries to breathe. Her anger grows and as we know, she nearly slices Mr.___'s throat.

According to the above article published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, anger co-occurs with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across various groups of traumatized individuals. Expression of this anger is not abnormal nor unexpected. But repression and non-recognition of it disallows treatment. The article further explains how the treatment of trauma -- which we all might agree as urgent to our survival -- must be specialized in its treatment of the anger that results from trauma. 

I am frustrated by our culture's constant efforts to deny othered people's the right even to feel anger, as our oppressors concurrently express theirs, legitimate and not, ad infinitum. And I do not mean anger for anger's sake. But a healthy recognition of feelings and subsequently, the behaviors that accompany it. We cannot treat if we continue to hold it in our guts. It makes us sick and it eventually, surfaces, often sideways.

Aside:

While writing this, another Walker book opens of its own accord to the essay, "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse":

Earth is my home--though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe... I intend to protect my home. Praying -- not a curse -- only the hope my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the Earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save mankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.

~In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

Some days I think and feel and respond in ways I think Shug would approve. Some days, I am right there with Celie. Either way, like many, many others, I am still here working it out.


Somewhere in the distant trees I see a justice I imagine for the Earth and humankind.

Between here and the trees is ground where real people suffer and must be allowed to know they have a right to feel anger over centuries of abuse, including the gaslight. To walk through fire, we need encouragement instead of repression. We also need more lessons in how not to hurt each other while we feel the natural emotions God gave us to help us survive.

Miss Celia claimed her time and her space and eventually, ... took out toward the trees. 

While she struggled, Shug stood right beside her, holding, watching and perpetually directing her toward peace. 

Postscript: And what about in the meantime? What to do when overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness and grief? I repeat what a wise person told me: Focus on doing work with which you are charged. We naturally want to relieve suffering, which is today, pandemic; but there are good willed, highly-qualified people in every field doing the work that we need. Highly qualified people doing their part for justice. Do yours, they told me, to your most excellent best.

I can teach and I can write.

Amen.

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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