Evolution of Black Women Autobiographical Writing in the White Territory

From Oppression To Expression: Evolution Of Black Women Autobiographical Writing In The White Territory

S. Farhad Research Scholar (Ph.D.) Asst.Professor Sri Mittapalli College Of Engineering Guntur Guide: Dr. Rajashaekhar Pateti Acharya Nagarjuna University India

Abstract: The paper pinpoints the revelation, evolution and development of the Black Women under the impact of slavery and modern day United States. Words became the rudimentary factor of expression to the Black women and they found the genre of autobiography more powerful. They made this genre a conscious identity for their social, political and economical. Hence the Afro- American autobigraphy in this paper tries to reveal it as a constructed, constituted and formed of the specific practices and discourses of a specific people and their response to their time and place. Black women‟s autobiographies seem torn between exhibitionism and secrecy, between self-display and self-concealment. Key words: slave writing, autobiography, exploitation, oppression, search for identity and expression

“The genre of autobiography lives in the two worlds of history and literature, objective and subjective awareness. It is dialectic between what you wish to become and what society has determined you are". (Stephen Butterfield. 1974:1) www.ijellh.com 41

The Afro-American autobiographical statement is the most Afro-American of all Afro- American literary pursuits. The autobiographical statement, up until the contemporary era, remained the quintessential (certainly the most predominant) literary genre for capturing the deep cadences of the Afro-American being, in which the deepest aspirations are revealed and evolution and development under the impact of slavery and modern day United States capitalism is traced. Black autobiography is the desire and effort of Black writers to examine themselves and to articulate and celebrate those experiences and ideals that are uniquely personal. Black autobiography does two things – it affirms the writer‟s potential for growth and brings his realization of that worth into the foreground by telling a true story of someone who has travelled a different path. In these terms, total subjective impression is the message of the Black American autobiographical writing. As Stephen Butterfield rightly puts it (1974:1), “In Black autobiography, the wounds on the human face heal to defiant scars; the eyes take on the glint of pride and awareness; the mouth sets in determination; the humanity blooms under the pressure of the boot into a fierce, tough flower, whose blossom tells us that until people are altogether emptied of every quality which distinguishes them from mere implements, there will always be a limit to how many times the foot can strike before it is left behind by a bloody stump.” Black writers offer a model of the self which is different from White models, created in response to a different perception of history and revealing divergent, often completely opposite meaning to human actions. The “self” in Black autobiography on the whole, taking into account the effect of Western culture on the Afro-American, is not an individual with a private career, but a soldier in a long, historic march towards Canaan. The self is conceived as a member of an oppressed social group, with ties and responsibilities to the other members. It is a conscious political identity drawing sustenance from the past experience of a group and giving back the irony of its endurance fashioned into armour and weapons for the use of the next generation of fighters. It is a bid for freedom, a beak of hope cracking the shell of slavery and exploitation. It is also an attempt to communicate to the White world what Whites had done to them.

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The Afro-American autobiography must be seen as constructed, constituted and formed of the specific practices and discourses of a specific people and their response to their time and place. Hannah Nelson, a contemporary Afro-American woman, argues that: The most important thing about black people (in the United States) is that they don‟t control anything except their own persons, so that everything black people think and do has to be understood as very personal (992: 277). Black autobiographies tend to cluster around periods, like, the 1840s and 50s during the height of the Abolitionist Movement, the 1920s and 30s during the Harlem Renaissance, the organization of CIO and the zenith of the Communist Party; or the 1940s and 70s during the great urban rebellions and the emergence of Black power. The particular bias behind this autobiographical writings during this period is that the Black writer, regardless of his class origin, has been to repair the damage inflicted on him by White racism, rend the veil of White definitions that misrepresent him to himself and the world, create a new identity, and turn the light of knowledge on the system that holds him/her down. In examining the social and political context out of which the Afro-American self has evolved, it is important to note that in its most essential aspect, slavery did not differ very much from the “formal freedom” that was granted to Black people in the United States (the full and unencumbered franchise was not granted to Afro-Americans until the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1965) and that slavery and its aftermath, represented a system of organized and sustained violence, psychic and otherwise against a subject people. The primal slave narrative reached the full peak of its strength during 1620s or so, before the fall of slavery. The narrators were among thousands who resisted, who escaped from the “yawning oven”, protected from the heat by the angel of revolutionary purpose. They had no rights whatever that would not be violated at any time according to their master‟s discretion. Their standard of living was sometimes below that of the cows and chickens they were classified with. Most of them were torn from their families, under-clothed, over-worked, whipped, sold, starved, chained, tortured, sexually assaulted, hunted, deceived and betrayed under all kinds of circumstances by Whites from every social class. They won their way to freedom past slave catchers and patrol teams and then wrote as a means of fighting back against their enemies. www.ijellh.com 43

More indirect form of oppression awaited them in the North, forms that could not be shaken off by knocking down an overseer or running away, and that was no less rooted in the very organization of society. The whole repressive energies of the slave system had been devoted to keeping them ignorant and fearful and they had to discover some means within themselves to free their minds and their bodies from the legacy. Even in the anti-slavery movement, they were often urged into mere support roles for White activists and discouraged from developing their own powers of speech and thought. The slave narratives fought these forms of expression too, testifying to the mental capacities of the slave, arguing tirelessly for his humanity, answering over answering over and over the same shallow, contemptible rationalization for slavery, demanding equal treatment for Black people in all areas of public life, and wrestling with the mental devils of self-doubt and despair. And little by little, book by book they constructed the framework of Black American literature. Autobiography in their hands became so powerful, so convincing a testimony of human resource, intelligence, endurance and love in the face of tyranny, that, in a sense, it set the tone for most subsequent Black American Writing. The slave narratives of men developed around this desire for freedom. The act of resistance is the backbone of his selfhood, his opinions, goals, politics, dreams and accomplishments. Many narratives do make blatant and melodramatic appeals to White pity, and piety, but they usually appeared beside images of defiance. The political purpose of the author is to portray the misery of slavery‟s victim while at the same time making attempts at humanizing and dignifying them. Narratives of Henry Bibb, (a fugitive who returned to the south, after his escape) Revered Noah Davis, (a former slave), Moses Brandy, Josaiah Henson and Samuel Ringgold Ward, transformed the work ethic into a source of racial pride and a special quality of blackness that would enable the Negro people to throw off their rulers and surpass them in achievements. J.W.C. Pennington, Samuel Ward, William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Douglass and John Thompson were somewhat less squeamish about being found impure at the bar of God – all described with pride and humour the incidents in which they successfully resisted tyranny by resorting to deceit. Violent resistance was defended ideologically by reference to the traditions of the American Revolution. David Walker in his Appeal of 1829 which antedates the contribution of Samuel Ward by a generation, argues that, www.ijellh.com 44

It is more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drive of water when thirsty; in fact, the man who will stand still and let another murder him, is worse than an infidel (1969: 37). Their goals had to be won on three levels: freedom of the body, freedom of the mind and spirit, and freedom for the whole Negro people. The metaphor of flight applied to the quest for identity helps to tie these levels together. This is what Richard Wright had done in his autobiography, Black Boy, a highly acclaimed autobiography during the slave period. What the writer struggled to achieve is self-description, and self-respect, a life where clean, positive tenderness, love honour, loyalty and coherent tradition are possible, life as a free and equal human being belonging to a free social group, and the destruction of the system of society that prevents him from realizing his dream. But it was Fredrick Douglass among all the slave narrators, who made the best use of his materials; he mastered and assimilated the rhetoric of the literary mainstream, stamped it with his personality and experience, and most ably turned it to whatever purpose he chose: persuasion, propaganda, passion, rational argument. Douglass produced three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), published shortly after his escape from slavery, My Bondage and my Freedom and The Life of Times of Frederick Douglass, completed in 1892. The identity of Douglass, like the identities of his contemporaries evolved from out of his fighting slavery. In his third autobiography, Douglass says (1892:312): While it shall be considered right to protect ones self against thieves, burglars, robbers, and assassins and to slay a wild beast in the act of devouring his human prey, it can never be wrong for the imbruted and whip-scarred slaves, or their friends to hunt, harass, and even strike down the traffickers in human flesh. If anybody is disposed to think less of me on account of this sentiment, or because I may have had a knowledge of what was about to occur, and did not assume the base and detestable character of an informer he is a man whose good or bad opinion of me may be equally repugnant and despicable. The year 1901 marks the appearance of Booker T. Washington‟s Up From Slavery, which is perhaps a true slave narrative. The structure of slave narrative survives in at least four www.ijellh.com 45

books, Up From Slavery, Let me live, Black Worker in the Deep South and Black Boy – all seem to testify to the strength, consistency, and importance of this genre in Afro-American literature. The opposite side of the coin, of course, was the beleaguered Black women whose ancestors were brought to the United States beginning in 1619, who lived through conditions of cruelty so horrible, so bizarre, that they had to re-invent themselves. The slave narrative provided them an avenue for assertion, self-definition and self-actualization. The first example of this connection is Belinda, or The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like the Moon, published in 1787, after being presented to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1782, as an autobiographical appeal for freedom in old age. The slave narratives often revealed the cruelty to which that total control of another coupled with a lack of self-determination as well as the battle of the Black female self to reject White woman‟s dominance could lead one to. The slave narrative became a means of asserting their humanity and identity in the face of systematic dehumanization. These retrospective endeavors helped the narrators to define and even create their own identity. This is true of all Black women‟s writing. But these autobiographical narratives were actually written by literate freed women. Simultaneously, along with men writers the women writers challenged the racists‟ and classists‟ assumptions by ascribing morality and virtue to external dynamics, and not to internal or inherent virtues. Jarena Lee‟s, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, A colored Lady (1836) was a land-mark among autobiographical narratives, and she became the first of the spiritual autobiographers prior to Rebecca Jackson and Amanda Smith. Narratives that followed were Mattie Griffifth‟s Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857), Harriet Willson‟s Our Nig (1859), Harriet Tubman‟s, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869). All these autobiographies were written by women who had escaped or been manumitted. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark- skinned selves without fear or share. If white people are placed – we are glad. If they are not, it doesn‟t matter. We know we were beautiful. And ugly too. The tom tom cries and the tom tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad . . . we build our temples for tomorrow strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves (Calvin C, Hernton. 1987: 37). www.ijellh.com 46

From the 1830s through the War year, the anti-slavery press and the Northern public turned avidly to the adventurous slave narratives as a testimony to the evils of slavery and simply as exciting, sensational, even titillating reading. When Black women did tell or write about their experiences, they were meant to be and often were particularly vivid testimonials of sexual exploitation and disruption of family ties – the two greatest evils of slavery in the American Victorian mind. As Katherine Fishburn suggests, neither the Southern lady nor the woman slave had a right to her own body: “Whereas the lady was deprived of her sexuality, the Black woman was identified with hers” (1995: 46). White women were characterized by their “delicate constitutions, sexual purity, and moral superiority to men. White Southern mythology cast Black women into roles of sub-human creatures who, by nature, were strong and sexual” (46). This emphasis in the women‟s narrative, sets them apart, not because they give more accounts of sexual coercion and family disruption than the men‟s narrative did but because they rendered these accounts from the female view point of the rape victim, the bereft mother or the grieving wife. Marion Starling suggests: The helplessness of the slave woman depicted in the narratives might serve as a galvanizing agent spurring lukewarm sympathies into active anti-slavery ferment (56). The Black woman wrote in a tradition of sentimental literature to which her experiences and life situations were anomalous. The period from 1831 to 1865 saw the height of popularity of the slave narrative, characterized as it was by sentimental literature that emphasized the cultivation of sensibility, the glorification of virtue and the preservation of family life, the revival of religion, and the achievement of a utopian society. The popular narratives, that stood along side the narratives by men were: Emily Pierson‟s Jamie Parker (1851), Aunt Sally; or The Cross Way of Freedom (1859); Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1853), The Tale of Southern Life (1861), The Story of Dinah, as Related to John Hawkins Simpson (1863). The deeply ambivalent responses of these women to the institutions of slavery and one another may in fact constitute a paradigm for clarifying the enigma of Southern history and the lingering impingements of its “peculiar institution” (Ibidem: 60) upon the cultural and literary consciousness. www.ijellh.com 47

The „Harlem Renaissance‟ in the 1920s, the Black Art / Power movement, and the Pre- Civil War period were a great impact on the Black women‟s autobiography. Though there was a change in their method and approach, Black women continued to pen down the traditional experiences of their foremothers. Autobiographies of Black Southern women dominated in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their works constitute something more than a running unmediated account of the experience of a particular group. The coherence of such a tradition consists as much in unfolding strategies of representations, as in experience itself. Some would even argue that the coherence of a tradition is only to be sought in the strategies of representations; the self is a function of discourse – a textual construct – not of experience at all. Others, including many Black feminist critics, would emphasize Black women‟s writing as personal testimony to oppression, thus emphasizing experience at the expense of text. The coherence of Black women‟s autobiographical discourse, does incontrovertibly derive from Black women‟s experience although less from experience in the narrow empirical sense than from condition – the condition or inter-locking structure of gender, class and race. But it derived even more from the tension between condition and discourse, from the changing ways in which Black women writers have attempted to represent a personal experience of condition through available discourses and interaction with imagined readers. Autobiographies of Black women, each of which is necessarily personal and unique, constitute a running commentary on the collective experience of Black women in the United States. They are inescapably grounded in the experience of slavery and the literary tradition of the slave narratives. Their common denominator, which establishes their integrity as a sub-genre, derives not from the general categories of race or sex, but from the historical experience of being Black and female in a specific society at a specific moment and over succeeding generations. Black women‟s autobiographies resist reduction to either political or critical pieties and resist even more firmly reduction to mindless empiricism. In short, they command an attention to theory and method that respects their distinctiveness as a discourse. The appearance of autobiographies like Jill Nelson‟s My Experience as an Authentic Negro (1993) serve as a reminder that not only Black women had to struggle to express themselves in print, but they often had to control the production of that print in order to find expression. The nonfiction www.ijellh.com 48

writings of women – journalism, autobiography and transcribed oratory – reflect a dynamic of persistent participation in the cultural and political life of the United States. Often, this required the establishment of independent institutions that produced publications that reached audiences of all races. Hence Black women‟s writing and an organized struggle for civil rights became inextricably connected to one another. Sex assigns Black women to the same category as White women, race assigns them to the same category as Black men. Like other autobiographies Black women construct prose portraits of themselves as histories of their lives or of the salient aspects of their lives. Much of the autobiographical writings of Black women eschew the confessional mode – examination of personal motives and a searching of the soul; Black women‟s autobiographies seem torn between exhibitionism and secrecy, between self-display and self- concealment. During the mid-nineteenth century Black women autobiographies mainly focused on the portraits of Southern White women, rendering articulate, the moral and emotional assessment of these women. Such autobiographies as, Harriet Jacob‟s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Keckley‟s Behind the Scenes; or Thirty Years of a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1908), Kate Drumgoold‟s A Slave Girls Story (1898). Harriet Jacob‟s Incident in the Life of Slave Girl, contains legitimate documentation of the contemporary world. Harriet Jacobs wrote her autobiography under the pseudonym of Linda Brent. Jacobs wrote, at least in part, to introduce the world to the special horrors of slavery for women. To achieve her goal, she sought to touch the hearts of Northern White women and accordingly, wrote as far as possible in their idiom. Jacaob‟s text differs significantly in tone and context from other examples of domestic fiction. In particular her indictment of slavery portrays the institution as a violation of womanhood. Linda Brent in Jacobs‟ self in the narrative; she grows up in the shadow of her master‟s determination to possess her sexually. She claims to defend herself from his advances as there is as an affront to her chastity. Ultimately, her determination to do avoid him leads her, after her master has prohibited her determination to do avoid him leads her, after her master has prohibited her sale and marriage to the free Black man she loves, to accept another White man as lover and to bear him two children. One important strand of her story concerns the ways in which she atones for this “fall” and especially. Regains the respect and love of her own daughter. www.ijellh.com 49

Jacobs begins her narrative: “I was born a slave but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (1861:3). For Jacobs that opening sentence underscores the difference between the self and the condition. Jacob‟s narrative embodies every conceivable element of fantasy and ambiguity. Jacobs in some repects like Harriet Wilson, registers the end of her journey as a somewhat bleak dawn on a troubled landscape. Here is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It was in the later period appeared the autobiographies of Kate Drumgoold‟s A Slave Girl‟s Story (1898) and Annie Burton‟s Memories of Childhood‟s Slavery Days, (1909). A Slave Girls Story is very much one of those slave narratives, which Frances Smith Foster calls “cheerleading exercise” (1995:70) for continued progress and optimism. Drumgoold‟s autobiography, though highly sentimental as she claims it to be, is yet a “delightful study” not only of a slave girl but of her recognition of the capacity of maternal love to cross racial lines. Along with this appeared Amanda Smith‟s An autobiography! The Story of the Lord‟s Dealing with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (1893). Most of the Black women autobiographies echo their anxiety to survive in the worst of the conditions: “We shall not always plant while others reap The Golden increment of bursting fruit, Not always countenance, abject and mute That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap Not everlastingly while others sleep Shall we be-guile their limbs with mellow flute, Not always bend to some more subtle brute; We were not made eternally to weep” (Stephen Butterfield. 1974: 91) During the twentieth century many Black women began to question the attributes of or the limitations of gender. It was Ida Wells who was in the limelight during this period followed as she was by Mary Church Terrell, and Ruby Goodwin. Ida Wells was a giant of the form, all the more visible because she wrote and fought during a time when few Black women had any hope of being heard outside the home. Her autobiography Crusade for Justice (1928) is a slave www.ijellh.com 50

narrative in its purest and truest light, without the sycophantic apology that weakened Booker T Washington‟s Up from Slavery. Ida Wells‟s: Apologies to Nobody. Unlike original slave narratives, her autobiography came on the scene like a literary Rip Van Winkle, long before the rebirth of the militant spirit among the Black masses. There was no mass movement, no companion file of slave narrators, travelling by her side. Resistance was its own reward. All her life, Ida Wells fulfilled the role of a vigilant sentry for the rights of her people, determined not to abandon the post even, if she herself were abandoned. At the age of fourteen she lost her parents due to a yellow fever epidemic and had to fight the adult community for the custody of her six brothers and sisters. Getting a job as a country school teacher she supported the family. She began a career of more than forty years of struggle for Black women‟s rights. She fought as a writer, speaker, organizer and physical combatant. The autobiography of Ida Wells is tremendously important as a historical source; for she made it her business to visit the scenes of race, riots and atrocities, gather data from eye witnesses, publish accounts that would correct the racist bias of the White press, and organize relief and defense efforts for the victims. Her style has the righteous force of a mother protecting her children. The mother is the one person who will not desert when trouble comes, even if she has to fight alone. This is the identity created by Well‟s language – a mother of Black freedom as she turned out to be. Ida Well‟s object in her autobiography is to redeem Black history from oblivion, correct the false accounts of White historians and make future Black generations aware of their proud heritage. From the 1940s the autobiographical statement got handed over to Barbara Grizzuti, Maya Angelou, Harrison, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Mary Cow Dog, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy and Maureen Howard, who performed an ironic twentieth century take on nineteenth century notion of sexual liaison and marriage as romantic affair. The year 1940 was marked by the contribution of Zola Neal Hurston to the genre. Hurston‟s autobiography Dust Track On a Road poignantly captures the dilemmas that seemed to confront Black women writers or intellectuals of her generation. Her text does not inspire confidence in the authenticity of her self-revelation. In most respects, it constitutes a marvel of self-concealment. Hurston provides clues about when she wants to do, what kind of stature she wanted to build for herself. She resoundingly repudiates any possible connection between www.ijellh.com 51

slavery and her own life or self-representation. Slavery however unfortunate, belongs to a past that has left no relevant legacy, as she would view it, “I have no responsibility for them” (1940: 10); above all, she fears the effect of bitterness: to be bitter is to become dependent, crippled and humiliated. Throughout Dust Track On a Road, Hurston provides numerous clues that her primary identification, her primary sense of herself transcends gender. It is a tale of wonderful reversals: Zora was brought into the world by a man rather than a woman, by a White rather than a Black. Hurston vacillates between sympathy, scorn and amused tolerance in her discussion of the women of the Black community from which she springs. By insisting on a self-independent of history, race and gender, she came close to insist on being a self, independent of body. Much like Harriet Jacobs she pictures herself at war with the world in her attempt to defend her integrity. If Jacobs warred with slavery, Hurston warred with a dominant bourgeois culture in which she sought acceptance as an equal. The emerging Civil Rights Movement lent motivation to Black women to document their lives, comparable to the abolitionist and religious motivations that inspired an earlier generation. Women who had achieved success on either a national or community level began to write of their lives to provide examination of their culture, explanation of their choices, most importantly setting examples to a coming generation. Marion Anderson‟s, My Lord What a Morning (1956), Billie Holiday‟s, Lady Sings the Blue (1956), Ethel Water‟s His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1957), Eartha Kitt‟s, Tuesday‟s Child, (1956), and Althea Gibson‟s I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (1958), appeared alongside, Effie Kay Adam‟s Experience of a Fulbright Teacher (1956), Ella Earl‟s Cotton‟s A Spark for My People: A Sociological Autobiography of a Negro Teacher (1954) and Reba Lee‟s I Passed for White (1955). As an obverse to Black women‟s autobiography there appeared a plethora of Black men autobiographies like Richard Wright‟s Black Boy (1945), James Baldwin‟s Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Malcolm X‟s, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), W.E.B. Dubois‟s. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (1968) and George Jackon‟s Soledad Brothers (1970). These autobiographies overshadowed the Black women‟s autobiographies. But as every cloud has a silver lining, appeared the autobiography of Anne Moody in 1969. Anne Moody‟s, stunning Coming of Age in Mississippi is especially valuable for its depiction of the extraordinary www.ijellh.com 52

spiritual bonds which existed in the segregated South and which emboldened long-suppressed locals to make a stand for freedom. Covering Moody‟s life from age four through her graduation from Mississippi, in 1964, Moody‟s narrative richly conveys the dense social network which protected Northern freedom riders and which sustained Black Mississippians throughout the renewed reign of such terror in the sixties. Embraced by an extended family of civil rights participants and supporters, Moody worked out of a Freedom House in Canton, Mississippi, a deeply racist and vicious Old South small town whose Blacks turned out in droves to support the Tougaloos students inspite of the fact that, “every hick in the country had been deputized” and they displayed “guns hanging of their hips like cowboys” (1969:369). Returning to Canton for a mass rally Moody could also return to the love and security of a family. The growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements prompted a wave of testimonies from activists, among them, Daisy Bates‟s The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1970), and Angela Davis‟s An Autobiography (1974) and Maya Angelou‟s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) began as a testimony to contemporary life. In addition, creative writers like Gwendolyn Brooks (Report from Part One), Lorrainne Hansberry (A Raisin‟ in the Sun), Anna Arnold Hedgeman (The Trumpet Sounds) and Marian Anderson (My Lord, What a Morning) have written autobiographies that have proved that these women of the 1960s have written in an increasingly pioneering manner. For Black women autobiographers the gap between the self and the language in which it is inscribed looms especially large and remains fraught with struggle. Black women‟s autobiographies suggest a tension in Black women‟s relation to various dominant discourses even as they subvert its deepest premises about the relations between the female self and gender. Their concern for discursive respectability persisted in the works of many Black women from the days of the Reconstruction to the 1920s and came to full flowering in the works of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. The best clue to the essence of that private troubled self lies in the autobiography, which more than all the other writings reveals the struggle that wrecked the self, even if it does not directly testify and does not, as it were confess. The autobiographies of Afro- American women hence delineate a specific history of colonization and offer a compelling metaphor of dependency. Since emancipation, Black women have been torn between their www.ijellh.com 53

independent relation to the dominant culture and their own people‟s relation to it. In complex ways, their self-perceptions retain a characteristically uneasy relation to the issues of their gender. It was the culmination of a number of factors by the end of the sixties that led to the outpouring of writings by Afro-American women. First, the inherent shortcomings of nationalism or the Black Power Movement, second the increased social and economic pressures that led to the rapid deterioration of the urban centers of America; third, the rise of the feminist movement that made Afro-American women more conscious of their particularity; and fourth, the increasing tensions in Black male – female relations to which Michele Wallace addressed herself in Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman. All these factors led to a special kind of problem to which the Afro-American woman had to address herself, adding a new and dynamic dimension to American literature. Watkins‟s connection that the White media exploited the rift between Black men and women that this literature examined, leading subsequently to the popularity of black women writers, possesses some degree of truth.

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References: 1. Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts press, 1974. Print. 2. Walker, David. Appeal in Four Article. Boston, 1830, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969. Print. 3. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855. Print. 4. Hernton, Calvin. C. “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers” Adventures in Sex Literature and Real Life. New York: Anchor press, 1987. Print. 5. Hudson, Hosea. Black Worker in the Deep South. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Print. 6. Holte, James Craig. The Ethnic I: A Sourcebook for Ethnic- American Autobiography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Print. 7. Evans, Mari. Ed. Black Women Writers (1950 - 1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1984. Print. 8. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narrative. West Port, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979. Print.