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Crossing Borders Through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction

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Crossing Borders Through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction Crossing Borders through Folklore Crossing Borders through folklore African American Women's Fiction and Art Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown University of Missouri Press CLOLUMBIA AND ONDON Copyright ©1999 The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 54321 0302010099 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Billingslea-Brown, Alma Jean, 1946– Crossing borders through folklore : African American women’s fiction and art / Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1199-2 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Afro-American authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Literature and folklore—United States. 4. Women and literature—United States. 5. Afro-Americans in literature. 6. Afro-American women artists. 7. Afro-Americans—Folklore. 8. Afro-American art. 9. Folklore in art. I. Title. PS374.N4B55 1998 813.009'9287—dc21 98-31339 CIP ⅜ϱ ™ This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Mindy Shouse Typesetter: BOOKCOMP Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Gill Sans, Lithos, Palatino in memoriam Kathryn Nina Brown June 7, 1975–April 29, 1993 I give her back to God with gratitude, love, and admiration. Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Folklore and the Borderland of the Sixties 9 2 Folk Magic, Women, and Identity 33 3 Reclaiming and Re-creating Africa: Folklore and the “Return to the Source” 56 4 Folklore as Performance and Communion 84 Notes 111 Selected Bibliography 125 Index 143 Illustrations 1. Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 13 2. Betye Saar, Imitation of Life 14 3. Faith Ringgold, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro 19 4. Faith Ringgold, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? 21 5. Betye Saar, Wizard 38 6. Betye Saar, Gris Gris Box 41 7. Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window 42 8. Faith Ringgold, Women’s Liberation Talking Mask 43 9. Faith Ringgold, Weeping Woman #2 44 10. Betye Saar, Sambo’s Banjo (open case) 58 11. Betye Saar, Sambo’s Banjo (closed case) 59 12. Faith Ringgold, Mother’s Quilt 66 13. Betye Saar, Spirit Catcher 91 14. Betye Saar, Mti 92 15. Betye Saar, Mti (as cumulative-participatory art event) 93 ix Acknowledgments From its inception, many people have contributed to this book. I am profoundly indebted to Richard A. Long, the Atticus Hay- good Professor at Emory University, for his masterful guidance and mentoring throughout the years, for his devotion to a scholarship of integration, and for his generosity of spirit. I am indebted as well to Professor Chinosole from San Francisco State University, who read and responded to this work in very useful ways, and to Pamela Smorkaloff, who, through the Faculty Resource Network at New York University, provided valuable help in research. I am also grateful to Dr. Audrey F. Manley, President of Spelman College, and Dr. Etta Falconer, Provost, for their warm support. There are a number of faculty colleagues at Spelman to whom I am indebted as well. With their foundational work on black women, Gloria Wade Gayles and Beverly Guy-Sheftall have been a sustaining inspiration for me. I have been helped in very particular ways by Gloria Wade Gayles, my “roomie,” who has shared over the years her experience, commitment, intelligence, wit, and wisdom. Pushpa Parekh, likewise, has been a valued colleague, helping me early on to rethink and re-envision this work. I want to thank Paul K. Bryant Jackson, for his thoughtful reading of portions of the manuscript, and Mona Phillips, for her insistence that I give myself time to do the work. From the Department of Art at Spelman, I have benefited enormously from the collegiality of Arturo Lindsay, Lev Mills, and xi xii Acknowledgments Jontyle Robinson. I owe a special debt of gratitude, however, to Akua McDaniel, for so generously sharing her expertise. Those students enrolled in my seminar on border theory helped me in very special ways. For their hard work and insistent questioning, I thank Ayana Corbin, Kendra Gaskins, Nakia Brown-Threadgill, Melanie Harris, Maia Hunt, Nasya Laymon, Heather McGowan, Valerie Mitchell, Nova Smith, Sabrina Tann, Princess Tate, and Caroline Taylor. I have deep and abiding gratitude for a communal network of friends who have listened patiently to my thoughts and who have always strengthened my understanding with a greater, more gener- ous understanding of their own. Flora and John Mosley,Belle and Jim Harrison, Zina and Larry Stuckey,Ruth and George Lyons, Virgistine and Morro Sanyang, Mary and William Hester, Mary Casey, and Annabelle Kilgore are such friends. For technical support at critical times I am indebted to Irma Dixon and to Zeina Salaam and her husband, Nmutakala Jones. I want to extend my gratitude and appreciation to the entire staff at the University of Missouri Press, but I am especially grateful to Beverly Jarrett, Jane Lago, and Julie Schroeder for their assistance and confidence. Finally I thank my family,above all, my parents, Leila T. Billingslea and the late Harold Billingslea, who never wavered in their en- couragement and faith. Morris and Janice Billingslea, Sandra and Richard Bowers, Tracy Bowers, Claudine and Efiom Ukoidemabia, and my paternal grandparents, Morris and Martha Billingslea, also helped to create a vital nucleus of family support that has sustained me over the years. David Thomas, my cousin and lifelong mentor, who read through the many, many drafts of this manuscript with persistent scrutiny and uncompromising honesty, deserves more than I can express here, but I thank you once again, David. Last, I thank my children’s father, Kenneth E. Brown, and my children themselves, Stephanie and Christopher, who by their very existence keep me centered and eternally grateful. Crossing Borders through Folklore Introduction For people of African descent in the Americas, forced migration, dislocation, and displacement produced an experiential border- land. Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua´ tells us, are present whenever different races occupy the same geographical space, whenever two or more cultures edge each other. Because borders are erected to separate, marginalize, and exclude, borderlands are sites of con- testation, transition, and flux. At the same time, they are places of communication, negotiation, and exchange.1 In the United States, the shifting political and cultural landscape of the 1960s constituted a temporal and psychosocial borderland, a his- toric terrain where the lines delineating racial, social, and economic difference were challenged and exploited. For African Americans, the decade of the sixties was not only a time of intense political activism, but also a time of historical revision, shifting consciousness, and cultural affirmation. This study takes as its point of departure the 1960s and the use of folklore as a strategy for border crossing in the works by two contemporary African American women writers, Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison, and two visual artists, Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar. It delineates how, during the 1970s and early 1980s, perhaps the most intense era since the Harlem Renaissance for the produc- tion and institutionalization of African American art, these women 1 2 Crossing Borders through Folklore manipulated material and expressive forms of folklore to transgress boundaries and devise an aesthetic. Folklore, a symbolic construction informed by ideology, tradition, and the artfulness of everyday life, has been described by Zora Neale Hurston as “the boiled down juice of human living.”2 Historically it has resonated in the aesthetic sensibilities and cultural articulations of people of African descent in the Americas. Articulating the values, beliefs, and ethos sustained and re-created in diaspora, the African American folk matrix enabled displaced African people to establish differential identity, affirm group solidarity, resist dominance, and “recall home.” The improvisational and hybrid forms of the blues, work songs, tales, jokes, and legends have since come to represent not only a category of knowledge and a mode of thought, but a kind of art. As an artistic process, African American folklore may be found in a number of communicative media. For that reason, black folkloric texts frequently cross into the domain of literature, the visual, and musical arts.3 In their creative and critical appropriation of black folklore, con- temporary African American women writers and visual artists not only create art, but also construct alternative epistemologies. These alternative epistemologies, Patricia Hill Collins asserts, create in- dependent self-definitions and self-valuations as well as articulate core themes. More important, as forms of subjugated knowledge, they challenge the very process by which certain other epistemolo- gies, those of dominant groups, are constructed and legitimated. As an alternative, dynamic, and open-ended process for construct- ing knowledge and truth, the African American folk idiom, along with the literature and art expropriated from it, historically has offered ways to question the content of what was claimed to be truth and to challenge, at the same time, the process of arriving at that truth.4 Using folklore as a strategy for border crossing enables these artists to draw attention to the periphery, the space from which they question forms of dominance and reverse meanings. In engaging archetypes and stereotypes like Aunt Jemima and Sambo, these women transgress social, cultural, and epistemological borders, but for the purpose of reclaiming and reconnecting. Individually and collectively,they negotiate, cross, and recross to engage sociopolitical Introduction 3 realities, fashion new forms of knowledge, and generate dialogue and empathy. In the artists’ literary and visual expressions, folklore functions to define an African American cultural identity, to reclaim a certain femaleness within that identity, and ultimately to affirm the black woman’s role in human and cultural continuity.
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