LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature
Sample Student Midterm, Fall 2007

Jennifer Jones

September 27, 2007

As the Pendulum Swings: The Victimization of African American Women 

            It is well known among the dominant and minority cultures in America that people of African descent have been penalized, alienated, and victimized over the last 200 years.  What is perhaps not well known is just how often African Americans penalize, alienate, and victimize themselves.  After hundreds of years of being beaten down, some African Americans seem almost unable to the let go of the old ways.  They, with good reason, remain skeptical of the dominant culture and its “American Dream,” but, strange as it may sound, they have also become skeptical of each other.  Receiving the brunt of this unjustifiable treatment are African American women.  Not only has the dominant culture historically abused these women, but African American men have as well.  African American women have been demoralized physically, emotionally, and sexually.  What seems even more shocking is that these women are sometimes not only the victims but also the aggressors.  In order to gain a better understanding of this concept, close examination of textual evidence published from the time of slavery until present day is required.  African American literature offers the perfect lens in which to view the plight of the African American woman from her place in slavery to her abusive relationships to her struggle to rise above it all. 

            History states that when they first appeared in this country, African American women were subjugated and degraded in slavery.  Masters bought and sold these women as easily as they might buy or sell a cow.  Very often, they were used by their masters as sexual objects, and, consequently, as breeding machines.   One of the worst offenses:  they were forced to suppress their mothering instincts.  Frederick Douglass, in his The Life of Frederick Douglass, discusses the possibility that his father was a white man.  He points out, “The opinion was … whispered that my master was my father” (Douglass 340).  This alludes to the historical opinion that white masters purposely impregnated their female slaves.  Douglass’s mother belonged to another slave owner and worked in the fields.  She made every attempt to care for her son, but was only able to see him at night.  “She would lie down with [Frederick], and get [him] to sleep, but long before [he] waked, she was gone” (Douglass 340).  If she was not back by dawn, she would receive “a whipping” from her owner (Douglass 340).  It would appear as though Douglass’s mother resisted the notion of severing the motherly ties for as long as she was able, even chancing “a whipping” from her master.  Eventually, she stops coming to see him, and he really does not miss her.  It is not until years later that he learned she had died.  Douglass states: “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (341). 

            It is perhaps even more interesting to see how African Americans hang on to this emotionless mentality even after slavery has ended.  Alice Walker confirms this throughout her novel, The Color Purple.  The main character, Celie, is used by her father as a household slave throughout her childhood.  When Celie is younger, he uses her mother, draining her essence until she dies.  Once Celie is old enough, he starts using her.  He rapes her repeatedly and impregnates her twice.  “He took [the first baby] while [she] was sleeping.  Kilt it out there in the woods.  Kill [the second baby] too” (Walker 2).  In actuality, he sells them to the highest bidder.  How is this different than the pre-Civil War era slave owner?  Why is he carrying on the habits and behaviors that should have died with the end of the Civil War?  Perhaps he feels he has no choice.  Perhaps he knows what he has done is wrong, and he wants to put his mistake as far away from him as possible.  Regardless of his reasons, after what slaves were put through by their masters, would it not make sense for him to break the cycle?  Shouldn’t it make sense for him, as the descendant of a slave, to want to be as far from the evil slave owner’s attitudes and behaviors as possible? 

            In addition to men, women are also seen repeating the cycle.  Thousands of years of natural intuition has been broken, and these women are portrayed as purposely ignoring their mothering instincts.  Walker shows this during a scene in which Celie and Shug Avery are discussing Shug’s children.  Celie asks where Shug’s children are, and Shug responds with, “My kids with they grandma… she could stand the kids, I had to go” (Walker 50).  Celie asks Shug if she misses them.  Shug says, “Naw… I don’t miss nothing” (Walker 50).  Shug leaves her children in order to party, sing, and entertain men.  She appears to have no interest in her children.    

            On the other hand, Toni Morrison shows what happens when the pendulum swings in the opposite direction.  Women go from intentionally ignoring their children to hanging on to them for dear life.  In Song of Solomon, Morrison’s character Ruth clings to her son as though he is her life force.  She breast feeds him as though it is a religious experience, and compares her breast milk to a “thread of light” and a “golden thread stream” (Morrison 20).  Even though her son has no interest in breast feeding at the age of four, he complies with her.  What else is he to do?  He’s only a child after all. 

            No matter which direction the pendulum swings, a happy medium never seems to be found among African American literature.  Men and women, regardless of skin color, have committed heinous acts toward African American women causing them to swing in either one direction or the other, rather than band together to end the cycle.  

According to Harriet Jacobs, a white woman’s weapon of choice is verbal abuse. Usually, when females become involved in this type of situation, they band together and help one another.  Before the Civil War, African American women received no such compassion from their white mistresses.  In her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs relates an episode in which a young slave gives birth to a “white” baby only for it to die shortly afterward.  As the girl wishes for her own death, the mistress says, “You suffer, do you? … I am glad of it.  You deserve it all, and more too” (Jacobs 455).  The young woman’s mother comments that she hopes her daughter follows the baby to heaven and the mistress reacts with “Heaven! … There is no such place for her and her bastard” (455).  She gives the young woman the anger she cannot give to her husband.  She too is voiceless and choiceless.  As the young woman lay dying and helpless, the mistress is too cowardly to stay and watch; Jacobs recounts that “when she left the room, the scornful smile was still on her lips” (455).  Jacobs paints this white woman as an evil creature.  However, it is likely that her cruelty is simply a reactive response misdirected toward the young woman.  Being a woman herself, she has no other choice than to take out the anger she feels toward her husband’s behavior on the only person that is beneath her in the social order – the young exploited slave girl.  On the other hand, she might just be jealous.

            It’s not only pre-Civil War white women that turn against African American women during their time of need.  African American women turn on themselves.  Walker’s character Celie is a supreme example of this concept when she tells her step-son to abuse his wife.  Celie has been raped, beaten, and stolen from by men, yet she still cannot stop herself from giving him this horrible advice.  His father also tells him to hit his wife, but Harpo does not act until he hears it from Celie.  When he asks her what he should do to get his wife to “behave,” she thinks to herself:

I don’t mention how happy he is now.  How three years pass and he still whistle and sing.  I think bout how every time I jump when Mr. _______ call me, [Harpo’s wife] look surprise.  And like she pity me. (Walker 37)

The words that come out of her mouth are quite different: “Beat her. I say” (Walker 37).  Why would she put her suffering on another woman?  She does it for the same reason the white woman verbally abuses the suffering young slave in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  She’s jealous.  Does that make it okay?  No.

            The one person who seems to be trying to take a step out of this long line of abuse is Maya Angelou.  She fights it with her poem, “Still I Rise.”  Angelou depicts the African American woman’s persona perfectly:

            Did you want to see me broken?

            Bowed head and lowered eyes?

            Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

            Weakened by my soulful cries. (16-19)

However, she shows her refusal to live down to this victimized attitude when she says, “I am the dream and the hope of the slave. / I rise” (43-44).  She is the aspiration and inspiration for millions of men and women.  With her poetry, she seems to be trying to give back some of that confidence that African Americans in general seem to be missing after so many years of victimization bringing the pendulum to a halt.

Slave masters have committed the ultimate crime against these women not by raping them, shoving them away from their children, and forcing them to ignore their natural mothering instincts, but by training African American men and women that this behavior is acceptable.  There is no way they will ever discover the American Dream until they have completely healed from years of victimization.  It all started with the first slave owner who thought raping and impregnating slaves was beneficial.  Giselle Hewitt (2006) states the point perfectly: “As a ‘double minority’ group African American women have many struggles they must face and overcome in order to find their “dream.”  In their initial relationship with the dominant culture they were placed into a role of sexual objectification, however, sexual objectification of African American women has continued as a common struggle that is still being faced today.”

Outside Works Cited

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1982.