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Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North ZOeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA UMI 800-521-0600

RECLAIMING A MULTICULTURAL HERITAGE: RACE, IDENTITY, AND CULTURE IN THE LIFE AND LITERARY WORKS OF OLIVIA WARD BUSH-BANKS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Dennis Marie Blue, B.A., M.A. *****

The Ohio Scate University 2000

Dissertation Committee : Approved by

Professor Amy Shuman, Adviser

Professor Valerie Lee

Professor Kitty Locker ' Advisor

Professor Jacqueline Royster Department of English UMI Number 9962378

Copyright 2000 by Blue, Bennis Marie

All rights reserved.

UMI*

UMI Mlcroform9962378 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT

This study analyzes a nineteenth century Black Montauk woman's construction of identity and a multicultural worldview. The subject of the study, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks wrote essays, plays, memoirs, and poetry acknowledging her multi-raced status at a time when it was difficult to be a

single-raced minority, and being multiply raced was a

liability, not an asset. This study is important because very few if any studies are currently available on how multi-raced people deal with issues of race, class, gender, and how these factors influence existence in a literate

society. The intent of this study is to contribute to the contemporary conversation on multiculturalism, and to demonstrate that nineteenth century identity dialogues preceded our "discovery" of multiculturalism.

11 DEDICATION

In Memory of My Parents and Grandparents

Mary Walker Blue/William Thomas Blue Bertha Hicks Walker/Vester Bright Walker Doc Capps/Chariotte Simmons Blue/Harrison Blue

In Special Memory of My Brothers and Mentor Who Encouraged Me

Joseph Edward Blue (1997) Paul Edward Blue (1999) John Sekora (1997)

With Greatest Love, For My Son

Marcus Jeremi Townes

1 1 1 ACKN0WLSDQMBNT8

As always, I give thanks to God for all that I am and all that I am inspired to be. I thank my Committee Members,

Professors Amy Shuman, Valerie Lee, Kitty Locker, Jacqueline

Royster, Steven Pink, Roland Williams, and outside examiners

Mack Stewart C. Patrick Woliver, and Lisa Florman for their assistance and advice. Because no project grows to completion without financial support, I am especially grateful to Kitty

Locker for always helping me find money to back my endeavors, and also to Amy Shuman for endlessly seeking ways to help me finance my studies and research. Thank you Amy for your patience, compassion, and guidance over the past five years.

A labor of love is not accomplished without those who love you, and so I have been blessed to have had the loving company of my son Marcus who has endured privations and constant moves over the past 14 years as we strove for the completion of this project. For my dear sister, Agnes Blue, no words could ever equal the many sacrifices you have made so that I could be the first "doctor" in the family. To Grace,

Victor, Mary Turpin, and the rest of the gang, thanks for your dollars for dinners, your prayers, and your faith in me.

IV Because she urged me to move forward and aim high,

Ernestine Leach deserves recognition as the person who (along with John Sekora) motivated me to get started on this process and to hold fast to goals. I am especially indebted to Caroll

Mills Young at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for helping me obtain an NAACP Scholarship and a summer internship at The

University of Kentucky that provided major funding for my pre­ dissertation studies and preliminary dissertation research.

Thank you also for introducing me to professional society by bringing to my attention the need to join the Modem Language

Association and the College Language Association where I formed collegial bonds to enable me to further my research interests. Mrs. S.L. Johnson became my steadfast friend, spiritual adviser, and employer as we worked on her forthcoming book about "hair."

I thank The University of Kentucky for the generous

Summer ABD Minority Fellowship that took me to Lexington and supported my writing and revision of my first chapter beyond the Prospectus. Richard Greissman, Ellen Rosenman (my mentor), Peter Mortensen, and Janet Eldred helped me to focus on my topic and sort out the complexities of Bush-Banks' multi-racial and multicultural identities. Dawn Karima

Pettigrew hosted my return to Columbus, Ohio as a guest speaker at a Native American Wordcrafters Circle Conference.

Thank you "Little Sister, " and also Victor, for helping me to reclaim Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and my own Native heritage. Dr. Bernice Guillaume, great granddaughter of Bush-Banks,

opened research doors for me by introducing me to Dr. Gaynell

Stone and the Long Island Anthropological Society. Thank you

for your kind letters suid words of encouragement.

I especially thank the American Folklore Society for

funding my travel to the APS Meeting in Lafayette, Louisiana

that placed me within driving distance of Tulane. There,

Rebecca Hankins, Senior Archivist at the Amistad Research

Center, helped me locate what is left of Bush-Banks' original

papers and news clippings pertaining to the author. Thank you

for your sustaining interest and assistance.

For always having the right answer for my endless

questions, thank you Cartha Sexton. A special thanks is due

to Shari Breckenridge for keeping matters straight for me in

the Graduate School while I worked at home in North Carolina

to help my family, and to Sandy Walden for reviewing my manuscript. Finally, I thank my first group of students at

Smithfield Middle School, my Seniors (Class of 1999) from

Enloe High School, and my "crew" in the Division of Education

at St. Augustine's College. Teaching you about writing and

literature has strengthened me as a critic of my own writing.

If I have overlooked anyone, I apologize and invite you

to read The Collected Works of Olivia ward Bush-Banks in the

Schomburg collection, thereby continuing to receive the insight that she intended to bestow on society.

VI VITA

August 10, 1953 . . . Born - Averasboro, North Carolina

1971 ...... National Achievement Scholar

Sponsor, Burroughs Wellcome Cottpany

Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

1975 ...... B.A., English

Virginia State University, Petersburg

1976 - 1989 ...... Quartermaster Officer, US Army

1980 ...... M.A., Business Management

Webster University, St Louis, Missouri

1991 ...... M.A., English

N.C. Central University, Durham

1991 - 1992 ...... Foundation Fellow, Graduate Studies

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

1992 ...... AHRRCO Beacon Scholar

Pittsburgh Chapter, NAACP

1995 ...... Summer Minority ABD Fellow

University of Kentucky, Lexington

1995 ...... Travel Grant Recipient

American Folklore Society

V I 1 PUBLICATIONS

1. "The Feminist Observer" Transformations : A Curriculum

Transformation Resource. Slippery Rock, PA: Slippery Rock

Women's Study Program, 1992. 91-94.

2. Review of Donald Murray's Writing to Leam. Focuses

Journal 8.2 (Winter 1995). 123-125.

3. "Pains and Gains: Results of a National Review of

Graduate Students in Rhetoric and Composition," in collaboration with Brenda Breuggemann, Scott Miller, and

Deneen Shepherd, College Conference on Composition and

Communication October 1997.

4. Critical Reviews of Works by Alice Walker, R.L. Stine, and Toni Morrison. Contemporarv Popular Writers. St James

Press. 1997.

5. "Ethnography of Writing." with Amy Shuman, Literacy: An

International Handbook. Ed. Daniel A. Wagner, Richard Venezky and Brian V. Street. Colorado: Westview P, 1999. 107-12.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field of Study: English

vxii TABLE OP CONTENTS

Page

A b s t r a c t ...... ii

D e d i c a t i o n ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

V i t a ...... vii

Chapters :

1. Introduction: "Who Am I That You Are Mindful of Me? l

2. "Race, Identity, and Culture" ...... 16

3. "Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as African American Literary Tradition Bearer" ...... 87

4. "You Don't Look Like an Indian to Me : Passing For Red and For Black, Or What Is This "Black" Woman Doing Dressed Up Like An Indian?" ...... 116

5. "Worldviews: As I See I t " ...... 13 9

6. Conclusion: "A Multicultural Place--What Makes Olivia Ward Bush-Banks Reclaimable" ...... 173

Bibliography ...... 194

IX OAPIER 1

INTRODUCTION

"WHO AM I THAT YOU ARB MINDFUL OF MB?"

Now behold, two of them were traveling that same day to a village called

Emmaus, which was seven miles from Jerusalem. And they talked together of

all these things which had happened. So it was, while they conversed and

reasoned, that Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes

were restrained, so that they did not know Him. (New King James Bible, Lk

24:13-16)1

Background

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869-1944), a Black Montauk woman, voiced her consciousness of her multi-raced identity, her perception of herself as a race writer and literary artist, and her interest and participation in folklore and history through her writings and through her service as the tribal historian for the Sag Harbor Montauks. Bush-Banks was a living exanple of multiplicities: she was dual-raced

(Black and Native American) and negotiated her identity in a white dominated culture; she was a mother and main provider for her two children and her aging aunt; she was a poet and prose writer who used multiple genres to convey her messages; and she lived in multiple centuries. Yet, while she made contributions to the I9th and 20th centuries, she finally never really belonged to either. The core issue of this dissertation is this sense of "belonging."

Bush-Banks also was a settlement house activist, an active worker in the Northeastern Federation of Women's

Clubs, literary editor of Boston's Citizen magazine, a New

York University trained public school drama teacher, founder of an Art Group, Director of the International Poetry Group, and an appointee to work in the Works Progress (Project)

Administration in New York. One of her most pressing concerns for herself was the dual heritage into which she was born, and while it is not readily apparent that she sought to reclaim what I call a multicultural heritage, she consciously participated in the multiple cultures that constituted her identity.

For the purposes of this study, multicultural means having the ability to cross cultural boundaries imposed by

American society's definitions of race and ethnicity, thus forming a hybrid identity, not a creolized one. That is, a hybrid may operate like a chameleon, immersing in either identity and/or culture, but never becomes absorbed by either. Above all, Bush-Banks was a strong Christian, and religious themes and motifs bound together her works, her life, and her identity struggle. As the scripture suggests, religion was often at the core of this woman's struggle to construct a meaningful and coherent world for herself and her family. She identified with Jesus of the Bible and her

reference to His concealing His identity from His disciples

is symbolic of her own hidden identities with which she

grappled throughout her life.

Among the larger issues this study addresses are

construction of identity, the difference between self­

ascribed and other-ascribed identity, the ways in which

identity imposes standards of conformity, the relationships

between folklore and literary genres, and tradition and

innovation. This study relies primarily upon folklore

theory and race theory for definitions and critical positions in this regard.

The central issue of this study is how Bush-Banks

represents herself and how her representation of a multicultural identity contributes to current thinking on

identity politics. Opposite the frontispiece of her published book of poems. Driftwood. Bush-Banks says,

I seemed to have lost my identity

regarding the distinctness of race,

being of African and Indian descent.

Both parents possessed some negro blood,

and were also descendants of the Montauk

tribe of Indians, which tribe formerly

occupied the eastern end of Long island

known as Montauk. (Collected Works 313) with these words, she declares herself conscious of her own identity as a culturally ascribed human being at a time when consciousness of single racial identity let alone multi­ racial identity was rarely voiced. She goes on to say.

At this period of my life [age

twenty] I acted upon my natural

inclination toward literary work which

as a child I had been deeply interested

in, particularly poetry which seems

always to have impressed me most

peculiarly.

It may be, that physical suffering,

extreme adversity and misfortune, have

aided me in this work in that they have

aroused the latent desires and ambitions

which otherwise might not have been

realized. (Collected works 314)

Thus, she reminds the reader that she is a self-conscious literary artist who is compelled by circumstances to act on innate desires to create.

Furthermore, she directly places herself within the cultural context of women writers and feminists by resorting to the only available yet respectable occupation for women of the nineteenth century:

Sensible of the fact that the

pecuniary results of my work is (sic) of much-needed personal benefit to me, I am

also fully conscious, that it will, in

however small a degree, tend toward the

uplifting of the dark-skinned race,

known as the colored people of America,

among whom I am identified and who at

the present day feel so keenly the pangs

of prejudice and injustice. To me this

thought alone serves as an inspiration.

And lastly, let me say that if

humanity, in whatever condition it may

be, is helped by one thought or word of

mine, I shall feel conscious of having

attained unto a long-desired end.

(Collected Works 314)

It is especially important that we include Bush-Banks' works

in our scholarly discussion of the cultural construction of

the national identity, along with the history of the country and its literary history. Not to acknowledge her works would continue to silence the voice of multi-raced people in

America, thus causing a deficit in the totality of American

literature and culture.

She was too many things--Black, Indian, woman, single parent--that she was not supposed to be in a society that valued scholarship by white males and that only tolerated writing by white women as what Nathaniel Hawthorne referred to as "sentimental scribbling." While Bush-Banks operated with several personal and professional liabilities, she still was a prolific writer of poetry, prose, and drama. By accepting her material and including them in scholarly discourse, we afford her works the opportunity of attaining her intended end for them which was to serve humanity and the Americcui reading public.

This dissertation investigates the ways in which Bush-

Banks constructs an identity for herself as a multiply raced person who contributes to the literature and culture of the nation. The method used is multi-disciplinary approach that involves folkloristics, rhetoric, feminist/womanist theory, and cultural and historical theory as sources for understanding the complexities of being a multi-racial woman writer in the nineteenth century. Each of these disciplines has its own definitions of identity and poses a set of questions about what identification is ; therefore, I examine the various approaches to identity and compare them to the model that I believe Bush-Banks constructs as she makes her contribution to the scholarship of America. I expect that Bush-Banks' model will fit yet challenge and change some of these definitions in terms of race, gender, and authority.

Of particular interest is her position as a multi-raced person who is writing about those experiences. In representing herself as African American, she left a literary legacy to her contemporaries and to those who followed such as Langston Hughes, Charles Chestnutt, and

Zora Neale Hurston, to name a few. She does this very well in her construction of the wise conjure woman. Aunt Viney in

Aunt Vinev's Sketches.

Because of her multi-genre work, and because of her multicultural perspective on both her world and her writing,

Bush-Banks is an ideal subject for a multi-disciplinary study that encompasses the cultural, rhetorical and the folkloristic. Bush-Banks thought of herself as a significant contributor to the Harlem Renaissance and to the society of her era, so she formed drama and literary groups to discuss social and literary concerns both at home in the

United States and abroad. She also penned several political and didactic speeches urging activism and racial consciousness within the African American community. In her play, Indian Trails: or. Trail of the Montauk. she focused upon the Native Americans' concerns where their lands were taken from the group. Additionally, she used her play to address gender issues among Montauks and their inter-tribal rivalries. Her work as a Montauk tribal historian, for the group that was declared extinct by Anglo- judicial decree, serves as repository of the lore of the

Montauk people who no longer can speak for themselves. With that work, she contributes to the fields of folklore as a creator and bearer of tradition, and to history as a voice that aids in the revision of American history currently in progress. Since she actively embraced both her African and

Montauk (Native American) descent, she incorporated these aspects in her works, specifically her unpublished play,

Indian Trails.- or. Trail of the Montauk. She also demonstrated a keen interest in issues of gender and folklore, as is evident in her Aunt Vinev Sketches. These sketches possess the folkloric characteristics of being "as told to," because she wrote to N.R. Stantley,

All of the material I have used in these sketches have

been (sic) taken from that which I have actually seen

and heard from different individuals in the colored

group. I feel safe in letting you see them, because I

know you appreciate and or recognize their origin. (CW

316)

The sketches further aid her commentary on gender as they give the old Black woman opportunities to bond with the

White woman shopkeeper in conversations that transcend the color line and the barriers of nineteenth race biases.

Other-ascribed identities come in many forms, and stereotypes are just one subset of this category of identity. Self-ascribed identity is the set of properties or traits that one assumes for him or her self.

Appropriating other-ascribed identity or identities conceptualized by outsiders seems to be especially problematic for African Americans who grapple with an

8 identity that has undergone several changes and modifications since slave trading of the I7th century in

America. Folklorist, Alan Dundes places my primary concern when he says, "Sometimes it is the internalization of stereotypes by a minority group which can cause problems in identity" (Folklore Matters 24). This was often the case for many nineteenth century African Americans,

For many Black Americans, it is exacting enough merely to be a Black in America ; yet Bush-Banks was proud to be both an Indian (another oppressed race) and Cape Verdian

Black in her American identity. Self-ascribed multiple identities create additional problems since others continue to itiç>ose other-ascribed single categories on people. Bush-

Banks confronted obstacles as a woman because she had to overcome the view that women writers were subordinate to men and that these women were merely "sentimental scribblers."

Further, she had to overcome prejudices associated with a legal system that sided with a greedy group of land-hungry people who decided that her Montauk relatives were not

Indians and that they had no claim to the land and Native

American heritage that were rightfully theirs. Furthermore, her struggles were compounded by the need to fight the oppression of a society that withheld power and privilege from Blacks, and more specifically Black women, because of the color of their skin. Notwithstanding, Bush-Banks confronted the difficulty of being a woman and having to deal with the issues of representation as an "Other" in a gendered body.

Though Bush-Banks' works were only recently "uncovered" through the research of Bernice P. Guillaume in the

Schomburg Series, Bush-Banks was recognized by Paul Laurence

Dunbar and Carter G. Woodson for her literary contributions to periodicals of her day. One of the aims of the Schomburg

Series is to enable researchers "to chart the formal specificities of this tradition [literary tradition of the

'Black Woman's Era'] and to trace its origins" (ix). As I trace Bush-Banks' contribution to this tradition, I examine ethnicity from a perspective where the Schomburg Series and other research on African American women writers falls short--the contributions of a multi-raced individual.

Statement of the Problem the Studv will Approach

The central issue of this study is how Bush-Banks represents herself and how her representation of a multi­ cultural identity contribute to current thinking on identity politics. In establishing Bush-Banks' work as representative of a dialogue in multi-culturalism and folklore, her stylistic and thematic patterns as well as the choices of subject matter and characterization in her works are cottpared to those by other authors, notably Zora Neale

Hurston, Charles Chestnutt, and Langston Hughes. Because I have seen patterns in Bush-Banks' works that resemble those

10 in the works of these authors, my research assumes that she

was a literary foremother for them and that she constructed

an identity model which these authors assumed as they wrote.

While it is not immediately provable that she had a direct

influence upon these artists, Bush-Banks used her position

as a columnist for the Westchester Record-Courier to applaud

the works of Langston Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance

writers (Collected works. Introduction 9). She also

corresponded with Carter G. Woodson, who was the editor of

The Neoro Journal, and with Paul Laurence Dunbar. Thus, her

influence was established and most likely felt by those

artists named who surpassed her by becoming "canonized" in

African American literary history. I believe that her work

has not been canonized because her multi-cultural identity

did not fit neatly into the African American or Native

American niches and because her sentimental and didactic writing did not fit the male model prevalent during that period in literary history.

Methods Used to Solve the Problem

This study ertçloys a multi-disciplinary analysis of the

Literary Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks is. While there is no readily available precedent for such a study, cultural theorist Simon During calls for a cultural critique through the analysis of literature which places the individual back in context with the culture (Cultural Studies Reader) .

11 Additionally, the nature of the woman, Olivia Ward Bush-

Banks, calls for a study that embodies the cotrplex

multicultural artist that she was. As part of my research,

I examine the textual and rhetorical strategies the author

uses to construct a multicultural worldview. One way of

sorting through the multitude of identities that this woman possessed is to use the rhetorician's tools to discern what

this cultural being said; when she said it; how she said it;

and to whom she said it, for what purposes. I atteitpt to

address the many facets of identity construction and the

rhetorical strategies Bush-Banks uses throughout her published and unpublished writings.

This study questions some of the ways her sentimental

and didactic work was excluded until recently. Foremost

here are the questions of whether the moralizing nature of

her writing or the brevity of her style were among the

reasons for her exclusion. Another question is whether her gender, race, or political beliefs prevented her work from being widely read and discussed prior to the efforts of the

Schomburg Series to reclaim it.

Chapter One introduces the subject and the questions

surrounding her construction of multicultural works while

she grappled with identity issues that continue to confront

contemporary writers. Chapter Two reviews the background

literature from various disciplines, among them,

folkloristics, race and cultural theory, and multicultural

12 theory that answer some of the questions of the roles of

race, identity, and culture in Bush-Banks' construction of identity and worldview. Chapter Three contextualizes Bush-

Banks within the African American women's writing tradition

and sets forth some of the womanist and feminist theory that

aid in understanding this particular aspect of Bush-Banks'

life and work. Chapter Pour continues the contextualization

set up in Chapter Three, except it examines the writer's

place in a society that questions her claim to being an

"Indian," as she "does not look like one." Further, it

offers some of the Montauk leaders' own views of themselves

as Native Americans and confronts the issue of "passing" for

Indian where other-ascribed notions depict the person as

merely "Black." This chapter then sets up Chapter Five and

the ways Bush-Banks or a multi-racial or multicultural

person might view the world for him or herself in a society

that denies them the right to all aspects of their "racial"

heritages. Some of Bush-Banks' published and unpublished

works are explicated in an effort to discern her worldview

by examining her voice and rhetorical style as she wrote within the confines of a literary marketplace that offered

limited opportunities to Blacks and women, and little or

none to Native Americans. Finally, Chapter Six concludes

the study and offers suggestions for continued scholarship on multi-racial and multicultural writers.

13 significance the Project Has for Others Working in the Field

This study is important to scholars in the field of

African American and Native American literary studies

because it attempts to understand the cultural and

rhetorical processes of composition (canons of invention,

arrangement, style, memory and delivery) of a person from

both races. Further, it investigates problems associated

with the production of literary texts by a multiply raced woman writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. Specifically, I would describe my study as an

"archeological" recovery of a fragment of the

epistemological effort involved in the Schomburg Series on nineteenth century African American Women Writers.

The study is also important because according to

editors, Guy-Sheftall and Bell-Scott in the Black women's

scholarly journal, SAGE, research is lacking in this area.

They call for studies on Black Indian women, so that "... we will learn more about the multi-cultural nature of

African-American history (SAGE, 2). Finally, the subject is

important to me personally because, as a woman raised to be

Native American, I have identified myself with African

14 Americans for cultural and other reasons. Bush-Banks

confronts the dilemma of identity in ways that enable me to answer personal and scholarly questions regarding try own

genealogical and literate identities.

NOTES

^ According to notes in the New King James Version, Personal Study Edition of the New Kina James Bible that are associated with this scripture, "Jesus temporarily concealed His identity from them" (1570).

This same topic is the subject of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' poem, "The Walk to Emmaus" (Original Poems qtd in ÇW 36-37) . Located there among her first published book of poems, the poem suggests a strong sense of religion in this writer's own personal identity construction.

15 CHAPTER 2

RACE, IDENTITY, AND CULTURE

Race as an Issue in Constructing an Identity Bauation

Race is important to the study of Bush-Banks' worldview and her works because of the repeated references she makes to race or some form of racial presence in her various genres of literature. In Bush-Banks' works, race is not always mentioned in the same way, nor is its central concern about a constraint preventing her from reaching some goal such as getting published. Generally, it is an outpouring of her worldview--how she defines others as well as herself.

She frequently refers to race; primarily it is about African

American issues, but just as often, she is describing or speaking of one or another of her various acquaintances.

The Lure of the Distances. Bush-Banks' unpublished memoirs, demonstrates the extent of her race consciousness. In the

Foreword for the book, she says.

Even more alluring have been the seeming distances

between human varieties with their distinctive types,

shades of coloring and engaging personalities, always

revealing and enphasizing the nearness of relationships

held in common. (ÇW 272)

16 This prose work reflects upon the "distances" or differences of the people among whom she circulated. By drawing attention to their skin color and the variety of their

"types,"she indicates that she is influenced by the racial

language of her times.

Except in "On Shinnecock," and "On the Long Island

Indian," she makes little if any overt mention of race in her Native American writings. The writing that she does about being an Indian seems nostalgic or pastoral, a signal that she is trying to reclaim that portion of her culture that was stripped from her when her relatives were denied their claim to Montauk heritage (cf. Jane Benson vs. wyandanch Pharaoh). In writing to reclaim the culture,

Bush-Banks emulates the folkloristic writing style of her day that sought to reclaim that which seemed to be disappearing. In her case, the reclamation was not about a perception of something thought to be disappearing, but it was for the actual lifestyle of the Montauks that was threatened by a Supreme Court decision that declared the

Native homestead rightfully belonged to a group of colonial land developers. Ultimately, the land developers won the fight for the land, but contemporary Montauketts continue to resist this dispossession and they fight the erasure of their Native heritage.

In contenplating her own identity, she empathizes with her associates of diverse heritage as she notes,

17 . . . with my background of American Indicui cuad Negro

parentage I have keenly felt the urge of commingled

ancestral calls within me, thro' which, doubtless, I

have been enabled to recognize the similarity of

emotions, desires and behavior in other humans. (CW

272-73)

Apparently she credits her multi-racial heritage and multicultural experiences with enabling her to recognize

similar traits in others and what she calls their

"handicapping" conditions related to race and identity.

Throughout the book, Bush-Banks reflects with pride upon her ability to socialize with members of different races, as she says she writes of " . . . the following nationalities with whom I have enjoyed close contacts of fine fellowship. They are namely, English, Italian,

American Indian, Jew, Irish, White and Colored Americans,

Persian, German, Mexican and Russian" (ÊH 273). As she describes each of her friends in The Lure of the Distances, she uses specific racial terms of description. For instance, she says that "Florence Willis was, by inheritance, unmistakably Anglo-Saxon, but I [Bush-Banks] preferred to think of her as a rare combination of many physical and spiritual inheritances" (£W 274-75).

Concluding her comments on Willis, Bush-Banks reveals her own preoccupation with identification and race matters :

18 She [Willis] was . . . a venturesome seeker of

interesting types and for some indefinable reason,

seemed to enjoy selecting me [Bush-Banks] as a comrade

to share her unique explorations. Again and again I

found myself seated by her side among audiences of

exotic Oriental or inhabitants from the Isles of the

Sea, and from the distances of Earth's far places. (CW

275)

Obviously, Bush-Banks admired Willis' ability to find value in the abilities of others who could overcome their "humble origin or racial handicap" (ÇW 275), and Bush-Banks sought to pattern her own views of humanity after those she saw demonstrated by Willis. Her last statement indicates that

Bush-Banks perceived of "race" as a handicapping aspect of one's worldview. Her aim in seeking the "oneness of mankind" was to overcome such handicaps.

Another entry in The Lure of the Distances describes

Porrista Bowman, a thirty-year acquaintance of Bush-Banks' of whom she remarks,

Porrista, in her physical aspect, was as artistic as

the name she bore. Distinctly Indian in type (emphasis

added) and yet, evidencing the warmth and colorful

characteristics of darker Americans (emphasis added),

she possessed a subtle magnetism that was positively coitpelling. (ÇW 278)

19 In this brief description, Bush-Banks gives the reader a

glimpse into her own view of another person's ethnic visibility. It is clear here that she perceives a

difference in the skin color of Native Americans and other

"darker" (Black, perhaps) Americans. And so, Bush-Banks

continues throughout the book, describing each friend in

racial and physical terms.

On several occasions, race serves Bush-Banks as a tool

to rally others to move, to act, to do something through a

common cause. In "Undercurrents of Social Life," she urges.

Young men and women, let us arouse from this apathy and

indifference, and if it be true that servitude has

deterred us in material progress, now under an improved

social law let us lay anew the foundation necessary to

the success of any people which shall furnish moral

incentives for real progress, and which shall reward

decisive action with actual development. (gw 145)

Here her rhetoric is most likely activated by her work with the Northeastern Federation of Women's Clubs.

Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and other Harlem Renaissance writers concerned themselves with "passing for white"’; Zora

Neale Hurston depicted her Indian heritage cynically;

Langston Hughes used his character Jessie B. Senple to poke fun at his Indian heritage. Elaine Ginsberg says,

. . . passing is about identities; their creation or

imposition, their adoption or rejection, their

20 accoitçanying rewards or penalties. Passing is also

about the boundaries established between identity

categories and about the individual and cultural

anxieties induced by boundary crossing. Finally,

passing is about specularity: the visible and the

invisible, the seen and unseen. (Ginsberg 3)

The specularity of passing, that Ginsberg so aptly notes, involves the difference between the ethnically visible traits of skin color that are more easily detected when the person passes between Black and White than it is in the passing from one dark hue to another such as in passing between Red and Black. As Bush-Banks created her own identity and crossed boundaries, she did not find it necessary to question the values attached to the boundaries between black and red as opposed to the boundaries between black and white.

Where other writers with multiple Black and Native

American heritage subvert their discussion of their multiraciality or completely avoid talking about it, Bush-

Banks honors her Montauk lineage alongside her Black ancestry and argues for "the oneness of mankind." In her essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale Hurston challenges this issue, humorously, saying: "I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United

States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an

21 Indian chief" (I Love Myself 152). Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' male kin were sachems (or, "Indian chiefs") of the Montauks,

and her uncle, Jacob Ward owned a permanent homestead on the

Poosepatauk reservation where Native American children were

schooled (Collected Works 7). Unlike Hurston's style, Bush-

Banks' work shows no such deprecating references to her

Native kin.

Hurston claims her own mixed heritage in her autobiography. Dust Tracks Along the Road. Signifying off

the stereotypical notion that one avoids blackness by claiming that one is the descendant of a black slave mother and white slave master, Hurston says, "I am mixed-blood, it is true, but I differ from the party line in that I neither consider it an honor nor a shame. I neither claim Jefferson as my grandpa, nor exclaim, 'Jus' look how that white man took advantage of my grandma !'" (Dust Tracks 235). This comment clearly marks Hurston's knowledge of Sally Hemmings' account of her life with Thomas Jefferson, and it indicates that from Hurston's perspective, one should not pride herself upon having such ancestry.

Furthermore, Hurston disavows any loyalty to the cherished notion that being a house slave descendant places one higher in the social order of Blackness than does being a field slave descendant. Ironically, Hurston does have "an

Indian up her family tree. " In identity politics, it is safe to make declarations about one's matrilineal history

22 because biological motherhood has been historically traceable. On the other hand, male parentage has not been so easily discernible for several reasons, one of which being the mother's complicity in obscuring paternal identity. Hence, Hurston points our attention to something that historically we seem to keep forgetting and denying when race issues arise: we are not a "purebred" raced nation. The irony of this "forgetting" is that we also pride ourselves on being a nation which has tolerance for diversity, yet we disavow our own nationwide multiraciality.

As Hurston's cynical portrait continues, she also depicts the social construction of Negroes by White American standards as well as her own mixtures of race. She quite artfully uses "double consciousness" or Stepto's "veil"^

(not DuBois; cf Robert Stepto's book. Prom Behind the veil). as she divulges herself and her worldview through a slippery psyche-protective lens. People tend to discredit the truth or veracity of Hurston's self-report because she uses this technique as a shield and does not represent herself in the straightforward pattern of the autobiography established by white males for this genre.

The key difference in Bush-Banks and Hurston is that

Hurston played it and possessed the secret of joy

(resistance, cf. Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of

Joy) but she made others think she had succumbed to their criteria and descriptors. Hurston is probably somewhere in

23 another life laughing her head off at how she played the

trickster with our society. Of course, the reader knowledgeable of African American history knows that Hurston

is being cynical. But, the underlying issue in her comment is how "colored"^ are the other-than-mainstream (those who consider themselves to be "White") Americans? For that matter, how pure are any "breeds," and why does it make a difference in this country? What Zora Neale Hurston's comment does is contextualize Bush-Banks within the African

American community where the blending of races was "colored" by the already dark or sable skins of the once-upon-a-time-

Africans.

What Hurston's comment seems to avoid confronting is the "how" all Negroes got an Indian chief in their mother's family and how the emerging society determined that it would be her mother's family and not her father's family. In answer, William Loren Katz's research reveals that intermarriage occurred between "before contact" (pre-

Columbian, and therefore, pre-slavery) Blacks and Indians.

This, along with intermingling of "before contact" Blacks and Whites contributed to Indian lineage and then on to the mixing of the already mixed-up races. Miscegenation laws in the United States further cemented the mystery of paternity by forcing White fathers to deny their "mixed" offspring.

Hurston shares her own humorous views of the natural way we become multi-raced when she says,

24 In the same connection, I have been told that God

meant for all the so-called races of the world to

stay just as they are, and the people who say that

may be right. But it is a well-known fact that no

matter where two sets of people come together,

there are bound to be some in-betweens. It looks

like the command was given to people's heads,

because the other parts don't seem to have heard

tell. (Dust Tracks 236)

Hurston's object in her essay is to talk about her own self­ perception or self-identification and how these perceptions changed when she moved from a homogeneous, or all Black, community which valued her "coloredness" as just simply another aspect of a precocious child. Upon moving into a community (probably majority White occupants) where she was most likely in the minority colorwise, Hurston became cognizant that others were aware of her skin color. This same set of perceptions still influences upon identity construction today. Jack Forbes does an excellent linguistic analysis of the terms "black" and "mulatto" in his book, Africans and Native Americans.

Some call Bush-Banks' approach assimilationist, and

Walter Benn Michaels might refer to it as anti-essentialist

("Race into Culture" in Identities 35) . Benn Michaels argues "that anti-itrçerialism promoted racial identity to an essential element of American citizenship; second, that this

25 promotion made possible the emergence of a new cultural and

multicultural Americanism; and, third, that our current

notion of cultural identity both descends from and extends

the earlier notion of racial identity" (Identities 35). He

further explains his notion of anti-essentialism in "The No-

Drop Rule.But, I believe that Bush-Banks was attempting

to resist the mainstream culture's insistence that its

notions of race should subjugate an element of her identity

equation. She did not want her multiple ancestry to be

discarded as the Supreme Court made the Montauks disappear

as Indians.

This erasing of a group of people, their race, and/or

their culture is an act that I have termed "e-rac(e)ing."

Erac(e)ing is most often a form of other ascribed identity,

but can also be a kind of self-identification. If a person

chooses she may erase her own familial or "racial"

background, as in the case of "passing," or a person with multiple ancestry may decide to declare herself a member of

both or either of her own "blood identified" heritages.

Clearly, the person with a multiple racial biological

background is neither black nor red nor white, but another version of the parts or variables in what I call an identity

equation. While a person who chooses to pass may e-race,

this concept of e-rac(e)ing is not an act of "passing" in

and of itself.

26 As the travel literature indicates, these colonizers

seemed to harbor fear of their own inferiority as they uprooted themselves from an intolerant society in England.

In The Word in Black and White. Dana Nelson recounts John

Underhill's description of the Pequots found in Newes from

America in such a manner as to evoke the notion of e-

rac(e)ure. Underhill's party of colonialists were

responsible for much of the slaughter of Long island

Indians, and directly responsible for the decimation of the

Montauks. What Nelson describes is Underhill's and the other early American colonialists tendency to lump all

Indians together when it suited their imperialistic purposes, and then to acknowledge them as different kinds of

Indians when the occasion favored the Euro-Americans.

Nelson says.

The events leading up to the "war," as well as the

British colonial restructuring of that war in colonial

texts highlights the ruthless quality of identity

politics and "race" in early America. The war that

ensued against the Pequots to "avenge" Stone and

Oldham's deaths was characterized, Kibbey asserts, by

the "frequent refusal of Puritan men to distinguish

among 'Indians,' combined with their declared intent to

exterminate the Pequots". . . . Underhill's text

highlights the strategic nature of such confusion, in

his account of Oldham's death, where it is importcuit to

27 blur tribal boundaries in order to pin the blame on

Pequots, Underhill refers only to "Block Islanders,"

and "Indians." Yet he seems perfectly comfortable

elsewhere in the text distinguishing between the

various groups, for instance when he relates his

dispassionate observations of "Pequeats, Narragansets

and Mohigeners changing a few arrows together" after

the Puritans have completed their slaughter at Mystic"

(Underhill qtd in Nelson, 13-14).

As an identity theory, e-rac(e)ing has its negative as well as positive aspects. When used by racists, it strips the individual of humanity as well as race, culture and other identials. As a survival mechanism, it allows the individual to self-identify or to claim an identity for herself by selecting from multiple identities the one that fits her identity requirement. Self-e-rac(e)ure permits the person constructing the identity to change something about herself depending upon whether the perspective considered is hers or some external view.

In the introduction to Enduring Traditions. Laurie

Weinstein comments on an aspect of the phenomenon that I call e-race-ing:

Many white Americans still believe that Indians

have either vanished or are living in tepees on the

Great Plains. The Indians in New England, they say,

could not possible be real; after all, many of them

28 intermarried with Blacks and Portuguese, and these

mixed communities are scattered almost invisibly

throughout the Northeast .... What our prejudices

and gross misunderstandings belie, however, is that

native communities have survived the centuries, and

they have survived despite land loss, conflict,

poverty, discrimination, and all-out war against them,

(xiii)

Weinstein's observations are supported by contemporary efforts (some successful, and some not) of the Lumbees,

Haliwas, Mashpees, and others, to reclaim lands and heritages stripped from them because they chose to intermarry.

Another question to be asked is, when did it become important to be one particular race or gender over another?

The colonizers authorized themselves to come to this continent and assume a superior racial posture. This is quite ostensible in colonial American literature and in such diaries as Columbus's and Michael de Cuneo's. without the intermingling after contact, this nation most likely would have perished. The supposedly superior raced conquerors had inferior survival skills and were too weak to stave off the hardships of the landscape amd weather without the help of those whom they eventually came to deride. These colonists exerted forced control over the aborigines as their

"superiors" based on race.

29 In one example from a letter he wrote in 1495, de Cuneo

demonstrates who the real "savages" were and how an old

"cannibal" saved their lives. He says,

We set sail from there [island of Sainta Maria

la Gallante] and arrived at a large island

inhabited by Cannibals, who fled immediately to

the mountains when they saw us . . . . eleven of

our men, who had banded together in order to

steal, (emphasis mine) went5 or 6 miles into the area by such a route that when they wanted to

return, they were unable to find their way . . .

we judged that the eleven had been eaten by the

Cannibals as they are want to do. However, after

5 or 6 days, the eleven men . . . , built a fire

on a cape .... Had it not been that an old

woman showed them the way back with gestures

they'd have been done for since we had planned to

set sail on the following day (emphasis mine) .

(Michele de Cuneo qtd in McQuade, 16)

The writer continues by telling of the civilized colonialists' compassionate response to the murderous

Cannibals and his own regard, or rather disdain, for the

Native women.

In yet another cruel scenario, de Cuneo describes the colonizing party's cruelty to a would-be survivor of their

30 raid and also of how he dishonored an innocent female whom he had stolen from Native community. He writes, One Cannibal was wounded . . . and thinking him

dead we left him in the sea. Suddenly we saw him

begin to swim away; therefore we caught him and

with a long hook we pulled him aboard where we cut

off his head with an axe. We sent the other

Cannibals together with the two slaves to Spain.

When I [de Cuneo] was in the boat, I took a

beautiful Cannibal girl and the admiral gave her

to me. Having her in my room and she being naked

as is their custom, I began to want to amuse

myself with her. Since I wanted to have my way

with her and she was not willing, she worked me

over 80 badly with her nails that I wished I had

never begun (emphasis mine). To get to the end of

the story, seeing how things were going I got a

rope and tied her up so tightly that she made

unheard cries which you wouldn't have believed.

At the end, we got along so well that, let me tell

you, it seemed she had studied at a school for

whores. (de Cuneo qtd in McQuade, 17)

What is really so disgustingly sad about this rapist's deliberate account of savagery and inhumanity is that this literature is canonized and often appears on the required reading lists for American literature students to this day.

31 The impact of revisionist history for this literature is that it forces us to look at how other ascribed identity (in this case, the identity de Cuneo marked upon the Natives as

Cannibals and willing partners to rape) helped establish negativity in the American identity model.

Over a period of 43 years (1899-1942), Bush-Banks penned over 75 poems, 23 plays and sketches, several essays and newspaper commentaries on social and political issues.

She also wrote a set of memoirs, pieces for a planned journal, and she maintained the tribal record for the

Montauk Indians. She managed to publish a play, three prose pieces, and 45 of her poems while she was responsible for the upkeep of her two small children and an elderly aunt who had reared her. Often her task was further complicated as she had to take any menial job available and she and her family had to live in poor surroundings.

Reading Bush-Banks' work, one can clearly see that the pieces selected for the Schomburg series are primarily influenced by African American culture. Bush-Banks wrote about her Native American heritage as well. Among those lost works or those no longer extant, can be found Bush-

Banks' account of the Montauks and Shinnecocks, her Indian kin. These include her play Indian Trails: Or. Trail of the

Montauk (unpublished, but Act I, Scene I, and Act III, Scene

II are still extant), and two poems "On the Long Island

32 Indian" (published in The Annual Report of the Montauk Tribe of Indians for the Year 1916) and "Morning on Shinnecock"

(Original Poems 1899). However, like most members of the

African American community, Bush-Banks' racial and cultural background is complicated by the presence of Native American

lineage (from intermarriage and other influences).

Black Indians are not new.® Actually, when asked, most

Black Americans will admit to having Native American ancestors, and some prominent Black writers like Langston

Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston wrote pointedly about their

Native American identity elements. Yet, the photo of Bush-

Banks and her kinswoman does present something of an anomaly--two women dressed to represent Native Americans in a series (Schomburg) on Black women writers. The question that the photo raises concerns racial and cultural identity and the resulting constraints upon Bush-Banks' artistic ability and literary production. Bernice Guillaume may have intended to provoke just such a question by deliberately choosing the powwow picture for the frontispiece when she edited the Collected Works for the Schomburg series on nineteenth century Black women writers.

For whom is race important, and why? Those who seek economic empowerment use race as a colonialist means of oppression to secure their status. It is used to e-race those who can be dismissed on the basis of their skin color.

Race has no scientific genetic explanation,* but the

33 cultural standards of the United States itrçose race through

ancestral accounting. Consequently, such standards exclude people who are raised to believe themselves to be one thing

and then they discover themselves to be something else.

While Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's aunt was raised to believe

she was White, Haizlip's mother was left in the Black

community to be "Black" (Sweeter the Juice). These race-

based standards also dismiss other cultural practices that

say an individual can belong to a group through matrilineal

connections that exist because the group adopted the

individual.

Does being adopted or being a stepchild make one any

less a member of a family? Bush-Banks' maternal aunt, Maria

Draper, adopted her and changed her entire set of cultural

experiences. Race and identity are both socially

constructed, and these constructed categories directly

influence Bush-Banks' worldview. These constructed

categories may also serve as foci to solve one problem of

identity construction where multiculturalism serves to value variegated racial hybridity.

Then, people such as Clyde Pulley, want to maintain the very standards that cause people to remain in identity

stasis despite genealogical evidence to support their claim to newly "discovered" or self-defined identity. In the

introduction to the book he spent his lifetime and a major sum of money concocting. Pulley says,

34 Every American has the right to know the ethnic

background and culture of his or her intended spouse,

and the right to help preserve their ethnicity and

culture if they desire. If a man loses his ethnic

identity and culture or tosses them aside, he loses a

part of himself, his family, his friends and his race.

Rather than becoming one, whole human being, he comes

to be a part of many things. He becomes a Protean Man,

like Proteus of Greek mythology, who could change his

shape easily but could not commit himself to a single

form. (Pulley, Introduction)

Pulley wants to ascribe an identity onto himself and his

descendants that is fixed and which will not acknowledge a multicultural nor multiracial equation.

Pulley's aim for himself is status that eliminates the

question of which race makes up his identity. His work is

an example of how notions of race have changed historically.

It also demonstrates to me that this Black man was deeply

troubled that his wife and her relatives should "pass for

Indian" and gain some monetary or other benefits from doing

so, and he burnt up quite a bit of his life trying to get

the government and Indian Affairs people to force the

Richardsons (the wife's family) to return to being Black.

Somewhere in his frustrated efforts, I sense something that troubled me as I grew up among Blacks--if you look Black in any way, people of Pulley's ilk do not want you to have any

35 other heritage and will go to great lengths to try to irake you belong to their race. Further, they attempt to make you feel that the other parts of your heritage are insignificant or of lesser quality, something to be scorned rather than valued. This is a philosophy of exclusion to justify other ascribed notions of racial identity.

Black people in America are not always "all" Black.^ They also have various racial components or variables in their heritage. These variables are not always readily visible because the kinky hair, broad noses, dark-complected skin, thick lips, and other socially marked characteristics override the other "ethnically invisible" identity markers and makes the "identity equation" appear Black. In this sense, the person's ethnically visible physical traits may overshadow the cultural traits that are non-Black.

Society's attitudes toward Blackness, "passing," and the economic redress historically assigned to being Black also further unbalance this identity equation. The compensations evolve from the efforts of affirmative actions and civil rights movements among other things.

Jamaican scholar Zena Moore says, "Many white Americans have not developed this sharp ability of telling people of color apart. Their culture has not taught them to differentiate between shades of brown. For them black is black is black. Brown is nonexistent, and white many times has the preferred meaning of 'blond with blue eyes'" (49).

36 These attitudes alter society's reception and perception of multiracial Americans who possess a Black variable in their

identity equation. To balance this inequity, some theorists would have Whites divest themselves of the privileges of

"Whiteness," and thereby level the space created by the removal of "race" as a form of cultural capital.

Cecille Ann Lawrence notes that "'black' Americans have had to suffer such an enormous amount of injustice and abuse that, as a minority in numbers, the term 'black Americans' should include as many people as possible to increase the amount of power that the group may acquire" (27-28). This perspective might help one to understand why many in the

Black community tend to resist the notion of multiraciality or "mixed racedness."

In constructing "Blackness," we often look first at the color or "tint" of a person's skin, and then ascribe racial characteristics to the person based upon how visibly ethnic or "racial" he or she appears. Tinged skin, and even some untinged skin, can be the result of shadings from any combination of heritages. Having "mixed blood" has held negative connotations in the past. However, multi-racial people such as Ohio State University's Law School Dean,

Gregory Williams (Life on the Color Line) and Shirlee Taylor

Haizlip (The Sweeter the Juice) speak out in serious efforts to dispel this negativity. As they share their life stories and the experiences associated with coming to terms with

37 personal raciality they forefront the impact of "race" and

multi-raciality upon one's place in contemporary American

society.

Historically, the focus of race theorists (excepting

studies of European immigrants) in America has been upon

distinctions between black and white. In Who Is Black?.

P. James Davis discusses how rules of miscegenation and the

"one-drop" or hypodescent rule developed in this country and

how American rules of race and ethnicity regarding Blacks

differ from rules in other parts of the world. He contends

that,

Societal rules for determining what group racially

mixed persons belong to reflect and clarify the

position these people are to occupy in the community.

Using the one-drop rule to define persons with any

black ancestry as blacks clearly assigns them to the

social status occupied by blacks. (Davis 87)

Davis says that while people in the United States have come

to accept the rule and use it to assign status to Blacks,

another rule was prevalent during slavery. Under that rule, mulattoes were classed "as an in-between group and not as blacks" (82).

Even more frustrating, Davis says, is the fact that the

American who is classed as "black" might be "coloured" in

Jamaica or "white" in Puerto Rico. Yet, even in apartheid driven South Africa where the buffer system maintains white

38 political control, "only unmixed Africans are defined as blacks" while the coloureds serve as the buffer group (121).

Multiracial Jamaiccin, Zena Moore, has this to say about how she was "received" as a doctoral scholar when she came to the united States:

Here I learned that one is judged not so much by

achievement, academic success, or status in society,

which in my culture [Jamaican] allowed one to cross

social barriers, but more by color and race. . . .

Here race is institutionalized. You are categorized by

the color of your skin. The official documents demand

that you say to what ethnic group you belong, these

ethnic groups having been determined by the white

majority in authority. (American Mixed Race 50)

Moore further critiques the American race caste system by describing it as ridiculous because it classified South

Americans of European descent as Hispanic nonwhites while

European Spaniards were elevated to status of white. She calls the system an ideological construct that "arbitrarily attempts to divide people with the intention of retaining power in the hands of few" (51). Moore's perspective further amplifies the view presented elsewhere in research that decries the historical attachment of power to a group of people based upon the color of their skin. What is even worse is that this system of racial binarity is supported by

39 those being oppressed such as Blacks who insist on

maintaining the status quo with the hypodescent rule.

Believing itself to be the most representative

organization to handle the issue of "race" in America, the

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) commissioned a group of

anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists in 1949 to

come up with a definitive statement on race. The specific

challenge that they were given was "to define the concept of

race and to give an account in 'clear and easily

understandable terms' of our present knowledge regarding the

highly controversial problem of race differences" (Race

Question 494). At the end of their deliberations, the

committee produced a statement on race dated, 1950. This

resolution that the General Conference of UNESCO voted on

was updated in 1951 by a group of anthropologists and

geneticists and further re-adopted. Brochures from the

UNESCO Study resulted in a collection of essays. Race

Question in Modern Science: Race and Science (1961).

The scientists generally agreed that men all derive

from the same species. Homo sapiens and that from the

biological standpoint, "... the likenesses among men are

far greater than the differences" (Race Question 496).

Furthermore, the committee declared that such biologically

like "populations are capable of interbreeding with one another" (Race Question 497) and that separation of the

40 populations accounted for the different physical biological histories. This resolution was most likely intended to dispel the myth that Black Americans were descended from apes ; that they promiscuously copulated with these apes in

Africa; and that because of their "bestiality," they were

incapable of breeding with "human" species such as white

Americans.

Roger Sanjek, who also traces the history of racism, says, "Prior to the sixteenth century the world was not race conscious and there was no incentive for it to become so"

(2). Furthermore, he notes that when people recognized the physical difference between barbarian and classical people,

"they had no immediate social connotation . , . ."(2). In fact, Sanjek places the onus of racism almost directly upon the group of traders and settlers which eventually evolved into the capitalistic American nation. Sanjek concludes by noting that "... racial ranking has no basis in substance, and that the categories themselves are historical precipitates of a five-hundred-year world epoch that we must envision ending and that we must hasten toward its end"

(Race 11).

Writing in Sanjek's collection of essays on race,

Michael Blakey also criticizes professional physical anthropologists such as Ales Hrdlicka for their racial determinism because Hrdlicka wrote that the higher civilized white man outpaced indigenous people who were "being

41 eliminated by nature" (Hrdlicka qtd in Race. 272). Blakey

further criticizes Hrdlicka because the anthropologist's

position was that the "Negro" was much further behind the

white man than the Japanese or Chinese and there was no hope

for this group of people to catch up. Such a view, says

Blakey, "was typical of, not peripheral to mainstream

physical anthropology in the early part of the century"

(272) and such racial biological determinism was further

promoted by Ernest Hooton of Harvard on through the 1930s

(272) . Blakey notes that it was not until the efforts of

Franz Boas and his students of anthropology that

anthropologists made any efforts to undermine the hegemonic

ideology that supported and legitimized inequalities in

"races" (274). in essence, Blakey is saying that historians

are not alone in their responsibility for making faulty

reports of racism's impact on the status of minorities, but

early anthropologists, those responsible for categorizing

"races," are also culpable. While Boas and other

anthropologists have worked to counter such culpability,

Terry P. Wilson claims that Congress called upon physical

anthropologists to help determine some "scientific" measures of "Indianness," and what the anthropologists produced were

some measures of the curliness of hair sangles, foot sizes, and results of scratches on their subject's chest (121).

James Kinney looks at race and "mixed race" and the rhetoric of racism in Amalgamation! For him, the "mixing"

42 of races creates an amalgam or alloy which is a strong

hybrid like a Creole. Creoles may have generated from

liaisons between single white males and Native Americans or women of African descent (Daniel 102). These "Free

Coloreds" were afforded economic and social status greater

than other blended people or those of African descent, and

less than that of whites. The Spanish, French, and English monarchs who had backed colonial exploits also supported the

Creole status because it helped the monarchs to maintain a balance between "independence-minded" whites and Black

slaves (Daniel 103) . They hoped to maintain New World dependence upon the European monarchies in the presence of

such divisiveness.

These creoles or mulattoes either rose to the status of

"free Negro elites" or some passed or were declared legally white. Some gained status from Santo Domingoan or Haitian cultural ties and avoided marrying Blacks or whites, choosing instead intermarriage among other mulattoes (Davis

36) . Davis says, "The Creoles of Louisiana, American-born whites of French or Spanish origin, employed terms of reference for different degrees of racial mixture. The term

'Creole' itself came to be used by freed persons to refer to free mulattoes with some French or Spanish ancestry— thus

'Creoles of Color' or 'Black Creoles'" (36) .

According to Daniel, Creole status is changing but.

43 It is a long-established means of fostering a sense of

solidarity, belonging, and self-pride that was

mobilized in defense against a binary system of racial

classification in which one is necessarily either Black

or White, and that has relegated to subordinate status

individuals who, by virtue of ancestry and culture,

were in the past accorded partial rights to the

privileges of the dominant whites. (106-107)

Another version of race "mixing" results in a hybrid who neither "melts" nor creolizes.

In one explanation of the early status of American hybrids, Homi Bhabha says "... colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial cultural representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority--its rules of recognition" (175).

In effect, Bhabha's hybrid prevents the colonialist from ignoring the presence of the minority "other" because the hybrid often serves to remind the colonialist that they share some aspects of humanity through mutual cultures.

Yet, the "mixed" person has the potential to undermine the power of the colonialists: "The presence of colonialist authority is no longer immediately visible; its

44 discriminatory identifications no longer have their authoritative reference to this culture's cannibalism or

that people's perfidy" (175). Because of the changeable nature of the hybrid or the person's stance between cultures, Bhabha notes that the hybrid poses an uncontainable threat to the mainstream culture because "it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/Other,

inside/outside" (177).

Another classification for hybrids or a category of mixed bloods is identified as Metis. In Canada, Metis are recognized as descendants of French or Scottish trappers and

Canadian Indians. They tend to occupy "bottom-of-the- ladder" status or status that is lower than the status of either of their parents. These hybrids continue to puzzle

Americans today.

Cynthia L. Nakashima says, "People who do not neatly fit into a clearly defined race category threaten the psychological and sociological foundations of the 'we' and

'they' mentality that determines so much of an individual's social, economic, and political experienced in the United

States" (164). Because our society has historically perceived race as "something absolute--that each person is either/or, and that races are mutually exclusive[,]" (164) our hegemonic society forces the hybrid to adjust to the cultural system or the system must adjust for her (which is unlikely). Olivia Bush-Banks resisted this hegemonic

45 categorization, perhaps at the cost of literary fame and an

enduring place as a notable artist in the American literary

tradition,

Aaron Gresson looks at race as "obsolescent" cuid says

that it is clear in postmodern America that our society is "

. . . increasingly pluralistic in racial and ethnic

composition [and] cannot continue to visualize itself as

'white' or 'black'" (209), He interviews several young

women who tell recovery narratives which are race related.

In The Recovery of Race in America. Gresson speaks against

racism and tells what it does to the person who wishes to

view her fellow human as "just another person":

It is both necessary and desirable to destroy racism

and the other forms of oppression that limit individual freedom and expressions of group identity. The best of

worlds would allow people to mate without consideration

of their racial groups. Likewise, it should be

possible for such individuals to speak of race as only

one aspect of their total identities. But a world

still dominated by race-conscious power groups keeps

this move toward an enlarged racial identity from

becoming a single act of will. (Gresson 112)

While the recovery stories that people tell Gresson have settled outcomes, they do not bode well for those who grapple with bicultural or multi-raced ancestry as the basis of their personal identity. These people are still left to

46 struggle with the ambivalence of those within society, and even worse in the divisive force of this externally ascribed identity onto members of their own familial households.

Gresson also says that on

. . . the threshold of the privatized Black

person's enlarged vision: race is dead. . . .

Blacks must free themselves of the reality they

acquired during the "middle passage." They can

now encounter white persons as persons, and they

should. To do otherwise would only perpetuate a

wretched stereotype with the villainous

perpetrator of the stereotype being, this time,

the Black man himself. (113)

Amazingly enough, Gresson follows the course of other contemporary race theorists and subsumes race under the category of either Black or white without giving consideration to the multitude of other racial classifications or "mixtures" available in this society and the impact of race upon those groups of people. Ultimately, he seems to indicate that the Black man will bear the blame for the next wave of racism in this country if people do not look to the "universal" view of mankind or if they do not accept Whites as "people."

47 Identity and Worldview Construction

Who am I? What do I signify or represent? I expect that Bush-Banks' identity model will fit yet challenge and change some of the disciplines' definitions of identity in terms of race, gender, and authority.

Burke's explanation of how one becomes consubstantial or like the audience provides one lens through which to view

Bush-Banks' efforts to write about her likeness and differences with her various audiences. As she appealed to her audiences she often had to persuade them to listen to her characters talking about issues of morals and politics.

Burke's theory also helps us to understand the agreement that groups have in their shared identity and how these people effect this agreement. We must include Bush-Banks' works in our repertoire as scholars who engage in the debate over the cultural construction of the national identity, its history and its literary history. Not to acknowledge her works would continue to silence the voice of multi-raced people in America, thus causing a deficit in the totality of

American literature and culture.

As Maria P.P. Root says, it is imperative that people with multi-racial heritages have heroes and role models who look like them and who come from the same kinds of backgrounds that they do (Mixed Race) . Thus far, not many self-identified multi-racial or multicultural writers are documented as such, so multi-raced people have few if any

48 heroes aside from Bush-Banks that they can look to as models

for how one should represent herself in literature auid in more than one culture. This is not to say that Blacks who

possessed multiple heritages and wrote about passing were

not heroes. It sitrply means that multi-racial people had no

known models who claimed all of their heritages and wrote

about them in the same as Bush-Banks did. Most multi-racial writers have subverted a portion of their identity equations

to find a comfort zone or place in a society which forces a

singular racial identity upon them. This then obscures the presence of multi-racial or multicultural heroes.

Two basic types of identity are self-ascribed and other-ascribed. In self-ascribed identity, the individual chooses the values, beliefs, attributes and worldview that tells others whom the individual believes himself or herself to be. This self-ascribed identity is reflected in the

individual's worldview and includes the groups or community to which the individual belongs and the rituals and traditions in which the individual participates. Catherine

McCall says.

In writings on personal identity problems, the

individual and the individual's personality are

frequently confused. Strictly speaking, the

personality has no identity; it is not an object, but a

collection of descriptions has no patio-temporal

continuity, and can thus be identified. Failure to

49 make this distinction leads to confusion concerning

personal identity. (181)

Most clues about identity come from autobiographical

writing--writers' ascription of markers or identifiers upon

themselves vs. assumption of other ascribed identity. The

author says, "This is who I am at this moment in history."

Further, race has often been confused with ethnicity and

used to supplant the cultural influences that shape

individual identity. Folklore helps us to understand personal identity in cultural terms. Folklorist Barre

Toelken says that, "in the case of ethnic groups, the

question of whether the group is a folk group will rest not on surnames or skin color or genetics but on the existence

of a network" (79).

Folklorists' discussions of identity are an attempt to provide a model for understanding identity as part of

culture. Folklorists such as Alan Dundes (Folklore

Matters). Elliott Oring ("Artifacts, etc . . . .") and Roger

Abrahams argue that folklore is a primary means of expressing identity, a property which makes folklore an

ideal medium for studying Bush-Banks.

Alan Dundes, a noted folklorist, claims that his

initial essay "Defining Identity Through Folklore,"

"demonstrate[s] just how crucial folklore is for establishing a sense of identity or senses of identities"

(Folklore Matters, vii). He also says "that one of the ways

50 individuals define their own identity is through folklore"

(Folklore Matters 2). Dundes bases this observation on a

definition of identity which considers similarities along

with differences in the traits of the subjects. Therefore,

he says, "... identity need not mean absolute or perfect

identity, as in A+A. . . . Thus identity remains constant

even if the physical constituents should change and the same

principle can be applied to group identity" (Folklore

Matters 4). According to DeLevita, group identity means that while

its members may change or vary, the group continues to show

constant features (qtd in Folklore Matters 4). Dundes

himself says, "... identity, both personal and social,

is decidedly multiple in nature. There are many personal

identities and many social identities" (Folklore Matters 6) .

Within these categories, if sameness and difference are all

totally identical, they yield a meaningless universe. If

all identities were the same in every category, studying

identity would be unnecessary because difference is the measure one uses to determine how she is like those with

whom she identifies. Dundes says that to be identified, one must be recognized by others and, that "the persecution of minority cultures (for example, Jews, blacks, etc.) by majority cultures has resulted in these oppressed peoples

clinging to their identity for dear life" (Folklore Matters

6) .

51 To have a self concept or identity, one must contrast

oneself with an "Other" or opposite; likewise, the group

identity is constituted by contrasting the corporate body with another group. Furthermore, Dundes believes that it is more important for minority group members to have a greater

stake in defining identity because members of such groups

"experience opposition more than majorities," and especially when the identity in question is that of the individuals within the minority groups (Folklore Matters 6-7). It is

especially important for Bush-Banks to inform the current

century of her group's identity because of the many factors

(legal, social, critical) forcing the group's identity and past out of existence. And, it is "[t]he sense of

continuity [that] links the individual with his past"

(Dundes, Folklore Matters 7).

Folklorist Richard Bauman defines folklore itself as a

function of shared identity (qtd in Dundes, Folklore Matters

8) . In reading Bauman's article, "Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore," I realize that Bauman's theory of shared identity serves as a theoretical base for my notion that a person such as Bush-Banks can cross between two cultures and perform or share cultural identity with members of another group without being totally subsumed by that group--that she did not have to lose her Indian identity to converse with her Black identity--as there is a point where each of her cultures understands the other and

52 has the ability to communicate across group boundaries.

This is what I am trying to argue makes this woman multicultural--she could converse across group boundaries, and while she felt forced by society to relinquish her

Native American culture to gain her aim to be a writer, she still held onto some aspects of her Native American heritage even though that group identity was being erased by the legal system of the larger national identity.

Another point Bauman makes is about crossing cultural boundaries, and since Native American and African American cultural groups share the "oppression" as a group of those who have been stripped of major identity factors such as dispossession from land and economic security and being identified as animal-like or primitive because their sense of morality did not match that of the "oppressors," this would readily be applicable to members of these two groups.

Generally, identity is classified as individual identity, group or corporate identity, national identity, ascribed identity (self-ascribed and other-ascribed), differential identity, racial and/or ethnic identity, and cultural identity. Folklorists, literary theorists, rhetoricians, race theorists, and multiculturalists use each of these categories as foci when directing critical terministic screens onto writers. In Bush-Banks' case, economics and power possessed by the dominant members of society influence and change identity in ways that affect

53 how this artist is perceived and received. For instance,

the legal system had the powerful influence of e-rac(e)lng the group identity of the Montauks who constituted part of

Bush-Banks' identity equation. Therefore, it is not

surprising that because of cultural standards itiposed by the

American legal system of her time, she found it necessary to

adopt her Black identity to achieve recognition.

Such an influence demanded that the author speak for

her Montauk group when they could not speak for themselves.

Her speaking for them contributed to what appears to be the

fragmented nature of her poetry, prose, and plays where she

attempts to "hearken back" to the time when the group was a

cohesive and functioning entity.

While Bush-Banks played the role of a folklorist by

documenting her culture as well as creating literature, only

a handful of Montauk writing is available to us today.

Those texts of Montauk culture are about the day to day life

experiences, fantasies, travels, and myths surrounding the

lives of this group of people. Most of the preserved writings of the Montauks is in the form of Samson Occam's

religious diary, letters of protest by tribe members who

appealed to the courts to save the Montauk land, and two or

three collections of fiction. Of these two works of

fiction, only Lords of the Soil was published during her

lifetime, and Heather Flower was published in 1967, 23 years after Bush-Banks' death. Anthropologist, Gaynell Stone says

54 these works are not "truly Montauk" because the material has been filtered through the acculturative process. Hence,

little or no evidence exists to show that Bush-Banks truly had a multi-racial Montauk conten^orary who wrote about the

subjects that concerned and motivated Bush-Banks to write.

Maria Pharaoh's "as-told-to" lifestory is recounted by her granddaughter, but no other writers of Montauk descent have

stepped forward and produced works of fiction, nor have they been widely recognized or written about.

Culture. Multiculturalism and Identity

Over the past decade or so, a plethora of material has appeared on the subjects of race, ethnicity, mixed race, and multiculturalism. The discussion of multiculturalism became very popular as a result of the Civil Rights activities of

the 1970's. First, public school teachers began to look into the multiculturally diverse appearances of their classrooms, especially since forced busing caused desegregation of previously homogeneous (if only in surface appearance) classrooms. Then, as college theoreticians began investigating the growing pluralism of American society, multiculturalism became a "hot topic" of conversation and a politicized site for resolution of many, any, and perhaps all, issues of gender, race, ethnicity

(especially in immigrant studies), and lately, sexual orientation. Furthermore, the Women's Rights Movement

55 helped overcome some of the negative thinking about race associated with miscegenation laws and enabled conversations abut race, gender, and culture such as the current study undertakes. F. James Davis remarks that key to racist ideology is a belief that "race cause culture, that each inbred population has a distinct culture that is genetically transmitted along with its physical traits" (24). He explains that in this belief ethnic groups, are confused with races. Thus people confuse culture transmitted through the process of socialization, not by the genes with certain values and patterns of behavior believed to be just "in the blood" of group members.

Davis goes on to say, "Parental habits and values cannot be passed on genetically. A wide range of cultural patterns can be learned by members of the same race. A

Korean orphan child raised from infancy in Iowa has the racial traits of its biological parents but leams English and Midwest American culture" (24) . By the same process,

Olivia Ward, orphaned at nine months, was raised in the

Montauk culture of her maternal aunt Maria Draper. This is the aunt whom Bush-Banks described as "a woman of rare instinctiveness, and extraordinarily keen perceptibilities, possessing a great determination of purpose, and in hardships displaying that stoical endurance which so fittingly characterizes the nature of the Indian" (Qf 313).

56 Teresa Kay Williams believes that "Being multicultural is not merely about being racially mixed, and it is not simply about appreciating different cultures; being truly multicultural means possessing an affinity for and loyalty to two or more social and cultural institutions" (282). I maintain that multiculturalism existed long before we academics theorized and politicized it. As I envision it, multiculturalism means that culture is not viewed as monolithic and that if a person actively participates in the values, beliefs and traditions of more than one culture on a regular basis, she lives a multicultural existence. This person then can speak authoritatively in a multicultural dialogue because he or she has firsthand knowledge of what it means to live, see, believe and know what it means to be an "Indian" and simultaneously an "African American," as

Bush-Banks did. This woman struggled to maintain herself and her family without a male breadwinner. Yet, she fought to retain her foothold within the literary circles of her society by using her positions as a newspaper writer and drama teacher to promote the works of other artists. She simultaneously struggled to create poetry, prose, drama, memoirs, sketches, and various literary art forms to contribute to the literature of her day.

Bush-Banks's techniques were modeled after the pastoral and romantic writing styles prevalent in the Black community around the turn of the century. Her constant theme or

57 recurring motif was that of the African American community at large--racial pride and uplift of kindred spirits. Carla

L. Peterson talks about how the northern Black population's elite separated itself to lead the community intellectually and politically. She says that by,

Working, speaking, and writing out of a particular set

of social institutions--the Press, the Church, the

Convention movement, and the Masonic lodges--this elite

constructed a program of "racial uplift." This program

has often been viewed as an attempt by the elite to

replicate the values of the hegemony and assimilate

into white middle-class culture by means of improved

education, acceptance of Euro-American standards of

civilization, and adherence to the dominant culture's

ethic of hard work, self-help, and moral purity. (187)

Bush-Banks' works are typical of the efforts of this

"program." Many of her letters and sketches provide evidence that she was patriotic and that Bush-Banks believed in a "melting pot" notion of an American identity. However,

Peterson warns that critiqueing this assimilation or

"melting" as bourgeois and conservative means misunderstanding "the dynamics of social change under conditions of internal colonization" (187). By adopting the ideology of assimilation, Bush-Banks not only deliberately chose to identify herself with the moral and political

58 tradition of the Black elite community, but she also carved a personal identity for herself that required she participate in what Peterson calls a critique of the dominant culture in its failure to "uphold its stated ideals and asserti[on of] the African American's rights to both political freedom and cultural distinctiveness" (187). Such a political statement or assertion of identity solidly situates Bush-Banks in the center of a cultural conversation prefiguring contemporary notions of multiculturalism or diversity. Such conversation asserts the need to value the heritage and characteristics that makes these individuals assets to society.

Because of several factors, prime among them lack of time and finances, Bush-Banks did not have the opportunity to write the necessary volume of material, nor did she have the luxury of time to seek the proper connections to gain backing and support for her works to become "major" within the Harlem Renaissance or any other literary movement during her lifetime. Her letters to Carter G. Woodson, Ella

Wheeler Wilcox, and Paul Laurence Dunbar indicate that she was strongly motivated to make a significant written contribution to society. Maggie Walker, one of the most famous Black woman entrepreneurs, did back the production of the unpublished play, Indian Trails: Or. Trail of the

Montauk. While Bush-Banks found Walker's interest in Native

Americans inspiring, the writer never found the appropriate

59 patron nor sufficient backing in the literary marketplace to gain the audience that she desired and required.

Despite the obstacles confronting her, Bush-Banks

continued writing and exerted every possible social and political effort to advance those whom she considered members of "her race," the "colored race"(ÇW 26). Although historically overlooked, her work deserves a current

reassessment because it records the efforts of a person holding a multiculturally-centered position in society.

Further, it serves as one historic artifact or source for

locating answers to some of the questions continuing today regarding self-validation and identity in a society that was supposedly intended to become one mass "melting pot. "

Fully understanding the importance of Bush-Banks' work as such an artifact requires an understanding of the term

"melting pot," its history that evolved through the concept of Americanization, Bush-Banks' perception of "melting pot," and what we mean by the term today. As Arthur Schlesinger,

Jr. notes, the "melting pot" was meant for those immigrants to the New world who looked alike. He credits Israel

Zangwill for coining the phrase "God's crucible," which came to describe America as a form of "melting pot" or a place where Europeans found new form. Schlesinger also refers to

Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Famer" as a defining moment for American identity. Crevecoeur's "letters" have

60 been instrumental in establishing the contemporary

conversations about America as a melting pot. Schlesinger

concludes that.

The melting pot was one of those metaphors that

turned out only to be partly true, and recent

years have seen an astonishing repudiation of the

whole conception. Many Americans today

righteously reject the historic goal of "a new

race of man." The contemporary ideal is not

assimilation but ethnicity. The escape from

origins has given way to the search for "roots,"

"ancient prejudices and manners,"--the old-time

religion, the old-time diet--have made a

surprising comeback. (Schlesinger 293)

Another commentary on this same melting pot comes from

Nathan Glazer who also criticizes the assimilationist nature of the idea of America as a "melting pot."

Although he is not defining the term "melting pot,"

Glazer describes the concept as "the demand that those accepted into American society Americanized or assimilated, and los[t] any distinctive group identity" (12). Glazer comments further about Americans' tendency to self-name ourselves and construct ourselves as independent frpm other nations :

One side of this self-naming may be seen as a

threat to the rest of the Americas and as

61 arrogance in ignoring their existence. But

another side must also be noted: the rejection by

this naming of any reference to English or British

or any other ethnic or racial origins, thus

enphasizing in the name of itself the openness of

the society to all, the fact that it was not

limited to one ethnic group, one language, one

religion. (Glazer, 14)

The self-naming is important to multiply raced and multi­

cultured individuals in contemporary society because self- naming and self-identifying often become the basis of an

identity where no racial identity fits the individual.

Glazer's theory then helps us to understand the difficulty a person such as Bush-Banks would encounter while trying to carve an identity in a society grappling with issues of national identity. In this society so many people were expected to assimilate in a model that not only failed to recognize minority races, but society also forced everyone to submit to a version of the very "oneness" Bush-Banks desired. However, the assimilation model did not allow for the separate entity she sought to be, but instead it expected everyone to become Anglicized White Americans--all others were non-humans and savages.

Philip Gleason presents a historical review of the place of ethnicity in the tradition of thinking and writing about American identity in an effort to determine the

62 significance of current concerns with what we think of as

ethnic as we debate the meaning of being an Americsui (58) .

He discusses the ideological origins of American identity

from colonial notions of Americanization up through Horace

Kallen's work on pluralism which Gleason asserts originally

"rested on the assumption that, although at one time a

distinctive American nationality did exist, it had been

dissipated by the great waves of migration" (141) . The

importance of Gleason's work to the study of Bush-Banks'

life and career is that her emergence and growth as a writer

coincide with the historical development of these national

ideologies of race and ethnicity.

Americanization politicized "melting" as an anti­

communist technique. Gleason notes that the 1950's

understanding of pluralism and diversity "seemed to be that

although Americans were a pluralistic people, they did not

have much real diversity; they therefore needed more, but

this diversity must never be divisive" (119). Bush-Banks'

ideological frame was consonant with her times as the underlying belief involved racial unity despite society's obvious inability to do this. Many of her works reflect a

subconscious notion that America is not truly a melting pot

(as depicted in her comments about the varieties of her companions) while on the surface she appeals to the reader to melt or blend in social consciousness and brotherly love.

63 Possible models for Olivia Ward Bush-Banks might have been religious women orators like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Maria Stewart. Perhaps their influence affected her writing style if she knew of them and read their works.

Religious speaking and writing have been established as distinct avenues by which African American women came to voice and gained a hold on public attention. The qualities they possessed and such backing as they gained that Bush-

Banks was lacking may serve as keys to Bush-Banks' role as a forerunner of multicultural writers as they provide her with historical and cultural context as a nineteenth century

African American woman activist and writer.

Including Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, and Chestnutt in the analysis of Bush-Banks places her historically in the Harlem

Renaissance movement where Guillaume notes that Bush-Banks was a minor figure. Likewise, her role in Native American culture and writing is connected to other Native writers such as Mourning Dove who wrote as a multi-raced Native woman writer during Bush-Banks' time. Additional connections can be observed by comparing Bush-Banks' style with the Montauk, Nathan Cuffee's and Lydia Jocelyn's in

Lords of the Soil, as well as other extant Montauk writing such as Verne Dyson's Heather Flower. Overton's The Indians of Long Island, and the works of Samson Occam.

Because Bush-Banks describes the Aunt Vinev Sketches as records of tales she has heard and she cocuments the

64 existence and cultural activities of the Montauks, these works affirm her as a folklorist and any existing tribal

records she maintained verify her status as a historian.

Analysis of her sketches, poetry and drama should reveal the moments when she attempts to be Black, Native, or bicultural. Examining what it means to be a multicultural person justifies reclaiming those aspects of her worldview that make Bush-Banks multicultural and further aids our understanding of contemporary dialogues on multiculturalism and pluralism.

An approach to discerning when and how Bush-Banks is bicultural is to examine the definition of biculturalism.

Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus questions whether biculturalism refers to the integration of two sets of cultural norms into one behavior pattern, or if the term refers to a process of switching one's behavior across situations (81). This is important in discerning how Olivia Ward Bush-Banks constructs her identity as a bicultural writer because at times she writes specifically as a Black woman addressing an

African American audience (Aunt Viney Sketches, and "To Our

Loyal Colored Americans"), and at other times, she speaks as an Indian and addresses a Native American audience (Trail of the Montauk). Of course an individual must pay attention to all of the identities she possesses if she hopes to present a whole, unified, and coherent self, even if such a self eventually proves impossibles to attain.

65 Despite the dynamic nature of her heritage and her writing, Bush-Banks was trying to make some meaning for herself that was not governed by a strict set of rules that said she could only be Black when she lived in and moved within Black culture, and she could only be "Indian" when she moved within Native American culture. She wanted to be the same person, accepted and "authorized, " wherever she happened to be. "Authorized," here, does not mean

"authorial intent," but simply that this particular authority meant Bush-Banks wanted to be acknowledged for the person she saw herself as being. While many engage in a struggle to find one, finding a coherent, unified self may be an impossibility, or perhaps, finally undesirable.

Although Rotheram-Borus' question may not be satisfactorily answered by the end of this study, our definition of multiculturalism and what constitutes an identity must acknowledge that some people come to self-knowledge or identification as a result of questioning their cultural backgrounds.

Although White men have been mating with "the Other" in

America since the arrival of the first Anglo-European settlers on this continent, we seem to have forgotten, or fail to acknowledge, that these aborigines, or the people whom Columbus and others described as "savages" and

"cannibals" inhabited this continent and had distinct cultural identities and literate (non-print) practices

66 before contact with explorers and European culture and

customs. Further, as William Loren Katz has shown. Black

people were present on the North American continent before

the captives were brought here in 1619. Additionally, these

people had a culture and a lifestyle that influenced the

offsprings of some of these unacknowledged matings.

Acknowledging these situations as valid sources of

bicultural or multicultural identities frees us to

understand that identity is not restricted to choice closed

off to influence. Sometimes, people can choose their

identities, and in other cases, they can be pressured into

assuming other identities.

In a performance model of identity where Bush-Banks

performs identities, she dedicates her book. Original Poems

thus.

This Little Booklet Is DEDICATED WITH PROFOUND

REVERENCE AND RESPECT TO THE PEOPLE OF MY RACE,

The Afro-Americans, BY MRS. OLIVIA BUSH, OF

PROVIDENCE, R. I. "Judge us not, 0 favored races.

From the heights we have attained;

Rather measure our progression

By the depths from whence we came. "

(Collected Works 27)

Bush-Banks is bicultural because she moves between the two

cultures of the Native American and the African American.

Because she operates in a mainstream culture that considers

67 her ethnic, an important question to ask is how ethnic identity relates to biculturalism. Inasmuch as she does not operate within a monolithically defined culture, Bush-Banks is not monocultural. She neither discontinues being Black when she goes to powwows or performs some other Native cultural activity, nor does she stop being Native because she lives in a Black neighborhood, publishes in Black journals, or has Black skin,

Rotheram-Borus examines this issue and the evolution of multiculturalism and ethnicity as they evolve in adolescents

(82). She says biculturalism is a multidimensional construct which affects self labels, role models and norms and values chosen. It has different rules and norms for appropriate behavior in social settings in mainstream culture which determine how the needs are met and absorbed.

Rotheram-Borus says it usually refers to the degree to which minority youths associate themselves with majority culture after exposure to mainstream culture (83) . The complication of biculturalism comes with the multiple contacts with other cultures that these youths encounter in our increasingly pluralistic society.

According to Rotheram-Borus, bicultural identity is the

"cotrplex and varied patterns of attitudes, beliefs, behavior patterns, and feelings ..." (84) the youths encounter while they also possess a bicultural reference group orientation or a desire to be similar to a particular

68 chosen group (85). She cites a study by Rosenberg which

found that youths establish their private, desired, and

public selves by comparing themselves to other members of

the chosen reference group. From this point, the youths

establish bicultural competence or the "ability to function

effectively in multiethnic, pluralistic environments. . . .

which irtplies an understanding of the varying social norms

of at least two groups and which requires behavioral

flexibility (83-85).

In response to the question of whether biculturalism

refers to the integration of two sets of cultural norms into

one behavioral pattern, or if the term refers to a process

of switching one's behavior across situations, I found that

a multiracial Ohio State University student, Mark Crew,

reveals he does not want to choose. As a contemporary

person who lives a multi-racial, multicultural life. Crew

speaks authoritatively on life experiences and identity

issues such as those Bush-Banks encountered, and he daily

confront the types of challenges that multiracial people

continue to encounter today. On the other hand, I personally chose to switch to Black behaviors and attitudes as a defense against the ethnically sensitive public eye

that said, "You don't look like an Indian." ®

Yet another question is does one switch? If so, when and why, and what are the rules for this switching?

Rotheram-Borus believes "it is not possible to maintain two

69 separate value systems and attitudinal sets operating

somewhat independently within the same person" (89). She

says that "[i]n those domains where it does appear feasible

to have two or more sets of norms, such as social customs

or language use, it is necessary for adolescents to

distinguish situations where traditional ethnic behaviors

are appropriate from those where a mainstream system is more useful" (89). In Bush-Banks' case, she clearly had the

sense to choose among her ethnic behaviors for each

situation that confronted her.

What does it mean to be "mixed raced" or multi-raced? what did it mean to Bush-Banks and when did it show in her writing? This is really hard to discern especially when her

"Indienness" was derived from an Indian nation which,

through its own notions of tribal sovereignty defined itself as a multi-raced nation. So, the race of the writer is obscured either under the heavy influence of the mainstream ascribed identity of Negro, or just as a matter of dual concerns.

Naomi Zack, a multiracial sociologist, says that according to nineteenth century racial theory, mixed heritage for Blacks must of necessity balance out to be

Black (Race and Mixed Race 5). Further, she decries

American racial designations as unfounded and unfair. She says, "Racial categories are primarily cultural categories.

The facts of hunan biology and anthropology do not support a

70 belief in the existence of racial characteristics as traits, which for any given race, are present in every individual member of that race (Race and Mixed Race 5) .

In another essay, Zack discusses how the "mulatto elite was becoming more brown after slavery" and that it was being displaced by a Negro elite which "would construct an ideology of ideals of blackness in increasingly symbolic meanings of 'black, ' as a word in any way related to skin color (not unlike the word 'white') (Race and Mixed Race

100). From the 1920's until her death, Bush-Banks moved within this circle of elites and was noted in newspaper columns for her activities among the literati as a "grand dame" of the literary social scene.

As Zack further examines the Black elite, she comments upon the paradox of the lives of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Cullen, DuBois, Hurston, Johnson, and Toomer who

"combine[d] white and black, culturally, within a black racial framework, [and] acted out their own mixed-race ancestry without daring to fully confront it" (Race and

Mixed Race 101). Zack even criticizes these Harlem

Renaissance leaders who "were a breath away from redefining both themselves and the majority of Negroes as neither black nor white or as both, but they did not do so. The closest these New Negro spokespeople came to such a redefinition was a glorification of brown skin colors in poetry, song, romantic preference, and prize fighting (e.g., Joe Louis as

71 "The Brown Bomber") (Race and Mixed Race lOl). For Bush-

Banks, however, such redefinition was a continued and lifelong focus of her work.

In her book. Black. White and Other. Lisa Funderburg interviewed a large number of contemporary respondents who addressed issues that continue today for people with multiple heritages. Throughout, a tone of perceived societal ambivalence seems to pervade these people whose parents either gave them the option of choosing to be one of their races, or who simply told their offspring that it was okay just to be themselves, non-raced human beings. This stance causes problems for more that one poor soul who is told "You don't look like a . . . "You are just trying to pass for white;" or some other racially intolerant and culturally ignorant response which ignores that the person does not want to be racially determined but just accepted on the virtues of their personality and human worth.

Maria P.P. Root's book. Racially Mixed People in

America, explores the encounters of multiracial people who attempt to be at home in an American society that is race- based and which attempts to force them to choose between or among their racial heritages. For example, Terry Wilson says that, "In the nineteenth century, mixed bloods, usually referred to pejoratively as 'halfbreeds,' were excoriated as social and psychological misfits, caught between two cultures, and frequently betrayers of their Indian heritage

72 by participating in and profiting from the exploitation of

their tribes' posterity, especially land and mineral

resources" (122) . Speaking of triracial isolates such as

the Montauks, G. Reginald Daniel says that the groups find

commonality not necessarily in cultural bonds but in

"similarities in experience and living conditions that unite

them in their refusal to accept a binary system of racial classification in which individuals suspected of having any

African ancestry are necessarily considered to be Black"

(98) .

Most discussions of race in America generally consider

"Blackness" or the etrçjhasis upon the African American because of the structuring of racism in our society. Race is important to the study of Bush-Banks' worldview and her works because of the repeated references she makes to race or some form of racial presence in her various genres of literature. Further, race has often been confused with ethnicity and used to supplant the cultural influences that shape individual identity. Many African Americans accept their Indian heritage, but some still look down upon multi­ raced people as "attempting to pass" for anything but the ultimately oppressed Black race in America.

From where I stand, issues of race still inform how

America wants to categorize or identify people like Bush-

Banks, and assigning a racial category is not only an act of

White America, but also of Black race theorists such as

73 Naomi Zack and Aaron Gresson. Also guilty, are some anthropologists such as M.R. Harrington who took it upon himself to describe the Montauks as they appeared to his eyes. Speaking of the Shinnecocks (Montauk cousins) whom he first saw upon his visit to their reservation in 1902,

Harrington says.

Some of those left behind intermarried with

negroes, a phenomenon seen among several remnants of

Atlantic Coast tribes among some Muskhogean peoples,

but exceedingly rare elsewhere, fortunately for the

future of the Indian race. Certain it is that the

African mixture has lost for the Long Island survivors

the respect and support of the Iroquois tribes who now

will not recognize them in any way, and will not even

admit that there is any Indian blood left on Long

Island. . .

Some are black and woolly headed, having at the

same time facial characteristics distinctly Indian.

Others have the straight hair and light color of the

Indian, but the flat nose, large dull eyes, and thick

lips of the negro. A few of the men are typically

Indian. (Harrington 279)

The supposedly objective anthropologist allows prejudicial bias to prevent him from gathering important cultural data regarding this group of people. For, when the Montauks sensed his race-based negativity, they closed up and shared

74 very little of the scant precious information about their ancestors. This problem of race assignment interfering with understanding of peoples is evident in the article, "One

Drop of Blood." There, Blacks resist the multiracial category on the Census or other official application forms because the category endangers the Black category on the

Census, what really is at fault, and very much an issue of how people define other people and even themselves, is economics. Economics pushed Native peoples from the better grazing and hunting lands; economics made water rights on reservations appealing; economics made the coastal Long

Island territory so appealing that the shipping industry figured in the removal of peace loving cultures as well as warring Pequots; economics caused Black slaves to be forcibly brought to this country and used and abused in such a fashion that Civil Rights reparations became necessary to bring a state of perceived equilibrium or equality with race as its focus. Yet, those who fear loss of economic ground because the Census Bureau might permit a person to design their own identity on a form, cause me to question the sincerity of people who espouse a belief in multiculturalism. Rather, at heart, those advocates are concerned with maintaining the economic racial status quo.*

Tradition plays a key role in identity construction, and Bush-Banks belongs to various traditions of writing, in

75 folklore, tradition is very important and is very much what the folklorist looks for to determine how the subject defines him or herself. So, what are traditions and what are the traditions to which Bush-Banks belongs? In

Tradition. Edward Shils explains that.

Works of literature, like all intellectual works, have

both a physical existence and a particular symbolic

existence, which is conceptually distinct from their

physical existence. . . . In their symbolic form, they

might become inert, but as long as there is a physical

exemplar, they are in readiness to be reanimated by

entering into the active possession of a later

generation of readers, actively in the possession of

living persons, i.e., in memory. In the case of works

of oral literature, only active possession in memory

and in the act of recitation enables them to persist.

(Shils 142)

Many folklorists disagree with Shils' explanation of the tradition of literature, but to accept it enables one to reclaim Bush-Banks' writing as a "symbolic existence" which laid inactive from Bush-Banks' death in 1944 to 1986 when efforts by Guillaume and the Schomburg series reanimated it.

This is important because Montauk stories and literary traditions were primarily passed along by word of mouth (cf

Dyson's and Overton's works).

76 From another perspective, folklorist Barre Toelken explains tradition thusly.

Tradition is a cottqpendium of those pre-existing

culture-specific materials, assumptions, and options

that bear upon the performer more heavily than do his

or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize

in the use of tradition that such matters as content

and style have been, for the most part, passed on by

the culture, but not invented by the performer.

The probability that most people belong to more

than one folk group is a consideration that remains

central in the study of folklore dynamics ; it requires

us to recognize that a given person may have a wide

repertoire of potential traditional dynamic

interactions, each of which is set in motion by certain

particular live contexts. . . . The insider recognizes

and performs for other insiders a certain variety of

appropriate jokes, gestures, pranks, and speech

customs. (Toelken 78)

Accepting Toelken's view of tradition enables the observer to distinguish the ways in which Bush-Banks is both an insider and an outsider, at different times, in both of her cultural heritages.

Bush-Banks claims African American traditions because she has "Negro" descent. Native American traditions come from her claim to "Indian" descent, and specifically Montauk

77 tradition because this nation of Indians had specific rules, traditions and a set of problems that the U.S. tried to resolve for them through techniques similar to the those used in the removal of other Indians. But, for the

Montauks, these techniques were different because of perceptions of what "race" was for this particular set of

Indians. Mainstream or "American" traditions apply because she lives in this particular society and constitutes her personal history within the political and historical context of her time which includes groups, gender, and also literary tradition.

Toelken further explains how a person can be discerned as being a member of a particular group's traditions. He says,

. . . it is the dynamic traditional interactions a

Mormon shares with other members of the same faith

(customs, proverbs, jokes, slang terms), factors

distinctive to a sense of "us." Similarly, in the case

of ethnic groups, the question of whether the group is

a folkgroup will rest not on surnames or skin color or

genetics, but on the existence of a network of dynamic

traditional interactions. An African American who does

not participate in any Black traditional systems is not

a functioning member of any Black folkgroup. Anglo-

Americans who do participate fully (language, custom,

dance, food, etc.) in an American Indian tribe may be

78 said to be members of that folk group--whether or not

their grandmothers were Cherokee princesses--while

someone who is genetically 100 percent Native American

may not be a member of a tribal folkgroup if he or she

does not participate in its folk customs. Thus we look

at the nature of the dynamic interaction, not at

superficial details. (Toelken 79)

Accepting Toelken's dynamic of tradition allows Bush-Banks

to be the multicultural person she chose to be as she

actively belonged simultaneously to both the Black and

Native American folkgroups.

Because she was a woman who identified with the gender

issues and concerns of women, Bush-Banks participated in women's traditions. Black women's traditions specifically

apply because she grew up in a society that assigned to her

those rules or requirements that established the role of being Black and a woman in America. She belonged to a writer's or literate and literary tradition because she

aspired to be and acted upon her need to create written art.

While she belonged to other traditions, they are too varied

to cover thoroughly in the present study. These gender and

literary traditions helped shape Bush-Banks' worldview.

We react to perceptions of "race" as we behold a person with our ideas, but then we react and change our notions about people when we consider that everything is not completely explained by ideas about race, but rather, at

79 times, is defined by culture. In short, this involves others' ideas about oneself. The point here is that when one speaks about Bush-Banks being an Indian, it has to do with the culture of the Nation to which she belonged rather than to how somebody else assigned blood quantum categories to what Bush-Banks' group of people determined to be their cultural identity.

Another problem arises because "Indianness" is not always a matter of blood quantum but often it involves a questioning of tribal sovereignty. White America has caused this problem by resisting Native sovereignty and by challenging the cultural identity of this group of people as well as the autonomous culture of people with African and other Black heritage. Inasmuch as treaties were made with some nations of Natives because of their warring capabilities (and those treaties were dishonored), were treaties made with the Montauks--how and why? In The

Indians of Long Island . Jacqueline Overton describes the

Montauks as peaceable while the Pequots and Naragansetts were warring tribes who not only fought with the white man, but with the other Nations of Indians as well. Yet, because the white man outnumbered and outgunned the Pequots, even they were made "invisible" in ways similar to the erasure or e-rac(e)ure of the Montauks.

If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is correct in his ruling, affirmative action is no longer necessary and

80 such Civil Rights reparations do not benefit society at large nor Blacks who have historically suffered lost power and position in American society. People who resist the new category on the government Census form that allows a person to "see" him or herself and do the describing, obviously have not figured out that rules change to make requirements fit the needed discriminatory situation, and then the laws are changed to corroborate maintenance of the status quo.

Hopeless as it may sound, the notion of power underlies much of the frustration and negativity over race. Given this knowledge, we must understand that people who have power will maintain it and are constantly working at ways to maintain their positions of power and the status quo.

Egalitarians think that the ideals of the Constitution and

Declaration of Independence were designed for their rights, but until the balance of power shifts with the move toward a new form of "minority-based" pluralism, (i.e., the various minorities will claim the majority body count in this nation in the year 2000) nothing is going to change.

The various minorities involved in the shift toward pluralism must change the content of conversations about race and the construction of multiculturalism from that currently in existence. Otherwise, the result will only be what Diane Ravitch calls "multi-centrisme" or another form of ethnocentrism. When they ascribe identity, according to

Naomi Zack,

81 . . . black Americans who value cultural tradition,

apply the white asymmetrical kinship system with great

rigor. According to "core" black standards, a person

is black if he or she has one black forebear, no matter

how white the person may look .... If individuals

who are darker in skin color than Nordic Anglo-Saxons - -

i.e., whites such as Italians, Hispanics, some Jews . .

. and Indians--are accepted as physically racially

white by whites on the basis of anthropological data

and custom, this is not sufficient for blacks to accept

that those individuals are white. Traditional blacks

tend to view these groups of people, whom they call

"munglas (as opposed to "peolas," a word for fair­

skinned designated blacks) as black people who are

"passing" for white people. It could be said that

blacks, like intentional white racists, use the

criterion of "blood in the face" for physical

whiteness. (Race and Mixed Race 37)

American minorities need to relinquish hypodescent notions of identity and establish a clear definition of multiculturalim. If not, our American society could well

suffer the same fate as did the South African Blacks did who outnumbered the apartheid-lawmaking minority, yet the few

rule, govern, and define the meiny.

82 The same argument that applies for the race groups disservices the "subcultures." Women, who statistically outnumber men, have allowed men to dominate them since the beginnings in the United States. Likewise, for those whom sexual preference is important, we need only look to the

"don't ask-don't tell policy" of the military (where the strength of capitalistic power is maintained) to see that even people having "different" sexual preferences and ideas of how their gender roles will be defined, are still controlled by those who believe themselves to be the majority. Acknowledging Bush-Banks'multiculturalism enables us to acknowledge that while our differences make us identifiable, our common goals make us a nation. By looking at her claims for herself as a gendered author who wrote in a society that subjugated her cultural identity to its own notions of race, we share with the historians in the necessary correction and revision of the United States' national identity. Sometimes, it seems that we cannot acknowledge the individual without imposing the hegemony of the group upon that person.

83 NOTES ’ See The Sleeper Wakes an edited collection on Harlem Renaissance women with foreword by Nellie McKay. Also see Color. Sex and Poetry. another collection on Harlem Renaissance women writers edited by Gloria Hull.

^ This reference is not to W.E.B. DuBois' Souls of Black Folks. but rather to Stepto's mention of an act of authorship in the introductory pages of his book, From Behind the Veil. Stepto says, Freedom in Veil is thus presented as being a protean state of literacy to be achieved and safeguarded. It is variously literate and the opportunity to do so. It is safeguarded when authorial control is managed, thus regulating the intrusions of competing self-identities and of the other Others--the listeners, observers, and readers of many guises. Regulating the intrusions of the Others is a means by which space is created in which to quest, to author. Thus, authorial control is a necessary, self-protecting aggression that is effective in great part because it recognizes how texts attract and form reading constituencies which are rarely to be trusted, even when--perhaps especially when--readers gather to praise. (xi)

^ My theory is that to be "colored" connotes being tainted or that one is not a "real" American within the national identity constructed for this country by people in the majority or those who held power at the time the defining or national identity construction was happening. So, to be "colored" in any way: red, black, immigrant, or anything other than white, meant certain struggles would be inevitable--struggles to be a person, struggles to be a woman, struggles to be a writer, and struggles to be economically sound.

4 In a critical response to his position on race and culture, Benn Michaels goes on to say, I criticize the idea of antiessentiallst (emphasis mine) accounts of identity, which is to say that I criticize in particular the idea of cultural identity as a replacement for racial identity. My central point is that for the idea of cultural identity to do any work beyond describing the beliefs people actually hold and the things they actually do, it must resort to some version of the essentialism it begins by repudiating. Thus, for example, the idea that people can lose their culture depends upon there being a connection between people and their culture that runs deeper them their actual beliefs and practices, which is why when they

84 stop doing one thing and start doing another, they csm be described as having lost rather than changed their culture. This commitment to the idea that certain beliefs and practices constitute your real culture, whether or not you actually believe or practice them, marks the invention of culture as a project (you can now recover your culture, you can betray your culture, and so on), and it marks also the return to the essentialism that antiessentialists mean to oppose. For insofar as your culture no longer consists in things you actually do and believe, it requires some link between you and your culture that transcends practice. That link I argue, has, in the United States, characteristically been provided by race. Thus, I conclude, cultural identity is a form of racial identity. (Identities 401) Inasmuch as Benn Michaels is concerned, then, being forced to stop practicing beliefs of one's culture such as the Montauks were forced by law to do, leaves the Montauketts no grounds to recover their cultural identity as Indians--they must remain Black and only Black.

^ William Loren Katz has written several books on this particular issue, specifically. Black Indians and So Proudly Red and Black. Sharon Holland has also written an article in Callaloo. "If You Know I Have a Heritage . . . ."

* In Theo Goldberg's Anatomy of Racism. Lucius Outlaw captures the essence of the issue of race as socially constructed versus race as a biological entity: . . . race is not wholly and completely determined by biology, but is only partially so. Even when biology does not determine "race," but in complex interplay with environmental, cultural, and social factors provides certain boundary conditions and possibilities that affect raciation and the development of "geographical" races. In addition, the definition of "race" is partially political, partly cultural. Nor does the modern conceptual terrain of "evolution" provide scientifically secure access to race- determining biological, cultural, social development complexes distributed among various groups that fix a group's rank-ordered place on an ascending "great chain of being." Racial categories are fundamentally social in nature and rest on shifting sands of biological heterogeneity. The biological aspects of "race" are conscripted into projects of cultural, political, and social construction. Race is a social formation. (68)

85 ^ Because of the lack of research on multi-racial women who possess African American and Native American (Indian) heritages, this dissertation takes up the challenge identified in SAGE: The Scholarly Journal of African American Women's Writing. The editors, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Bell-Scott make the following editorial comments : The cover photograph of Diane Fletcher, a Black woman who lived among the Kiowa Nation, reminds us of the erasures and silences which continue to characterize the scholarship about women of African descent. While essays in early issues of the Journal of Negro History and more recently the work of William Loren Katz (Black Indians. 1986) and Jack Forbes (Black Africans and Native Americans. 1988) establish the importance of Afro- Native American experience and the existence of Indian slaveholders in the American South, we know little about Black Indians who were women. We also know very little about the experiences of Black Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. When Marilyn Richards' biography of sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1843 - ?) , daughter of a Black father and Chippewa mother is published and indepth research is generated on Blacks in the West, we will learn more about the multi-cultural nature of African-American history. (SAGE, 2)

® The concept of experience has been problematized, especially by the historian Jean Scott. Contemporary theorists believe that having an experience does not entitle one to an interpretation or to a claim of knowing the truth. If all positions are culturally constructed, then a person cannot claim that having an experience makes that person's position unconstructed. These theorists, then, believe that my position is as constructed as anyone else's position because I believe that people who experience things know about them in almost natural ways. Critics of this position believe that the things we know are always mediated by our conceptions of them.

’ This was the topic of Dr. John Nichols' seminar on multiculturalism at The Ohio State university in 1993 sponsored by the Office of Faculty and Teaching Associate Development.

86 CBXPTBR 3

OLIVIA WARD BÜSH-BANXS AS AFRICAN AMERICAN

LITERARY TRADITION BEARER

Imagine encountering, on the frontispiece of a series on

African American women, two women dressed in Native American regalia, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and her Montauk relative Emma

D. King are so presented on the frontispiece of The Collected

Works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks. one of the books included in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women

Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. What can this representation possibly mean as a 20th century portrayal of

19th century race and gender in literature? What message does this picture convey about race and writing in the 19th century? Does this photograph signify that there are different ways to be Black, or does it signify that there is more to race than skin color; that race is also connected to culture and perhaps not only the culture of the African

American slave?

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks belonged to several traditions of writing, among them the Black Women's (also referred to as the

African American Women's) Literary tradition. Feminists and womanists have worked hard to define just what this gender

87 based tradition means to the participants, who include the

writers, the readers, and the theorists/historians. An

overarching task of Black women writers has been the job of writing themselves into a previously all-male tradition from which they have been expunged. When theorists criticize these women and their writing from a traditional perspective which

assigns literary merit in much the same fashion as the title

of Gloria Hull's book: All of Women Are White. All of the

Blacks Are Men. But Some of Us Are Brave, they limit or

exclude these Black women writers.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. tries to define this Black women's tradition from the perspective of an African American

literary theorist. In the opening comments prepared for each book in the Schomburg Supplement, Gates declares that African

American women wrote so much between 1773 and 1910, that they

formed a literary tradition and "a larger discourse on race and gender" (Collected Works ix) . Further, he says that beginning with poet Phillis Wheatley, these women constituted

... a group of writers who confronted the twin

barriers of racism and sexism in America. Through

their poetry, diaries, speeches, biographies,

essays, fictional narratives, and autobiographies,

these writers transcended the boundaries of racial

prejudice and sexual discrimination by recording

the thoughts and feelings of Americans who were, at

once black and female. (ÇW ix)

88 Indeed, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks is worthy of inclusion in this

Schotnburg Collection and the writing tradition because she

attempted work in each of the mentioned genres and because she

acknowledged her Black American heritage along with her Native

American heritage in many of the different pieces of

literature which she wrote.

As a Black American and Native American woman writing in

less conventional genres of literature, Bush-Banks often

struggled to get her work published, Bush-Banks' work found

its way into print through the Colored American Magazine, the

Voice of the Nearo. the Boston Transcript. The Annual Report

of the Montauk Tribe of Indians for the Year 1916 (31 August

1916), The Westchester Record-Courier where she was featured

"Cultural Art" columnist, and the Boston Citizen magazine where she spent time as the literary editor. Her publishers also included Atlantic Printing Conpany of Cranston, RI; the

Providence, RI, Press of Louis A. Basinet; and the A.M.E. Book concern of Philadelphia (ÇW) .

In a letter dated December 22, 1938, Carter G. Woodson also offered to publish some of Bush-Banks' poems without compensation in his Nearo History Bulletin. Thus, she gained public access for her writing in the periodicals and other outlets that assisted the perpetuation of the Black women's literary tradition. Further in his discussion of the African

American women's literary tradition. Gates mentions an anthology of short fiction in the Schotnburg Collection which

89 contains work "published by black women in the Colored

American Magazine . . . a collection that reveals the shaping influence which certain periodicals had upon the generation of specific genres within the black women's literary tradition"

(ÇW x i ) .

Hazel Carby explains the environment of the Black scholarly journal, saying, "The staff of the Colored American

Magazine considered their journal to be a tool in the creation of a black renaissance, an inspiration for 'Theologians,

Artists ([and]) Scientists' whose theories had grown dormant for lack of a channel of communication ..." (163). While this avenue of publication obviously channeled Black writers into specific types of writing, Carby says the staff of the periodical went to great pains to avoid dependence upon white patronage. Carby says this resistance to white patronage was intended to give the magazine the appearance of intellectuals representing "the people" inasmuch as these artists did not allow the white patronage to define and limit the material to be presented (165-66) . This becomes very important when it implicates Bush-Banks in a mode of thinking about patronage that may have prevented her from gaining financial support for her corpus from would-be white patrons.

In closing his comments in the Schomburg Supplement,

Gates declares that the works, including Bush-Banks' Collected

Works (CW), "are invalucüDle sources for readers intent upon understanding the complex interplay of ethnicity and gender,

90 of racism and sexism--of how 'race' becomes gendered and how gender becomes racialized--in American society” (ÇW xii). He feels that having this material available for study will help researchers who want to understand how definitions of male and female are complicated, and how these definitions change or become further complicated when categories of race, as in

Black race, are included. In Reading Black. Reading Feminist. Françoise Lionnet discusses such a complexity as presented by Sojourner Truth's challenge to white women at a Woman's Suffrage meeting. Truth queried them about her attributes that include those of the

"true woman, " While she was expected to simultaneously perform tasks normally assigned to men, and these tasks befell her simply because of her race. In this definition based on gendered tasks. Sojourner Truth becomes a virago or a transgressive representation of a woman as man.’ So, then, as

Lionnet says. Black women do not fit uncomplicatedly into a generic definition of woman as a gender. But, for them, the whole experience of being a woman is tied up in the experiences imposed upon them as a function of belonging to a race where economics determined their gender roles. According to this race-based concept. Black women could perform manual tasks and fill roles similar to those occupied by their Black male counterparts but they were simultaneously expected to function in the same womanly capacities as did their white female counterparts.

91 An in-depth study of this dynamic woman, Bush-Banks,

reveals, that in her commentary on her own life, and perhaps

more disparately in her literature, she consciously and

directly addressed each issue noted by Gates. Furthermore,

through her insistence upon retaining and discussing her

African and Native American heritages, she addressed and

embodied the spirit of multi cultural ism. Her views were

shaped by her experiences of living in a dual culture within

a mainstream culture which forces one to choose one specific

racial category. Bush-Banks attempted to focus her multi­

raced perspective into a worldview that resembles current notions of multiculturalism. These issues continue today as

American society becomes more of a pluralistic society as it

approaches the 2lst century. So, given the worldview she attempted, and the nature of

the continuing cultural changes in American society, it is no accident that two "apparently Black" women are wearing Native

American regalia in ÇW. Bush-Banks is a multivocal and complex writer and human being who further complicates the conplex issues Gates suggests. All that she was and did--

Black, Indian, woman, orphan, mother, writer, breadwinner, divorcee, political activist--defied categories of I9th century representation which designated roles and places for women and minorities.

Forces at work ascribing identity upon Bush-Banks included society, the Census Bureau, and legal adjudication

92 which she encountered directly through the Supreme Court's

ruling against the Montauk tribe as a sovereignty in the 1910

case of Jane Benson vs. Wyandanch Pharaoh. The society at

large required individuals to belong to only one race, and yet

it placed stigmas upon the social categories assigned to Bush-

Banks. According to Jack Forbes in Black Africans and Native

Americans. the Census Bureau representatives came through,

looked at the physical attributes of the people being counted,

and decided the racial category of the individual being

counted. Because they did this, the Census Bureau then only

permitted the individual to belong to one category. Today,

however, because of requests by people with multiple racial

heritages for a multiracial category on the Census form, this position of the Census Bureau is under consideration for

change ("One Drop of Blood," New Yorker). Finally, the

judicial system, as in the case of Wyandanch Pharaoh and the

Montauks, decreed that a group of people who identified

themselves as Indians--a matter of culture--were not Indians

as a race, so they had to be recategorized as Negroes by the white legal system (see ÇW, 6).

Gates credits Phillis Wheatley for founding the African

American literary tradition in 1772 when she "walked demurely

into a room in Boston to undergo an oral examination, the results of which would determine the direction of her life and work" (Qf xiii) . Just as Phillis Wheatley had to meet a board of white examiners to authenticate her works, Bush-Banks

93 "walked into the room" of this literary tradition seeking her authentication from a Black man, Frederick Douglass. His words, "Judge us not, 0 favored races,/From the heights we have attained;/Rather measure our progrèssion/By the depths from whence we came./" (ÇW 26) follow the dedication of her first published book of poetry. Douglass was a known figure to the white public which determined whether American writers such as Bush-Banks were artists worthy of note. By invoking his appeal to the audience, she set the stage for evaluation of this and her subsequent works as a progression from a supposed illiterate segment of society to the products of an ambitious poet. Bush-Banks probably deliberately chose

Douglass's words for authentication because he wrote extensively on the Montauk nation (Stone, I0n9) . In this writing, he provided a record to authenticate the group's identity where the legal forces of society would ascribe its own identity on the group.

Likewise, she appealed to an audience of Black Rhode

Island readers with the dedication: "/This Little Booklet/Is

Dedicated With/Profound Reverence And Respect/To The People Of

My Race,/The Afro-Americans,"/ (ÇW 26) . In so dedicating her book, Bush-Banks appealed to the group of people with whom she was identified by society as one element of her identity equation, the Negro or Blacks, which she claimed for herself.

However, in The Lure of the Distances, a later, unpublished

94 book intended to be her memoirs, Bush-Banks appealed to the audience in a different voice of identity: With my background of American Indian and Negro parentage

I have keenly felt the urge of commingled ancestral calls

within me, thro' which, doubtless, I have been enabled to

recognize the similarity of emotions, desires and

behavior in other humans. (ÇW 272-73)

One does not have to stretch the imagination very far to see that Bush-Banks speaks of the sensing of similarity amidst difference which undergirds the contemporary multicultural movement but which was deemed assimilation or "melting in the

American pot" during Bush-Banks' time.

Even so, Bush-Banks appealed to a well known white woman writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox and to Paul Laurence Dunbar,

Carter G. Woodson, Maggie L. Walker, and others within her social circles for monetary support and feedback on the quality of her writing. ^ In her memoirs, Bush-Banks wrote of the support she gained from America's wealthiest Black womain and of her own introduction to the southern Black elite.

My visit to Richmond, VA was memorable indeed because of

the hospitable attitude of that magnificent distinguished

woman Maggie walker, founder of a notable business

enterprise offering employment to many capable women of

all ages. Mme Walker was deeply interested in my

dramatic programs of Indian life, and she followed up

this interest by introducing me to an audience of more

95 than 2,000 people, urging them to become patrons of my

Play--The Trail of the Montauk. It was my privilege also

while in Richmond to be the guest of Mrs. Ruffin, Ex.

Sec. of the Y.W.C.A. and through her kind favor I had the

extreme pleasure of witnessing "The White Christmas," an

annual celebration at Hartshorn Memorial College, one of

the finest institutions of learning in Virginia. (CW

276)

The Mrs. Ruffin to whom Bush-Banks referred, was Josephine St.

Pierre Ruffin, one of the key figures in the Black Women's

Club Movement. This Club Movement created an organization that changed the whole social, economical, and political outlook of nineteenth century Blacks. In the presence and good favor of the two foremost women powerbrokers of the times, Bush-Banks most likely required no coercion to favor the African American element of her identity equation.

Gates himself ascribes a cultural pattern to the evolution of Black writers as well as to Bush-Banks' work that does not consider the multiracial heritage of the majority of these writers as descendants of Native American nations or

"tribes." He further contends,

That the progenitor of the black literary tradition

was a woman means, in the most strictly literal

sense, that all subsequent black writers have

evolved in a raatrilinear line of descent, and that

each, consciously or unconsciously, has extended

96 and revised a canon whose foundation was the poetry

of a black woman. (CW xvi)

In effect then, Gates inplies that all Black American women writers are heirs solely of Wheatley's and he overlooks the hierarchies of the Native nations which also figured in the identity equations of some of these women writers. Not every one of the Native nations had matrilinear bases, and by overlooking the fact that while Bush-Banks and some of the other "Black" writers in the series had other than African ancestry. Gates silences the voice of multicultural descent within the Black women's literary tradition.

Yet another criteria of the Black Women's Literary

Tradition is presented by Patricia Hill Collins. She says that the African American women's literary tradition responds to Maria Stewart's call to her fellow African American woman to "reject the negative images of Black womanhood so prominent in her times, pointing out that racial and sexual oppression were the fundamental causes of Black women's poverty" (3) .

Bush-Banks spoke from a position of one impoverished by society; yet she maintained the gentility of the "true woman."

Further, she persisted in writing about morality and the proper image of women and men of her race. The fervor with which she applied Stewart's dictum, could explain why Bush-

Banks' work appears didactic and preachy to the contemporary reader.

97 Another characteristic of the Black, woman's literary

tradition espoused by Collins is that it seeks the power of

self-definition as alternative to white domination and

negative images (Collins 4). This is a very important point

for the examination of Bush-Banks because self-definition is

the core of self-identification. As a self-defined person,

Bush-Banks constantly battled the negative images inposed upon

Black women while she negotiated her place among Blacks as a

person who asserted her right to claim multi-raciality.

Furthermore, Collins adds that this tradition champions

"Black women's relationships with one another in providing a

community for Black women's activism and self-determination"

(Collins 4). within this tradition, the Black women unite to

gain higher education for the community seeking knowledge as

a powerful key to self-improvement. The Black woman is urged

to represent herself as a moral and virtuous woman with morals. In her sketches and her skits, Bush-Banks appeals to

African American women to be virtuous, charming, ladylike, and

charitable. Additionally, Bush-Banks dedicated herself to

Black women's activist causes and she taught in the Works

Progress Administration (WPA) to educate the Black community

in rhetorical style as well as in ethics and moral uprightness.

Collins says.

This painstaking process of collecting the ideas and

actions of 'thrown away' Black women like Maria Stewart

98 [and Olivia Ward Bush-Banks] has revealed one itrportcuit

discovery. Black women intellectuals have laid a vital

analytical foundation for a distinctive standpoint on

self, community, and society and, in doing so, created a

Black women's intellectual tradition. . . . The shadow

obscuring the Black woman's intellectual tradition is

neither accidental nor benign. Suppressing the knowledge

produced by any oppressed group makes it easier for

dominant groups to rule because the seeming absence of an

independent consciousness in the oppressed can be taken

to mean that subordinate groups willingly collaborate in

their own victimization .... Maintaining the

invisibility of Black women and our ideas is critical in

structuring patterned relations of race, gender, and

class inequality that pervade the entire social

structure. (Collins 5)

So, it is no accident that Black women's intellectual efforts have been neglected and their identities have been obscured.

By virtue of her assignment to the category by race, and by her intellectual efforts in Black women's activist and literary causes, Bush-Banks, too, deserves a revisit as a literary figure. Her resistance to monolithic racial categorization and her work to develop Black intellect situate her as a woman who did not willingly collaborate in her own victimization.

99 Speaking of tradition within the context of mainstream tradition, Mary Helen Washington says it is,

A word that has so often been used to exclude or

misrepresent woman. It is always something of a shock to

see black women, sharing equally in the labor and strife

of black people expunged from the text when that history

becomes shaped into what we call tradition. . . . What

we have to recognize is that the creation of the fiction

of tradition is a matter of power, not justice, and that

that power has always been in the hands of men--mostly

white but some black. (32)

What Washington refers to is the hierarchical structure of power in the creation of literature: white men, white women, some Black men, no Black women, and absolutely no women claiming to be multi-raced. Not only are Black women expunged from the text, but generally the only times that women with multiple heritages are included, are the times when it is in the context of the tragic mulatto or the negatively wild or wanton savage of a half-breed. Therefore, the tradition to which Bush-Banks can claim inheritance as a Black woman is one forged against a power structure that excludes her and her concerns. That she has been overlooked and that she probably did not gain financial or other support for her work is no wonder when that "tradition" is specifically suppressed and not even acknowledged by the existing power framework.

100 Washington goes on to say that "Women are disinherited.

Our 'ritual journeys,' our 'articulate voices,' our 'symbolic

spaces' are rarely the same as men's. Those differences and

the assumption that those differences make women inherently

'inferior, ' plus the appropriation by men of the power to

define tradition, account for women's absence from our written

records" (32) . Not only does Bush-Banks meet with a power

hierarchy, but the things that mattered to her, as a woman who

attempted to bridge multiple ancestral cultures, are also

counted as inconsequential by those who had the power to

define or "identify" the tradition in which she worked and to

declare her writing to be unmeritorious within the mainstream

tradition.

The exclusion is imposed upon Bush-Banks and other Black

women as well by the Black male intelligentsia who decided to

meet to determine the character of African American literature

and to select the literati. Washington says that when W.E.B.

DuBois and the other self-selected committee decided to meet

to propose who should belong to the Talented Tenth, the Black

elite, they deliberately chose to exclude women by opening it

only to men of African descent (32-33) . So, a tradition which

originally had its basis in exclusion based upon race now

takes on the additional character of exclusion based upon gender as well.

Washington further notes that the male-domination of the

literary and critical tradition have been perpetuated by a

101 prevailing attitude toward Black women. She says that despite this obstacle.

Women have worked assiduously in this tradition as

writers, as editors, sometimes, though rarely, as

critics, and yet every study of Afro-American narrative,

every anthology of the Afro-American literary tradition

has set forth a model of literary paternity in which each

male author vies with his predecessor for greater

authenticity, greater control over his voice, thus

fulfilling the mission his forefathers left unfinished.

(Washington 33)

While Bush-Banks occupied each of these roles from writer to editor to critic, Bernice Guillaume, contemporary historical critic has defined her as a "minor" figure of the Harlem

Renaissance. While Guillaume's characterization of Bush-Banks might seem aspersive. Black women writing in the Harlem

Renaissance have also been neglected by other critics who favor the more prominent male writers such as Langston Hughes,

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Charles Chestnutt, and so on. Even Zora Neale Hurston, the most outrageously outspoken feminine woman representative of the era, needed to be

"recovered" in the late I960's. She wrote lengthy novels that are immensely popular today, folklore collections and critiques of African American folklore, but not as diverse a range of genres as Bush-Banks attempted. Despite her assiduous efforts auid diverse range of works, Bush-Banks

102 ranked no higher in this critical scheme than did Hurston, or any other Black woman, for that matter.

Washington notes that "Women's writing is considered singular and anomalous, not universal and representative, and for some mysterious reason, writing about black women is not considered as racially significant as writing about black men"

(33). So, not only does Bush-Banks's work not fit the categories of merit--not long enough, too didactic, sentimental, concerned with women's trivial issues, and so on, it is not universal nor is it always about Black men.

Most importantly, Washington says,

If there is a single distinguishing feature of the

literature of black women--and this accounts for their

lack of recognition--it is this: their literature is

about black women; it takes the trouble to record their

thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women,

experiences that make realities of being black in America

look very different from what men have written. There

are no women in this tradition hibernating in dark holes

contemplating their invisibility; there are no women

dismembering the bodies or crushing the skulls of either

women or men; and few, if any, women in the literature of

black women succeed in heroic quests without the support

of other women or men in their communities, women talk

to other women in this tradition, and their friendships

with other women--mothers, sisters, grandmothers,

103 friends, lovers--are vital to their growth and well­

being, (Washington 35)

Even the act of my writing about Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as a neglected writer fits Washington's description of writing within and critiques of the Black Women's Literary Tradition.

Making sense of the life and work of a woman whose literary corpus was larger than that of many noted authors of her time, yet it never reached the right sources to keep it before the public so that it could serve a useful purpose and be remembered, presents a struggle for me. Bush-Banks's subjects are mothers, sisters, and even her daughters and granddaughters, to whom she writes and who serve as her contemporary critical community.

Washington talks about Black women having to work and being denied access to good jobs and economic freedom (36) .

Bush-Banks witnessed this aspect of the Tradition as she took whatever menial jobs she could muster and lived in one of the poorest districts in town when necessary so that she could support her two little daughters, her ailing aunt who served in loco parentis for her, and herself. Despite having to work at non-literary jobs, Bush-Banks maintained her belief that she had artistic inclinations and so she made the time and found the financial means to pen two books of poetry and to form both a local and international poetry forum.

Perseverance in the face of dire odds seems to best describe

Bush-Banks' life during this period.

104 Washington notes that Black women were more apt to write about their sexuality and sexual abuse as compared with their male counterparts who kept this area of their lives private.

She invokes Linda Brent and Nella Larsen to name two. This is not an overriding theme in Bush-Banks's writing, though she does allude to sexual conduct in her short didactic essays, and she brings up male-female relationships in her play,

Indian Trails: Or. Along the Montauk Trail.

within the nineteenth century context, women's writing might better be understood through the role women were assigned as upholders of the moral good. Furthermore, as part of the African American Women's Literary Tradition, Washington says that Black women in the Harlem Renaissance had to carry the burden of morals of the race and that sexuality in women's literature was neither celebratory nor uninhibited, but was constantly thwarted and ended in biological entrapment (38) .

This might explain why Bush-Banks's works turned didactic as

Black women were still coping with the "cult of the true lady" and she was trying to set an example for her two female children. For the Black woman, the politics of writing, at this point, meant more than just an attempt to gain the attention of a reading and listening audience, it was a struggle to gain and maintain control over their own individual bodies. Washington says, "Once again the issue is control, and control is bought by cordoning off those aspects of sexuality that threaten to make women feel powerless" (38) .

105 Contemporary feminist still struggle with this problem in writing as well as in just surviving.

In Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-

American Woman Novelist. Hazel Carby lends her own critical perspective to that of Collins and Gates regarding the evolution of the African American woman as writer and literary agent. She says, "... to gain a public voice as orators or published writers, black women had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood which excluded them from the definition 'woman'" (6). This definition of a "true woman," and what the gender signified, were determined by mainstream white males. According to

Carby, under this definition of women and domesticity, white women were held up on a pedestal as the pure mothers of the "American race." In their roles as chattel or slaves, the

Black women were perceived of as animals or objects whose purpose was to serve as vessels for the dark lust of the masters in the "master race." Thus, Black women were denied the positive identifying traits of the feminine gender.

Black women bonded through their work in the organizations which they formed for political and intellectual activity (Carby 7) . Bush-Banks participated in many of these organizations as she was a settlement house activist, an active worker in the Northeastern Federation of Women's Clubs, literary editor of Boston's Citizen magazine, a New York

University trained public school drama teacher, founder of an

106 Art Group, Director of the International Poetry Group, and she was appointed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to teach drama at the Adam Clayton Powell Abyssinian Church school. Carby says it is necessary not only to understand the discourse and context in which Black women's writing was produced, but it is also just as important to understand "the intellectual forms and practices of black women that preceded them," which included political lectures, essays and journalistic and magazine writing (Carby 7) . Bush-Banks carved her niche in the Black women's tradition through these genres just as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary

Church Terrell did in journalism, education and public activism.

In the majority of her writing, Bush-Banks appears to speak to a Black audience, and uses a Black voice, the voice of a Black woman speaking within the Black American cultural context about issues relevant to the Black community. When she was successful at getting published, it was in the marketplace representative of the Harlem Renaissance and furthermore, her patronage and support came from Black entrepreneurs or scholars. It seems that the response Bush-

Banks sought from Ella Wheeler Wilcox^ was merely intellectual encouragement, and as far as can be discerned from the correspondence between the two women, she got a marginal response from wheeler Wilcox, who found Bush-Banks' poetry for the Driftwood "remarkable." Wheeler Wilcox declared in her

107 own autobiography that she resented aspiring writers who sought advice and assistance from her when she chose not to seek or take any for herself. She says,

I wish the scores of grown men and women who write

me for "aid and influence" in getting into print

could know just how I found my way into the favor

of editors. It was by sheer persistence. It never

occurred to me to ask advice or assistance of

others. I am glad it did not, for the moment we

lean upon any one but the Divine Power and the

divinity within us, we lessen our chances of

success. I often receive letters now from writers

in the West, asking me to use my influence with

editors in their behalf and saying, "You must

realize from your own early struggles how

impossible it is to get a start in an Eastern

periodical without a friend at court." No more

absurd idea ever existed. Eastern editors are on

the lookout for new talent constantly, and if a

writer possesses it, together with persistence, he

will succeed whether he lives in the Western

desert or in the metropolis, and without any friend

at court. All such literary aspirants are

requested to read these pages and l eam how I found

my "friend at court"--the will in my own soul, and

the patient and persistent effort of mind and heart

108 and hand. Miles from a post-office, more miles

from a railroad, and far from any literary center,

without one acquaintance who knew anything about

literary methods or the way to approach an editor,

I pounded away at the doors of their citadels with

my childish fist until they opened to me. . . .1

am sure I made many blunders and wrote much trash,

and when advice was volunteered I did not value it

as highly as I should. I felt I alone must make my

climb toward the heights I sought, and no one could

"boost" me up. (Wilcox, The Worlds and I 23-24)

With such an unsympathetic attitude toward fellow aspiring writers, it is almost certain that Wilcox was not a financial supporter of Bush-Banks' writing.

In an article in The Boston American. ("Is She the

Reincarnation of Queen Cleopatra?", 20 Oct 1912), Wheeler

Wilcox admonished that Bush-Banks ought to seek support from the Black community for "her little booklets. " Even Wheeler

Wilcox's own publisher George H. Doran expressed lack of faith and interest in the writing of Black authors.* Nevertheless,

Bush-Banks' enduring faith in her fellow humans and artists did not prevent her from seeking the feedback and support of those within her social and literary circle.

Even her granddaughter, Helen, urged Bush-Banks on in her efforts (ÇW, "Latrps at Even," 307-308) . In this regard, Bush-

Banks seems to acknowledge that while she had an urge to be a

109 poet and writer, the limitations on women, and especially

Black women, were almost insurmountable. One has to admire her perseverance in the face of such great odds against success. The corpus of her work may seem small to a twentieth century reader, but considering that she really did not have the leisure, means, support, nor time to bring her writing to current standards of "quality," she actually penned a more material than one would have expected from a woman with her responsibilities and resources.

Bush-Banks critiqued the spiritual, a significant African

American literary genre which has social and political messages deeply embedded within it. In her prose piece,

"Echoes from the Cabin Song," Bush-Banks used her position as journalist to expound upon the value of the spiritual as a musical form and by implication, an oral literary form of poetry. She also took advantage of the opportunity to promote

"a golden-voiced baritone [most likely John Greene], now living in the western part of our country. His youthful career, attended by seeming insurmountable difficulties

..."(ÇW 148). Using her literary critic's voice, she judged the young singer to be commendable and noted that he set an inspirational example for his peers while he was considered by eastern young "Colored" people to be a rarity (ÇW 148).

As she turned her discussion from the performer back to the performance, Bush-Banks addressed an audience which was clearly patriotic, saying, "Countless songs are eternally

110 sacred to these, for whom, out of national experiences, they have been wrought" (ÇW 146) . She described the subjects of the spirituals as "the humble," and the form of the genre as

"Joyful soul-cries." Hearkening back to the ever-present theme of religion in African American writing and social consciousness, Bush-Banks pointed out to her reader that the spirituals of which she wrote resonated "an assurance of heavenly reward, and a joyous home-going ..." (CW 146-47).

Even today, many ministers in the African American church exhort their congregations to prepare for such an event by living morally upright lives that will assure their happy departure to a heavenly place after death (home-going) or to a joyful "family reunion" with members of their religious families at the Resurrection.

Bush-Banks compared the literary merit of the spiritual

"Steal Away to Jesus" with the poetry of the European Nobel laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson ("Crossing the Bar"), making it clear that she believed them to be of equal value and she likened the spiritual to another traditional form, the musical syrtphony, as she termed "Steal Away to Jesus," a "Great

Symphony of human feelings" (CW 147).

The religious inclination in Bush-Banks' writing is typical of and refers back to the tradition of Black women writers such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Maria Stewart, to mention a few. Each of these women took actions to place themselves in the eyes of the public using

111 religion as a focal device to support their needs to express themselves. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Rebecca Cox Jackson wrote about their religious conversions and the resistance they met when they attempted to gain access to the pulpit, podium, or the public. Most often. Black males resisted these women's attempts to publicly voice their views. Persisting though, they did make their views known, and added to the religious writings of the nineteenth century (William Andrews,

Sisters of the Spirit).

Maria Stewart not only wrote about her religious conversion, she also set the example of social consciousness, as she wrote urging moral uplift of Blacks in the manner that

Bush-Banks herself would adopt several decades later. Marilyn

Richardson says that the orphaned and widowed Stewart urged

"other women, black and white, following the dictates of mind and conscience . . . to emerge from the shadows and, taking the path she had opened, walk up the steps to the podiums of churches and meeting halls throughout the land to proclaim the social gospel of liberation and justice for all" (Richardson

27) .

In her "Religion and the Sure Foundation On Which We Must

Build," Stewart presented her meditations with the intention

"to arouse [women such as Bush-Banks] to exertion, and to enforce upon [their] minds the great necessity of turning

[their] attention to knowledge and improvement" (Stewart qtd in Richardson 28) . Resonances of this religious model of

112 exhortation permeate Bush-Banks' work in every genre that she employed. Throughout Bush-Banks' works, abounds the moralistic and didactic heritage of Black women whose first introduction to literacy might have been the slave sermons and the white church meetings the slaves were allowed to attend.

Bush-Banks' style emulates that of Stewart, who exhorted the "daughters of Africa" to arise and "Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties"

(Richardson 30). Sixty nine years later, Bush-Banks wrote,

Confronted with one of the greatest problems of the

day, and of which we are the central figure, it is the

time for careful thought, guarded action, proper

disposition of financial possession and the sacrifice of

useless customs for combined effort in the all-absorbing

issues which tend to our advancement.

Young men and women, let us arouse from this apathy

and indifference, and if it be true that servitude has

deterred us in material progress, now under an itiproved

social law let us lay anew the foundation necessary to

the success of any people which shall furnish moral

incentives for real progress, and which shall reward

decisive action with actual development. (CW.

"Undercurrents of Social Life", 144-145, originally pub.

in the Colored American Magazine)

Bush-Banks is not only indebted to the Black Woman's literary tradition for underpinnings of religious or moralistic themes,

113 but she is also directly indebted to Maria Stewart for a presentation style which made the material more amenable to a

Black audience.

The Schomburg series has accorded Bush-Banks a place in the African American literary tradition. However, that recognition is confining, as it does not acknowledge her interest in preserving a multiracial heritage. Also, we might observe that the contemporary understanding of Black women's literature does not necessarily privilege the didactic style of writing, but it does privilege the concern with values.

The Black Women's Literary Tradition not only represents the general idea of Black women describing their experiences, but it also refers to an intellectual tradition with particular concerns. The Schomburg, and other series that recover previously ignored contributions of Black women writers, provide us an opportunity to reconsider that tradition. With Bush-banks' work, we can begin to understand both the multicultural dimensions of Black women writers' work as well as the didactic and sentimental presentation of issues of moral concern. These moral issues were the foundation of what Bush-Banks and others believed to be their responsibility--to uplift humanity in general. Blacks in particular, and Black women specifically.

114 NOTBS ^ Thanks to Cindy Wittman, Writing Consultant at OSU for helping to sort through this description of Sojourner Truth as a virago/transgressive representation of woman as man.

^ See Appendices to CW for letters to various cited individuals. Also note Bernice Guillaume's background information in her introduction to CW.

3 In a letter to Wheeler Wilcox, circa 1912, Bush-Banks wrote:

What I need is to be strengthened mentally: I have let go my hold somehow on the hopefulness of former days; I have lost my way, and so out of my heart I write to one who understands. I have had some little experience as a public speaker, and while I shrink from publicity, still I feel that I have a message. Oh, I am so heart-hungry for mental encouragement, I need your strength, and again I ask you to give me your best thoughts for my heart's desire.

^ See David Levering Lewis' discussion on Walter Francis White's attempt to get Doran's company to publish his novel. The Fire in the Flint (When Harlem Was in Vocrue. 131-37) .

115 CHAPTER 4

"YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE AN INDIAN TO ME":

PASSING FOR RED AND FOR BLACK, OR

WHAT IS THIS "BLACK" NOMAN DOING DRESSED UP LIKE AN INDIAN?

What does it mean to be an Indian or classed as a Native

American? More specifically, what does it mean to be a

Montauk Indian woman writer? Does Bush-Banks follow specific models--either from her own group of people, or from related or allied "tribes"? At the August 1919 Tribal Meeting of the

Montauks, the sachem or spiritual leader had this to say:

When I use that term--Indian--I mean people who have

enough of the blood of their fathers and forefathers to

possess some of their traits. Indians may differ in

personal appearance, facial expression, may not conform

to type any more than all the palefaces do, yet they

possess traits of character that make them a peculiar

people in the midst of civilization. They may hide

themselves within themselves for a long time, but sooner

or later, like a flash in the storm, the blood will

declare itself--in their walk, their talk, their manner

of dealing with men. There is a freedom and independence

116 that will betray them, though they speak in 40 languages

and wear the garb of any nation." (in Stone 482)

Oddly, when anthropologist, M.R. Harrington made his callous assessment of what an Indian ought to be and look like to him, a white man who was supposed to be an unbiased scientist, he did not bother himself to ask someone like Sachem Waters nor

King Wyandanch for their input.

Reporting for the American Museum of Natural History,

Harrington injects.

There has been a heavy infusion of white blood . .

., but affairs had progressed so far that when I paid my

first visit to the Shinnecock "Reservation," in 1902, the

place appeared to be a negro, or rather, mulatto

settlement, pure and single. But more careful search

revealed a number of individuals showing Indian

characteristics. To quote my notes, written at the

time:

Some are black and woolly headed, having at the same

time facial characteristics distinctly Indian. Others

have the straight hair and light color of the Indian, but

the flat nose, large dull eyes, and thick lips of the

negro. A few of the men are typically Indian. Of these,

Wickam Cuffee . . . is the best example. He is Indian in

color and feature, cuid claims to be full blooded, but the

slight curl in his hair seems to point to some admixture.

He speaks with a Yankee accent, and gladly tells all he

117 knows of the old times. Andrew Cuffee, the blind ex­

whaler, also presents many Indian characteristics, while

Charles Bunn, . . . (with a slight tinge of negro) and

John Thompson . . . (part white) are good types, Very

few of the young men on the reserve show Indian

characteristics, A number of the women are pure or

nearly pure-blooded Indian. Among them are Mary Brewer,

Mary Ann Cuffee . . . and Mrs. Waters. (Harrington 279)

The anthropologist described these people using physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and other

"typical" identials, but his report nowhere reveals self­ ascribed data from the residents.

Harrington goes on to tell how the Shinnecocks joined with the Montauks under submission to Sachem Wyandanch:

Of the Shinnecock's relations with other Indians we

learn of their distress on account of a threatened attack

by "Naragannsets" in 1653, and of their submission to

Wyandance of Montauk, whom they acknowledged as "Sachem

of Pawmanack or Long Island." He however was brother of

their own chief, Nowedonah.

Little record was made of the Shinnecock after they

ceased to be, from the settler's point of view, a menace

to the colony, and took their place in its whaling and

other industries. We learn from other sources that many

of them went to Brotherton, in Oneida County, New York,

about 1789, where they joined the remnants of various New

118 England tribes, and in 1833 moved with them to Wisconsin,

where their mixed descendants may still be found.

Some of those left behind intermarried with negroes,

a phenomenon seen among several remnants of Atlantic

Coast tribes and among some Muskhogean peoples, but

exceedingly rare elsewhere, fortunately for the future of

the Indian race (enphasis mine) . Certain it is that the

African mixture has lost for the Long Island survivors

the respect and support of the Iroquois tribes who now

will not recognize them in any way, and will not even

admit that there is any Indian blood left on Long Island.

(Harrington 277-79)

Harrington's personal biases against Blacks here color his

"objective" reporting on the remnants of a coastline culture which welcomed the Europeans to America. His bias may have precluded knowledge of shared Black-Native culture which could

tell much about the multicultural nature of the New World prior to and during colonization.

In response to Harrington's other ascribed view of the people whom he saw on Long Island, Sachem Waters' words to his assembly regarding "Indianness” would present an alternative view. Waters asks.

Does any foreigner cut entirely from his life every

memory of his fatherland because he moved from nation to

nation? Then why should an Indian forget home, country,

and kindred, give up everything in order to be grafted

119 upon the civilized tree? To belong to a tribe is to be

a citizen of a nation. Be glad with me today for the

privilege of having your name upon a tribal list that

forever makes you of the Americans, an American. (in

Stone 484)

The Montauk legacy is one of documented literacy given evidence in the work of Samson Occum.

Sachem Waters urged his followers to keep before their children the education of their heritage: The sachem of Montauk would urge the parents to take

greater interest in the education of the young. Whenever

and wherever the opportunity for [t]he best school

facilities are given, the Indian boy and girl of Montauk

should not be conspicuous for their absence. Parents

should consider this a solemn duty, as binding as the

tribal law in the days of our fathers, when the training

of the young was looked after by the whole tribe. The

young should take from the trail of the White Man's

civilization all the knowledge, as the older braves did

in the old days. Year by year, if only a few from each

tribe can stand alone upon their own feet, it adds to the

dignity of the race and their value as citizens.

There are Montauk Indians scattered all over this

United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Almost

all of them own homes and are self-supporting. Among

them are doctors, clergymen, teachers, musicians,

120 mechanics, graduates of high schools and colleges, with

the opportunities now offered, the younger generation

should surpass the older ones. Still, there is lacking

among many the knowledge and information concerning the

customs, traditions, and history of their own people, in

the old days, there were good farmers and fishermen.

There have been many changes since the first teacher,

Samson Occum, gathered around him his 30 scholars, and

pasted letters cut out of papers on cedar chips to teach

them the alphabet. The year and summer of 1749 should

never pass from Montauk's history (in Stone 486).

These remarks show the degree of pride the Montauk leader had in his people's intellectual abilities and provides a basis for activism such as Bush-Banks displayed after him.

Regarding the theory of race through blood quantum.

Waters continues.

During the session of Congress last year, the question as

to "quantum of blood" was brought up. The answer given

was, "We have no requirement as to quantum of blood, just

as long as they have any Indian blood or are affiliated

with the tribe and have been recommended for enrollment

by the tribal Council. " Another question that was

brought up before [Congress] was [that of] mixed blood.

[The answer was,] A mixed blood was any Indian possessing

any degree of blood not Indian."

121 The call of the blood is strongest in the Indian's

love for kindred. Heckwelder, the great historian, said

"I do not believe that there are any people on earth more

attached to their offsprings and relatives." Everyone

who is best acquainted with the Indian character agrees

that with them, the ties of family affection are strong

and enduring. The Indian possesses an intense and

fervent love of offspring, and no matter how degraded,

how reckless, how brutal, the prattle of his children is

sweetest music to his ears." (in stone 483)

Contemporary race theorist, G. Reginald Daniel examined the source of difference in definitions of Native Americans posed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the U.S. Census

Bureau. He found that the BIA only included in their definition people entitled to receive BIA services. Daniel says, "Acceptance by a tribe, however it may be defined, in conjunction with proof of at least one-quarter degree of aboriginal ancestry, is generally required. For census purposes, self-definition has been the prevailing policy for all ethnicities since 1960" (lOO-lOl).

Given the Montauk leader's views on what it means to be a Montauk, a more specific query would follow: What does it mean to be a Montauk Indian woman writer? Does Bush-Banks follow specific models--either from her own group of people, or from related or allied "tribes"? Daniel finds that Afro-

122 Native Americans prevented by society and government are not

allowed to affirm

. . . all of who they are without also being classified

as Black, yet unable to claim residence on a reservation

or prove that they meet the ancestry quantum requirements

various triracial communities have, nevertheless, used

the flexibility in the definition of Native American to

their advantage. . . . Poospatucks (sic) of Long Island,

New York, after a prolonged struggle, had succeeded in

officially changing their earlier classification as

mulattoes to nontreaty Native Americans. This status

excludes them from government benefits, but it places

them squarely on the aboriginal side of the racial

divide. (Raciallv Mixed People in America 101)

Daniels' findings divulge why revisionist identification has

become necessary--after continued struggle for personally-

ascribed identity, these Native Americans have been permitted

to self-ascribe while simultaneously divesting themselves of

the monetary power to be.

Although the Native American literary tradition has been viewed by many in much the same way as the whole group of aborigines on this continent--savage and primitive - -, scholars of Native American history and literature, and more specifically of Indian women writers, find that aboriginal

Americans had something to say before colonization. Sachem

123 James E. Waters, spoke of the traditions of the Montauks in his 1919 tribal address. He felt that.

The needs of his [the Indian's] life were few; he

was among his own people. His motto was "to live and let

live." The abundance was the special gift of the Great

Spirit to him to supply all of his needs. He did not

enslave his soul with the passion of possessing things

material. So ours, yours, and mine, is today the

heritage of field and stream, the spirit of the pathless

wood, the song of the birds, the quiet hush of eventide

when the low winds whispering through the pine trees make

music sweeter than the poets can breathe or master

musicians dream, the changing skies, and in all, through

all, underneath all, the Great Spirit.

Now civilization is an enthraller of souls. It aims

to forever merge the individual into the mass. Its

standards forever changing, the great wheel turning

always upon the pivot of "Advantage." It knows no word

but "advantage." into these new conditions comes the

Indian. while all civilization is calling for

readjustment, his case alone is immediate. He is the

strong man unarmed. The paleface possesses all. The

Lord of the Soil [where the name of Cuffee'a book

originates] is a beggar in his own land. His glory lies

in the past. With the few on reservations, the paleface

would make the world believe that the Indian died with

124 his coming, as he tries to claim that Negro history began

with slavery. But the history of our people goes back,

back until it is lost in tradition and mystery. We here,

today, belong to a society older than any organization

upon American soil. It ought to be a matter of pride to

everyone here, and yet how few know the traditions of

their people. (Stone 484)

Regarding Montauk customs. Waters has this to say:

The old days are gone, and many of the customs and

traditions of our fathers have been laid to rest with the

passing away of our old people. The presence of our old

people is the tie that binds us to the old days and

customs from our fathers. . . . may the young of the

tribe never forget the law, to look after them as well in

these times of civilization as the Indians were

accustomed to do when this broad land was out heritage.

. . . Times have changed, but the spirit of the law ever

remains. (Stone 482)

The listing of her name and the names of members of her

immediate family on the Montauk rolls provides evidence that

Bush-Banks believed she belonged to an Indian tradition:

"Contributions to Montauk Expenses Since January 1, (1922?)"

#50 Olivia Ward Bush Banks 425 E. 45 PL. Chicago, IL

$2.00 (in Stone p. 491)

From the Montauk Tribal roll listing:

#198 Horton, Maria B. Bush [BB's daughter]

125 345 Huntington Ave. Roxbury, M A(in Stone, p. 495)

#58 Banks, Olivia Bush Chicago, IL (in Stone p.494)

#59 Bush, Frank P. [SB's husband]

335 Bay View Ave. Providence, RI (in Stone, p. 494)

Native American women continue to contribute much to the literature and history of the American nation today. If one looks at the literary history of England, after which contemporary American society is modeled, it is apparent that oral tradition was the means of transmission of traditions, beliefs, and work ethics, as well as for most communication prior to the invention of the printing press.

To some judges of literary merit. Native women's writing may appear to be stylistically trite, simplistic, and lacking development, and by her inclusion in this tradition, Bush-

Banks' work would also be so judged. However, Maria Chona

(Papago) says,

Indian narrative style involves a repetition and a

dwelling on unimportant details which confuse the white

reader and make it hard for him to follow the story.

Motives are never explained and the writer has found even

Indians at a loss to interpret them in older myths.

Emotional states are summed up in such colorless phrases

as "I liked it, " "I didn't not like it." For one not

deeply immersed in the culture the real significance

escapes. (Chona qtd in American Indian Women: Telling

Their Lives. 65)

126 One argument regarding the lack of attention given to Bush-

Banks' work might be that her style was too brief or didactic to sustain critical notice. While this may be the case, another cause for this is the cultural differences which affected the tastes of the large reading communities who determined the value and quality of literature. I propose reconsidering Bush-Banks and her works since we are becoming a more culturally aware and accepting reading society.

By examining the notions of privilege assigned to literacy in America, one might discern who was permitted to read, write, and to be included in the elite group of literates. In doing so, the scholar might entertain a clear picture of what it meant to be a literate Indian or that unimaginable entity, a literate Black Indian! The history of racism in America shows that being literate for almost anyone except upperclass white males was prohibited for most of the years preceding Bush-Banks' birth. Stemming from a tribal heritage of people schooled by Samsom Occam, the great Mohegan

Dartmouth scholar and minister, and being born to free parents six years after the abolishment of slavery, Bush-Banks actually had no claim to illiteracy and would therefore consider herself a rightful member of the literary milieu.

So, if one were to consider her as Black and nothing more, it would be logical to conclude that she came from a tradition of illiteracy forced upon Black slaves. But, Black Indian women

127 such as Bush-Banks would rarely appear in literature by and

about American writers.

Feminist Native folklorist, Rayna Green explains the

Native woman's contribution:

Before European writing, there were voices to sing

and speak, dances to make real the stories that the

People told or to honor the retelling anew. There were

hands that talked and drew and shaped. Some tales could

be told with one or two small marks--because the artist

knew how to put them together so that those who saw would

be reminded of where they came from just from seeing the

marks. Others would take eight nights to sing the words

so that someone could be healed and others could

remember. And others might get the story as they watched

the women weave it into the rug. (That's What She Said

2 ) Explained in this way, the Native woman's contribution to the

literary tradition is a cultural act of folkloric performance

in much the same way as the Black American woman's quilting

helps to weave that aspect of American culture into being.

Green goes on to say that though everyone does not know

how to perform in high cultural artistic fashion, nor could

they all shape pottery, still "everyone sees or hears and

touches, and some have the special gift to say the right words. They kept them even when no one asked to hear them--

even when the whiteyes came and asked only what the men knew"

128 (That's What She Said 2) . While Green's last comment protests the imposition of patriarchal hierarchy on Native lifeways,

Bush-Banks creates the poetry of which Green speaks because she kept the Montauk words despite the fact that the public seems not to have asked to hear them.

Attempting to remind Afro-Montauks of "where they originated" Bush-Banks left behind her poem, "On the Long

Island Indian" (ÇW 129-30). This poem describes the landmark and recalls the seabound lifestyle common to the fading early nineteenth century group of people who were the remnants of

"the once proud race." In the mien of the tribal historian that she was, Bush-Banks opens the poem by speaking of the effects of time:

"By its stroke, great empires vanish /

Nations fall in swift decline" (3-4).

She goes on to describe the warring activities of the people as well as their peace time activities. In an almost

"mainstream canonical" fashion, she describes the Native inhabitants of Long island:

"Once here lived a race of Red Men, /

Savage, crude, but knew no fear" (7-8) .

129 And, further, Bush-Banks characterizes the inhabitants of this place as

Tall and haughty warriors.

Of this fierce and warlike race.

Strong and hardy were their women.

Full of beauteous, healthy grace. (13-16)

Just as chronicled American history describes the colonial pilgrim or pioneer, this stanza from Bush-Banks' poem recalls to memory the "other" people of New York's island.

Stanza seven describes the Montauks' love for their land and their system of law:

Thus they dwelt in perfect freedom.

Dearly loved their native shores,

wisely chose their Chiefs or Sachem,

Made their own peculiar laws. (21-24)

Then, the poet tells the outcome of the arrival of Whites to this place which had been a peaceful home of law-abiding

Natives :

Now remains a scattered remnant

On these shores they find no home.

Here and there in weary exile.

They are forced through life to roam. (29-32)

Whether this poem was written specifically for the occasion of the August 1916 tribal meeting of the Montauks is unknown.

However, it found its way into print and perpetuity via The

Annual Report of the Montauk Tribe of Indians for the Year

130 1916 (31 Aug.. 1916). and was praised by Sachem James Waters

in his address to the assembled members at that meeting (Stone

484) .

While Bush-Banks can be contextualized within the Black

woman's tradition, scrutinizing the Native element in her

heritage equation likewise becomes requisite. Although the

Native American literary heritage stemmed from oral practices

in much the same way as did the Anglo-American literary

tradition, Native Americans, and significantly. Native

American women, left written records of their thoughts and

deeds and thereby placed their mark on contertporary American

culture. Sometimes these records appeared in "as-told-to"

form, but they were also firsthand accounts of daily life

activities. Maria Pharaoh, considered to be the last of the

Montauks, gave an account of her life to her daughter

Pocahontas Pharaoh who recorded it (Stone 487) . As taken down

by her daughter, Maria Pharaoh's edited deathbed lifestory is

included among the James Waters Family Papers. This record

probably contains the only Montauk woman's writing against

which Bush-Banks' work can be measured. In telling her story,

Maria Pharaoh left an account of the culture and lifeways of

the last Montauks or Montauketts.

Coupled with points made by Sachem James Waters at the

August 29, 1919 Tribal Meeting of the Montauks, Maria

Pharaoh's "autobiography" provides insight to the philosophical and cosmological perspectives and the worldview

131 of these Indian people. As can be seen, their elders outlined criteria and told what they thought "an Indian was."

In American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Native women such as Maria Chona (Papago) , Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Sa

(Sioux), Maria Campbell, and Sarah Winnemucca tell their own stories. These Native lifestories reflect a cultural literacy that often considers issues which assert a culturally based hierarchy of responsibilities neither matrilineal nor patriarchal in pattern. Other Native writers include Mourning

Dove, an Anglo-Indian contemporary of Bush-Banks' who wrote

Coaewea about the same time as Bush-Banks was penning poems and prose about the Shinnecock and Montauk Indians.

Mourning Dove draws a portrait of intermarriage and racial/cultural relations that stems from a Native and

Caucasian heritage where Bush-Banks refers to Afro-Native

Caucasian heritage. In Cocrewea. Mourning Dove tells about what it means to be a Native woman married to a white man.

However, Mourning Dove's story is also criticized because it has been "edited" or modified by her white male sponsor,

Lucullus McWhorter.

Arnold Krupat says that one must define the concept of identity before an Indian "identity" can be used as a criteria for defining Indian literature. He takes to task Jack Forbes whom he says is guilty of applying racial identity to Indians :

But in the contemporary American world such reference is

not only largely useless (e.g., a great many Indians, as

132 a great many others, are persons of mixed racial

origins), but obnoxious (e.g., it can tend to

distinguish different percentages of "blood," ranking

each a "higher" or "lower" type, depending on the context

of concern) . In the end, then, it would seem that

Indians must be culturally Indian, with such cultural

"identity" not a wholly random or arbitrary choice (e.g.,

the Indian person having some actual heredity link to

persons native to America). (Krupat 207-208)

Further, Krupat charges that Forbes can identify no particular cultural traits, such as a common Native language, that would identify the person as Indian.

Krupat then undermines the "absurdity" of the Bureau of

Indian Affairs' standards for determining who can be enrolled in a Native American tribe. He quotes Brian Swann's citation of these absurd standards which require the potential tribe member to possess one-quarter Indian blood for which the BIA has no chemical test. However, Krupat counts as reasonable

Swann's criteria for "Indianness" as Swann "decides that

'Native Americans are Native Americans if they say they are, if other Native Americans say they are and accept them, and

(possibly) if the values that are held close and acted upon are values upheld by the various native peoples who live in the Americans' " (Swann qtd in The Voice in the Margin. 208n5) .

Swann's definition of Indian more closely resembles my own choice of definition because it permits indigenous people to

133 self-ascribe their identities as they define how they perceive

themselves.

Works by Bush-Banks' own Montauk tribe members are still

extant and available for stylistic comparison--Lords of the

Soil and Heather Flower are just two. However, Montauk archeologist Gaynell Stone disagrees even to the extent of

saying that Cuffee's book is not representative of true

Montauk writing as a white woman, Lydia Joycelyn, wrote down

the stories in Cuffee's book and that Bush-Banks was too assimilated to render a realistic portrait of Montauks. Once again, anthropological "objectivity" aids in discounting the

Montauk effort at self-definition. In Stone's case, however,

the anthropologist has gone to great lengths to gather

together and record an extensive volume of research on the

Montauks and another on the lore of Long Island Indians.

At times, Bush-Banks does speak in a clearly decipherable

Native voice. Dr. Bernice Guillaume has linguistically analyzed the voice of women characters in Indian Trails. or :

Along the Montauk Trail and discerned that the extant portions of the work retain the Algonquin r dialect and that the words hold true to their derivative uses. But, just as it eventually proves difficult to sort out pieces of Bush-Banks' genres and name them one thing as compared with another, it is also hard to separate out her racial and cultural traits one from another. This desire to blend is her version of an

intent to be multiculturally inclusive and reflects her habit

134 of wanting to blend. I disbelieve that she wanted to choose.

However, these instances of Native text are scanty, and they

become cloudy when she assumes the stanceof one who speaks as

a seeker of oneness of humankind.

This perspective, which some might see as

assimilationist, plausibly derives from the influence of Bush-

Banks' membership in the Bahai and Seventh Day Adventist

faiths, or it may be related to the fact that the Montauks are

historically noted for their intermingling since the early

1500's. Or, it could be representative evidence of the tribal

cultural philosophy such as was espoused by King Wyandanch

Pharaoh and Sachem James Waters as they presided over the 1916 and 1919 tribal meetings of the Montauks of Long Island. Both

leaders allude to the notion that all beings are descended

from the Great Spirit.

In his 1919 report. Sachem JamesWaters says of the

Indian,

One family, they dwell in the Great Spirit. Above,

beneath, the living and the dead were never separated.

This "call of the blood" may seem strange words to some

of you, who may have in mind some of your ancestors of

whom, to say the least, were "queer" in their manner.

The question is often asked, "Has the Indian learned any

lesson?" I say, if the Indian did not learn, the race

would have been completely destroyed." (Waters qtd in

Stone 483)

135 Apparently, the Indians of Montauk learned no lesson because

they have almost been obliterated by the Benson ruling and

subsequent tribal dispersal. Throughout, Bush-Banks seems to

be connected to both her Red and Black dead ancestors even in

the case of writing graphically about events during slavery of

which she had no experience. Further, these sachems make

other remarks that indicate the Montauk cosmology is one

embracive of people regardless of race or cultural background

so long as those persons are peace loving.

Continuing his Report of the August 1919 meeting. Sachem

James Waters expressed the Montauk version of an Indian

worldview;

The Indian is a mystic, and his relations to the universe

are shaped by his mysticism. Every event and every act

of his life has spiritual significance. Bringing

civilization to the mystic laboratory of his own nature,

he early became suspicious that the predominating element

in the paleface civilization was not spiritual but

materialistic, and for two and a half centuries of

contact with that civilization, with tolerance and

sublime patience, he has been testing it with his

mysticism. (Stone 484)

This could explain why Bush-Banks chose to look up to Edna

Wheeler Wilcox--she was deeply involved in mysticism and its practices, and for a woman in mainstream society, Wilcox had

found a degree of success using that kind of material.

136 What are the instances in Bush-Bank's writing where she discusses mystical subjects or displays her sense that she derives from a mystical cosmological heritage? How does she use this mystic sense of the universe? My sense is that every poem and nearly every piece of written material she prepares is concerned with the spiritual and not just the materialistic--even the piece on communism shows that she seems to more concerned with the spiritual well-being of her subjects than the mere "feeding" of them.

While she received monetary backing from a Black woman entrepreneur for its production, Bush-Banks' play, Indian

Trails: Or. Along the Montauk Trail, addresses Native concerns, employs Native characters, and attempts a Native style or tone as a genre or form of writing. "On Shinnecock," one of her Original Poems, clearly is a pastoral account of a

Native bit of nostalgia, as she looks back at the place named for the Shinnecocks who were a kindred Indian nation which absorbed many Montauks at the time when the American legal system told the Montauks they were no longer a "tribe." in many of her prose pieces, both published and unpublished, she expresses her concerns about having dual ancestry. Bush-

Banks' great granddaughter, Bernice Forrest Guillaume, still participates in Shinnecock cultural rituals, though the

Montauks were declared to be non-Indian in 1910. Having written the dissertation that eventually became The Collected

Works. Guillaume is a professor of history hersel. She

137 recalls that her great grandmother's fondest dream was that her Driftwood would be of some help to others. Upon analysis, it is clear that the book, Driftwood, is a metaphor for Bush-Banks' fragmented life and for the fragmentation of her tribe. The bits and pieces are those Indians who continue to keep afloat the Montauk cultural ideals despite life's currents that separate them from their solidarity as a tribe.

That she can write and call to present mind the philosophy and cosmology of Montauks is not to be overshadowed by the preponderance of material she has created in honor of her

Black heritage.

138 CEXPTBR 5

WORLDVIEWS : AS I SEE IT

The traditions in which she participates shape a person's identity and worldview. As a woman who was both

Black and Indian, and who also wrote about both cultures,

Bush-Banks engaged in the literary traditions of both Black

American and Native American women writers. Contextualizing these traditions separately helps to demystify Bush-banks' identity equation. Examining her contemporaries' themes and forms along with those of women from both traditions who paved the way or set the standard for Bush-Banks clarifies for us how she saw the world and how she carved an identity for herself that involved multiplicities of race and culture.

As a tradition bearer for Montauks, and more specifically Montauk women, in her construction of her worldview, Bush-Banks quite plausibly may have drawn from encounters with these women or her reading of materials that they created. As she constructed her worldview and identity, Bush-Banks created artifacts of her own culture to leave as evidence that such a multicultural tradition existed. These artifacts include a play, Indian Trails: Or.

139 Along the Montauk Trail, and poems about the Shinnecocks and

other aspects of New England Indian lifeways.

Traditions of writing--racial, gendered, and literary--

influenced Bush-Banks' identity. Furthermore, a culture

that produces racist ideologies shaped her ability to write,

to expand her literary corpus, and to present a coherent and

unified worldview. These traditions generated the roles and

categories she occupied and reflected her outlook and self-

concept. In response to that world and culture, she wrote

into the newly forming and strengthening Black woman's

tradition. Henry Gates identifies that tradition as the

writings of African-American women between 1773 and 1910

that "... configure into a literary tradition because

their authors read, critiqued, and revised each other's

words, intertextual groundings with their sisters (ÇW ix).

The women of this tradition bolstered Bush-Banks' worldview

by adding to and modifying ideas she generated when she

looked out upon the world and her life experiences.

Like the women of both racial traditions from which she wrote, Bush-Banks drew from a multitude of views and source material. In so doing, she often found herself in the position of being required to choose. But, people generally do not align themselves with coherent single worldviews.

For instance, today's liberated woman's assertive outlook might net her the accusation of "acting like a man, '• and in

Bush-Banks' day, anybody who aligned herself with a Black

140 social community and was ethnically visible--by skin color-- as Black was assumed to be Black. Bush-Banks also saw the world from the perspective of a Montauk and of a woman with multiple roles and responsibilities who was influenced by mainstream Anglo-American and British men such as Whittier,

Coleridge, the "Fireside poets," and others.

Social Work theorist Patricia Reid-Merritt's definition of worldview as "a system of thought integrating values, philosophy, behavior, and perception of one's place in the world" (183) is comparable to that of folklorist Barre

Toelken, who defines worldview as "the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it" (Toelken 263). Reid-Merritt essentializes though, when she assumes that "the presence of spirits . . . is a unique cultural aspect of the African worldview" (Reid-

Merritt 183). To characterize a culture and suggest it is unique in the exclusive sense is a mistake. Reid-Merritt's assumption overlooks Native American cosmology's grounding in spirit-presence. If the sociologist's theory were here applied, Bush-Banks would have to choose again among her two worldviews, both of which are similarly grounded in spirituality.

14 1 Reid-Merritt makes an argument for an African worldview by saying.

The Western or European worldview tends to define

the world by examining its visible, segmented

components.

The Eastern or African worldview tends to define

life in a circular, holistic fashion, where everything

is felt to be interconnected. In this kingdom

everything is alive, and ancestral spirits live in all

objects. (This perception is based on the West African

concept of animism.)

Western concepts that see individuals as self-

generating independent units are difficult to

comprehend if you hold the Eastern worldview. In the

Eastern view the self expands to include all the

ancestors, and even the yet unborn, all of nature, and

the entire community.

The African American worldview shares elements of

both the Eastern and Western concepts. Separation of

church from governments provides oppressed people with

a safety zone. The pragmatic emphasis of the

traditional churches in American communities offers

African Americans stability, as well as a base of

operations from which they can reach into mainstream

society and effectively work for change. At the same

time, these Western church practices are dominated by

142 the Eastern belief in spiritual forces. Black folks,

regardless of their religion or church background,

place great errphasis on destiny, "vibes," symbolism,

and imagery. African American culture encourages

people to move with the natural rhythm, to "go with the

flow, " to allow things to happen at the appropriate

time. And time is always relative. (Reid-Merritt 183-

84)

Reid-Merritt begins explaining how powerful Black women gain their senses of self through this "bridged gap" that connects the community and various self-views, but she falls short by making generalities about Blacks and African

Americans as if they are all the same. Reid-Merritt commits the same mistake as others in society make, and that is to deny the person her status as a non-traditional Black American, or status as a multiracial or multicultural entity. Assuming an identity for others that modifies the individual's perception of self and her worldview as well are not what one expects from a sociologist. While the implications of assuming that all

"Black Americans" are African Americans and that "all

Blacks" see themselves as racially and culturally the same further essentializes Black identity, even folklorists have overlooked the variety of African American experience, and instead, they have identified one group as the folk.

143 Jamaican. American, Cecille Lawrence, does not perceive of herself as Black. Lawrence has been taught in her culture that she is not African American just as a naturalized American citizen from Nigeria or Uganda does not perceive of herself as Black in the same way that a "Black

American" b o m citizen does. Lawrence admits to having been changed because of her "Americanization," but that change means how she receives others' view of her as a non-white person.

The "vibes," that Reid-Merritt says Blacks emphasize, are actually codes. Toelken says that "each culture has a distinctive way of thinking that it passes on to its young, and this way of thinking is made up of codes so deeply represented in language that they become . . . the primary way in which people of that culture can understand anything"

(263). As an example of these "codes," Karla Holloway relates her response to overhearing a Black mother rebuking her child in a bank. Holloway says, "It was likely that her words dissolved as they drifted past the other customers waiting in line, but they stopped fully formed when they got to my place because I could give them a text and because I held a memory of them" (Codes of Conduct Holloway, 4) .

Though the codes of which Holloway speaks are not the sole way of communicating understanding in the culture of the

Black community, they serve as memory links. Or, they aid understanding of the speaker's intended message. Because

144 Holloway's writing appeals to me, it helps me to give memory to the text of Bush-Banks' works.

Bush-Banks' words bring to mind words and cultural experiences I have encountered from childhood to present.

Some would call my "giving memory" a form of signifying. By giving memory, I identify with the meaning or signification of the meanings underlying Bush-Banks ' text because I have many similar life experiences. For me, Bush-Banks' words are not just the trite or empty expressions of a "wannabe" writer; I have also attempted to write under similar pressures. I know why she writes about having to wear old clothes to a social function because I have had similar experiences. Such experiences reflect the enforcement of community rules that maintain or insure conformity.

Folklorist William Bascom identifies one function of folklore as that of control. He posits that,

. . . folklore fulfills the important but often

overlooked function of maintaining conformity to the

accepted patterns of behavior .... More than siitply

serving to validate or justify institutions, beliefs

and attitudes, some forms of folklore are important as

means of applying social pressure and exercising social

control. (294)

By employing this folklore function in her prose, Bush-Banks demonstrates the ability to not only create a folkloric artifact, but to recover cultural codes she encountered as

14 5 she navigates through the Black segment of her cultural

identity. Snubbing a person for their outdated or shabby clothing

is one form of social control within the Black community.

Bush-Banks presents an example of this classist control in the conversation of two of her feminine society gossips:

"Dorothy, you cannot imagine how perfectly lovely

it is to have you visiting me tonight, for I've been

longing to get 'high up' on Harlem Society and I know

that if anyone can tell me, you above all others can,

now let's get real comfy, there now, what [is] (sic)

the latest? Really, Lucille has a new coat? Persian

lamb? I wonder! Why how did she get it? Her husband

is only a postal clerk, you know. Aha, I see--but they

ar[e] (sic) taking desperate chances--goods like that

often become liabilities." (ÇW 241)

This exchange between two gossips not only portrays the catty envy that was supposedly typical of the feminine gender, but it also portrays the two characters' attempt to generate control of Lucille. Obviously, they believe

Lucille is living above her means and that she ought to wear shabby clothes.

At another point in the essay, Bush-Banks takes a risk that may have prevented the writer from publishing it--she openly inserted herself and her economic conditions into her writing. The character of Dorothy's hostess continues:

146 "... --by the way, do you know that Olivia ward Bush-

Banks? Well I [do] she amuses me--I met her on the

street a few days before the Amsterdam News Scrapbook

Dance, and I said, "What are you going to wear the

Dance, old dear"--she answered with that 'air' of hers,

'0, my White Chiffon, it's so Parisian, you know,'

Now, Dorothy, I do not want to be catty, but as a

matter of fact I don't think she has anything else to wear, I saw her with the same 'Parisian' gown on two

years ago at the Renaissance and the Alhambra, and

yet, she is so much of a 'free lance' that she had just

as soon appear at any function with a Bungalow Apron

on--Artistic people are 'like that' you know." (CW

242)

Not only does Bush-Banks allow the reader access to the efforts of the two society gossips to control the renegade or "free lance" by scoffing at her inability to show up in a new outfit, but the writer also reveals a bit of her own self-concept. Bush-Banks explicitly depicts her belief that artists are different from the milieu, and since she is an

"artist," she is different from the average Black society gossip.

Perhaps this snubbing is a form of negative self-talk for Blacks who value clothing and material possessions, having lacked either for hundred of years and who have assumed such negative worldviews from a binary race-based

147 culture. In his novel. Middle Passage. Charles Johnson has his narrator, an ex-slave, Rutherford Calhoun explain this phenomenon as it resides within his own psyche:

"If you have never been hungry, you cannot know the

either/or agony created by a single sorghum biscuit--

either your brother gets it or you do. And if you do

eat it, you know in your bones you have stolen the food

straight from his mouth, there being so little for

either of you. This was the daily, debilitating side

of poverty that no one speaks of, the perpetual

scarcity that, at every turn, makes the sinplest act a

moral dilemma.

.... and I wondered how in God's name you could have

anything if circumstances threw you amongst the had. Ah, me. The Reverend's prophecy that I would grow up

to be a picklock was wiser than he knew, for was I not,

as a Negro in the New World, born to be a thief? Or,

put less harshly, inheritor of two millenia (sic) of

things I had not myself made?" (Johnson 47)

In his neo-slave narrative, Johnson reveals the inbred sense of lack engendered by the racist American slave system that today presents itself in the Black mind as a force making one compete with a fellow for whatever meager possessions he might claim.

So, while shared experiences with the author may bring to memory their meeuiing, Bush-Beinks' words also might say,

148 "If you look Black, act Black, and have Black kin, that is all you are--Black." Once again, Johnson's character's words offer a mean for understanding the underpinnings of a code that reinforces the hypodescent notion that all Blacks are always all Black or African. Rutherford goes on to say,

"Compared to other African tribes, the Allmuseri were

the most popular servants. . . . As I live, they so

shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own,

. . . While Rutherford Calhoun might envy certain

features of Allmuseri folkways, he could never claim

something he had no hand in creating." (Johnson 78)

Yet, these coded beliefs are also composites of identity building effected by Black Americans.

Codes of identification are not just overheard, but spoken between and among groups that are different. Without the "memories" that constitute the code, it is difficult for one to interpret the code and misunderstandings occur.

So, understanding the codes of the communities which represent Bush-Banks, and recalling from memory the meanings or understandings associated with both of her cultural communities, facilitate our understanding of her worldview as both a Black woman and a Montauk.

One response of Bush-Banks to her world was to yield but not succumb to the binary cultural model imposed by racist hegemony and to maintain a sense of her cultural self--her multi-racial, multicultural identity. Cecille Ann

149 Lawrence has offered one explanation for the negativity of a worldview associated with slave heritage. That view stems from the notion of slave mothers being raped by white masters and this engenders self-hatred for being the progeny of rape (Lawrence 26). This same view is the one Hurston satirized with her comment about Thomas Jefferson's not being her grandfather.

Yet another thing that undermines a single worldview is marginalization of women. Even under the umbrella of

"woman," other categories of women are marginalized or moved from the center of the woman worldview. Aside from race or "Blackness," class and personal lifestyles also contribute to or detract from one's positioning in this

"woman" umbrella. Patricia Sawin talks about margins and women in her article, "Reclaiming the Power of the Margins:

Gendered Speech in the Kalevala" (178-99). If a universal gender model for woman exists, Bush-Banks could fit there at the margin being a mother, divorced when divorce was disapproved by society, as a breadwinning daughter to an aunt and sole provider for her own children.

At this margin would be her role as the adoptee of a maiden aunt who iitposed the beliefs, values, and culture of

Montauk upon her while simultaneously sending Bush-Banks out into the culture of a Black community. Orphans or "near­ orphans" have child-centered problems or issues which affect the formation and advancement of worldviews. For many, at

150 least in my own case and for my brother who died recently with unresolved issues regarding our mother, it even goes to

the core of one's self-concept and suspends the child in a place of recurring frustrations and confusion because of the

loss of an identifying parent, the mother. Ohio State University Professor Jacquelyn Royster made a memorable point during one of her seminars on Black women writers: strong Black women knew who they were because

their mothers told them who they were. To elaborate upon that point, for many, mothers are expected to be the teachers of family values such as good behavior in public and acting with dignity and refinement so one does not embarrass the family. The maternal role is evolving and my comment is not intended to be stereotyping, but one center of family worldview and value development in mainstream

American society, to include the Black family, has been and frequently continues to be, the mother.

Sandra Patton decries society's definition of "real families through biological ties" because transracial adoptees like Bush-Banks the orphan, "with origin narratives beginning in a public agency [in Bush-banks' case, in the home of a maiden aunt, and for my brother and me, in the home of a maiden older sister] rather than a human body cannot help but struggle with question of who we "really" are, who we might have been, and how our identities have been constructed" (274). while Bush-Banks spent no time in

151 an adoption agency, and though she speaks lovingly of the aunt who assumed the "mother" role for her when the infant

Olivia's mother died, Bush-Banks struggled throughout her life with the way her identity was constructed.

Patton comments further that adoptees often hold the assumption that "all human identities are socially constructed." She believes that these adoptees move through their lives conscious of having their identities externally constructed and feeling that who they are is not "natural"

(274). She says.

Not only are adoptees often aware that we would have

been fundamentally different people had we been raised

by our birth rather than adoptive parents, but this

sense of identity as constructed, yet somehow

arbitrary, is heightened by the feeling that there are

other lives we could have lived, other people we could

have been, had some small circumstance of out births or

adoptions been different. (274)

I too have often wondered how my life may have been altered if only my mother had lived to tell me who I was and how to be whom I was born to be. Though Bush-Banks, my brother, and I grew up in loving and nurturing environments, our worldviews have been altered by the vulnerability of our identities to the construction by "others."

The multi-cultured environment in which Maria Draper raised Bush-Banks is also a major factor that caused Olivia

152 to see the world as she did and to make meaning of her life that was not solely Black. Patton believes "Demographic and cultural factors such as the racial composition of the neighborhood and community and the racial assumptions of parent and other family members fundamentally shape the range of cultural systems of racial meaning that are made availcüale to these children" (276) . Draper involved Bush-

Banks in the Native American culture of Montauks on

Shinnecock reservations while she raised her in a Black community.

Bush-Banks had to have seen the world and herself through skewed lenses. Her Aunt Maria occupied the same role for Olivia that my sister filled for my brother and me, a close relative representation--but not our mother. Both women exposed us as small children to social climates that sent mixed racial messages: living in a Black community demanded the alliance with or affinity to Blackness from members. Yet, we were taught by our mother figure that we were racially something else--Indian. These factors certainly contribute to a complicated view of the world and positions the person in the role of always questioning who she is and what she is being she is told she is in contrast to what she is being seen by others to be. At the same time, she looks at herself and attempts to make some meaning of her being.

153 Alan Dundes writes about folk ideas as a smaller unit

for understanding worldview. These folk ideas are

"traditional notions that a group of people have about the nature of man, of the world, and of man's life in the world"

(Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. 95). Further, he says that "insofar as folk ideas are the unstated premises which underlie the thought and action of a given group of people, they are not likely to appear consistently in any fixed- phrase forms" ("Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview," 95-96).

In distinguishing between worldview and ethos, Dundes says, "Worldview refers to the cognitive, existential aspects of the way the world is structured. Ethos refers to the nominative and evaluative (including esthetic and moral judgments) aspects of culture" ("Folk Ideas," 102). He believes that it is important to identify assunptions underlying a culture because "[a]11 cultures have underlying assumptions and it is these assumptions or folk ideas which are the building blocks of worldview" ("Folk Ideas," 96).

Bush-Banks' "Aunt viney Sketches" contain examples of these folk ideas that perpetuate stereotypes of Blacks and that undermine her effort to portray the old Black woman as a sage.

In "Aunt viney Names Miss Ollie's Gift-Shop, and Talks

On Art," Bush-Banks has the old Black woman tell the White woman shopkeeper, "So I gits up at 6, yestiddy mawnin' puts on dat red 'en yaller spote dress ob mine 'en my white

154 shoes, dat wuz a size too small for me, takes my green silk umbrella, 'en gits on de subway at de corner of a Hunerd

25th St. 'en Lennox Ave." (ÇW 254) . The folk idea here is that Blacks love to wear loud-colored clothing and shoes that are too small. The folk ideas function here to deflect from Bush-Banks' attempt to present a scenario in the dialect of the Black community. This attempt at dialect writing and portrayal of Black folklife is most likely due to the influence of Paul Laurence Dunbar and other writers

Bush-Banks encountered as she wrote for the various Black journals such as the Voice of the Negro and The Colored

American Magazine.

Bush-Banks' Aunt Viney has difficulty seeing the unlimited good that Dundes understands as a folk view. But apparently the Depression-era Blacks of whom she speaks in

"Aunt Viney Talks on Harlem Society, and the Depression" seem to agree. She says.

Miss Ollie, I'se been tinking 'bout de Depression 'en

bout how some ob my people is boun' to keep up wid de

Joneses .... But de times has changed since den, coz

now, dese same people has been on the A.B.C.'s, en de

WPA,s, 'en dey's ridin' aroun' in streamline kyars, 'en

de wimmin is wearin' dose gon wid de win dresses. 'En

look like a million dollars, but dey better look out;

'coz de time is right now, when dey's gittin' dese pink

slips, 'en dey won't hab eny mo' chance to stan' in de

155 pay-roll line, 'en walk away with dim blue checks. Dey

she' will hav to go back on relief. (ÇW 259-60)

Aunt viney not only deconstructs Black hope of good fortune for all, but she also points out how the racism of society makes that pool of economic benefits or handouts a place where Blacks must go because the unlimited goods do not apply to them--handouts do.

Dundes goes on to introduce the folk idea of unlimited goods which hold "that there is no real limit as to how much of any one commodity can be produced . . . [and that]

"[t]here's (plenty) more where that came from" ("Polk

Ideas," 96). Furthermore, Dundes says, "Once one has identified a number of folk ideas present in a culture, one may begin to perceive what the pattern, if any, of these ideas is and how each of the ideas is related to the total worldview of that culture" ("Folk Ideas," 96). This condition of limited goods leads Aunt Viney into negative self-talk and undercutting of Black men, an act which also reinforces the stereotype that Black men are inherently lazy and that they rely upon their women to earn the living for the family.

Aunt viney criticizes.

Now speakin' 'bout de relief, I can't talk against

it, coz' I'se on it myself, 'en its bin a great hep' to

me, tho' l'de rather hab work coz' it makes enybody

feel so much mo' independent. But l'se feared dat dis

156 relief hez been a mighty bad ting for som ob dese lazy

cullud men. Stidy tryin' to git wuk, dey sits down

home 'en waits for de food 'en de rent check. Bit I

knows plenty cullud women dat goes out 'en tries to get

days work, so dat dere chilien kin hab shoes 'en warm

clothes to wear. I'se really feared dat dis relief hab

made some of dese men mo' wuthless dan dey wuz fo' de

Depression. (ÇW 260)

Once again, Bush-Banks lapses into multiplicities--she wishes to encourage Blacks to be self-sufficient, but she simultaneously continues the negative self-talk that says

Black men have no ambition in the face of limited good.

Dundes speaks of folk fallacies or untruths that we speak but we know that they are not true about a group of people ("Folk Ideas," IGI). These folk fallacies are distinguishable from folk ideas, Dundes says, "because they

[folk fallacies] are demonstrably false" ("Folk Ideas,"

101). Examples of folk fallacies might be that all Blacks have rhythm or that all Blacks are good athletes. Some folk fallacies in Bush-Banks' writing would be the stereotyped notions of lazy Black men not working and of Blacks in loud clothing.

Included among Dundes' "folk ideas" is something he calls "forward orientation." Dundes says,

. . . folk are normally consciously aware of folk

fallacies . . . and can articulate them without

157 difficulty. Folk fallacies are part of the stated

premises of culture. . . . [and they] tend to be

"native" or folk statements as opposed to "analytic"

statements which are descriptions of reality made as a

result of and only after analytic study. Folk ideas

would be more a matter of basic unquestioned premises

concerning the nature of mankind, of society, and of

the world ....

Folk fallacies such as stereotypes would therefore

be part of the conscious or self-conscious culture of a

people whereas folk ideas would be part of the

unconscious or unself-conscious culture of a people.

("Folk Ideas," 10l)

By forward orientation, Dundes means the way American society is always forward looking--saying, "I'll see you tomorrow" or the idea of unlimited good and the unachievable state of the unlimited good.

In analyzing worldview erroneous claims may be made about a particular aspect of worldview being unique to any given racial or other cultural category. Essentializing by saying a particular view encapsulates the essence of that particular group denies the individual a rightful possession of a worldview expressive of a multicultural identity. This is especially important since Americans have become so mixed up in our cultural attributes that discerning whether any given one belongs to the European, African, or indigenous

158 American descent becomes difficult. The notion of unlimited good does not belong solely to Anglo-American culture because the Native American circle of life finds everything

in nature interchangeable and therefore never exhausted, so the goods of nature would never be limited.

Russell and others provide an example in The Color

Complex of how folk ideas can contribute to the development of negative feedback for worldview construction in the area of others' perceptions of Blacks in America. The Black in­ laws of a dark-skinned Mississippi man "eventually learned to accept him, but they continued to refuse to allow him in their house on New Year's Day--they adhered to an old superstition that having a dark-skinned Black in one's home on New Year's Day spelled bad luck for the rest of the year"

(Color Complex. 98). Such negative folk ideas derived from within the Black community support the racist hegemony that builds invisible obstacles for darker members of society such as Bush-Banks. It probably affected her ability to gain access to greater financial support from the sources where she anticipated it because the Talented Tenth definitely were not dark-skinned in overwhelming numbers ; nor were they claiming multiraciality. In effect, she was consistently an outsider trying to fit in and not necessarily understanding the color code because her worldview did not embody the negative view of dark-skinned people like herself.

159 Patton offers another way of looking at this notion of outsider versus insider and its complexity. In her explanation of racial identity formation, she says,

The human construction of a meaningful sense of self is never played out in such simple, neatly divided

categories. Cultural anthropology provides a useful

framework for considering how individuals in particular

social contexts construct their identities through the

cultural meaning systems available to them.

Approaching culture as anthropologist John L. Caughey

defines it, as a "conceptual system of beliefs, rules,

and values that lies behind different ways of behaving

"allows us to consider all human beings as

multicultural; that is, all humans are exposed to and

in turn utilize a broad range of cultural meaning

systems in negotiation of everyday life. From this

perspective the central question concerning the

formation of racial identity . . . [becomes] how the

individual's identity is informed by the particular

version of African American and white/hegemonic

cultural meaning systems he or she encounters.

(Getting a Life. 276)

As a journalist, Bush-Banks participated in a writing tradition that shaped her own worldview, that of the Black community as well as the worldview of the mainstream white community. DeWayne Wickham explains,

160 The tradition of black commentary has, at its best,

been characterized by selfless acts of courage by

African-American journalists who often sacrificed their

own comfortable stations in life in their pursuit of

justice. Educated and committed to lifting a race from

brutality and oppression, these pioneers were as much

warriors as writers, (li)

Whether she saw herself as a warrior for Blacks, Bush-Banks did picture herself as involved in lifting others from oppression and brutality. She wrote of her need to lift others of her race and of an alternative route to justice.

Her "Undercurrents of Social Life," published in the

Colored American Magazine (1900), declares.

Necessity requires that colored Americans conform

to existing circumstances in accordance with their

possibilities and capabilities.

While it is true that former years of enforced

dependence on the favored race . . . interfered with,

yet not totally destroyed, the needed consciousness of

responsibility in us, . . .

Young men and women, let us arouse from this

apathy and indifference, and if it be true that

servitude has deterred us in material progress, now

under an iirproved social law let us lay anew the

foundation necessary to the success of any people which

shall furnish moral incentives for real progress, and

161 which shall reward decisive action with actual

development. (ÇW 144-45)

Bush-Banks' article is brief and sittç)le, yet it works to arouse a sense of immediacy to action for the worldview of young people of color who might otherwise feel immobilized by the recent past of racial injustice. From a folkloric point of view, Bush-Banks' point here is a coitplex folk idea of suffering that embraces one's suffering without giving in to the enemy. Bush-Banks intermittently switches roles of social activist, teacher, journalist and purveyor of folk ideas and folk traditions.

Pulling from the traditions and cultures of the two worlds that made her worldview, Bush-Banks offered a peaceful rhetoric similar to the one Martin Luther King,

Junior gave contemporary society. Hers seems to have been historically rejected as she dropped into obscurity, but occasionally modem writers have attempted to evince ideas of multicultural or multiracial worldview only to have them reduced by the binary racial model of our society. Alice

Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy offers as a solution

"resistance" as the secret of joy. As her forerunner, Bush-

Banks seems to have been guided by the same notion of what made for a joyful world.

As a journalist, Bush-Banks saw herself as a helper of her people. She used her columns in The Westchester Record-

Courier and The Citizen to encourage minority artists like

162 Barthe', Langston Hughes, John Green, and others by praising their works and performances. She wrote a Cultural Arts column for a newspaper that was probably a small Black press property which is now defunct. Her writing often returned to or reflected the didacticism of her role as a teacher, and the notion of communal self-help prevalent in Montauk and African American communities. She urged her fellow citizens to raise themselves up and to do the best they could with resources available to them.

While nineteenth century writers such as Bush-Banks may have been short on words. Barre Toelken has this to say about the oral verbosity of Black conversationalist and how it affects Black-White relationships:

Conversations with Black friends have convinced me

that many Blacks are equally unaware of the custom

among White Americans to use modulated tones in formal

conversation to avoid any variation in volume that

might itiply the speaker is "losing control." This

broad difference in the daily application of traditions

concerning culture-specific speech events has led many

Whites to believe that Blacks lose control of their

tempers easily, that they won't let another person

finish a statement, that "they just won't listen." It

has convinced many Blacks that whites are not

interested in conversation (or in the issues

represented therein), that whites never really get

163 committed to anything conversationally, and that "they

won't listen."

If we add to this the common ingredient found in

worldview contrasts--a kind of fear or paranoia

concerning those who process reality and human

expression differently [emphasis mine] --we get a faint

glimmer of how the study of folklore relates racial and

social dynamics in a multicultural country such as

America; for whenever fear enters such relationships,

especially when fear is founded upon and nourished by

folk traditions that believers feel represent normalcy

and stability, merely rational or political approaches

will not suffice for the discussion and resolution of

conflicts and problems. (Toelken 296)

As a periodical contributor, Bush-Banks wrote in the brief

style of the journalist and from the perspective or worldview of a journalist.

If one examines Bush-Banks' works microscopically, she might assert that Bush-Banks' work could be perceived as

lacking merit because of its brevity and sitrple style.

Bush-Banks belonged to the profession of journalist because

she wrote for the Westchester Record-Courier and other periodicals. As such, her journalistic style and worldview overflowed into other areas of her life and writing.

A contemporary defense of the brevity of the Black journalistic style was offered Blacks in a well known Ohio

164 newspaper, in recounting the efforts of Ohio's 25,000

African Americans to have a National Republican Convention, a Cleveland Gazette (Ohio) column "warned" whites against scoffing at black news columns. These news writers drew upon the strong and political nature of Black journalists to assume the stance of representation by declaring themselves the voice of Blacks. They condemned

"... the contenptuous manner with which some of our

white friends hasten over our columns : and we wish to

remark, while we have the floor, that our little sheets

voice the wishes of our people, and exert an influence

that cannot be obtained any other way. Need we say

more?" (qtd in Thinking Black. 12)

Although this declaration by Black columnists comes nearly a century after Bush-Banks' days as a journalist, their sentiments reflect the worldview underpinning Bush-Banks' and other Black nineteenth century journalists' writing.

This worldview responds to the white audience's reception of Black news writing and editorial commentary as trivial or oversimplistic. As a political stand, it defies the "others'" worldview that says what matters to the Black community was not complex or "scholarly" enough. In short, it revealed that very single "sheet" as a source of power within the Black community because it did indeed influence their responses to nineteenth century life.

165 In "A Hero of San Juan [Hill]" (sic), Bush-Banks speaks

from the first person point of view and with a motherly

persona :

My heart grew faint to se him thus.

His dark brown face so full of pain,

I wondered if the mother's eyes

Were looking for her boy in vain. (2.5-8)

Looking in today's media at the faces of Andrew Ramirez,

Christopher Stone, and Steven Gonzalez, three young American

soldiers captured in Kosovo, Yugoslavia on March 31, 1999,

one understands the mother's worldview Bush-Banks portrays

in her poem. The three contemporary scared, sad faces evoke motherly concern. Not only does the poet speak from a

firsthand mother's concern for a dying child, but she also uses the general message of the poem to honor the valor and bravery of Black soldiers who served at the San Juan Hill

Battle in the Spanish American War.

Turning from watching another mother's son dying, the speaker in the poem gives motherly advice, personifying the

African continent as the mother begetter of the Black soldiers :

March on, dark sons of Afric's race.

Naught can be gained by standing still;

Retreat not, 'quit yourselves like men.

And, like these heroes, climb the hill.

Till pride and prejudice shall cease;

166 Till racial barriers are unknown.

Attain the heights where over all,

Equality shall sit enthroned. (41-48)

From Bush-Banks' own motherly viewpoint, sons must bravely fight battles like men, whether those battles are actual physical battles of war to honor one's nation, or battles against race prejudice to honor one's ethnic, racial, or cultural group.

From another aspect of her personal worldview, Bush-

Banks articulated her sense of loyalty to the maiden aunt who functioned as the mother figure in the writer's life.

In 1914, Bush-Banks dedicated her book Driftwood:

To the Sacred Memory of My Aunt, Maria Draper, Who

loved me increasingly, labored untiringly, Sacrificing

willingly for me her own life's interests in this book

is most affectionately dedicated. (ÇW 46)

Maria Draper spent much of her adult life modeling the example of mother to her sister's child and grandchildren.

This is particularly interesting to me as I note with empathy my own tendency to constantly invoke the motherly teachings and models presented by my mother's daughter, mother, and sister. Although my maternal grandmother and aunt have died, they modeled what a mother should do, say, and be. Likewise, my own sister Agnes labored lovingly as a mother-icon for four of my siblings and me, suid she continues this effort long past her retirement date because

167 she mothers my brother's three small daughters who were traumatically left fatherless after his untimely death.

Reflecting further in Driftwood. Bush-Banks expresses her benevolent and rejoicing mother's worldview in

"Morning," where she depicts herself as an observer of a group of poor children by the seashore gathering driftwood to heat their families' homes. To her listening mother's ear, she says.

Their merry laughter, ringing loud and clear,

Resounds like sweetest music to my ear,

As swift they toil, each with the same desire. (4-6)

While we did not grow up by a seashore, my siblings and I found much to be mirthful about as we accomplished the tasks set for us by our grandmother, aunts and older sister.

Bush-Banks muses further about the outcome of the children's work :

I watch these little children of the poor.

Till they have reached each lowly dwelling's door.

And then, I too my footsteps homeward turn;

I fancy what a joyous sight twill be.

To see the children sitting in their glee.

Close by the fire and laugh to see it burn. (13-18)

Not only does the writer take pleasure in watching the children of others happily working for their families' benefit, but she probably also feels another sense of kinship in her own recent economic past. Bernice Guillaume

168 notes that for two decadesjust preceding the publication of this poem, Bush-Banks "was caught up in a vicious cycle of poverty, transiency and illness" (Dissertation 30). So, as a dutiful niece and reflecting mother, the poet swept her gaze back to her own budding daughters Rosa and Maria.

In "Heart-Throbs," Bush-Banks appeals to the reader's sense of moral indignation as she describes a Black mother's response to the frustration she feels when viewing the prejudice her child will meet in life. She writes.

The mother of the dusky babe.

Surveys with aching heart

Bright prospects, knowing all the while.

Her off-spring (sic) shares no part.

The child attains to manhood's years.

Still conscious of the same.

While others boast of Life's success,

He knows it but in name. (25-32)

While the overall theme of the poem is to protest racial injustice, Bush-Banks appeals first to the collective audience of Blacks, and then to the mothers who have a sense of who their children ought to be.

Including herself as she says, "We suffer and ye know it not, . . . Or why we suffer so," ("Heart-Throbs," 37, 40) the poet makes a well-known mother's appeal to children who seem to never listen as mother's give advice. Not just

Black mothers, but all mothers fear for their children who

169 are subjected to various kinds of prejudices. These

children appear oblivious despite the fact that they may

reach adulthood deprived of the full measure of opportunity

their efforts merit. Specifically, in this poem, Bush-Banks

speaks out against the injustice that Black mothers see

their children enduring while others achieve success

unimpeded.

"Be Faithful" is an emotionally charged poem that

appears to be an elegy for Bush-Banks' aunt Maria Draper.

The poet uses imagery to establish a "homey" setting--"At

the gate of the dear old homestead"--for a parting scene

between a mother and daughter. Perhaps Bush-Banks aimed for

religious allegory in this poem which, in stanza 6, reflects

upon another "homestead" and "gate":

Then I turned and lingered a moment.

At the churchyard there by the road,

And I thought of the dear Sainted mother.

Resting now at home with her God

Beyond lay the broad sparkling river.

Clear as crystal its bright waters shone.

And I thought of another we read of.

Winding its way by God's Throne. (41-48)

Although bereft of her own mother when she was an infant,

Bush-Banks imbues this poem with mother-daughter imagery that conveys the relationship the poet experienced with her aunt.

170 The first stanza evokes the image of two women who

speak and understand each other through the codes of touch,

silence, and sight that seem to be characteristic of their

gender. The poet expresses this code thusly, "We stood

together in silence, / With feelings no language could tell"

(3-4). Again, this code of erapathetic expression is presented in the description of a pause the two women make as they walk on their way:

And somehow we felt but one inpulse.

And that was to linger and wait.

For our hearts were too full for expression

So we looked at each other and smiled. (15-18)

"Be Faithful" exudes emotions in a fashion characteristic of

the expected melodrama of women's writing during the

specific moment in literary history where Bush-Banks

resided. The woman "pled with the Father,/To keep you, her child in His care,/; "whispered" "with tear in her eye;"

"cast a longing glance backward, / For a glimpse of the dear old face. /; and "oft in fancy . . . hear[s] her soft whisper," (ÇW 100-101). Such flowery writing was atypical of masculine writing and did not express the man's point of view at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The same fidelity of girl-child to mother is repeated

in "The Organist's Dream" (ÇW 105-108) . Conscience strikes the speaker in the poem as she remarks.

But somehow I can't help thinking,

171 That perhaps I'd ought to pray. For I haven't heard a sermon.

Or a prayer for many a day.

Though I promised the dear mother

That I'd go to meeting some.

But its been five years and over.

Since I left the dear old home.

And I haven't kept my promise.

But that dream I had last night.

Makes me feel ashamed and sorry.

That I haven't done just right. (61-72)

Not only does the writer portray what cynical critics might at first glance call maudlin emotion, but upon looking deeper, the reader finds an expression of the depth of

religious and family values Maria Draper instilled in her niece. The very traits that make Bush-Banks' writing appear trite or maudlin are, upon deeper reflection, what makes her representative of a reclaimable heritage. If the simple and basic everyday aspects of such a literary beginning are lost to perpetuity, so too is the underpinning of the multiculturally constructed identity.

172 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

A MULTICULTURAL PLACE:

WHAT MAXES OLIVIA WARD BUSH-BANKS RECLAIMABLE

Bush-Banks uses various genres to construct or represent herself as a (l) multiracial or multicultural writer, (2) representative of Montauk culture, (3) folklorist, journalist, teacher, and dramatist.’ This chapter discusses the interconnection of these roles and reviews attitudes of some writers who found publication in the same media in which she published. The chapter will conclude the study of the inqpact of her work on the discussion of multiculturalism, and its place in literary history. While in many ways she was a product of her times, her work was rejected by publishers and critics who failed to acknowledge the value of her material as documentation of the literary history of a multiracial people such as the

Montauks, Shinnecocks, and Poosepatucks. Issues of importance to the current research involve her writing style and how the particular issues that mattered to Bush-Banks placed her outside of accepted ideas. These same issues continue to be of concern today, and I recommend that we

173 reconsider some of her positions since they can be helpful

to us today.

Bush-Banks wrote two books of poetry, one published by

Basinet Press and the other published by AME Book Concern.

Although Carter G. Woodson promised to use some of her

material in his Nearo History Journal without paying for it,

there is no evidence to show that he did print any of her

work. However, many of her poems were published in The

Voice of the Nearo and The Colored American Magazine. She

also wrote articles and columns for The Westchester Record-

Courier. and an entry for the Northeastern Federation of

Women's Clubs. News columnists and literary critics

reviewed her work and commented on her participation in

literary society; therefore, evidence is given that she was a known member of the literati of her time.

By comparison, Bush-Banks' literature typifies Black women writers of her time and sets a precedent for Montauk writers as only Maria Pharaoh and Nathan Cuffee otherwise represent that group of people. She uses the genres of poetry and prose in much the same way as did her contemporaries, Georgia Douglas Johnson (cf Voice of the

Nearo), Pauline Hopkins--who critiqued and published Bush-

Banks' works--and Zora Neale Hurston. Further, her writing conformed to the editorial philosophy of the journals in which she published, and her commentary was conterminous with scholarship of her day.

174 In each of the separate books comprising the recovered

Black women series of the Schomburg collection, Henry Louis

Gates, Junior applauds the recovered women and their creation of and contributions to a Black woman's literary tradition. While the volume on Olivia Ward Bush-Banks presents the picture of her "dressed up like an Indian," neither Gates nor Howard Dobson mentions what the picture makes obvious--Black women writers possess diverse heritages that also affect their writing and worldviews. This area of scholarship regarding Afro-Native American writing is worth further investigation.

Given Gates' comments on coming to an understanding of the larger discourse on race and gender, the absence of discussion of this version of "Blackness" in Gates' and

Dobson's preliminary comments for the Schomburg series signals a need to recover not only Bush-Banks' work but more writers of her ilk. The paucity of scholarly criticism on

Afro-Native Americans' multi-racialism and multiculturalism is symptomatic of the need to recover and re-examine works such as Bush-Banks' that offer an alternate model of identity. Her worldview perceives Americans as more than

European-immigrant blends, Afro-European Americans, or melted down Anglo-American Indians. Her identity model requires reconsideration of the politics of identity and culture that allow race-based biases to determine the value of literature and the people from whom this writing springs.

175 Some people view multiculturalists and pluraliste as

separatists, but throughout, Bush-Banks advocated inclusion

and valuing the visible and cultural traits of her people

and others she encountered in society. As Walter Benn

Michaels so aptly notes, "Our race identifies the culture to which we have a right, a right that may be violated or defended, repudiated or recovered" (Identities. 55), but if

a person is not allowed to own all of his or her racial

components, then that person is denied the right to recover

or even to claim the heritages that they rightfully possess.

Bush-Banks' inclusive identity model therefore forces us to look at the ethnically visible identity markers and beyond to a mixture of traits that is both immigrant and aboriginal, a mixture that is often discounted by Whites,

Blacks, and others as negligible because the fused physical characteristics only permit the viewer to see that which is

"Black."

Bush-Banks, currently is the only known Montauk woman author of literature and recorder of Montauk heritage.

While Maria Pharaoh's brief autobiography left traces of ethnohistory, and Samson Occom and Jacqueline Overton attempted to tell the story of Montauk, scant creative

literature of Montauk derivation exists today. Although

Nathan Cuffee's Lords of the Soil and later, Verne Dyson's

Heather Flower attempted to recall the romance and lore of the Montauks, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' writing stands alone

176 as the one major corpus of Montauk literature. This is a

call for further research because such writing could correct

colonial accounts of this coastline or "first contact"

culture forced into "nonexistence" by people who used their

own "foreign" laws to displace the Montauks and their

neighboring kin. Accounts that refuse to acknowledge the

Montauks' persistence as a group of people because of their

admixture deny the consequence of that version of "melting"

on mainstream society. The consequence of such "melting" is

that it threatens the binarity of America's race-based

society because it would cause the complexion of the nation

to change or darken.

Race theorists have discussed culture, race, and

identity, and I concur with F. James Davis, Blacks are not

always "all" Black. Part of identity is the search for

roots or heritage, and this search is not always solved for

everyone in the same way. Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' model of

identity as an Afro-Montauk writer seeking to uplift others

while she struggles to maintain her own self-concept may not

provide the perfect solution for the problems of Black

identity, and is no panacea for centuries of ills that

beleaguer those who must reclaim their heritages. This

study offers a different perspective on that which some

Black writers value and a way to understand people who are

not content to settle for being other ascribed as "just

Black."

177 Contetrporary ways of talking about Blackness and

multiculturalism are challenged here, but the proposal is

not to relinquish the gains of Blacks since their arrival on

this continent. Instead, Bush-Banks' search for solidarity

and unity, or "oneness" of humankind while giving credit to

all known ancestors, presents a new way for Americans to

"melt." Early in the nineteenth century, Paul Laurence

Dunbar urged Blacks to not release their tentative hold on

equality. Historian, Colin Palmer recalls that:

Writing in 1899, seventy years after [David]

Walker wrote his Appeal. Paul Laurence Dunbar railed

against the assaults on the franchise that blacks had

won as a free people. While Walker had urged an end to

slavery, Dunbar did not have that battle to fight. At

a time of diminishing rights, he urged resistance.

"Let these suffering people relinquish one single right

that has been given them, " he predicted, "and the

rapacity of the other race, encouraged by yielding will

ravage from them every privilege that they possess."

(Passaqewavs 135)

Ironically, ninety-nine years later. Ward Connerly, a Black businessman-scholar with the regents of the University of

California, leads the move against affirmative action, the bastion of rights for Dunbar's suffering people. As Dunbar posited, such hard earned rights as those provided by affirmative action should not be relinquished.

178 Issues of identity and enfranchisement intertwine because Bush-Banks did not have the privilege of a "mother to tell her that she was as smart as the Other," and to tell her how to compete with them. However, Maria Draper stood as surrogate mother and Maggie Walker financed the production of Bush-Banks' play about the Montauks. Walker's interest in Native Americans enfranchised Bush-Banks where the responses of Edna Wheeler Wilcox and Carter G. Woodson did not.

Paul Laurence Dunbar and Olivia Ward Bush-Banks physically crossed paths in life as they walked in the circles of Black literati. Where these two agreed. Ward

Connerly and I disagree about the status of affirmed identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As opponents of affirmative action are discovering, reversing statutes that have enfranchised Blacks and other oppressed minorities does not automatically insure either economic equality or diversity.

As noted in Chapter Two of this study, Bush-Banks wrote like others in the Black woman literary model, using like genres. She was critiqued by the leading Black women writers of her time. For example, when Pauline Hopkins was literary editor of The Colored American Magazine, she found

Bush-Banks' works worthy of commentary. Likewise, society columnists for Chicago and New York newspapers described

Bush-Banks as a "grand dame" of the literary social set.

179 She also operated within the philosophy of the community in which she lived and published as a person of letters.

Palmer says that between 1925 and 1935, Black "[w]omen wrote one-third of the novels in spite of the difficulties they experienced in finding publishers" (139). While she never wrote a novel, Bush-Banks was still busy writing during the period of Black literary evolution Palmer mentions. His finding supplies a degree of evidence about why Bush-Banks' unpublished poems, plays, sketches, and memoirs only reached the public 86 years after they were written. Women writers generally met difficulty in finding publishers as Fanny

Fern's story attests, and Black and other minority women felt the problem even more keenly as Bush-Banks can affirm.

According to T.J. Bryan, in the decade from 1920 to

1930, Black women poets still wrote "a large number of lyrics grounded in the romantic tradition, a tradition that was passe' by then. During this period mainstream American writers were experimenting with free forms and becoming increasingly race conscious" (13). Although the era of writing encompasses the years after Bush-Banks' published works, the style of which Bryan speaks typifies Bush-Banks' writing style from 1899 until she moved from the publication circuit somewhere around 1914. Thereafter, she wrote privately with intention of future publications which never saw fruition because she died in 1944.

180 Bryan goes on to cite Arlene Stetson's explanation of the stagnated mode of poetry writing as resulting from Black males foisting an "Ideal for Black Womanhood" upon their female counterparts. Also, these women were expected to live within a strict Victorian model of domestic acquiescence and sexual fidelity that limited them to marriage and the roles of wife and mother, within this model. Black women writers were expected to use "the lyric mode, conventional poetic language, traditional forms, and

'ladylike subjects'" (Stetson qtd in Lanaston Hughes Review.

13). A review of Bush-Banks' works, most significantly the prose pieces such as "A Shantytown Scandal," reveals that as a writer, Bush-Banks adhered in philosophy to this model of

True Womanhood and writing. However, just as she exemplified a mass of multiplicities in race and in crossing cultural boundaries, she also moved in and out of this model as it suited her purposes. "True womendid not get divorced, nor did they work outside the home or speak strongly about subjects such as race and other public causes.

Bush-Banks' path to publication was through such Black periodicals as the Colored American Magazine, the Voice of the Negro, and the A.M.E. Book Concern, and now, the

Schomburg Collection. These venues were key in shaping the content of her publications along with her philosophy and worldview. In a discussion of the history of the A.M.E.

181 Zion Quarterly Review. Penelope Bullock lends insight to the editorial philosophy of the A.M.E. Book Concern that published Bush-Banks' only published play. According to

Bullock, John C. Dancy said that while the journal "always has assumed an attitude of conservatism, it has been a conservatism which believes that there are other triunç)hs to be won and other liberties to be assured" (Dancy qtd in

Bullock 65). While Bush-Banks maintained this conservatism in her writing, such writing was scoffed at by her contemporary, Jessie Redmond Fauset. Raised in a "distinctly white neighborhood" (Wall 38),

Fauset was the respectable, conservative, poor, but very intelligent mentee of W.E.B. DuBois. Of this A.M.E. minister's daughter, Cheryl Wall says.

To Fauset, the bishop's [L.J. Coffin, A.M.E,

minister] Unwritten History [a race book typical of the

sort published during Bush-Banks' publication time] was

"more wonderful than a fairy tale." For the most part,

such books were published privately or through church-

owned presses like the AME Book Concern. Although she

was rarely harsh in her criticism of such works, Fauset

did point out their defects. Not surprising, given

their sponsorship, a frequent flaw was the tendency of

the authors to write "in the vein of the Sunday School

Teacher" (Wall 55).

182 That Fauset criticized the religious overtones of writers who gained publication through the church press indicates how she might view the writings by Bush-Banks such as her

Easter play that the A.M.E. Book Concern published. So,

Fauset the literary critic may have viewed Bush-Banks' didactic style as flawed.

Contemporary Black women writers such as Toni Cade

Bambara seem to disagree with Fauset. In an interview with

Zala Chandler, Bambara shares how the church women influenced her writing. The late, notable writer said.

Another group of women who moved me were the sanctified

church women, members of the Women's Department of the

various sanctified churches. These women frequently

spoke on Speakers Corner. They were significant

because they were the historians of the church, and, as

such, they always insured that the contributions of

women in the church were "lifted up." They taught

women how to be speakers, to be historians, to be

researchers, to be bibliophiles, and they trained women

to travel, to balance budgets, and to monitor each

other's development." (Bambara qtd by Zala, 345-46)

Although Bush-Banks did not belong to the sanctified church, the Sunday School Teacher mode did characterize most of her writing. Her play. Memories of Calvary: An Easter Sketch, was published by the A.M.E. Book Concern and was intended for performance in the church. Speaking, directing, and

183 performing under the authority of the church, Bush-Banks did her part to insure women in the church were uplifted.

Sançles from Bush-Banks' unpublished prose that exettç>lify the type of writing that influenced Bambara appear in her plays, Making Christ Real: A Vacation Bible School Play (ÇW

216-227) and The Star of Bethlehem (ÇW 228-233). Bush-Banks indicates her intent to lift and train others in religious character as she says of Making Christ Real, "Its Aim (sic) is to emphasize the true spirit of worship, and to inspire our Bible School pupils with an earnest desire to make

Christ real in their individual lives" (ÇW 216). Many of the characters are women whose names include "Experience,"

"Strongheart," Service," "Seed-Sower," and "Instructor."

Throughout, the audience is taught various lessons of

"Sunday School," or religious principles. She partially synopsized The Star of Bethlehem by describing a scene in which "Three women of Bethlehem, Naomi, Mariam, and Dorcas, meet at the home of Rebecca where they engage in needlecraft, for the benefit of people who cannot afford to purchase such articles for their homes. Their roles in the play further exettplify the type of women who influenced Toni

Cade Bambara.

Another of Bush-Banks' contemporaries, Pauline Hopkins not only gave Bush-Banks publication space, but she also wrote a favorable review of Bush-Banks' club woman's work and a paper she presented at the convention of the

184 Northeastern Federation of Colored Women's Clubs held August

12-14, 1903. Reporting on the well-attended convention, Hopkins recounted:

The culture of the Afro-American woman is a surprise

which never grows old to the Anglo-Saxon because he is

taught that incapacity and immorality are to be the

eternal characteristics of Afro-Americans. It is not the fault of the Caucasian that we are making his words

and wishes false as the rotten hearts from which they

sprung. All thanks to God who watches the sparrows

fall that our women are proving the salvation of the

race in America. True-hearted, fond wives are they to

their husbands, and faithful, loving mothers to their

daughters and sons who rise up and call them blessed.

(Colored American Magazine 709)

Hopkins' report reveals one explanation for, or source of,

Bush-Banks' view of woman's place and role in society as a loving, faithful woman and mother who cared for her family while she also sought to help others of her race through her civic and literary work. After the Cambridge, Massachusetts resident, Bush-Banks, was nominated superintendent of the juvenile department for the Federation, Hopkins reported,

"The afternoon session was devoted to juvenile work. A very

185 deep and interesting paper entitled "Child Culture in the

Home," was read by Mrs. Olivia w. Bush" (Colored American

Magazine 711).

As verified by her words, Hopkins shared Bush-Banks' philosophy of unity for humanity. At another point in the same scholarly journal, Hopkins noted that, "Spite of these sad short-comings, [sic] let us hope. Never until we welcome the Negro, the foreigner, all races as equal and welded together in a common nationality, shall we deserve prosperity and peace" (Colored American Magazine 713). In this mutual view of the need to weld the people of American society, Bush-Banks and Hopkins espoused a philosophy of

"oneness" of mankind that contrasts with contemporary politics of racial separateness. Furthermore, Hopkins attended to pecuniary needs of her contributors by following the practice of her peer Post-Reconstruction editors who made token payments to writers they felt would enhance their magazines. As editor for the Colored American Magazine.

Hopkins began paying contributors to the magazine. Mary

Church Terrell, a nineteenth century activist and writer, said that although the remuneration she received from the

Voice of the Negro was small, it was more than she received for most of her work (Bullock 67). So, through these two periodicals, Bush-Banks may have satisfied her need to write for pecuniary reasons.

186 These two journals. The Colored American and The voice of the Nearo. were part of an outgrowth of periodicals that served post-Emancipation Blacks as tools for developing their literary styles and critical voices. As such, they served not only as Bush-Banks' avenue into the literary marketplace, but also as a testing ground where she could make herself and her work conterminous with others who concerned themselves with issues and literature of what was thought to be an illiterate segment of society, minority women writers. Palmer says that these voices grew in sophistication from 1865 to 1880 and that during this time

"writers focused on the place of Africa in the black imagination, the nature and construction of racism in the

United States, the politics of protest and resistance, the search for a racial identity, and the history of a people, among other themes" (Palmer 130-31) . Bush-Banks employed each of these topics and themes in her published and unpublished prose, drama, and verse. Her first published book. Original Poems (1899), contained three poems, "A Hero of San Juan [Hill]," "Crispus Attucks," and "Honor's Appeal to Justice" (ÇW 30-37) that recall Blacks' military contributions to U.S. history and the responding racism directed at the newly freed patriots.

Situating herself as an omniscient mother by the side of a dying young soldier in a battle of the Spanish-American war, she declares in "A Hero of San Juan [Hill],"

187 And I; I seemed to grasp it, too,--

The stalwart from, the dusky face

Of those black heroes, climbing up

To win fair glory for their race. (29-32)

There, she reminded the reader that these newly emancipated

soldiers "... fought for Cuban liberty . . . won the day/

And added honor to their names" (37, 39-40). The closing

two stanzas of the poem are a protest against racism and an

appeal for racial equality:

March on, dark sons of Afric's race,

Naught can be gained by standing still;

Retreat not, 'quit yourselves like men.

And, like these heroes, climb the hill,

Till pride and prejudice shall cease;

Till racial barriers are unknown.

Attain the heights where overall.

Equality shall sit enthroned. (41-48)

Not only do these lines evoke images of Africa as the source

of stouthearted warriors, but they also express the poet's

belief that racism could be overthrown and equality

achieved.

"Honor's Appeal to Justice" explores the construction

of racism and demands resistance in the name of justice.

The first stanza objects to the notion that Blacks are

inherently criminal: "And claims that with the sin of

crime/The Negro's nature is imbued" (3-4). Stanzas two and

188 three demand that Blacks speak out, appealing to the laws of

justice for correction. The writer invokes a courtroom

scenario by using such legal sounding terms as "defenceless"

[sic], "plead a right," "justice's laws," "vindicate this wrong, " and "perjured."

Like an attorney for the race, Bush-Banks builds the case against slave masters whose bloodstained hands dealt cruelly with non-violently submissive people who resorted to religion for solace (stz. 4-6). Then, she counters with an image of the faithful slaves honorably maintaining the masters' homesteads and families while the masters were away at war (stz. 7-9). Her closing statement depicts a loyal, anarchy-free person who "... loves his country, and remains/ A law abiding citizen" (39-40). In summation, she appeals again to the court of "Justice" to "Protect our name, assist our cause" (49), showing her skill not only as a poet but also as a rhetor. Not only did Bush-Banks write and speak like a rhetor, but she also taught rhetoric as part of her duties with the Works Progress Administration

(WPA) . One might say that her writing, teaching, and works made her consubstantial with her audience of student writers and dramatic artists.

That Olivia Ward Bush-Banks could write like those with whom she mingled and that she created literary artifacts showing Montauk culture as a site for creative production and multicultural discourse, make her reclaimable. While

189 she may have been rejected or not recognized because of her

style and worldview, the significance and reclaimability of

her work is that her romanticism and vision of oneness of

humanity make her worthy of inclusion in the discourse on

American identity and multiculturalism as it inpacts the

course of American history. This woman contributed much to

American life and literature. Thus she must be remembered and people such as she should be further studied by

folklorists, literary theorists, scholars of oral and written history, multiculturalists, race theorists, historians, and rhetoricians.

Folklorists may find a starting point for study of the oral and performance arts of a Native culture that affirms the multi-cultural nature of the aborigines on the American

New England shoreline. For literary theorists, her legacy is one that signifies the diversity of writing by people of other than mainstream culture that demands a new approach to the value system for what is "good" literature. As she wrote within the Black woman's literary tradition, she also generated an approach to the race theory that binds the literary theory and clarifies that Black women can easily be multi-raced, multicultural women and not strip from the race the hard-earned gains of the years between emancipation and today.

Scholars need to remember that oral and written histories of people and the creative artifacts such as

190 plays, sketches, news articles, poems, and other literary forms give permanence to the memory of a people. That the

Montauks were declared non-existent by judicial decree makes it even more imperative that Montauks forefront research on the writing by and about their creative forepeople and that they continue to build upon the foundation that this woman supplied.

Multiculturalists, need to research more about the ways people in mainstream America successfully live in two or more cultures while being racially identified as one portion of whom they are, or as something totally different from what they proclaim for themselves. Bush-Banks' model counters the negative press given to some who are viewed as separatists. She believed in and talked about equal status for people from all cultures and we thought we had just invented this dialogue today.

Race theorists might learn that culture can provide an alternate route if their research unveils a methodology for overcoming the years of hate generated by their erroneous fixation upon the scientific nature of race. That is, race theorists might research a cultural or other replacement for that which they cannot scientifically prove. Perhaps the

DNA identification work in progress by scientists will hold significant clues for the positive direction they must take in understanding the nature of race and "race mixing." Or, it may prove once and for all time that race has its basis

191 in nothing more than prejudice and biases necessary to maintain a status quo for those who find it useful in maintaining power over others.

American historians can research and recreate some of the other aboriginal cultures swept under the country's rug by the people who constructed the American society with race-based prejudices. By doing so, they might supply more than a revisionist history of this land. Rhetoricians can revisit the ways people talk and send codes among themselves and between cultures. Just as Karla Holloway noted some reason to recall to memory her life experiences when she heard the "mother codes" in the bank, and just as Bernice

Guillaume found a definite connection between Bush-Banks' writing and the Algonquin r dialect of the original

Montauks, such revisiting by rhetoricians and linguists can fortify the claims to identity with which Bush-Banks grappled. Research focused on how culture-based language unites such "fragments" of a group as the Montauks,

Shinnecocks, Mashpees, and so on may reveal how and why these groups choose the identities they have selected.

Finally, the Algonquin r dialect might literally be all that the Montauks have to show that they really are Montauks and that they are not all Black, but also culturally and socially Native and Afro-American people.

By the literature she has left behind and the record of her life, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks has transcended boundaries

192 that complicate race. She has opened the door wider for what Gates calls "a larger discourse on race and gender" (CW ix). When scholars of future millennia discern the quality of literature and the value of their own identities, they must reflect upon the exanple of this woman who wrote Afro-

Native literature into existence for Montauk and for

"mankind."

NOTES

’ Her work as a teacher of Behavioral Drama and her work as a dramatist are discussed in The Collected Works. Though she did not publish all of them, she wrote several skits and one-act plays. Also, her play about the Montauks reveals her ideas on race and the roles of women in Native American society on Long Island. Her primary activities are those in which she published (poetry, news articles, and short prose pieces) , but she also was a drama and rhetoric teacher as well as the creator and director of an international drama group (cf ÇW).

^ See Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood for more detailed discussion of the "cult of true womanhood."

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