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The Outraged Mother Joanne Braxton S&F Online www.barnard.edu/sfonline Double Issue: 3.3 & 4.1 The Scholar & Feminist XXX: Past Controversies, Present Challenges, Future Feminisms Document Archive Reprinted from: Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance Joanne M. Braxton and Andre Nicola McLaughlin, Editors New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 The Outraged Mother By: Joanne Braxton In an essay called “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” novelist Toni Morrison speaks of her attempt to “blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world . with neither taking precedence over the other.” In Morrison’s view this artistic goal is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world. We are a very practical people, very down to earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limiting. And some of those things were ‘discredited knowledge’ that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited and therefore what they knew was ‘discredited.’1 Other aspects which Morrison uses to define the literary tradition of Black Americans include the “oral quality” of that body of writing and “the presence of an ancestor.” Morrison views the inclusion of this figure as a “deliberate effort, on the part of the artist, to get a visceral, emotional response as well as an intellectual response as he or she communicates with the audience” in a literary pattern of “call and response” (341, 343). The ancestral figure most common in the work of contemporary Black women writers is an outraged mother. She speaks in and through the narrator of the text to “bear witness” and to break down artificial barriers between the artist and the audience. Not only does this ancestor figure lend a “benevolent, instructive, and protective” presence to the text, she also lends her benign influence to the very act of creation, for the Black woman artist works in the presence of this female ancestor, who passes on her feminine wisdom for the good of the “tribe,” and the survival of all Black people, especially those in the African diaspora created by the Atlantic slave trade. This essay examines the ancestral presence of the outraged mother as a primary archetype in the narratives of contemporary Black American women writers. The outraged mother embodies the values of sacrifice, nurturance, and personal courage—values necessary to an endangered group. She employs reserves of spiritual strength, whether Christian or derived from African belief. Implied in all her actions and fueling her heroic ones is outrage at the abuse of her people and her person. She feels very keenly every wrong done her children, even to the furthest generations. She exists in art because she exists in life. Images of the outraged mother abound in the oral lore and early autobiographical narratives of persons of African descent enslaved in the Americas. For example, Jamaican Maroon folklore attributes many supernatural powers to Grandy Nanny, “a mythical ancestress from whom all present day Maroons (believe) they are descended.” According to legend. Nanny was both a magician and a military leader in Maroon resistance to the British. In one story Nanny uses magic to neutralize a large British military force. “[S]he stooped down and tauntingly presented her rump toward their guns; as they fired on her, she proceeded to shock them by catching between her buttocks a full round of lead shot, rendering them inactive.” Thus she both insults and overwhelms the enemy. British written history of Jamaica acknowledges the existence of “an important personage named Nanny,” and refers to her as “a powerful obeah woman or sorceress.” And when today’s Mooretown Maroons refer to themselves as “Nanny’s yo-yo. Nanny’s progeny,” they assert a connection with an outraged mother of an ancestral past, signifying both continuity and tradition.2 Throughout the slave narrative genre and even in the post-emancipation accounts of female former slaves, the outraged mother remains an ancestral presence. She is fully developed in Harriet “Linda Brent” Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Linda’s conviction to save herself and her children moves her to act deliberately and decisively in planning a secret escape. As in Jamaica and elsewhere in the African diaspora, maroonage or running away from slavery, proved a viable form of rebellion for many enslaved in the United States. Like Grandy Nanny, Linda takes to the woods, and becomes, for a brief period, an American Maroon, a rebel and a fugitive from slavery. With the help of her maternal grandmother, Aunt Marthy, a free woman, and another outraged mother, “Linda” was disguised as a sailor and taken to the “Snaky Swamp,” a location she found more hospitable than landed slave culture. “[E]ven those large venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.”3 Such language and imagery set the tone for later developments in Afra-American narrative, with the protective and determined qualities of the outraged mother well established, and the “autobiographical act” performed in the presence of Aunt Marthy, an outraged female forebearer who dies during the course of the narrative. Female slave narrators like “Linda Brent” planted the seed of contemporary Black feminist autobiography and “womanist” fiction early in Black American literary tradition. In fact, the slave narrator’s outraged grandmother, Aunt Marthy, foreshadows Zora Neale Hurston’s Nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). A spiritual sister of the Mythical Grandy Nanny, Zora Neale Hurston’s fictional Nanny shares many of the mythic character’s rebellious and protective attributes. She emerges in Eyes as an ancestral presence. Another American Maroon, Hurston’s Nanny flees the slave plantation to create a new and better way of life for herself and her child. Nanny takes to the woods with her blond and gray-eyed newborn after the plantation mistress makes use of the master’s absence to order Nanny whipped and the child sold. Repeating the story for her granddaughter Janie Starks (narrator of Eyes), Nanny reflects: “Ah knowed mah body wasn’t healed, but Ah couldn’t consider dat. In the black dark Ah wrapped mah baby the best I knowed how and made it to the swamp by the river. Ah knowed de place was full uh mocasains and other bitin snakes, but Ah was more skeered of what was behind me.”4 Here the words of Hurston’s fictional heroine echo those of slave narrator Linda Brent: “[E]ven those large and venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.” The outraged mother is more afraid of what is behind her than what is in front of her; she must create the New World and with it a new way of life. Like Linda’s Aunt Marthy, Nanny dies and joins the ancestors in the course of her granddaughter’s story. Although Incidents is a work of autobiography and Eyes a work of fiction, there are distinct similarities between the texts, especially in the pairings of the narrator-granddaughter with a protective and powerful grandmother. The ancestral presence in Maya Angelou’s autobiography I KnowWhy the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is represented by the narrator’s paternal grandmother, who, though still living at the end of Caged Bird, embodies the “timeless” quality of the ancestor figure. Momma Henderson, a self-sufficient woman, provided for her two grandchildren and for her crippled son, Marguerite’s Uncle Willie. “Momma intended to teach . the paths of life that she and all Negroes gone before had found, and found to be safe ones,” Angelou writes.5 Mrs. Henderson nurtured Marguerite and her brother, Bailey Jr., through their Stamps, Arkansas, childhood and beyond, doing what she could to protect her son’s young children from frequent intrusions of “white reality.” In praising her grandmother’s courage and spiritual strength, Angelou invokes the ancestral presence and strengthens the maternal archetype. Early in the narrative “Momma” hid a would-be lynch victim and provided him with supplies for a journey even though she jeopardized her own security to do so. On another occasion it was necessary for Mrs. Henderson to conceal her crippled son one night after an unknown Black man was accused of “messing with” a white woman: “With a tedious and fearful slowness Uncle Willie gave me his rubber tipped cane and bent down to get into the now enlarged bin. It took forever before he lay down flat, and then we covered him with potatoes and onions, layer upon layer, like a casserole. Grandmother knelt praying in the darkened store” (14-15). Through this description of her experience, Maya Angelou invites others to follow her grandmother’s model—to stand courageously and full of faith—not to turn back and not to falter. In the role of nurturer and protectress, Momma, in the words of critic Stephen Butterfield, both protects and "inspires the urge to protect.”6 Despite Mrs. Henderson’s reliance on faith and her ingenuity in avoiding confrontations, her outrage bursts forth one day when a white dentist she had assisted with a loan denies Marguerite needed dental care because she is Black. Mrs. Henderson, a proud woman, pleads, not for herself but for her grandchild. “I wouldn’t press on you like this for myself but I can’t take No. Not for my grandbaby.” The dentist’s response is clear, “Annie, my policy is I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s” (159-160).
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