La Quita Rhone

Virtue Purloined:

 African and Mexican American Women as a Double Minority

            Minority identity has proven to be a tremendous burden for women who have found themselves purloined of class, voice, and the pursuit of the “American Dream.”  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The House on Mango Street, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are all first person autobiographical narratives written by minority female authors. These women gain “double minority” status by virtue of not only their race but their gender as well. These authors share compelling accounts of personal struggle, loss, and survival. And it is through descriptive personal accounts that readers discover the power of the female minority “voice” and “vicariously share the minority experience.”

Womanhood juxtaposed to manhood has historically proven to be unequal. When the founding fathers of this great country gathered to establish a new land of freedom and the pursuit of individual happiness, they hardly expected women, much less minority women to claim a rightful share of this “dream.” Minority women have a unique story to tell by virtue of the unique barriers they encounter. These are barriers of not only racism, but sexism as well. Minority women have had to learn about the nuances of life and mature in turbulent times of racism and degradation. Of the three literary authors examined, only Harriet Jacobs experienced, first hand, the scourge and denigration of slavery. Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros create their literary works in an atmosphere of racial prejudice and intolerance.

 Although Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published more than one hundred years prior to Caged Bird and The House on Mango Street, the themes in these literary works parallel. In Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs chronicles her dehumanizing experiences as a slave. In the beginning of her narrative she shares:

I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away…. I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, … (Gates, pg. 445).

Although Jacobs and her family were slaves, her father worked very hard with the “dream” of one day purchasing freedom for himself and his family. But Jacobs’ father died without having realized this dream and so she took up the cause. Fortunately, she had a mistress who taught her to read as well as spell. And thus she was able to articulate her personal plight and record it for future generations. Jacobs gives insightful and descriptive accounts of the abuse that female slaves suffered. In one such instance she tells of a slave cook who was made to eat food prepared for the master’s dog.  When the dog refused to eat, the master ordered the slave woman to eat it. He mistakenly assumed that the slave woman’s stomach could digest the dog food. To Jacobs’ chagrin, even animals were afforded better treatment than the female slaves. In another sadistic account, Jacobs describes a young slave girl gripped in the pangs of childbirth:

I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of a child nearly white. In her agony she cried out, “O Lord, come and take me!” Her mistress stood by, and mocked at her like an incarnate fiend. “You suffer, do you?” she exclaimed. “I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more too.” (Gates pg. 455)

The slave mistress refused to empathize with this poor young woman, because of her race, even though she was in the perils of childbirth. Harriet Jacobs learned harrowing lessons at a very young and impressionable age about the inequalities of race and gender.

She mourned when she gave birth to a daughter:

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. (pg. 526)

Jacobs’ outrage and frustration with the horrendous slavery practices is multiplied by the helplessness she feels because of her gender. She yearns to escape her feminine prison as well as the prison of slavery. To this end, she resigns to hide in a physical prison of only nine feet long and seven feet wide for almost seven years. The tortures of physical imprisonment were preferable to the tortures of slavery. When Jacobs did gain the opportunity to escape to the “free” north, she simply traded one set of racial barriers for another.

Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros also speak about the burden of the minority status of women. Angelou’s Caged Bird, written in the early 1970’s, describes her life as an African American girl growing up in the segregated south.  “Angelou's book, although it is meant for a broad audience, is also concerned with conveying the difficulties of being black and a woman in America.” (Classic Note)  While Harriet Jacobs’ voice was silenced due to the scourge of slavery, Angelou’s voice is literally silenced after she is raped. Angelou determined that she should never speak again because she believed her spoken words led to the death of the man that raped her. But Angelou does regain her voice with the help of an African American teacher by the name of Mrs. Flowers who tells Maya, “Now no one is going to make you talk- possibly no one can. But bear in mind, language is man’s way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals.” (Angelou, pg. 98) Maya, admittedly, had never thought of her own voice in this manner and Mrs. Flowers goes on to tell her that, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.” (Angelou pg. 98) These “shades of deeper meaning” abound in Angelou’s own narrative. She speaks about race and prejudice, segregation, and imprisonment in the female body. Growing up in Stamps, Arkansas, Maya Angelou felt ugly and awkward. She had first hand experience with segregation and racial injustice in the 1930’s. Her paternal grandmother, whom she called momma, raised her and her brother Bailey. Even though momma owned her own store, she was not exempt from racial and gender discrimination. Maya recalled a particular scene between momma and the “powhitetrash” children. The spectacle of momma standing and facing the derogatory and racial insults of these girls was a testament to her faith and mental fortitude. Momma was able to defeat the “powhitetrash” children by refusing to lower the standards that she set for herself. Maya learned that black women needed to tell the story unique to their race and gender.

Sandra Cisneros tells her own story through the narration of Espiranza. The House on Mango Street is her autobiographical narrative dealing with the issues of gender inequality, racism and segregation from a Mexican American perspective. Her story is told through the young narrator Espiranza who shares “snapshots” of her life growing up during a time when her parents were constantly moving. The reader immediately senses Espiranza’s longing for a nice “home.” These “snapshots” offer a glimpse of the real life dilemmas Espiranza faces. Interestingly, Espiranza also speaks about the differences between boys and girls. She says, “The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls” (Cisneros pg. 8). It’s as if the girls are invisible and don’t deserve to be heard. Espiranza bristles at the thought of being passive and not having a voice and a choice about life decisions. She also gains a first hand lesson on segregation and prejudice when she moves into a new neighborhood in a run-down house. She tries to make friends with a little girl who says, “Okay, I’ll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That’s when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad.” (Cisneros pg. 13) These events awakened a new sensitivity in Cisneros.

Cisneros is also in search of a “dream.” Her dream is to own a “nice” house with real stairs, a big yard, and at least three washrooms with running water and pipes that work. But the house that they move into on Mango Street is nothing like the dream home that her parents promised. The house on Mango Street is small with crumbling bricks and a front door that won’t open properly. It doesn’t have a front yard and everyone has to share a room. Minority participation in the amenities offered by the dominant culture has always been a struggle.

Espiranza comes face to face with her minority identity when she talks about her name. Espiranza hates her name because of the way the teachers and children at school pronounce it; “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name-Magdalena-which is uglier than mine.” (Cisneros pg. 11) Espiranza’s feelings of shame and awkwardness are a direct result of the dominant culture’s racial indifference and intolerance. She even feels that she has to denigrate her sister Magdalena’s name so that she doesn’t feel as badly about her own.

The authors of Slave Girl, Caged Bird, and The House on Mango Street all find voices to share their “double minority” experiences. Their powerful messages are full of significant human truth. In a narrative style of prose and poetic prose, these women bear their souls in an effort to share with all of humanity the indignities of racism, segregation, and gender discrimination. The slave narratives constituted the first written African American autobiographies. Slaves wrote in order to expose the horrific conditions under which they lived and to provide proof of their humanity to further the abolitionist cause. (Menga-Wallace, pg. 1) While Harriet Jacobs wrote in an attempt to validate her humanity, she also emphasized the inordinate abuse suffered by female slaves. The institution of slavery ushered in an era of harsh treatment for African Americans physically, mentally, and socially. Women of color seized the opportunity to shatter the barriers of ignorance and gender discrimination.

Maya Angelou wrote Caged Bird to describe a time when she, as a young African American girl, sought to understand the racial forces that swirled about her when she was growing up in Stamps, Arkansas. As a young girl, Maya felt awkward and ugly. She felt that being a female made the matter worse. According to Megna-Wallace, “Angelou's account of her childhood and adolescence chronicles her frequent encounters with racism, sexism, and classism at the same time that she describes the people, events, and personal qualities that helped her to survive the devastating effects of her environment.” Interestingly enough, “Conway notes, "Autobiographical narratives are fictions, in the same sense that the narrator imposes her or his order on the ebb and flow of experience and gives us a false sense of certainty and finality about causation in life." Despite this limitation, Conway goes on to assert the positive benefits of autobiographical narratives: "Yet they are not fictions but accounts of real lives, lived in a specific time and place, windows on the past, chances to enter and inhabit the real world of another person, chances to try on another identity and so broaden our own" (vii).” (Menga-Wallace, pg. 3) In essence, this epitomizes the literary experience. The ability to study the works of minority writers and “vicariously share the minority experience” is indeed an artful experience for the reader as well as the writer.

Sandra Cisneros, when asked what she was thinking while writing The House on Mango Street, replied:

So much is unconscious when I was writing. I was very, very young. I was forming both my spirituality and my politics at the time that Esperanza was. If you had asked me these questions at the time I was writing it, I would not have been able to articulate it as spiritual and political. I just knew that there were many things that I felt very powerless to change, things that I was moved by, things I was learning as I was working in the community. As I learned those lessons, they emerged in my text. I was just writing from my heart. (Heredia, Kevane, pg. 49)

The responsibility that Cisneros felt for the young Latina girls of her culture inspired her to write literature that would change their lives. She felt that her own life, though poor, was a sheltered one in comparison to the young Latina girls growing up in direct contact with gangs and violence in addition to navigating through the complexities of womanhood.

Perseverance and the burning desire to tell the world not to give up during the trials of growing up and growing out is the resounding message espoused by the narratives of these authors. The incredible stories of loss, rebirth, and survival exhibit the resiliency of womanhood and humanity. The literary “voices” of these incredible women will resound throughout eternity.

Works Cited

 Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Kevane, Bridget, and Juanita N. Heredia. Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Megna-Wallace, Joanne. Understanding I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/caged/shortsumm.html

http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Authors/about_sandra_cisneros.html