Sisters of the Yam

In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which

the emotional health of black women has been and continues
to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a
context where black females could both work on their
individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining
connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks
articulates the link between self-recovery and political
resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and
the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters
of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black
womanhood.

A cultural critic, an intellectual, and a feminist writer, bell

hooks is best known for classic books including Ain’t I a
Woman, Bone Black, All About Love, Rock My Soul,
Belonging, We Real Cool, Where We Stand, Teaching to
Transgress, Teaching Community, Outlaw Culture, and Reel
to Real. hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in
Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and resides in her
home state of Kentucky.

2
Sisters of the Yam
Black Women and Self-Recovery

bell hooks

3
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an

informa business

© 2015 Gloria Watkins

The right of Gloria Watkins to be identified as author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First and second editions published

by South End Press 1994, 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be

trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

hooks, bell, 1952–

4
Sisters of the yam : black women and self-recovery / bell
hooks. — 3rd edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. African American women—Mental health. 2. Self-esteem

in women.

3. Self-actualization (Psychology) 4. Oppression

(Psychology) I. Title.

RC451.5.N4H66 2015

155.8’496073—dc23

2014023035

ISBN: 978-1-138-82167-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-82168-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74316-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond MT Std

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

5
Celebrating the life and work of Toni Cade Bambara whose
visionary insight, revolutionary spirit, and passionate
commitment to struggle guides and sustains.

“Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed,

cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when
you are well.”

—Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

6
Contents
preface to the new edition: reflections of light

introduction

healing darkness

1. seeking after truth

2. tongues of fire

learning critical affirmation

3. work makes life sweet

4. knowing peace

an end to stress

5. growing away from addiction

6. dreaming ourselves dark and deep

black beauty

7. facing and feeling loss

8. moved by passion

eros and responsibility

7
9. living to love

10. sweet communion

11. the joy of reconciliation

12. touching the earth

13. walking in the spirit

selected bibliography

an interview with bell hooks

index

8
9
Preface to the New Edition:
Reflections of Light
When I wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
more than forty years ago, the chapter that most spoke to me
was “Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood.”
Concluding that chapter, I wrote:

Widespread efforts to continue devaluation of black

womanhood make it extremely difficult and oftentimes
impossible for the black female to develop a positive
self-concept. For we are daily bombarded by negative images.
Indeed, one strong oppressive force has been this negative
stereotype and our acceptance of it as a viable role model
upon which we can pattern our lives.

Since I first wrote these words, the white-dominated mass

media have changed little in the way in which they represent
black women. We have changed. In the last thirty years black
women have collectively challenged both the racism and
sexism that not only shape how we are seen but determine
how everyone interacts with us. We have resisted continued
devaluation by countering the dominant stereotypes about us
that prevail in white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy by
decolonizing our minds. Here decolonization refers to
breaking with the ways our reality is defined and shaped by
the dominant culture and asserting our understanding of that
reality, of our own experience.

10
In a revolutionary manner, black women have utilized mass
media (writing, film, video, art, etc.) to offer radically
different images of ourselves. These actions have been an
intervention. We have also dared to move out of our “place”
(that is away from the bottom of everything, the place this
society often suggests we should reside). Moving ourselves
from manipulatable objects to self-empowered subjects, black
women have by necessity threatened the status quo. All the
various groups—white men, white women, black men,
etc.—that have imagined that black women exist to be the
“mules of the world,” providing service to others, have had to
cope with our collective refusal to occupy this position. This
challenge to the status quo has generated serious anti-black
female backlash. The kind of backlash that combines fierce
racism with antifeminism, the kind that journalist Susan
Faludi does not even begin to consider in her best-selling
book Blacklash: The Undeclared War Against Women.
Indeed, Faludi’s work erases any focus on the way in which
race is a factor determining degrees of backlash. That she
could completely ignore the specificity of race, and once
again construct women as a monolithic group whose common
experiences are more important than our differences, heralds
the acceptance of an erasure within the realms of popular
feminist books—works written to reach mass audiences—of
all the work black women and women of color have done (in
conjunction with white allies in struggle) to demand
recognition of the specificity of race.

The continued rise in black anti-feminism, often spearheaded

by a focus on endangered black masculinity, has rekindled
false assumptions that black women’s efforts to resist sexism
and sexist oppression are an attack on black life. To the
contrary, renewed black liberation struggle can only be

11
successful to the extent that it includes resistance to sexism.
Yet there are masses of black people who are encouraged by
sexist and misogynist black male and female leaders to
believe that uppity black women are threatening our survival
as a race. This backlash requires that those of us who are
aware be ever vigilant in our efforts to educate one another,
and all black people, for critical consciousness. Backlash,
from whatever source, hurts. It retards and obstructs freedom
struggle.
Intense attacks help create a context of burnout and despair. It
is crucial that black women and all our allies in struggle,
especially progressive black men, seize the day and renew our
commitment to black liberation and feminist struggle.

In my daily life practice as a teacher, writer, and activist, I

work hard to find ways of sharing feminist thinking, black
liberation struggle, with diverse groups of people, not just
those of us who are involved in academic institutions. Years
of inventing strategies to reach a broader audience have
convinced me that we need to explore all outlets to share
information. Initially it was the success of the self-help book
Women Who Love Too Much that convinced me that women
of all races, classes, and sexual preferences would read work
that addressed their concerns and most importantly their pain
and their longing to transform their lives. This book, however,
like many other self-help books for women, disturbed me
because it denied that patriarchy is institutionalized. It made it
seem that women could change everything in our lives by
sheer acts of personal will. It did not even suggest that we
would need to organize politically to change society in
conjunction with our efforts to transform ourselves.

12
Mind you, since I have consistently used self-help literature to
work on areas in my life where I have felt dysfunctional, I
have tremendous respect for this literature whatever its
limitations. For those among us who cannot afford therapy, or
who have had endless hours of therapy that just did not work,
it helps to have these other guides. For some time now, too, I
have seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for
social change if individuals struggling for that change are not
also self-actualized or working towards that end. When
wounded individuals come together in groups to make change
our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not
been dealt with emotionally. Those of us committed to
feminist movement, to black liberation struggle, need to work
at self-actualization. In the anthology The Black Woman,
Toni Cade Bambara reminded us that “revolution begins in
the self and with the self.” She urged us to see
self-actualization as part of our political efforts to resist white
supremacy and sexist oppression.

Many of us have longed to see the union of our political

efforts to change society and our efforts to be individually
self-actualized. We have wanted to politicize movements for
self-recovery. Yet, working to help educate black females for
critical consciousness, I often find that folks felt they did not
have time for political work because they felt there were so
many things messed up in their psyches, or in their daily
lives, that they were just barely keeping a hold on life.
Frankly, they are often more concerned with getting their
lives together than with larger political issues, issues that did
not seem to intersect with this need or promise to enhance this
quest. This perspective is understandable, but much too
limited. It ignores too much of the world around us. Desiring
to create a context where we as black females could both

13
work on our individual efforts for self-actualization and
remain connected to a larger world of collective struggle led
me to consider writing a self-help book that would especially
address our concerns. I felt such a book would speak to black
women and to everyone else that wanted to know us, and
perhaps even themselves, better.

Meditating long and hard on Audre Lorde’s essay “Eye to

Eye” was the catalyst urging me to push harder to write work
that would address a wider audience of black women. In her
essay, Audre Lorde urges black females to put our struggle to
self-actualize at the center of our daily life. She taught us,

Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a

simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond
and deeper than the surface appreciation of Black beauty,
although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to
reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we
accept another superficial measurement of self, one
superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since
it pauses at the superficial. Certainly it is no more
empowering. And it is empowerment—our strengthening in
the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our
work and future—that will be the result of this pursuit.

Living the teaching of Lorde inspired me to write this book

on self-recovery, a book that would particularly address the
needs and concerns of black women.

In the last thirty years, many black women have had the joy
of ecstatic sustained bonding with one another. We have
witnessed the power of sisterhood. We have experienced
self-recovery. We have known, and continue to know, the

14
rewards of struggling together to change society so that we
can live in a world that affirms the dignity and presence of
black womanhood. In many ways Sisters of the Yam: Black
Women and Self-Recovery is a manifestation of that joy and
an expression of the awareness that we must be ever
vigilant—that the struggle continues.

15
16
Introduction: Healing
Darkness
Sisters—and you who are our friends, loved ones, and
comrades—I greet you in love and peace. This Saturday
afternoon is a beautiful spring day, where the world is
overflowing with beauty and splendor. Every aspect of nature
is full of life. That which appeared dead but was merely
dormant is beginning to grow again. Symbolized by holy days
that celebrate resurrection and renewal, this is a time for all
things to be made new—a joyous time. This morning as I
went for walking meditation, I felt as though the world
around me—the birds, the flowers, the newly cut green
grass—was all a soothing balm, the kind Big Mama would
spread on various parts of our body for any little old ailment.
We thought her homemade salves had magical healing
powers when we were children. Now, I am convinced that the
magic, that power to heal, resided in her warm, loving, brown
hands—hands that knew how to touch us and make us whole,
how to make the hurt go away.

This is a book about healing, about ways to make the hurt go

away. Like all the books I have written, it comes to me from
places dark and deep within me, secret, mysterious places,
where the ancestors dwell, along with countless spirits and
angels. When I was a girl, Mama’s father, Daddy Gus, taught
me that everything in life was a dwelling place for spirits, that
one only had to listen to hear their voices. The spiritual world
of my growing up was thus very akin to those described in

17
novels by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, or Ntozake Shange.
There was in our daily life an ever present and deep
engagement with the mystical dimensions of
Christian faith. There was the secret lore of the
ancestors—the Africans and Native Americans—who had
given that new race of black folk, born here on this portion of
earth, whole philosophies about how to be One with the
universe and sustain life. That lore was shared by the oldest of
the old, the secret believers, the ones who had kept the faith.
There was the special magic of the Caribbean that was present
in the form of Voudoun, that way of working roots my
father’s mother Sister Ray knew about (or so everyone said).
And I remember most that people feared her—that she was
seen as a woman of power.

Having lived in a segregated southern black world and in an

integrated world, where black people live with and among
whites, the difference I see is that in the traditional world of
black folk experience, there was (and remains in some places
and certainly in many hearts) a profound unshaken belief in
the spiritual power of black people to transform our world and
live with integrity and oneness despite oppressive social
realities. In that world, black folks collectively believed in
“higher powers,” knew that forces stronger than the will and
intellect of humankind shaped and determined our existence,
the way we lived. And for that reason these black people
learned and shared the secrets of healing. They knew how to
live well and long despite adversity (the evils caused by
racism, sexism, and class exploitation), pain, hardship,
unrelenting poverty, and the ongoing reality of loss. They
knew joy, that feeling that comes from using one’s powers to
the fullest. Despite the sexism of that segregated black world,
the world of spirituality and magic was one where black

18
women teachers, preachers, and healers worked with as much
skill, power, and second sight as their black male comrades.
Raised in such an environment, I was able to witness and
learn. And yet, like the old ones before me who had been
required by circumstance to willingly or unwillingly leave
their ancestral home, I left that world of my beginning and
entered the strange world of a predominandy white elitist
university setting. I took with me to that world, however,
ways of knowing and understanding reality I was determined
to keep and hold. They were my links to life-affirming
black cultural traditions. And indeed it was the will and way
of the ancestors that sustained me during that time of my life,
that sustains me still.

For the past twenty years I have been most concerned with
learning book knowledge about many subjects. I decided to
be a writer when I was still at home, still in grade school, and
of course made public announcements and shared my work
with family and friends. Everyone agreed that I had talent. I
could act and I could write. I went away to college to study
drama and everyone believed that I would one day come
home, to the world of my ancestors, and be a teacher in the
public schools. I did not return. In the years before she died,
Baba, my Mama’s mother, would often ask me “Glory, how
can you live so far away from your people?” I knew what her
words meant. She was asking how it was I could live without
the daily communion and community of ancestors, kin, and
family—how I could sustain my reason for living since I had
been raised to believe that these connections gave life
substance and meaning. I had no answer for her. I hung my
head so that she could not see the tears in my eyes. I could not
honestly say that I had found new community, new kin. I only
knew that I was inhabited by a restless roaming spirit that was

19
seeking to learn things in a world away from my people.
Much of what I learned in that world was not life-affirming.
Longing to become an intellectual, I stayed in college. I
learned some important information. I became a strong and
defiant critical thinker expressing my ideas publicly in the
production of feminist theory, literary criticism, and more
recently, cultural criticism. The artist inside me was most
visible in private space. There I thought and dreamed about
the world of my ancestors. I longed for the richness of my
past, to hear again the wisdom of the elders, to sit at their feet
and be touched by their presence.

Living and working in predominantly white settings, in

situations where black people seem confused and uncertain
about politics and identity, I began to think deeply about the
way in which the collective lives of black people in
contemporary white-supremacist patriarchy have become
fundamentally
estranged from life-affirming world views and life practices.
Many black people see themselves solely as victims with no
capacity to shape and determine their own destiny. Despite
powerful anti-racist struggle in this society, expressed in the
sixties’ civil rights and black power movements, internalized
racism manifested by ongoing self-hate and low self-esteem
has intensified. Devastating poverty and the rising gaps
between black folks who have gained access to economic
privilege and the vast majority who will seemingly remain
forever poor make it difficult for individuals to build and
sustain community. Kinship ties between black people are
more easily threatened and broken now than at other
historical moments when even material well-being was harder
for black people to gain than it is now. Widespread addiction,
pervasive among all classes of black people, is yet another

20
indication of our collective crisis. Black people are indeed
wounded by forces of domination. Irrespective of our access
to material privilege we are all wounded by white supremacy,
racism, sexism, and a capitalist economic system that dooms
us collectively to an underclass position. Such wounds do not
manifest themselves only in material ways, they effect our
psychological well-being. Black people are wounded in our
hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits.

Though many of us recognize the depth of our pain and hurt,

we do not usually collectively organize in an ongoing manner
to find and share ways to heal ourselves. Our literature has
helped, however. Progressive black women artists have
shown ongoing concern about healing our wounds. Much of
the celebrated fiction by black women writers is concerned
with identifying our pain and imaginatively constructing
maps for healing. Books like Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo;
The Bluest Eye; The Color Purple; Praisesong for the
Widow.; Maru; The Salt Eaters; and many others address the
deep, often unnamed psychic wounding that takes place in the
daily lives of black folks in this society. This fiction is
popular because it speaks to the hurt black folks are grappling
with. Indeed, many non-black people also find healing maps
in this work they can use in daily life. It has been in my role
as a professor, teaching the work of black writers in general,
and black women writers in particular,
that I became more fully aware of our contemporary
collective suffering. Teaching young black people at one of
the most prestigious universities in this society, I was amazed
by their lack of self-awareness and understanding, their lack
of knowledge of black history and culture, and the profound
anxiety and despair that was so pervasive in their lives.

21
When black female students would come to my office after
reading these novels and confess the truth of their lives—that
they were terrorized psychologically by low self-esteem; that
they were the victims of rape, incest, and domestic violence;
that they lived in fear of being unmasked as the inferiors of
their white peers; that stress was making their hair fall out;
that every other month one of them was attempting suicide;
that they were anorexic, bulimic, or drug addicted—I was
shocked. Most of these students were coming from materially
privileged backgrounds. Yet I saw in their lives the same
problems that are so acutely visible among the black poor and
underclass, problems that are usually seen by liberals in the
larger society as rooted primarily in economics. What the
experiences of these young black women indicated, however,
was that the problem was not merely economic. This, of
course, made sense to me. I had been raised in a world of the
black poor and underclass that was still life-affirming. I knew
that poverty by itself need not be a condition that promotes
such nihilism and despair.

When black female students read Toni Bambara’s novel The

Salt Eaters in my black women writers course, several came
to talk with me about their identification with the black
woman character Velma, a character who attempts suicide
when the novel opens. Hearing these women describe their
sense of estrangement and loneliness, I felt that a support
group was needed and helped organize it. There is this
passage in The Salt Eaters where the black women ancestors,
one living, one dead, come together to see about healing
Velma. The younger of the two, Minnie Ransom, says to the
elder: “What is wrong, Old Wife? What is happening to the
daughters of the yam? Seem like they just don’t know how to
draw up the powers from the deep like before.”

22
I strongly identified with this passage. Knowing that I had
been raised among black women and men who were in touch
with their healing powers, who had taught me how to “draw
up the powers from the deep,” I grieved for this new
generation who seemed so modern, so sophisticated, and so
lost. And I thought we should call our support group “Sisters
of the Yam” to honor Bambara’s work and the wisdom she
offered to us. I also felt the “yam” was a life-sustaining
symbol of black kinship and community. Everywhere black
women live in the world, we eat yam. It is a symbol of our
diasporic connections. Yams provide nourishment for the
body as food yet they are also used medicinally—to heal the
body.

Our collective hope for the group was that it would be a space
where black women could name their pain and find ways of
healing. The power of the group to transform one another’s
lives seemed to be determined by the intensity of each
individuars desire to recover, to find a space within and
without, where she could sustain the will to be well and create
affirming habits of being. The Salt Eaters begins with a
question, asked by the elder black woman healer. She says to
Velma, who has tried to kill herself and is barely alive, “Are
you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Only an
affirmative response makes healing possible. In her
introduction to the recentiy published collection of essays The
Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves,
Evelyn White reminds readers of the grim statistics that
document the grave health problems facing black women.
Significantly, she reports that “more than 50 percent of black
women live in a state of emotional distress.” This will
surprise few black women, who are daily assaulted by
institutionalized structures of domination that have as one of

23
their central agendas undermining our capacity to experience
well-being.

In the Sisters of the Yam support groups, which continued for

years, we found that one important source of healing emerged
when we got in touch with all the factors in our lives that
were causing particular pain. For black females, and males
too, that means learning about the myriad ways racism,
sexism, class
exploitation, homophobia, and various other structures of
domination operate in our daily lives to undermine our
capacity to be self-determining. Without knowing what
factors have created certain problems in the first place we
could not begin to develop meaningful strategies of personal
and collective resistance. Black female self-recovery, like all
black self-recovery, is an expression of a liberatory political
practice. Living as we do in a white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchal context that can best exploit us when we lack a
firm grounding in self and identity (knowledge of who we are
and where we have come from), choosing “wellness” is an act
of political resistance. Before many of us can effectively
sustain engagement in organized resistance struggle, in black
liberation movement, we need to undergo a process of
self-recovery that can heal individual wounds that may
prevent us from functioning fully.

In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, I

want to share those strategies for self-recovery that I and
other black women have used to heal our lives in Sisters of
the Yam support groups and elsewhere. Though I write about
the healing process as an individual, the insights shared are
collective. They emerge from my lived experience of
community and communion with black people. Even though

24
our collective healing as a people must be a collective
process, one that includes black men, I speak here directiy to
black women because I am most familiar with the issues we
face.

Often when I tell black folks that I believe the realm of

mental health, of psychic well-being, is an important arena for
black liberation struggle, they reject the idea that any
“therapy”—be it in a self-help program or a professional
therapeutic setting—could be a location for political praxis.
This should be no surprise. Traditional therapy, mainstream
psychoanalytical practices, often do not consider “race” an
important issue, and as a result do not adequately address the
mental-health dilemmas of black people. Yet these dilemmas
are very real. They persist in our daily life and they
undermine our capacity to live fully and joyously. They even
prevent us from participating in organized collective struggle
aimed at ending domination and transforming society. In
traditional southern black folk life, there was full recognition
that the needs of the spirit had to be addressed if individuals
were to be fully self-actualized. In our conventional religious
experience we sang songs that posed profound questions like:
“Is it well with your soul? Are you free and made whole?”
Psychological problems were not ignored back then. They
were treated by the diverse and usually uncertified “healers”
who folks knew to take their troubles to. In the years before
television, folks talked to one another. Conversation and
story-telling were important locations for sharing information
about the self, for healing. Let us remember that
psychotherapy is often called the “talking cure.”

Recently, I appeared with other guests on a talk show which

focused on the crisis in black family life, and how it is

25
exemplified by domestic violence. We were asked to suggest
strategies that would help. I urged that black families talk
more with one another, openly and honestly. In his essay
“Dying as the Last Stage of Growth,” Mwalimu Imara speaks
about the importance of open communication:

We seldom think of conversation as commitment, but it is. I

find that expressing what I really feel and telling another
person what is actually important to me at the moment is
difficult. It requires a commitment on my part to do so, and I
sense that this is true for most of us. It is equally difficult to
listen. We are usually so full of our own thoughts and
responses that we seldom really listen close enough to one
another to grasp the real flavor of what the other person is
attempting to convey. Creative communication in depth is
what allows us to experience a sense of belonging to others. It
is the force that limits the destructive potential in our lives
and what promotes the growth aspects. Life is a struggle.
Coping with a lifetime of change is a struggle, but through a
lifetime of change we will experience ourselves as full
persons only to the degree that we allow ourselves that
commitment to others which keeps us in creative dialogue.

It is important that black people talk to one another, that we

talk with friends and allies, for the telling of our stories
enables us to name our pain, our suffering, and to seek
healing.

When I opened my tattered copy of The Salt Eaters today, I

found these words written in pencil on the back cover. They
were
spoken to me by a student seeking recovery: “Healing occurs
through testimony, through gathering together everything

26
available to you and reconciling.” This is a book about
reconciliation. It is meant to serve as a map, charting a
journey that can lead us back to that place dark and deep
within us, where we were first known and loved, where the
arms that held us hold us still.

27
28
1
Seeking After Truth
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each
other until it becomes a habit because what was native has
been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
But we can practice being gende with each other by being
gentie with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by
giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us,
by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel.
We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet
her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions
toward fulfillment…As we arm ourselves with ourselves and
each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving
and begin to speak the impossible—or what has always
seemed like the impossible—to one another. The first step
toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to
each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.

—Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and

Anger,” Sister Outsider

Healing takes place within us as we speak the truth of our

lives. In M. Scott Peck’s popular discussion of a new healing
psychology in The Road Less Traveled., he emphasizes the
link between dedication to truth and our capacity to be well.
He stresses that: “One of the roots of mental illness is
invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told
and lies we have told ourselves.” Commitment to truth-telling

29
is thus the first step in any process of self-recovery. A culture
of domination is necessarily a culture
where lying is an acceptable social norm. It, in fact, is
required. White folks knew that they were lying about African
slaves who labored from sun-up to sundown when they then
told the world that those same slaves were “lazy.” White
supremacy has always relied upon a structure of deceit to
perpetuate degrading racial stereotypes, myths that black
people were inferior, more “animalistic.” Within the
colonizing process, black people were socialized to believe
that survival was possible only if they learned how to deceive.
And indeed, this was often the case.

Slaves often told “lies” to white oppressors to keep from

being brutally punished or murdered. They learned that the art
of hiding behind a false appearance could be useful when
dealing with the white master and mistress. Skillful lying
could protect one’s safety, could help one gain access to
greater resources, or make resistance possible. Slave
narratives testify that the ability to deceive was a requirement
for survival. One collection of slave narratives edited by
Gilbert Osofsky is even tided Puttin’ On Ole Massa. In her
slave narrative Incidents in the Ufe of a Slave Girl’ Harriet
Jacobs expresses motherly pride that her children learn at an
early age that they must keep the secret of her hiding place
from oppressive white people as well as untrustworthy black
folks. A Jamaican proverb that was often quoted among
slaves urged folks to “play fool, to catch wise.” This was seen
as essential for black survival, even if it required lying and
deceit.

Any reader of slave narratives knows that religious black

folks expressed anger and rage that they were forced by

30
oppressive social circumstances to commit the sin of “lying.”
Slaves expressed righteous indignation that oppressive white
people created a dehumanizing social structure where
truth-telling could be valued but not practiced and where
black people were judged inferior because of their “inability”
to be truthful. Caught in a double-bind, on one hand believing
in the importance of honesty, but on the other hand knowing
that it was not prudent to always speak truthfully to one’s
oppressors, slaves judiciously withheld information and lied
when necessary. Even free black people knew that white
supremacist power could so easily be asserted in an
oppressive way, that they too practiced the art of hiding
behind a false appearance in the interest of survival. In The
Narrative of Tunsford Earn, published in 1848, Lane stated
that even after freedom:

I had endeavored to conduct myself as not to become

obnoxious to the white inhabitants, knowing as I did their
power, and their hostility to the colored people…First, I had
made no display of the little property or money I possessed,
but in every way I wore as much as possible the aspect of
slavery. Second, I had never appeared to be even so
intelligent as I really was. This all colored in the south, free
and slaves, find it particularly necessary for their own comfort
and safety to observe.

The realities of daily life in white-supremacist America

conveyed to black people in the long years after slavery had
ended that it was still not in their interest to forsake this
practice of dissimulation. Continued racial oppression,
especially when it took the form of lynching and outright
murder of black people, made it clear to all black folks that
one had to be careful about speaking the truth to whites.

31
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s much quoted poem gives eloquent
witness to how conscious black folks were of the way that
they had to practice falsehood in daily life:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile,
With tom and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

The justification for “wearing a mask” is obvious when we

consider the circumstances of living in conditions of legal
racial apartheid, where black folks had so little recourse with
which to address wTrongs perpetrated against them by whites.
Yet the time
has come when we must examine to what extent the practice
of dissimulation, of being deceitful, carried over into our
social norms with one another. Encouraged to wear the mask
to ensure survival in relation to the white world, black folks
found themselves using strategies of dissimulation and
withholding truth in interpersonal relationships within black
communities. This was especially true for gender relations.

Patriarchal politics not only gave black men a bit of an edge

over black women, it affirmed that males did not have to
answer to females. Hence, it was socially acceptable for all
men in patriarchal society (black men were no exception) to
lie and deceive to maintain power over women. Just as the
slaves had learned from their white masters the art of

32
dissimulation, women learned that they could subvert male
power over them by also withholding truth. The many
southern black women who learned to keep a bit of money
stashed away somewhere that “he don’t know about” were
responding to the reality of domestic cruelty and violence and
the need to have means to escape. However, the negative
impact of these strategies was that truth-telling, honest and
open communication, was less and less seen as necessary to
the building of positive love relationships.

Even though most black children raised in traditional southern

homes are taught the importance of honesty, the lesson is
undermined when parents are not honest. Growing up, many
of us saw that grown folks did not always practice the same
honesty they told us was so important. Or, many times, we
would tell the “truth” only to be punished for such talk. And
again, since racism was still the crucial factor shaping power
relations between black and white people, there was still an
emphasis on practicing dissimulation—one that persists in
most black people’s lives.

Many of the survival strategies that were once useful to black

people, like dissimulation, are no longer appropriate to the
lives we are living and therefore do us grave harm. Imagine,
for example, this scenario: A black woman professor who has
never completed her Ph.D. finds that in her daily life most
folks she interacts with simply assume that she has this
degree. She finds it easier not to explain. And indeed finds
that she receives greater respect and
recognition when folks see her as doctor so-and-so. Yet, there
is a price she must pay for this deception—inner stress, fear
of being found out, fear of losing the status she has falsely
acquired. Now, one healthy response she could have had

33
when she found that people accorded her greater respect when
they assumed she had the degree would have been to use this
information as a catalyst inspiring her to complete unfinished
graduate work. We could all give countless examples related
to jobs where black folks feel that the decks are stacked
against us to begin with because of racism and therefore feel
it is okay to lie about skills, experience, etc. Unfortunately
such strategies may help one get jobs but the burden of
maintaining deception may be so great that it renders
individuals psychologically unable to withstand the pressure.
Lies hurt. While they may give the teller greater advantage in
one arena, they may undermine her well-being in another.

Cultivating the art of dissimulation has also created an

over-valuation of “appearance” in black life. So much so that
black children are often raised to believe that it is more
important how things seem than the way they really are. If
illusions are valued more than reality, and black children are
taught how to skillfully create them even as they are
simultaneously deprived of the means to face reality, they are
being socialized to feel comfortable, at ease, only in situations
where lying is taking place. They are being taught to exist in a
state of denial. These psychic conditions lay the groundwork
for mental stress, for mental illness. Dissimulation makes us
dysfunctional. Since it encourages us to deny what we
genuinely feel and experience, we lose our capacity to know
who we really are and what we need and desire. When I can
stand before a class of predominantly black students who
refuse to believe that conscious decisions and choices are
made as to what roles black actors will portray in a given
television show, I feel compelled to name that their desire to
believe that the images they see emerge from a politically
neutral fantasy world of make-believe is disempowering—is a

34
part of a colonizing process. If they cannot face the way
structures of domination are institutionalized, they cannot
possibly organize to resist the racism and sexism that
informs the white-dominated media’s construction of black
representation. And, on a more basic level, they lack the
capacity to protect themselves from being daily bombarded
and assaulted by disenabling imagery. Our mental well-being
is dependent on our capacity to face reality. We can only face
reality by breaking through denial.

In Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, Celie, the black

heroine, only begins to recover from her traumatic
experiences of incest/rape, domestic violence, and marital
rape when she is able to tell her story, to be open and honest.
Reading fictional narratives where black female characters
break through silences to speak the truth of their lives, to give
testimony, has helped individual black women take the risk to
openly share painful experiences. We see examples of such
courageous testimony in The Black Women’s Health Book.
Yet many black readers of Alice Walker’s fiction were
angered by Celie’s story. They sought to “punish” Walker by
denouncing the work, suggesting it represented a betrayal of
blackness. If this is the way folks respond to fiction, we can
imagine then how much harder it is for black women to
actually speak honesdy in daily life about their real traumatic
experiences. And yet there is no healing in silence. Collective
black healing can take place only when we face reality. As
poet Audre Lorde reminds us in “Litany for Survival”:

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent

35
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Collective unmasking is an important act of resistance. If it

remains a mark of our oppression that as black people we
cannot
be dedicated to truth in our lives, without putting ourselves at
risk, then it is a mark of our resistance, our commitment to
liberation, when we claim the right to speak the truth of our
reality anyway.

Many individual black women, particularly those among us

involved in the feminist movement, consider it important that
black females who have been victimized by traumatic events
like incest and rape speak openly about their experiences. Yet
some are not necessarily committed to a philosophy of
well-being dedicated to truth. While these individuals may
applaud a black woman who publicly names an injury done to
her by a man, they may fail to support her if she is committed
to speaking truthfully in other areas of her daily life. These
women may punish another black woman for speaking
truthfully, or critique her by suggesting that she does not
possess certain social graces. This is especially true among
professional classes of black women who buy into notions of
social etiquette informed by bourgeois values committed to
keeping the public and the private separate. Indeed, black
females from working-class backgrounds who have been
raised to speak openly and honesdy may find those traits a
social handicap when dealing in bourgeois circles. They will
be encouraged, usually by forms of social exclusion (which

36
serve as punishment), to change their ways. It is not easy for a
black female to be dedicated to truth. And yet the willingness
to be honest is essential for our well-being. Dissimulation
may make one more successful, but it also creates
life-threatening stress.

Among poor and working-class black people the impetus to

dissimulate is usually connected with the desire to cover up
realities that are regarded as “shameful.” Many of us were
raised to be believe that we should never speak publicly about
our private lives, because the public world was powerful
enough to use such information against us. For poor people,
especially those receiving any form of government aid, this
might mean loss of material resources or that one’s children
could be taken away. Yet, again, we hold onto these strategies
even when they are not connected to our survival and
undermine our well-being. Telling the truth about one’s life is
not simply about naming the “bad” things, exposing horrors.
It
is also about being able to speak openly and honesdy about
feelings, about a variety of experiences. It is fundamentally
not about withholding information so as to exercise power
over others.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of my sisters about a

very obvious lie that someone in our family had told to me.
Emotionally upset, I was crying and saying, “I could deal
with anything this family does if folks would just tell the
truth. It’s the lying that makes me feel crazy.” We had a deep
discussion about telling the truth, wherein she confessed that
she tells a lot of lies. I was shocked, since I had always seen
her as an honest person. And I wanted to know why. She
admitted that it started with trying to gain a financial edge in

37
her domestic life, but then she found herself just lying about
litde things even when it was not necessary. Analyzing this,
we decided that the ability to withhold information, even it
was something very trivial, gave her a feeling of power. We
talked about the importance of learning that this feeling is
“illusory” for it does not correspond with actual power to
effect changes in one’s daily social reality and is thus
ultimately disenabling. Parents who lie do nothing to teach
children the importance of speaking the truth.

For many poor black people, learning to be honest must take

place in a situation where one also learns to confront the
question of shame. The dominant culture acts as though the
very experience of poverty is shameful. So how then can the
poor speak about the conditions of their lives openly and
honesdy. Those of us raised in traditional southern black
homes were taught to critique the notion of “shame” when it
was evoked to strip us of dignity and integrity. We were
taught to believe that there was nothing shameful about being
poor, that richness of life could not ultimately be determined
by our access to material goods. Black women working as
maids in white homes had first-hand experience to prove
money did not guarantee happiness, well-being, or integrity.

It is one of the tragic ironies of contemporary life that the

privileged classes have convinced the poor and underclass
that they must hide and deny the realities of their lives while
the privileged go public, in therapy, sharing all that they
might have
repressed out of shame, in order to try and heal their wounds.
In the introduction to my third book, Talking Back, I wrote
about the importance of speaking openly and honesdy about
our lives. I wrote about the negative “flak” I get from folks

38
for being honest. Or lately, in bourgeois work settings, it is
said about me that I do not keep confidences, when what is
really happening is that I politically choose to resist being put
in the position of keeping the secrets of the powerful, or of
being welcomed into social circles of deceit. I had written
years ago that “even folks who talk about ending domination
seem to be afraid to break down the barriers separating public
and private” by truth-telling. That still seems to be the case.
Hence, it must be remembered that to be open and honest in a
culture of domination, a culture that relies on lying, is a
courageous gesture. Within white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchal culture, black people are not supposed to be
“well.” This culture makes wellness a white luxury. To
choose against that culture, to choose wellness, we must be
dedicated to truth.

By giving up the illusory power that comes from lying and

manipulation and opting instead for the personal power and
dignity that comes from being honest, black women can begin
to eliminate life-threatening pain from our lives. As I wrote in
Talking Back:

There are some folks for whom openness is not about the
luxury of “will I choose to share this or tell that,” but rather,
“will I survive—will I make it through—will I stay alive?”
And openness is about how to be well and telling the truth is
about how to put the broken bits and pieces of the heart back
together again. It is about being whole, being wholehearted.

Many black women in the United States are brokenhearted.

They walk around in daily life carrying so much hurt, feeling
wasted, yet pretending in every area of their life that
everything is under control. It hurts to pretend. It hurts to live

39
with lies. The time has come for black women to attend to
that hurt. M. Scott Peck ends his chapter “Withholding Truth”
by reminding us that folks who are honest and open can feel
free:

They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have
to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct
new lies to hide
old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or
maintaining disguises…By their openness, people dedicated
to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their
courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

In black life, the church has been one of the few places that
has encouraged black folks to live truthful lives. Yet
hypocrisy has come to be a central characteristic of the
contemporary black church. The old black folks took the
Biblical passage that declares “the truth will set you free” to
heart. And, while the church might have changed, these words
are still true. Their healing power can be felt in black
women’s lives if we dare to look at ourselves, our lives, our
experiences and then, without shame, courageously name
what we see.

40
41
2
Tongues of Fire: Learning
Critical Affirmation
Writing about truth-telling in relationship to black experience
is difficult. Making connections between the psychological
strategies black folks have historically used to make life
bearable in an oppressive/exploitive social context and then
calling attention to the way these strategies may be
disenabling now when we use them in daily life, particularly
in intimate relationships, can too easily sound academic. I
look back on the previous chapter and it does not read with
the ease that I have become accustomed to in self-help books.
Maybe this is why the self-help books we read rarely talk
about political realities. I want to shift the tone now, however,
and speak more concretely about how we confront issues of
openness and honesty. Oftentimes, black folks find it easier to
“tell it like it is” when we are angry, pissed, and desire to use
“the truth” as a weapon to wound others. In such cases, even
though a speaker may be open and honest, their primary
agenda may be to assert power over another person and hence
use the practice of truth-telling to assault someone else’s
psyche. That is why this chapter attempts to distinguish
between the harsh critiques we give one another, which may
contain “truth,” and liberating truth-telling—they are not the
same.

42
Raised in a family of sharp-tongued women, who were known
to raise their voices, to argue and cuss, I and my five sisters
learned early on how “telling it like is” could be used as a
weapon of power to humiliate and shame someone. Here is an
example from my
experience. Growing up I was very skinny and saw this as a
sign of extreme unattractiveness. Relendessly teased by my
sisters and my brother (who often told elaborate stories that
entertained everyone about how often he had witnessed the
wind blowing me away and had to chase after me and hold
onto my feet to keep from losing me), my family completely
reinforced the sense that to be skinny was to be ugly and a
cause for shame. Now, whenever my family described me as
skinny, they were being honest. Yet, what was the intent
behind the honesty? Usually, it was to make me the object of
ridicule and mockery. Though often the object of unkind
“reading” that humiliated and shamed, I learned to protect
myself by also developing the skill to name just that bit of
information about someone that would expose them and make
them feel vulnerable. What we all participated in was a
practice of verbal assault, truth-telling as a weapon. In
contemporary black culture this practice often takes the form
of calling somebody out, that is “reading” them or, in a milder
form, “dissin” them. Having someone critically analyze you
and expose aspects of your reality you might like to keep
hidden or deny can be constructive and even pleasurable;
however, it usually takes place in a context where the intent is
to hurt or wound.

Exploring the way we as black women use this form of

“telling it like is” will help some of us, who may see
ourselves as open and honest, examine whether we are really
dedicated to truth-telling when we are exposing something

43
about someone else. Harsh criticism, with a truth-telling
component, is often a major characteristic of black
mother-and-daughter relationships. Since many black women
were and still are raised in households where most of the love
and affection we receive comes from black women
elders—mothers, aunts, and grandmothers—who may also
use criticism in a verbally abusive way, we may come to see
such a practice as a caring gesture. And even though it
wounds, we may imagine this hurting takes place for our own
good.

Let me give an example that is fresh in my memory because it

was a story told to me just yesterday by T., a young black
woman. Attending a girlfriend’s college graduation, she went
out to eat with
her friend’s family. During dinner, the mother kept calling
attention to the fact that her daughter needed to lose weight.
Now it should be obvious that the public setting was not an
appropriate place for such a dialogue. And why on a special
day, a time when the daughter’s achievements should be
focused on and celebrated, does the mother call attention to
perceived flaws or failings? When T. tried to intervene on her
friend’s behalf and assert that she thought she looked fine, she
was kicked under the table by her friend and made to hush.
Probably, like many of us, the friend is so accustomed to her
mother choosing inappropriate moments to offer criticism, or
always being critical, that she adjusts by simply not
responding. For some of us, the endless negative critiques we
have received from our mothers have been very disenabling.
Yet, having learned how to use criticism with truth content to
wound, we may employ the same practices. And like mothers
who do this, when called on it, we may fall back on insisting
that we are “just being honest.” Here honesty is evoked to

44
cover up abusive practices and hurting intent. This is not the
kind of honesty that is healing. And it is vitally important for
black female well-being that we can distinguish it from a
commitment to truth-telling.

Often black females are raised in households where we are

told by mothers who constantly give disparaging critiques, “I
would be less than a mother if I did not tell you the truth.”
When trying to analyze the sources of this faulty logic, I trace
it back, once again, to the survival strategies black folks
developed to adjust to living in a white-supremacist context.
The reality of racial apartheid was such that most black folks
knew that they could never really trust that they would be
“safe” in that white-dominated world outside the home or the
all-black neighborhood. To gain a sense that they had some
control over this situation, they set standards for behavior that
were seen as appropriate safeguards. When racial integration
happened, black folks did not immediately disregard these
strategies, they adjusted them. One adjustment was the
attempt to second-guess what the critical white world might
say to disparage, ridicule, or mock and to prevent that from
happening through self-critique and changing one’s behavior
accordingly. We were
raised hearing stories about mothers punishing black children
who were given no clear sense of what they had done that was
considered wrong or inappropriate, because they felt that the
child might assert themselves in ways outside the home that
might lead white people to abuse and punish them. Setting up
a system of internal checks required not only vigilant
self-scrutiny, but also a willingness to place oneself in the
mindset of the oppressor. This meant that black people were
not focusing attention on constructing ways to critically
affirm ourselves. Instead they worked at developing strategies

45
to avoid punishment. Since no in-depth studies have been
done looking at attempts on the part of black people to see
ourselves through the negative eyes of the colonizer/
oppressor, we can only speculate that such practices helped
create a social climate where black folks could be harshly
critical of one another. Living in a sexist society, where
mothers are often blamed for any problem that arises with
children, it makes sense that black mothers have often felt the
need to assert control over their children in ways that are
oppressive and dominating. How else can they “prove” to
outside onlookers that they are good parents? The desire, of
course, is to be beyond reproach.

Fierce parental critique and the threat of punishment is a

strategy many black women use to assert their authority with
children. One has only to observe black women parenting
young children in public places. Often the children are spoken
to harshly—bring your ass over here like I told you, sit your
black ass down and shut up—not because the mother is angry
at the children but because she desires them to behave
“appropriately” in public settings. She wants to be perceived
as a good parent. Notice though that being a good parent is
made synonymous with the extent to which one is able to
exercise control over a child’s behavior. We would do well to
connect this obsession with control to the strategies of
domination white people have used, and still use, to maintain
authority over us. We need to better understand how black
folks who feel relatively powerless to control their destiny
exercise negative power over one another in hierarchical
settings.

The parent-child relationship in a culture of domination like

this one is based on the assumption that the adult has the right

46
to rule the child. It is a model of parenting that mirrors the
master-slave relationship. Black parents’ obsession with
exercising control over children, making certain that they are
“obedient” is an expression of this distorted view of family
relations. The parents’ desire to “care” for the child is placed
in competition with the perceived need to exercise control.
This is graphically illustrated in Audre Lorde’s
autobiographical work Zami. Descriptions of her childhood
here offer glimpses of that type of strict parenting many black
parents felt was needed to prepare black children for life in a
hostile white society. Not understanding the way racism
works as a child, the young Audre decides to run for
sixth-grade class president. She tells the news to her mother
only to be greeted with these furious words:

What in hell are you doing getting yourself involved with so

much foolishness? You don’t have better sense in your head
than that? What-the-france do you need with election? We
sent you to school to work, not to prance about with
president-this election-that. Get down the rice, girl, and stop
talking your foolishness.

When Audre participates in the election anyway and comes

home crying and emotionally crushed because she did not
win, her mother responds with rage, striking a blow that
Lorde remembers “caught me full on the side of my head.”
Then her mother says:

See, the bird forgets, but the trap doesn’t! I warned you! What
you think you doing coming into this house wailing about
election? If I told you once I have told you a hundred times,
don’t chase yourself behind these people, haven’t I? What
kind of ninny raise up here to think those good-for-nothing

47
white piss-jets would pass over some little jacabat girl to
select you anything?

And the blows continued. Though Lorde’s background is

West Indian, northern, and urban, those of us growing up in
the south confronted the same craziness in our parents. I can
remember when my sister V. wanted to play tennis after the
schools were racially integrated. Up until then our black
schools did not have tennis teams. Our parents could not
afford the
necessary equipment, however, but rather than explain this,
they criticized V. and made it seem that she had a problem for
wanting to play this game. Often after such strange incidents,
after maternal rage had subsided, we might be given a bit of
tenderness, behavior that further reinforced the notion that
somehow this fierce, humiliating critique was for our own
good. Again these negative parental strategies were employed
to prepare black children for entering a white-dominated
society that our parents knew would not treat us well. They
thought that by making us “tough,” teaching us to endure pain
with a stiff upper lip, they were ensuring our survival.

Knowing the concern and care that informs such behavior,

and understanding it better when we grow older, often leads
black women in adult life to imagine that our “survival” and
the successes we have gained are indeed due to our having
been forced to confront negative critique and punishment.
Consequently it is often difficult for black women to admit
that dominating mothers who used a constant barrage of
negative verbal abuse to “whip us into shape” were not acting
in a caring manner, even if they acted out of positive intent.
When I “got grown” and had to cope with running my own
household—keeping it clean, buying necessities, paying the

48
bills—I began to look with awe at Mama, wondering how she
found the time to take care of seven children, clean, shop, and
cook three meals a day with very little help from our
patriarchal father. Understanding these hardships made the
constant harsh humiliating way she often spoke to us make
sense. I find it easy to forgive that harshness, but I now can
also honestly name that it was hurting, that it did not make me
or my siblings feel securely loved. Indeed, I always felt that
not behaving appropriately meant that one risked wrath and
punishment, and more frighteningly, the loss of love.

It is important for black women engaged in a process of

self-recovery to examine the way in which harsh critique was
used to “check” and police our behavior so that we can
examine the extent to which we relate similarly to others.
When my siblings and I were children, we vowed that we
would not yell at our kids or say
mean things the way Mama and Daddy did. Yet, some of us
have, unwittingly, broken that vow. Visiting one of my sisters
and her family for the first time, I was shocked at the harsh
negative manner she used wThen speaking to her children. It
was so much like our childhood, only there was one
difference, her children used the same “nasty” tone of voice
when speaking to each other. When I gently called her on it
and voiced my concern, she expressed surprise. Working all
day and coming home to more work, she had not really
noticed how she and the kids were talking to one another. To
make my honest critique a constructive, caring one, I
suggested that we do role playing with the kids after
dinner—talking the way they talk to one another, then
showing how it could be done differently. Rather than saying:
“Sit your ass down. I ain’t gon tell you no more,” we
practiced saying politely but firmly: “Would you please stop

49
doing that and sit down?” At first the kids made fun of their
Aunt Glo and her stories about “noise pollution” and how the
way we talk to one another can hurt our hearts and ears, but
we could all see and feel the difference. Critical affirmation
emerges only when we are willing to risk constructive
confrontation and challenge. What my sister found with her
children was that if she spoke in a completely harsh
humiliating manner she might indeed get a quicker response
than when she made declarations with caring tones, but the
effect of the latter was so much better. She improved the
family well-being even though it required greater
concentration and a little more time to frame responses in a
caring way.

To heal our wounds we must be able to critically examine our

behavior and change. For years I was a sharp-tongued woman
who often inappropriately lashed out. I have increasingly
learned to distinguish between “reading” and truth-telling.
Watching my behavior (actually jotting down on paper how
many negative critical comments I made in a day) helped me
to change my behavior. Most black women know what it is
like to bear the brunt of brutal tongue-lashings. Most of us
have been told the “truth” about ourselves in ways that have
been hurtful and humiliating. Yet, even so, many of us
continue to see harsh critique as a means
to strengthen character. We need to know that constructive
critical affirmation is just as effective a strategy for building
character, if not more so. We find this out through an ongoing
practice of critical affirmation. Often the harsh abusively
critical voice-of-authority that we heard in childhood enters
us. Then we no longer have to be in the presence of a
dominating authority figure to hear that voice, for it speaks to
us from within. In self-healing, black women can identify that

50
voice within ourselves and begin to replace it with a gentle,
compassionate, caring voice. When we see the positive results
in our lives, we are then able to extend the generosity we give
ourselves to others. Having silenced the negative voice
within, and replaced it with loving caring criticism, it is also
important for black women to practice speaking in a loving
and caring manner about what we appreciate about one
another. For such an action makes it evident to all observers
of our social reality that black women deserve care, respect,
and ongoing affirmation.

51
52
3
Work Makes Life Sweet
“Work makes life sweet!” I often heard this phrase growing
up, mainly from old black folks who did not have jobs in the
traditional sense of the word. They were usually
self-employed, living off the land, selling fishing worms,
picking up an odd job here and there. They were people who
had a passion for work. They took pride in a job done well.
My Aunt Margaret took in ironing. Folks brought her clothes
from miles around because she was such an expert. That was
in the days when using starch was common and she knew
how to do an excellent job. Watching her iron with skill and
grace was like watching a ballerina dance. Like all the other
black girls raised in the fifties that I knew, it was clear to me
that I would be a working woman. Even though our mother
stayed home, raising her seven children, we saw her
constantly at work, washing, ironing, cleaning, and cooking
(she is an incredible cook). And she never allowed her six
girls to imagine we would not be working women. No, she let
us know that we would work and be proud to work.

The vast majority of black women in the United States know

in girlhood that we will be workers. Despite sexist and racist
stereotypes about black women living off welfare, most black
women who receive welfare have been in the workforce. In
Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls, one can read about black
women who went to work in the cotton mills, usually leaving
farm labor or domestic service. Katie Geneva Cannon

53
remembers: “It was always assumed that we would work.
Work was a given in life, almost like breathing and sleeping.
I’m always surprised when I hear people talking about
somebody taking care of them, because we always knew that
we were going to work.” Like older generations of southern
black women, we were taught not only that we would be
workers, but that there was no “shame” in doing any honest
job. The black women around us who worked as maids, who
stripped tobacco when it was the season, were accorded
dignity and respect. We learned in our black churches and in
our schools that it “was not what you did, but how you did it”
that mattered.

A philosophy of work that emphasizes commitment to any

task was useful to black people living in a racist society that
for so many years made only certain jobs (usually service
work or other labor deemed “undesirable”) available to us.
Just as many Buddhist traditions teach that any task becomes
sacred when we do it mindfully and with care, southern black
work traditions taught us the importance of working with
integrity irrespective of the task. Yet these attitudes towards
work did not blind anyone to the reality that racism made it
difficult to work for white people. It took “gumption” to work
with integrity in settings where white folks were disrespectful
and downright hateful. And it was obvious to me as a child
that the black people who were saying “work makes life
sweet” were the folks who did not work for whites, who did
what they wanted to do. For example, those who sold fishing
worms were usually folks who loved to fish. Clearly there
was a meaningful connection between positive thinking about
work and those who did the work that they had chosen.

54
Most of us did not enter the workforce thinking of work in
terms of finding a “calling” or a vocation. Instead, we thought
of work as a way to make money. Many of us started our
work lives early and we worked to acquire money to buy
necessities. Some of us worked to buy school books or
needed or desired clothing. Despite the emphasis on “right
livelihood” that was present in our life growing up, my sisters
and I were more inclined to think of work in relation to doing
what you needed to do to get money to buy what you wanted.
In general, we have had unsatisfying work lives. Ironically,
Mama entered the paid workforce very late, after we were all
raised, working for the school system and at times in
domestic service, yet there are ways in which she has found
work
outside the home more rewarding than any of her children.
The black women I talked with about work tended to see jobs
primarily as a means to an end, as a way to make money to
provide for material needs. Since so many working black
women often have dependents, whether children or other
relatives, they enter the workforce with the realistic
conviction that they need to make money for survival
purposes. This attitude coupled with the reality of a job
market that remains deeply shaped by racism and sexism
means that as black women we often end up working jobs that
we do not like. Many of us feel that we do not have a lot of
options. Of the women I interviewed, the ones who saw
themselves as having options tended to have the highest
levels of education. Yet nearly all the black women I spoke
with agreed that they would always choose to work, even if
they did not need to. It was only a very few young black
females, teenagers and folks in their early twenties, who
talked with me about fantasy lives where they would be taken
care of by someone else.

55
Speaking with young black women who rely on welfare
benefits to survive economically, I found that overall they
wanted to work. However, they are acutely aware of the
difference between a job and a fulfilling vocation. Most of
them felt that it would not be a sign of progress for them to
“get off welfare” and work low-paying jobs, in situations that
could be stressful or dehumanizing. Individuals receiving
welfare who are trying to develop skills, to attend school or
college, often find that they are treated with much greater
hostility by social-service workers than if they were just
sitting at home watching television. One woman seeking
assistance was told by an angry white woman worker,
“welfare is not going to pay for you to get your B.A.” This
young woman had been making many personal sacrifices to
try and develop skills and educational resources that would
enable her to be gainfully employed and she was constantly
disappointed by the level of resentment toward her whenever
she needed to deal with social services.

Through the years, in my own working life, I have noticed

that many black women do not like or enjoy their work. The
vast
majority of women I talked to before writing this chapter
agreed that they were not satisfied with their working lives
even though they see themselves as performing well on the
job. That is why I talk so much about work-related stress in
Chapter Four. It is practically impossible to maintain a spirit
of emotional well-being if one is daily doing work that is
unsatisfying, that causes intense stress, and that gives little
satisfaction. Again and again, I found that many black women
I interviewed had far superior skills than the jobs they were
performing called for but were held back because of their
“lack of education” or, in some cases, “necessary experience.”

56
This routinely prevented them from moving upward. While
they performed their jobs well, they felt added tension
generated in the work environment by supervisors who often
saw them as “too uppity” or by their own struggle to maintain
interest in their assigned tasks. One white-woman
administrator shared that the clearly overly-skilled black
woman who works as an administrative assistant in her office
was resented by white male “bosses” who felt that she did not
have the proper attitude of a “subordinate.” When I spoke to
this woman she acknowledged not liking her job, stating that
her lack of education and the urgent need to raise children and
send them to college had prevented her from working toward
a chosen career. She holds to the dream that she will return to
school and someday gain the necessary education that will
give her access to the career she desires and deserves. Work is
so often a source of pain and frustration.

Learning how to think about work and our job choices from
the standpoint of “right livelihood” enhances black female
well-being. Our self-recovery is fundamentally linked to
experiencing that quality of “work that makes life sweet.” In
one of my favorite self-help books, Marsha Sinetar’s Do
What You Love, The Money Will Follow, the author defines
right livelihood as a concept initially coming from the
teachings of Buddha which emphasized “work consciously
chosen, done with full awareness and care, and leading to
enlightenment.” This is an attitude toward work that our
society does not promote, and it especially does not
encourage black females to think of work in this way. As
Sinetar notes:

Right Livelihood, in both its ancient and its contemporary

sense, embodies self-expression, commitment, mindfulness,

57
and conscious choice. Finding and doing work of this sort is
predicated upon high self-esteem and self-trust, since only
those who like themselves, who subjectively feel they are
trustworthy and deserving dare to choose on behalf of what is
right and true for them. When the powerful quality of
conscious choice is present in our work, we can be
enormously productive. When we consciously choose to do
work we enjoy, not only can we get things done, we can get
them done well and be intrinsically rewarded for our effort.

Black women need to learn about “right livelihood.” Even

though I had been raised in a world where elderly black
people had this wisdom, I was more socialized by the
get-ahead generation that felt how much money you were
making was more important than what you did to make that
money. We have difficult choices ahead.

As black females collectively develop greater self-esteem, a

greater sense of entitlement, we will learn from one another’s
example how to practice right livelihood. Of the black women
I interviewed the individuals who enjoyed their work the most
felt they were realizing a particular vocation or calling. C.J.
(now almost forty) recalls that generations of her family were
college-educated. She was taught to choose work that would
be linked with the political desire to enhance the overall
well-being of black people. C.J. says, “I went to college with
a mission and a passion to have my work be about
African-Americans. The spirit of mission came to me from
my family, who taught us that you don’t just work to get
money, you work to create meaning for yourself and other
people.” With this philosophy as a guiding standpoint, she has
always had a satisfying work life.

58
When one of my sisters, a welfare recipient, decided to return
to college, I encouraged her to try and recall her childhood
vocational dreams and to allow herself adult dreams, so that
she would not be pushed into preparing for a job that holds no
interest for her. Many of us must work hard to unlearn the
socialization that teaches us that we should just be lucky to
get any old job. We can begin to think about our work lives in
terms of vocation and calling. One black woman I
interviewed, who has worked as a
housewife for many years, began to experience agoraphobia.
Struggling to regain her emotional well-being, she saw a
therapist, against the will of her family. In this therapeutic
setting, she received affirmation for her desire to finish her
undergraduate degree and continue in a graduate program.
She found that finishing a master’s and becoming a college
teacher gave her enormous satisfaction. Yet this achievement
was not fully appreciated by her husband. A worker in a
factory, whose job is long and tedious, he was jealous of her
newfound excitement about work. Since her work brings her
in touch with the public, it yields rewards unlike any he can
hope to receive from his job. Although she has encouraged
him to go back to school (one of his unfulfilled goals), he is
reluctant. Despite these relational tensions, she has found that
“loving” her work has helped her attend to and transform
previous feelings of low self-esteem.

A few of the black women I interviewed claimed to be doing

work they liked but complained bitterly about their jobs,
particularly where they must make decisions that affect the
work lives of other people. One woman had been involved in
a decision-making process that required her to take a stance
that would leave another person jobless. Though many of her
peers were proud of the way she handled this difficult

59
decision, her response was to feel “victimized.” Indeed, she
kept referring to herself as “battered.” This response troubled
me for it seemed to bespeak a contradiction many women
experience in positions of power. Though we may like the
status of a power position and wielding power, we may still
want to see ourselves as “victims” in the process, especially if
we must act in ways that “good girls, dutiful daughters” have
been taught are “bad.”

I suggested to the women I interviewed that they had chosen

particular careers that involved “playing hardball” yet they
seemed to be undermining the value of their choices and the
excellence of their work by complaining that they had to get
their hands dirty and suffer some braises. I shared with them
my sense that if you choose to play hardball then you should
be prepared for the bruises and not be devastated when they
occur. In some ways it seemed to
me these black women wanted to be “equals” in a man’s
world while they simultaneously wanted to be treated like
fragile “ladies.” Had they been able to assume full
responsibility for their career choices, they would have
enjoyed their work more and been able to reward themselves
for jobs well done. In some cases it seemed that the
individuals were addicted to being martyrs. They wanted to
control everything, to be the person “in power” but also
resented the position. These individuals, like those I describe
in the chapter on stress, seemed not to know when to set
boundaries or that work duties could be shared. They
frequently over-extended themselves. When we over-extend
ourselves in work settings, pushing ourselves to the breaking
point, we rarely feel positive about tasks even if we are
performing them well.

60
Since many people rely on powerful black women in jobs
(unwittingly turning us into “mammies” who will bear all the
burdens—and there are certainly those among us who take
pride in this role), we can easily become tragically
over-extended. I noticed that a number of us (myself
included) talk about starting off in careers that we really
“loved” but over-working to the point of “burn-out” so that
the pleasure we initially found dissipated. I remember finding
a self-help book that listed twelve symptoms of “burn-out,”
encouraging readers to go down the list and check those that
described their experience. At the end, it said, “If you checked
three or more of these boxes, chances are you are probably
suffering from burn-out.” I found I had checked all twelve!
That let me know it w^as time for a change. Yet changing
was not easy. When you do something and you do it well, it is
hard to take a break, or to confront the reality that I had to
face, which was that I really didn’t want to be doing the job I
was doing even though I did it well. In retrospect it occurred
to me that it takes a lot more energy to do a job well when
you really do not want to be doing it. This work is often more
tiring. And maybe that extra energy would be better spent in
the search for one’s true vocation or calling.

In my case, I have always wanted to be a writer. And even

though I have become just that and I love this work, my
obsessive
fears about “not being poor” have made it difficult for me to
take time away from my other career, teaching and lecturing,
to “just write.” Susan Jeffers’ book, Feel the Fear and Do It
Anyway, has helped me to finally reach the point in my life
where I can take time to “just write.” Like many black women
who do not come from privileged class backgrounds, who do
not have family we can rely on to help if the financial going

61
gets rough (we in fact are usually the people who are relied
on), it feels very frightening to think about letting go of
financial security, even for a short time, to do work one loves
but may not pay the bills. In my case, even though I had
worked with a self-created financial program aimed at
bringing me to a point in life when I could focus solely on
writing, I still found it hard to take time away. It was then that
I had to tap into my deep fears of ending up poor and counter
them with messages that affirm my ability to take care of
myself economically irrespective of the circumstance. These
fears are not irrational (though certainly mine were a bit
extreme). In the last few years, I have witnessed several
family members go from working as professionals to
unemployment and various degrees of homelessness. Their
experiences highlighted the reality that it is risky to be
without secure employment and yet they also indicated that
one could survive, even start all over again if need be.

My sister V. quit a job that allowed her to use excellent skills

because she had major conflicts with her immediate
supervisor. She quit because the level of on-the-job stress had
become hazardous to her mental well-being. She quit
confident that she would find a job in a few months. When
that did not happen, she was stunned. It had not occurred to
her that she would find it practically impossible to find work
in the area she most wanted to live in. Confronting racism,
sexism, and a host of other unclear responses, months passed
and she has not found another job. It has changed her whole
life. While material survival has been difficult, she is learning
more about what really matters to her in life. She is learning
about “right livelihood.” The grace and skill with which she
has confronted her circumstance has been a wonderful
example for me. With therapy, with the help of friends

62
and loved ones, she is discovering the work she would really
like to do and no longer feels the need to have a high-paying,
high-status job. And she has learned more about what it
means to take risks.

In Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow, Sinetar

cautions those of us who have not been risk-takers to go
slowly, to practice, to begin by taking small risks, and to plan
carefully. Because I have planned carefully, I am able to
finally take a year’s leave from my teaching job without pay.
During this time, I want to see if I enjoy working solely as a
writer and if I can support myself. I want to see if (like those
old-time black folks I talk about at the start of the essay)
doing solely the work I feel most “called” to do will enhance
my joy in living. For the past few months, I have been “just
writing” and indeed, so far, I feel it is “work that makes life
sweet.”

The historical legacy of black women shows that we have

worked hard, long, and well, yet rarely been paid what we
deserve. We rarely get the recognition we deserve. However,
even in the midst of domination, individual black women
have found their calling, and do the work they are best suited
for. Onnie Lee Logan, the Alabama midwife who tells her
story in Moth emit, never went to high school or college,
never made a lot of money in her working life, but listened to
her inner voice and found her calling. Logan shares:

I let God work the plan on my life and I am satisfied at what

has happened to me in my life. The sun wasn’t shinin’ every
time and moon wasn’t either. I was in the snow and the rain at
night by my lonely self…There had been many dreary nights

63
but I didn’t look at em as dreary nights. I had my mind on
where I was going and what I was going for.

Whatever I’ve done, I’ve done as well as I could and

beyond…I’m satisfied at what has happened in my life.
Perfectly satisfied at what my life has done for me. I was a
good midwife. One of the best as they say. This book was the
last thing I had planned to do until God said well done. I
consider myself—in fact if I leave tomorrow^—I’ve lived my
life and I’ve lived it well.

The life stories of black women like Onnie Logan remind us

that “right livelihood” can be found irrespective of our class
position, or the level of our education.

To know the work we are “called” to do in this world, we

must know ourselves. The practice of “right livelihood”
invites us to become more fully aware of our reality, of the
labor we do, and of the way we do it. Now that I have chosen
my writing more fully than at any other moment of my life,
the work itself feels more joyous. I feel my whole being
affirmed in the act of writing. As black women unlearn the
conventional thinking about work—which views money and/
or status as more important than the work we do or the way
we feel about that work—we will find our way back to those
moments celebrated by our ancestors, when work was a
passion. We will know again that “work makes life sweet.”

64
65
4
Knowing Peace: An End to
Stress
It is against blockage between ourselves and others—those
who are alive and those who are dead—that we must work. In
blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves
off from pain. But in the long run, the wall, which prevents
growth, hurts us more than the pain, which, if we will only
bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone.

—Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

When we live in peace, our lives are not tormented by the

anguish of stress. So much of what has been said in the
previous chapters about black women’s lives should indicate
that ours are far from peaceful. Stress is a hidden killer
underlying all the major health problems black women face.
Over-burdened and over-extended, stress is the body’s
response to carrying more than it can bear. When we are
trying to do more than we can, confront more than we could
possibly cope with in several lifetimes, we end up feeling that
our lives are out of control, that we can only “keep a hold on
life” by managing and controlling. Ironically, stress usually
manifests itself most harmfully when things are out of
control, yet many black women try to cope by attempting to
assert and maintain control, which of course intensifies the
stress. When we feel that we can no longer assert meaningful,

66
transformative agency in our lives, when we are doing too
much, when we experience an ongoing impending sense of
doom, constant anxiety, and worry, stress has invaded our
lives and taken over. Without our even knowing quite
how it happened, we have forgotten what it feels like to live
without debilitating stress.

Life-threatening stress has become the normal psychological

state for many black women (and black men). Much of the
stress black people experience is directly related to the way in
which systems of domination—racism, sexism, and
capitalism, in particular—disrupt our capacities to fully
exercise self-determination. It is a tragic irony that many
more black people suffer undue anxiety and stress as a result
of racial integration. Elsewhere, I have talked about the fact
that coming home to black neighborhoods that were not
controlled by a visible white presence provided black people
the necessary space to recoup and regain a measure of sanity.
The power of these segregated communities was that they
were places where black folks had oppositional world views
that helped us sustain our integrity, our very lives. There are
many segregated communities still but they are not often
constituted as communities of resistance. Now many black
people work at jobs in integrated settings where the presence
of racism may bring added tension to the work setting, and
then we must encounter this same terrorizing tension in
banks, stores, supermarkets, or public transportation. Many
black people, especially the underclass and working poor, feel
as though they are powerless to change most things in their
lives. And yet they have to survive. They have to find the
wherewithal to get up in the morning and make it happen. The
whole process is profoundly stressful.

67
Since black women are major providers in black households,
both in those where men are present and where they are not,
we often feel it is up to us to keep it all together. If we
examine the history of black women and work in this society,
it clearly shows that we have been mostly employed in
arduous, backbreaking jobs where we were forced to push
ourselves way past normal limits. (Let us not forget that
slavery was one ongoing work-until-you-drop system.) Black
women then return home, to what sociologist Arlie
Hochschild calls “the second shift,” that is housework and
childcare, usually without the help of male partners. The point
I want to make is that black people, and black women in
particular,
are so well socialized to push ourselves past healthy limits
that we often do not know how to set protective boundaries
that would eliminate certain forms of stress in our lives. This
problem cuts across class. What’s going on when professional
black women who “slave” all day on the job, come home and
work some more, then provide care and counseling for folks
who call late into the night? Is it guilt about material privilege
that makes us feel we remain “just plain folks” if we too are
working ourselves into the ground even if we don’t have to?
Rarely are the statistics on heart disease, depression, ulcers,
hypertension, and addiction broken down by class so that we
might see that black women who “have” are nearly as
afflicted by these stress-related illnesses as those who “have
not.”

In a society that socializes everyone to believe that black

women were put here on this earth to be litde worker bees
who never stop, it is not surprising that we too have trouble
calling a halt. When my five sisters and I left home to set up
our households, one of the first things we noticed about Mom

68
was how she never stopped working. She was continuing a
pattern set by her mother, who spent a lifetime getting up at
the crack of dawn to begin the day’s work. Mama’s mother
used to sell fishing worms and liked to fish herself. And I can
remember them finding her when she was in her eighties
where she had fallen down by the creek trying to dig worms
and fish. In part, these generations of southern black people
were so desperate to let the racist white world know that they
were not “lazy” that they were compulsive about work. Had
not slavery socialized the generations before them to be
compulsive about work? Had not being farmers, working the
land, meant long days of hard labor? The compulsive need we
see in our Mom always to be busy, never to be resting (she
has high blood pressure) is disturbing. And yet many of us
have adopted a similar life pattern. We do not know when to
quit.

Knowing when to quit is linked to knowing one’s value. If

black women have not learned to value our bodies then we
cannot respond fully to endangering them by undue stress.
Since society rewards us most, indicates that we are valuable,
when we are willing
to push ourselves to the limit and beyond, we need a
life-affirming practice, a counter-system of valuation in order
to resist this agenda. Most black women have not yet
developed a counter-system.

Work-related stress is most often the manifestation of stress

that is easiest to identify, even though it is not always the
easiest arena to change. One of the original Sisters of the Yam
left Yale as a lawyer and went to work in what appeared to be
a marvelous job, one that was engaged in progressive social
and political issues. Everything about this job seemed perfect

69
for her needs. Yet, she has had to cope with disrespectful
white supervisors who have not unlearned their racism. Most
black women have horrendous stories about how white people
continue to think we are working as their “maids,”
irrespective of our job status. Rather than being a space of
empowerment, this job setting has been disenabling (my girl
has aged—the stress she is experiencing shows in her face
and her body language). Now nothing that has been
disenabling and disheartening has been related to her job
duties directly, it’s all stress around interpersonal dynamics.
Though she knows she must seek another job, financial
concerns keep her working in a context that fundamentally
assaults her well-being. Together, we have tried to think of
strategies to lessen the stress and intensify her sense of
agency. Her experience is similar to that of many black
women.

Growing up, I heard the black women in our family who

worked as maids talk about the stress of being constandy
watched by white employers and I hear myself articulating
that same annoyance when I am in the English department at
my job. Unless black women begin to make our health, and
our well-being, a central priority, we cannot begin to develop
lifestyles that enhance our lives. This is not a simple task; but
it is a rewarding one. In the future, I hope black women all
around the United States will set up work-related support
groups where someone with the skill and know-how can
advise individuals about ways that they could re-map or
change their ways of life and work patterns. I find that I am
often better able to give clear advice to someone other than
myself, so I

70
think it’s good to find a mutual acquaintance or friend to
exchange constructive “reads” on one another’s lives or work
situation.

I suggested to the Yam lawyer whose work situation I

described earlier that she spend some time visualizing what
she would do at her job if her supervisors were not present,
locating both how she would feel and ways she would work.
Then I encouraged her to use this as a way to set agendas that
do not allow her to become unduly distracted by interpersonal
tensions. This exercise was directed at helping her get in
touch with her power and agency in the work setting. The
intent was to redirect her attention away from the problem
and focusing instead on her ability to take specific actions on
her own behalf. This is only a short-term solution, of course.
She needs to leave this job. Time and time again I find myself
saying to myself and to black women friends who make
excuses to justify not leaving stressful jobs: “If the job is
killing you, then you are not really enriching your life in any
way by staying in it.” My experience of black women friends
and acquaintances indicates that those of us who stay in jobs
that are “killing” us tend to feel compelled to create reasons
for our actions, like over-spending (which then makes stress
around finances and makes us need the job).

Practically every black woman I know spends way too much

of her life-energy worried and stressed out about money.
Since many of us are coming from economic backgrounds
where there was never enough money to make ends meet,
where there was always anxiety about finances, we may have
reached adulthood thinking this is just the way life is.
Concurrently, in such environments we may never have
learned how to manage finances. Even though many of us go

71
on to make incomes that far exceed those of the families we
come from, we may over-extend through spending or sharing
with friends and family and find that we do not have enough,
that we are constandy in debt (which only intensifies stress).
We need more black female financial advisers who can help
sisters get it together and teach us how to use our money
wisely. We need to know how to eliminate the stress around
money in our lives.

Early on in my adult life, I found myself in debt because of

clothing purchases. I had just finished college and was
looking for a job and thought I needed a new wardrobe. One
outfit would not do. The stress of this debt was so intense that
I thought “never again.” I began to read self-help books that
inform readers how to manage money. In a short period of
time, I was able to pay my debts and learn how to manage
finances. Freeing my life of financial stress gave me yet
another space to feel inner peace. And I have tried to share
with other black women the strategies I used. Some of them
are so convinced that it is impossible to eliminate financial
stress that they refuse to really try. It is not impossible.

Of course, one of the simplest strategies to use is learning to

live within one’s means. That’s hard because most of us
desire things well beyond our means. Yet, we need to get a
grip on what we spend money on. To do this one might record
for a week, or a month, where one’s money goes and to look
at that as a map and analyze it. I find that too large a portion
of my income is spent on telephone bills. Living in an isolated
setting, I often rely on talking to friends and comrades for
psychological support. But to eliminate one area of stress by
creating another is problematic. I decided that it was
important for me to keep calls within a set limit. To this end I

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now record each call, and what I think it costs, so I know
when I’m reaching the limit. I used to say to friends (and still
do when I don’t stay within my set budget) that I can gauge
what my mental state has been over the course of months by
looking at my phone bills. Hearing this as commentary on my
well-being, I began to think that maybe I needed to change
location. When black women find ourselves (and many of us
do) living away from community, from friends and family, to
work “good” jobs, and then use the phone to have that
community, we may need to evaluate whether or not we are
gaining in overall quality of life by being where the “good”
job is rather than where our love and support is.

Going against the grain, choosing community over a “good”

job may be a hard choice for individual black women to
make. Again, we are only able to make lifestyle choices that
enhance
well-being and reduce or eliminate debilitating stress if we
believe we deserve to live well. Most black women do not
have this sense of “entitlement.” We are not raised to believe
that living well is our birthright. Yet, it is. We have to claim
this birthright. Doing so automatically creates a change in
perspective that can act as an intervention on the stress in our
lives. Accepting that we are entitled to live well, we feel
empowered to make changes, to break with old patterns. This
does not mean that we will not have to cope with difficulties
that arise when we make changes. Quitting stressful jobs is
often easier to do than charting new journeys, finding
different maps that if followed will lead us to those locations
of wellness.

For some of us, stopping a stressful work pace may mean

confronting “voids” in our lives, areas of lack, unfulfillment,

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loneliness, and sorrow. Opal Palmer Adisa’s essay “Rocking
in the Sunlight: Stress and Black Women” (published in The
Black Women’s Health Book) addresses the stress black
women feel when we are just downright dissatisfied with life.
Adisa writes:

Did you ever wonder why so many sisters look so angry?

Why we walk like we’ve got bricks in our bags and will slash
and curse you at the drop of a hat? It’s because stress is
hemmed into our dresses, pressed into our hair, mixed into
our perfume and painted on our fingers. Stress from the
deferred dreams, the dreams not voiced; stress from the
broken promises, the blatant lies; stress from always being at
the bottom, from never being thought beautiful, from always
being taken for granted, taken advantage of; stress from being
a black woman in white America. Much of this stress is
caused by how the world outside us relates to us. We cannot
control that world, at times we can change it but we can assert
agency in our own lives so that the outside world cannot
over-determine our responses, cannot make our lives a
dumping ground for stress.

Positive thinking is a serious antidote to stress. Since so much

of our personal worrying has to do with feeling that the worst
that can happen will, we can truly counter this negative by
changing thought patterns. This is not an easy task for many
black people. Some of us (myself included) have been really
“into” the cynical “read” on life. We express a lot of our
negative thinking in
humorous vernacular speech. It often has a quality of magic
and sassiness that comforts. It’s tied up with our sense of
being able to look on the rough side and deal. Frankly, I must
confess, it’s been really, really hard for me to give up this

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habit of being and engage in positive thinking. The vast
majority of black people, particularly those of us from
non-privileged class backgrounds, have developed survival
strategies based on imagining the worst and planning how to
cope. Since the “worst” rarely happens, there is a sense of
relief when we find ourselves able to cope with whatever
reality brings and we don’t have to confront debilitating
disappointment.

Positive thinking feels a whole lot more scary. To think that

the universe is not an alien place, that there are enough
resources to meet everyone’s needs—for a lot of us that
smacks of not facing reality, and we pride ourselves on not
being “pollyannas,” most crudely as not being “white girls.”
Well, growing up my folks called me “miss white girl.” Their
nicknaming me this was very much related to the fact that I
wanted what I wanted and when I did not get it I expressed
my disappointment. I cried; I whined. They saw this as a sign
of weakness and I internalized that thinking. Now I know
better. Not being addicted to being tough, to facing
everything with no show of hurt or pain, allows us to express
disappointment, hurt, outrage, and be comforted. Bottling up
emotions intensifies stress. In The Salt Eaters, when Velma’s
husband goes to masseuse Ahiro for his usual massage, he is
stunned when he is told that what he needs is a good cry, that
he should “never be too tired to laugh or too grown to cry.” It
is healthy to give expression to a wide range of emotions.
This a form of positive thinking and action that can
dramatically reduce stress.

Black folks fear that too much positive thinking is unrealistic.

And yet we can’t really name the benefits of negative thought
patterns other than warding off disappointment. What would

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it mean for black people to collectively believe that despite
racism and other forces of domination we can find everything
that we need to live well in the universe, including the
strength to engage in the kind of political resistance that can
transform domination? The
messages of hope that were projected by Martin Luther King
were important because he knew that through the difficult
times there had to be a positive foundation to sustain the
impetus to struggle and sacrifice. No wonder the last piece of
writing he did, published after his death, is called A
Testament of Hope.

Many outstanding black political leaders have been positive

thinkers. Shirley Chisholm’s autobiography Unbought and
Unbossed is a powerful example of the way one can use
positive thinking to realize dreams. A role model for me
because of her unshakable integrity, she wants readers to
know that she “persisted in seeking this path toward a better
world.” Declaring her personal confidence she states: “My
significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black
woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public
office without selling out to anyone.” And who among her
peers would have imagined that she would be the first black,
the first woman presidential hopeful in the United States?
Very few people achieve against the odds without learning
how to think positively. Even though many of us know this
we still find it hard to let go negative thought patterns.

The self-help book that really enabled me to rethink my

attitudes about positive thinking was Feel the Fear and Do It
Anyway. One insightful paragraph was especially helpful. It
focused on worry. In response to critics who suggest to her

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that positive thinking is unrealistic, the author, Susan Jeffers,
asserts:

It is reported that over 90% of what we worry about never

happens. That means that our negative worries have about a
10% chance of being correct. If this is so, isn’t it possible that
being positive is more realistic than being negative? Think
about your own life. I’ll wager that most of what you worry
about never happens. So are you being realistic when you
worry all the time?

Worry is another major cause of stress in black women’s

lives. Many of us worry because it allows us to imagine that
obsessive constant thinking about something, fretting, means
we are in control. Learning when to let go is crucial to
reducing and eliminating stress. And often black women do
feel that what we worry about “does happen.” This means that
what we need to
consider is whether positive thinking can change the outcome
of events. Certainly, stress does not empower us to handle
whatever comes our way.

It’s important for black women committed to self-recovery to

survey our lives and honesdy identify what causes us stress.
Then we need to look for ways to cope and change. I suffer a
lot from insomnia. It causes me stress because often after a
sleepless night I have to carry on with the activities of the day
as though I am not tired. Meditating helped me learn to relax
so that I could enhance the chances that I would sleep the
night through or, if not, experience my wakefulness
unstressfully. It would be useful to black women to hear more
from one another about the ways we change our lives to
reduce and/or eliminate stress. Initially, we need to believe

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that it’s possible. We need to consciously work against the
cultural norms that would have us accept stress as the only
way to live. So many stress-related diseases that black women
suffer are connected to the heart. There is a quality of
heartbrokenness in many of our lives. We need to reclaim our
ability to live heart-whole, able to handle without stress
whatever life brings our way.

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5
Growing Away from
Addiction
Self-recovery is an idea most people know best from
programs that focus on helping people break addictions,
usually to substances. Though I first learned of this term in
political writing about the issue of decolonization, I have
found it meaningful to connect the struggle of people to
“recover” from the suffering and woundedness caused by
political oppression/exploitation and the effort to break with
addictive behavior. In contemporary black life, disenabling
addictions have become a dangerous threat to our survival as
a people. Still many black people refuse to take addiction
seriously, or if we accept the harm to individual and
community that addictions cause, we may refuse to take
seriously what it means to create an environment where
people can recover. Increasingly, books about addiction are
emphasizing that ours is a culture of addiction. As early as
1975, Stanton Peele explained:

Addiction is not a chemical reaction. Addiction is an

experience—one which grows out of an individual’s
routinized subjective response to something that has special
meaning for him—something, anything, that he finds so safe
and reassuring that he cannot be without it…We still find that
we learn habits of dependency by growing up in a culture
which teaches a sense of personal inadequacy, a reliance on

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external bulwarks, and a preoccupation with the negative or
painful rather than the positive or joyous. Addiction is not an
abnormality in our society. It is not an aberration from the
norm; it is itself the norm.

A culture of domination undermines individuals’ capacity to

assert meaningful agency in their lives. It is necessarily a
culture of
addiction, since it socializes as many people as it can to
believe that they cannot rely on themselves to meet even their
basic human needs.

Considering the way black people have been socialized, from

slavery to the present day, to believe that we can survive only
with the paternalistic support of a white power structure, is it
surprising that addiction has become so all-pervasive in our
communities? It is no mere accident of fate that the
institutionalized structures of white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy have created a modern society where the vast
majority of black people live in poverty and extreme
deprivation—most often with no hope of ever changing their
economic status. Living without the ability to exercise
meaningful agency over one’s material life is a situation that
invites addiction. Concurrently, addiction among black people
who have high incomes, who are professionals, is often
directiy related to the stress and low self-esteem engendered
by working in settings with white people who have not
unlearned racism, and by the feeling that we cannot
effectively confront life’s difficulties.

I have witnessed first-hand the anguish of addicted beloved

family members and experienced learning how to help
without being co-dependent. Thus, I believe black people

81
cannot collectively experience recovery if we continue to
deny the experience of addiction. I want to explore the way
the societal construction of black women as “mammies” and
caretakers, and our acceptance of that role, makes us likely
candidates for the role of co-dependent, enabling those
around us to maintain addiction. When I look at black life
historically, seeking explanations for our refusal to see
“addiction” as problematic, I find again and again, especially
among the underclass and working poor, the belief that the
daily hardships and sufferings black folks face can only be
endured if mediated by a realm of pleasure, and that wherever
and however we find a way to feel good is acceptable. Within
the slave system, rare days of collective pleasure involved
substance abuse. It makes perfect sense that in a society of
domination, where black folks remain a majority of the
oppressed and exploited, that folks will seek out those social
mechanisms that enable them to escape, that they will look
for ways to numb pain, to experience
forgetfulness. (Among black people in South Africa,
alcoholism ranks high on the list of life-threatening diseases/
addictions.)

In many traditional black communities, folks believed that an

alcoholic was a person who drank too much and could no
longer exercise control over his or her behavior. People who
were obviously dependent on drink who manifested no
anti-social behavior were never identified as alcoholics. And
even though there is greater understanding about the nature of
substance abuse in many contemporary black communities,
there is still the assumption that it is not a problem if the
person does not exhibit any anti-social behavior. Drug
addiction has been more readily accepted as “dangerous”
because so often it leads to anti-social behavior.

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Generally, folks think of anti-social behavior as that which
leads an individual to cause physical harms to others or to
property. There has been little publicly expressed concern
about psychological abuse in black life. When structures of
domination identify a group of people (as racist ideology does
black folks in this society) “mentally” inferior, implying that
they are more “body” than mind, it should come as no
surprise that there is little societal concern for the mental
health care of that group. Indeed, by perpetuating and
upholding domination, society invests, so to speak, in the ill
health of certain groups, all the better to oppress and exploit
them. Internalizing racist thinking or attempting to cavalierly
subvert it, many black people tend to see us as having an edge
on “silly” white people who have all these mental health
problems and need therapy. Our edge, our one claim to
superiority, is supposedly that we do not suffer mental
illnesses. Myths like this one make it nearly impossible for
some black folks to face the fact that psychological dilemmas
may be an important source of addictions.

One aspect of the myth of the “strong” black woman that

continues to inform black women’s self-concept is the
assumption that we are somehow an earthy mother goddess
who has built-in capacities to deal with all manner of hardship
without breaking down, physically or mentally. Many black
women accept this myth and perpetuate it. Providing a
convenient mask, it can be the projected identity that hides
addiction and mental illness among
black women. To confront addiction in our lives, to engage in
a process of self-recovery, black women must break through
all the forms of denial that lead us to pretend that we are
always in control of our lives, that we don’t go “crazy,” that
we don’t abuse substances.

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Two addictions affecting black women, which may not be as
evident as alcohol or drug abuse, are food addictions and
compulsive shopping. Since constant consumerism is such an
encouraged societal norm, it is easy for black women to mask
addictive, compulsive consumerism that threatens well-being,
that leads us to lie, cheat, and steal to be able to “buy” all that
we desire. Concurrently, in black life “fat” does not have
many of the negative connotations that it has in the dominant
society. Though black women are the most obese group in
this society, being overweight does not carry the stigma of
unattractiveness, or sexual undesirability, that is the norm in
white society. This means, however, that it is very easy for
black women to hide food addiction. In our family, though it
was a custom to ridicule individuals who ate compulsively, it
was never seen as a serious problem. Often food-addicted
individuals were children of alcoholics. Yet, growing up, no
one made the connection between the two disorders. It has
only been in recent years that research on addiction has
clarified the connections between sugar consumption and
other forms of addiction. Many black children in the drug- or
alcohol-addicted family setting consume massive amounts of
sugar, physiologically paving the way for other addictions in
the future.

As noted, addictions in black life are often connected to the

desire to experience pleasure and escape feelings of pain. The
book Craving for Ecstasy is a powerful exploration of the way
these longings serve as a catalyst for addiction. Our longing
for candy as children was totally connected to the desire for
pleasure, and especially that form of pleasure that was
connected to a sense of transgression or taboo. In Toni
Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Pecola, the little black girl
who is full of self-hate, who is the victim of incest rape,

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counters her sense of personal anguish and shame by eating
candy. Fond of a candy that features a picture of a little
white girl who symbolizes the goodness and happiness that is
not available to her, Pecola’s addiction to sugar is
fundamentally linked to her low self-esteem. The candy
represents pleasure and escape into fantasy:

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of

little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white
face. Blond hair in gende disarray, blue eyes looking at her
out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant,
mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty7. She eats the
candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is
somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane, Love Mary Jane. Be
Maty Jane.

Eating has always been a central location of pleasure in

traditional black folk life. It becomes an addiction when
individuals seek through compulsive behavior to experience
again and again comfort and fulfillment via the substance.
Many black women living alone (both working professionals
and unemployed women) often use food and drink as ways to
reward and comfort. Often these activities take the place of
emotionally nurturing connections with other individuals,
connections that are absent.

Addictions often become central to black women’s lives when

we experience life-altering stress. The breakup of a
relationship, the loss of a loved one, and an abrupt loss of
employment are just a few examples of situations that can
lead individuals to abuse substances in an effort to keep going
in life when they may feel like stopping. Tragically, the
energy received from addictions is artificial and ultimately

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takes its tolls. One of my family members became addicted to
alcohol and drugs at a moment in her life when she was
finding it impossible to cope with parenting. As an addict, she
was perceived as being “out of control” no longer a “good”
parent and it was acceptable for her to abandon her children to
the care of other family members. What struck me about this
was the reality that no one would have shown her much
sympathy or regard had she come to the family and said: “I
am having a nervous breakdown, I can’t deal with these
children. I need some space to recover myself.” These
requests would have gone against the strong black woman
norm. No doubt she would have been told to “get a grip,” that
“wasn’t nobody gonna do her job for her” or “if
you didn’t wanna raise kids you should have thought of that
before you had them.” As preposterous as it may seem, I
wonder to what extent debilitating “addiction” has allowed
black females, particularly the underclass and working poor,
to take needed time out. Unfortunately, when addiction is the
reason for breaking down or opting out, circumstances do not
enable the individual to be engaged in a constructive
“healthy” process of recovery.

Negative attitudes towards therapy in black life may make it

hard for individuals to seek mental health care when they
need it and thus heighten the likelihood that they will seek
“relief’ via substance abuse. Often traditional black mothers
are among the group of black people who are most adamantly
opposed to individuals’ seeking therapy. Their resistance to
therapy seems to be linked with the notion that if a child
(young or adult) has a mental health problem, the mother will
somehow be blamed or perceived as having failed in her job.
Our mother has demonstrated a greater willingness to cope
with the negative ravages of addiction than she has to

86
confronting constructively and positively the implications of
helpful therapy. She has internalized the culture’s pervasive
mind/body splits. To the extent that addictions can be viewed
solely as physiological, the world of the psyche, of the
psychological, can be ignored. Hence, black people can
recognize the ravages of addiction but still maintain the myth
that we are not suffering from psychologically-based
illnesses. Perceiving addiction as only about the body, and not
about the mind, we can act as though there is no need to seek
a therapeutic environment to experience recovery.

When a family member of mine was struggling to cope with

crack addiction, and went through a period when he was
“clean,” I kept encouraging him to consider talking to
someone—therapist, minister, anyone—about the deeper
issues that might be the underlying dilemmas promoting his
addiction. He resisted any analysis that suggested his
substance abuse might be connected to psychological
dilemmas and unreconciled psychological pain. Tellingly, he
has been able to maintain his addiction and his addictive
lifestyle because of the enabling support of black
women—lovers, friends, and relatives. They have functioned
in a co-dependent manner. Understanding co-dependency is
crucial for black female self-recovery, for this is a role we
often unwittingly assume.

In her book When Society Becomes an Addict, Anne Wilson

Schaef suggests that a major characteristic of co-dependents
is that they “are devoted to taking care of others.” Sound
familiar? She furthers states that “co-dependents frequendy
have feelings of low self-worth and find meaning in making
themselves indispensable to others.” Over and over again in
the preceding chapters, I have talked about the ways in which

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black women are socialized to assume the role of omnipotent
caregiver and the way our passive acceptance of this role is a
critical barrier to our self-recovery. Nowhere is this more
evident than in the addictive relational matrix where we so
often function as co-dependents.

Let me give an example of co-dependent behavior. Imagine a

black mother who has broken through her denial and accepted
that her adult child is a drug addict. Knowing this, and
knowing that the individual is using, she may still give money
for gas or other needs, filling in the gaps created when the
user spends all their funds on the habit. Though she may pride
herself on “not giving her hard-earned money to anybody to
buy drugs,” she may be unable to see her child’s empty
refrigerator without buying food, or paying the rent—all
actions that may be enabling. Of course throughout this
process she gets to reaffirm that she is needed, that the child
(usually an adult who has never learned in home or school to
make responsible decisions) could not survive without her.

Many black women have difficulty letting their children

grow. They continue to treat them as dependents long after
such treatment is appropriate. Those of us raised in traditional
black homes have all heard the phrase, “You’ll always be a
child to me.” It is a common refrain, whenever we attempt to
establish our autonomy as responsible adults. In his work on
addiction, Stanton Peele emphasizes the link between passive
acceptance of authority, of coercive hierarchical domination,
and addiction. Seeing addiction as “a manifestation of a need
for external structure” in
his book Diseasing of Americans, he examines the way
families and schools are places that keep individuals
dependent, teaching them that it is most important to obey

88
orders. Much black parenting focuses on the assertion of
authority through coercion and domination. Respect of elders
is made synonymous with obedience. Peele asserts that: “Fear
of the unknown and the unwillingness to give up sure sources
of nurturance—these are the ingredients of addiction.”
Perhaps future research on black people and addiction will
explore the connection between leaving home (especially for
those raised in predominantly black settings) and the effort to
cope with living and working in predominantly white settings
and addiction. Concurrently, such research might focus on the
relationship between repressive parenting in black life and
addiction.

The more black women work on our self-recovery, increasing

our self-esteem, ridding our lives of debilitating stress,
rejecting the learned impulse to try and meet everyone’s
needs, the less we will be seduced into co-dependency.
Increasingly, I meet individual black women who are entering
recovery programs to confront addiction and transform their
lives. This is a positive sign for all of us. Talking with black
women who have been in recovery programs about the path
that led them there, a common factor was insurmountable
pain, usually from the break-up of a relationship or a trauma
surrounding significant family members. One person whose
father had just been institutionalized for life-threatening
alcoholism and related illnesses was also grappling with being
in a primary relationship with an addict. She did not want to
end up reliving her childhood, becoming a hostage to the past,
so she went to a recovery program. Several other black
women talked about the way reading courageous writings by
black women about abuse and recovery enabled them to feel
that an alternative life was possible, that it was possible to
heal. They too sought therapeutic help. Though a number of

89
the black women I spoke with had worked through recovery
programs that use the Twelve Step model, each spoke of the
difficulty of attending meetings where few if any black
people were present. They all agreed that support and
affirmation
for recovery does not need to come from someone who shares
the same race or gender, but they also acknowledged that it
was meaningful and especially affirming to be able to share
the recovery process with folks like themselves. In the future,
we will hopefully hear more from black women who have
confronted addictions, who are fully engaged in recovery, and
whose transformed lives are living testimony.

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6
Dreaming Ourselves Dark
and Deep: Black Beauty
Where there is a woman there is a magic. If there is a moon
falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her
magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with
a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and
tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits.

—Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo

In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a

thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering.
Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to
see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So
if you were running around lost you knew you were found
when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you.
And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark
space before time are holding us still.

This is a little origin story I made up. I thought of it one day

when I was trying to explain to a little brown girl where the
babies lived before they were born—so I told her they lived in
this world of loving darkness. I made up this story because I
wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and
its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or
dread. I made it up because I thought one day this little brown

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girl will hear all sorts of bad things about the darkness, about
the powerful blackness, and I wanted to give her another way
to look at it. I held her hand,
just like my father’s father, Daddy Jerry, a man who worked
the land, who knew the earth was his witness, had once held
my hand in the darkest of summer nights and taught me that
the blanket of night I was scared of was really longing to be
my friend, to tell me all its secrets. And I reminded her, as he
reminded me way back then, that those arms that first held us
in that dark space before words and time hold us still.

Traditionally, black folks have had to do a lot of creative

thinking and dreaming to raise black children free of
internalized racism in a white-supremacist society, a society
that is everywhere every day of our lives urging us to hate
blackness and ourselves. When we lived in the extreme racial
apartheid of Jim Crow, it seems black folks were much more
vigilant because we could never forget what we were up
against. Living in our own litde black neighborhoods, with
schools and churches, in the midst of racism, we had places
where we could undo much of the psychological madness and
havoc wreaked by white supremacy. If that white world told
us we were dirty and ugly and smelled bad, we retreated into
the comfort and warmth of our bathtubs and our beauty
parlors and our homemade perfumes and reminded ourselves
that “white folks don’t know everything.” We knew how to
invent, how to make worlds for ourselves different from the
world the white people wanted us to live in. Even though
there was so much pain and hardship then, so much poverty,
and most black folks lived in fear, there was also the joy of
living in communities of resistance.

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Long before racial integration fundamentally changed the
nature of those communities, disrupting black folks’ ability to
be self-affirming, they sent into our all-black world a
powerful tool that would teach us to internalize racism, that
would teach us all manner of ways to be unloving toward
ourselves, that tool was television. Learning to identify with
the screen images of good and bad, whether looking at
Westerns or Tarzan movies, television was bringing into the
homes of black people a message that we were inferior, a race
doomed to serve and die so that white people could live well.
Even with this dangerous enemy in their house, many black
folks were vigilant enough to resist. They watched television
with a critical eye. Mama and Daddy explained the cinematic
racial politics that made it possible for one white man to
slaughter a thousand Indians. But somehow the sixties came
and brought with them the promise that racism was about to
end and many black people began to imagine that they no
longer had to be vigilant, that it was no longer important to
create an oppositional world view that would protect them
from internalizing white racism. The old deeply felt belief
that black folks should be ever suspicious of the motives and
intentions of white folks was replaced with a rhetoric of love
that suggested we were all the same. And even though many
black people knew we were not the same, they pretended. It
took them a while to see that loving white folks in a
white-supremacist culture really meant that they could never
love blackness, nor themselves. Internalized racism seems to
have a greater hold on the psyches of black people now than
at any other moment in history.

Unfortunately, it has become an obvious cliché for people to

point to the fact that racism encourages black children, and
black grown-ups, to be self-hating and have low self-esteem.

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Yet highlighting the problem never seems to go hand-in-hand
with finding solutions. Not all black people hate ourselves or
our blackness. We come from a long line of ancestors who
knew how to heal the wounded black psyche when it was
assaulted by white-supremacist beliefs. Those powerful
survival strategies have been handed down from generation to
generation. They exist. And though a working public
knowledge of them has been suppressed, we can bring this
old knowledge out of dusty attics, closets of the mind where
we have learned to hide our ghosts away, and relearn useful
habits of thinking and being.

Certainly the slaves understood better than anybody that to be

able to love blackness in a white world they had to create
images—representations of their world that were pleasing to
the sensibilities and to the eye. So they made quilts and dolls
and all kinds of images that gave them a loving mirror of
blackness to look into and be renewed. The book Stitching
Memories: African-American Story Quilts shows the picture
of an old log cabin quilt made in the 1870s depicting familiar,
caring images of black life. This quilt
always seems to me to embody a black woman’s dream of
how life would be in freedom. For in the quilt there are all
these neat littie houses. And the black folks outside, women
and men, are taking care of plants and trees. We would be
searching forever if we wanted to gather all the loving images
enslaved and newly freed black folks created to remind
themselves of their beauty and dignity in a world where their
humanity was assaulted daily.

Clearly, if black women want to be about the business of

collective self-healing, we have to be about the business of
inventing all manner of images and representations that show

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us the way we want to be and are. Within white-supremacist
patriarchal society, it is very difficult to find affirming images
of black femaleness. A few years ago, I went to live in a new
place where I knew no one, so it occurred to me that I needed
to surround myself with life-affirming images of black
womanness in my home to have in my midst representations
of a nurturing community. I was shocked by how difficult it
was to find representations of us where our features were not
crudely distorted or exaggerated. I was dismayed by how
many paintings showed us without eyes, or noses, or mouths.
And I began to wonder if these body parts are “forgotten”
because they represent the unloved, unliked parts, because
they takes us into the realm of the senses. The problem that I
encountered was not a dearth of imagery, but a lack of
appealing imagery. So what did I do? I went to the home of a
girlfriend who had been making little brown dolls (she had to
dye material to make colors that could convey the variety of
our complexions), and she made me six girl dolls to represent
me and my sisters. My Aunt Ellen made me a quilt, each
piece a black female figure. I added to these the brown baby
doll I first received as a girl (that of course I kept for the
daughter I dreamed about having someday), and a host of
other family objects, passed through the generations, so that
the spirit in these things could welcome and take care of me
in my new place.

Obviously, the dearth of affirming images of black

femaleness in art, magazines, movies, and television reflects
not only the racist white world’s way of seeing us, but the
way we see ourselves. It is
no mystery to most black women that we have internalized
racist/sexist notions of beauty that lead many of us to think
we are ugly. In support groups like Sisters of the Yam, all

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over the United States, I have seen black females of
awe-inspiring beauty talk about how ugly they are. And the
media has bomdbarded us with stories telling the public that
little black children (and we are talking here primarily about
girl children) prefer white dolls to black dolls, and think that
white children are cleaner and nicer. The white-dominated
media presents this knowledge to us as if it is solely some
defect of black life that creates such aberrant and
self-negating behavior, not white supremacy.

Many black people have always known how to love

ourselves, our blackness, in the midst of white supremacy,
despite those among us who internalize racist thinking. So we
must ask ourselves, what is happening now that so few black
folks, especially young black people, are able to resist. To
come up with answers, I think it is crucial that we look at
black female experience. For if the majority of black children
are being raised by black females then certainly how we
perceive ourselves, our blackness, informs the social
construction of our individual and collective identity.

Returning to the images of beautiful black females who

perceive themselves as ugly, let’s explore the origin of their
self-contempt. Putting aside the general ways sexist thinking
about females affects self-concept, any examination of the
way many black women learn to think about our bodies at an
early age will show where the internalization of negative
thinking begins.

The first body issue that affects black female identity, even
more so than color, is hair texture. There is a growing body of
literature (essays by black women writers Pearl Cleage, Lisa
Jones, myself, etc.) that discusses our obsession with hair. But

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I want to start with basics. How is it that little black girls learn
(even before we know anything about racism) that our hair is
a problem? Negative thinking about our hair is usually
conveyed in the home by parents, other caregivers, and
siblings. One aspect of white-supremacist thinking that
seemed to take hold of the black psyche in the 20th century
was the assumption that straight hair
was better—that it was “good” hair. I would like to suggest
that apart from the racist assumption that any attribute of
whiteness was better than blackness, over-worked black
women often found that it took less effort to daily groom
straightened hair than hair in its natural state. Practically
speaking, a lot of black women learned to prefer straightened
hair, to see it as better, because it took less time. If we
consider that this attitude about time and effort spent on body
grooming is a response to oppressive/exploitive conditions
(over-work) then why is it black females often have the same
attitude when such conditions do not exist?

Is this another “survival strategy” carried over into

contemporary black life that is no longer needed? Certainly,
going out to work in a white world that has always been
threatened by black people who appear to be decolonized has
had a major impact on what black females choose to do with
our hair. Nowadays, more black women are asserting their
right to choose natural hairstyles (braiding, locks, twists, etc.).
Their choices make it possible for all black women to
consider wearing natural hair.

As grown-ups, many of us look back at childhood years of

having our hair combed and braided by other black women as
a moment of tenderness and care that was peace-giving and
relaxing. This dimension of sharing in care of the black

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female self is necessary in our life and we should seize all
opportunities to feel caring hands tending our hair. In a
workshop with black women recendy, where one of the
women present was trying to decide whether to “process” her
hair, I began to talk about the different feel of natural hair,
raising the question of whether processed hair is inviting to
the touch. As with other such group discussions, black
women there began to insist that they did not like to have
anybody touching their hair. Yet, when pressed to look at the
origins of this “dislike,” it was found to be rooted in the fear
that our hair is really not an aspect of our being that most of
us see as related to bodily pleasure. I have written elsewhere
in an essay on hair that many black women view their hair as
a problem, or as one black woman put it, a “territory to be
conquered.” To enjoy black hair, such negative thinking has
to be unlearned. And in part we
begin to unlearn it by talking to ourselves differently about
our hair.

When we allow ourselves to experience the sensual pleasures

of various black hair textures (especially in its natural state),
we unlearn some of the negative socialization we are
bombarded with about black hair. Despite the raised
consciousness of black people around the question of
internalized racism, most black magazines still favor images
of black women with long straight hair. Often, in
advertisements the light-skinned woman with straight hair
will be depicted as the female who has a partner or who is
more sexually appealing. In my workshops, there are always
black women who will say that they would like to wear their
hair natural but that whenever the subject comes up they
receive negative feedback from family and friends. And, of
course, heterosexual black females must often get past the

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fear that men will not find them appealing if they do not have
straightened hair. Is it not a gesture of self-worth to
interrogate the possibility that a black male who does not like
unstraightened hair may have his own low self-esteem issues,
and that may be an indication that a sister interested in such a
man needs to be looking elsewhere for affirmation?

When we accept that it is an expression of self-worth and

self-care for black women to choose to wear natural hairstyles
in a society that does not affirm our beauty, we learn to be
more appreciative of those individuals who can support our
choices. A few weeks ago, I was in an airport and a black
man came up to me, pointed to my curly kinky natural hair,
and said, “Like your hair, really looks good.” And it shocked
me to think that I am almost forty and that this was perhaps
the only time in a public setting that I received affirmation for
having natural, unruly hair. I am more accustomed to hearing
remarks like, “You could be fine if you did something with
that hair.” Since many black women learned in childhood to
associate getting our hair combed with a painful, negative
process, we have to practice positive thinking about the time
spent grooming our hair. We have to learn to enjoy the
process.

In groups with black women where we talk about our bodies,

it is clear that many of us were raised in home environments
where
we were taught that it was a sign of vanity (all the more if
these were religious households) to be “too” concerned with
body care. Those of us coming from large families without
material privilege, with only one bathroom, with the high cost
of water and all products associated with body care, were
certainly made to feel that ours should be a utilitarian

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approach to the care of the self. Now, living as we do in a
racist/sexist society that has, from slavery on, perpetuated the
belief that the primary role black women should play in this
society is that of servant, it logically follows that many of us
internalize the assumption that we/our bodies do not need
care, not from ourselves or from others. This assumption is
continually reinforced in our daily lives. Care of the self
begins with our capacity to tenderly and lovingly care for the
body. Black women often neglect our bodies.

When I first suggested to a group of black women that it was

important for us to be able to stand naked in front of mirrors
and look at our bodies, express our care for them, and our
recognition of their beauty, many of the individuals thought
this was just nonsense. Yet, is it nonsense that black women
are the most overweight group in this society, that more than
half of the women suffering with AIDS are black, that this
and other diseases that most afflict us (diabetes, hypertension,
heart disease, and cancer) are related to diet, to the basic
health of our immune systems? Louise Hay, in You Can Heal
Your Life and in The AIDS Book, shows the relation between
basic care of the self and our overall well-being. Since many
black women (myself included) allow ourselves to become
over-extended—working, meeting the needs of others—we
often do not take time for care of the self. And those among
us who have been socialized from childhood on to feel that
black women’s “personal power” only comes through serving
others may have the most difficult time learning to see that
personal power really begins with care of the self.

In the past few years of my life I have

over-worked—teaching, writing, traveling to give lectures,
doing “home psychoanalysis” for me and everybody else.

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When I begin to look critically at how I was treating my body
and health, I decided to make changes. It helped
that friends would say to me, “Weren’t you sick and
exhausted when I saw you this time last year?” Yet, when I
tried to pull back from obligations, often clearly stating to
folks that I needed to take care of myself and my health, I
often found that people responded with hostility and anger. It
seemed to me that if folks in this society have been socialized
via racism and sexism to see black women as existing to
“serve,” it often follows that folks feel we should continue to
serve even if we are sick, weary, or even near death. My
mother has completely internalized the notion that her value
is completely tied to her capacity to serve others. Though in
constant poor health, she perseveres. My sisters and I have
expressed our rage at her unwillingness to take care of
herself, her well-being, a central agenda for life. Even though
we are grown women who are working to unlearn what I call
“the black woman martyr syndrome,” there is still the child
within us that wants to see her change so that we can feel that
it is fine for us to make these changes, that we have her
approval.

When one of my sisters, who has a husband and family,

began to place “care of the self’ on her agenda, her changes
were greeted with familial rage and hostility. Considering that
it was her practice to rush home from work and without even
taking a moment’s rest to begin meeting the demands of
everyone, particularly fixing meals, it is not surprising that it
was a shock to the family system when she began to suggest
that not only would it be a positive help to her if people
would make their own meals, but that the kids would learn
both a sense of autonomy as well as realize their capacity to
take care of their basic needs. The hostile responses that

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greeted her attempt to change patterns are called, by Harriet
Lerner in The Dance of Anger, “countermoves” or “change
back” behavior: “Countermoves are the other person’s
unconscious attempt to restore a relationship to its prior
balance or equilibrium, when anxiety about separateness and
change gets too high.” Lerner’s book usefully suggests
constructive ways to cope with changing life patterns in
intimate relationships.

Overeating or eating the wrong type of food is one of the

major ways black women abuse our bodies. Feminist books
on the
issue of fat say very little about black women’s bodies,
though Shadow on a Tightrope addresses some aspects of
black female social reality. Black women need to write more
about our eating issues. As noted earlier, we often use food as
solace and comfort, to give us the pleasure that we may not be
experiencing in other areas of our lives. In part, black women
cannot begin to take care of body weight issues until we begin
to care in an overall way for the body. If we do not focus
concern with body weight by first approaching the black
female body with respect and care, we may choose ways to
deal with weight that are ultimately destructive. In a sexist
culture, one that continues to socialize women to worship the
thin female figure, women whose bodies will never conform
to this model must go against the culture’s norms to develop
positive body esteem. For black women who must also
confront racist stereotypes that devalue us, the resistance must
be even stronger.

It is difficult to feel good about one’s body when most of the

clothes that are available to women are created without the
bodies of black women in mind. Choosing clothing that looks

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appealing on our bodies is another critical issue for black
women. The world of fashion is as much informed by racist/
sexist assumptions about beauty as any other aspect of
contemporary life. Although there are more images of black
women in fashion magazines than ever before, the fact
remains that the bodies of these women rarely resemble in
any way the actual bodies of most black women.
Concurrendy, clothes that are designed for thin, anorexic-like
figures rarely look good on bodies that are larger. Many black
women are large. And many big black women are often
forced by the economics of fashion (large size clothing is
often only sold in specialty shops, and costs more) to push
their bodies into clothes that are too small. The recent fashion
interest in “ethnic” clothing (fashions imported from Third
World countries, places where the body is not perceived as
solely thin) makes it more possible for large women to find
interesting-looking clothing that suits their size and shape.
Clothing for large women is also often more conservative and
matronly looking. This poses problems for large young black
females. Of course a creative answer to this is for us to
create and design clothes that meet the needs of black bodies.
Right now this is happening all around the United States.
These clothes can often be found on display in black-owned
businesses, or they may be sold on the street in urban areas.
When clothing is made with the large black woman in mind
she can adorn herself in ways that affirm and appeal. This
enhances body self-esteem.

Another area of the black female body that receives litde or

no focus, but usually indicates the degree of body self-esteem,
is the feet. Recent studies on women and shoes reveal that the
majority of women in this society stuff their feet into shoes
that are at least one size too small. Many black women have

104
large feet and again find it difficult to find reasonably priced
shoes. Yet even the black females among us who wear regular
sizes also abuse our feet by stuffing them into shoes that are
uncomfortable or too little. Since many black females have
learned that it is not “bad” to have hurting feet, or even that
this is the norm, such thinking has to be unlearned if we are to
acknowledge that the happiness and comfort of one’s feet in
daily life are crucial to wrell-being. This unlearning can begin
when we pay attention to our feet.

Take a week in your life and keep a foot notebook. How

comfortable are your shoes? How do your feet feel at the end
of the day? How often do you give your feet that special bath
and massage? Do you wear the same shoes all the time?
Answering these questions can indicate areas where changes
are needed. Often black females will buy a number of poorly
made, cheaper-priced shoes that are not really comfortable
when we could buy one pair of really well-made, comfortable
shoes. And since many of us have irregular-size feet, we need
to know that we can always have a pair of shoes made
especially for our feet. This is also a dimension of care for the
self.

One also cannot really talk about black female body

self-esteem without talking about the politics of skin color,
about the way internalized racism encourages and promotes
self-hatred and/or self-obsession. A fair-skinned black female
who may be able to feel that she is lovely and desirable
because of her skin color may rely so much on looks to
negotiate her way through daily life
that she will not develop other areas of her life, like a
grounded personality or her intellectual skills. She may
become so obsessed with seeking constant affirmation of her

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“beauty” that she may learn no skills that would enable her to
fully self-actualize. Concurrendy, darker-skinned black
females who internalize the assumption that dark is ugly and
constantiy assault themselves by inner negative feedback also
cannot fully self-actualize.

This is tragic. Without a doubt, dark-skinned black females

suffer the most abuse when black people internalize
white-supremacist notions of beauty. I have asked beautiful
dark-skinned sisters what they feel enables them to resist the
socialization that would encourage them to see themselves as
ugly. They all talk about going through a stage where they
had to unlearn old negative ways of thinking about
themselves and learn how to be positive. They talk about
surrounding themselves both with friends and comrades who
affirm their looks but also with pictures and other
representations. For many black women, Tracy Chapman is
an important pop culture icon, not only because her music is
deep and compelling, but because she has broken new ground
in representing a black beauty aesthetic that is rarely depicted
positively in this society. To see her picture on album covers,
billboards, posters, and in magazines affirms that one does
not have to be light-skinned with straight hair and thin nose to
be regarded as beautiful.

There is no mystery as to why after all these years of black

resistance to white racism, skin-color politics continues to be
a negative force in our lives. White-supremacist thinking
about color is so embedded in every aspect of contemporary
life that we are daily bombarded in the mass media with
images that suggest blackness is not beautiful. When I first
saw images of black woman Naomi Campbell years ago, I
was thrilled. It was so exciting to see this fine sister with full

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lips and natural hairstyles in fashion magazines. Seeing her
image then was empowering. But when I see her now, usually
wearing a long blonde straight wig, or some other nonsense, I
resent this distortion of her image.

Negative representations are fundamentally disenabling. We

know that black children have tremendous difficulty feeling
good about their looks. Consider, for example, the black
female parent who contacts me after hearing me give a lecture
on black identity and explains that she is having a problem
with a black girl child who comes home from school and puts
a yellow mop on her hair to pretend that she is blonde and has
long lovely locks. The mother says: “Our household affirms
blackness. We have positive art images. We make positive
comments about black beauty. And yet she thinks only white
skin and long hair is pretty.” Looking at the mother’s
appearance, I see that she has dark skin and processed hair.
Straightened black hair is not always an indicator of low
self-esteem. Yet there is no getting away from the reality that
in a white-supremacist culture, where all aspects of blackness
are devalued, it remains a sign that suggests one has opted for
a style that may reinforce the notion that straight is better. No
matter how I feel about myself, when little black children see
me wearing straight hair in a context where they have learned
from dolls, from television, or from playmates, that kinky
textured hair is a “problem,” in their eyes my appearance
reinforces the idea that straight is better, more beautiful. I
encouraged the black mother who wanted to know what she
could do to improve her child’s self-esteem to take time to
openly and honestly examine her own deep-seated attitudes
about skin color and hair texture, to see if she was possibly
communicating negative messages to the child by the way she
constructs her own body image.

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For it really does not matter how many positive images of
blackness we surround ourselves with, if deep down we
continue to feel bad about dark skin and kinky hair. In this
case, I felt the mother could intervene on this situation by first
making sure that her own body gestures were self-affirming.
Then I suggested it was important to look whether or not her
daughter had access to toys and books with diverse, affirming
images of black children. I encouraged her to look critically at
the racial politics of her child’s school, to find out to what
extent it was an environment that affirmed blackness. Often
black parents send black children into
predominantly white school settings and then express surprise
when their child’s black identity is not fully affirmed. Yet,
such a context can only be affirming if it is non-racist.
Finally, I encouraged this mother to listen carefully to the
kind of comments her husband and other males made about
female beauty, as well as other black female authority figures.
When a child adores a grown-up who makes certain
pronouncements about beauty, that may have greater impact
on the child’s consciousness than comments coming from
folks who do not matter as much.

A beautiful dark-skinned girlfriend of mine shared with me

recently that, even though she was raised in a household
where people “talked that black is beautiful stuff,” whenever
her father or brothers expressed any opinion about a woman’s
attractiveness, they chose someone who was either white or
fair-skinned. And even though they told her she was
beautiful, she never believed them. She remembered the many
times they would say (what we have all heard black folks who
suffer from internalized racism saying), “She’s pretty to be so
black.”

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I think most black folks know the kind of changes that must
take place if we are to collectively unlearn racist body
self-hatred, yet we often do not practice what we know. This
is the challenge facing us. How many black females seize the
opportunity daily to say or do something in relation to another
black female or male that aims to affirm blackness and
subvert the usual racist ways of seeing the black body? If
internalized racism enters the souls of black folks through
years of socialization then we are not going to be rid of it by
simply giving shallow expressions to the notion that black is
beautiful. We must live in our bodies in such a way that we
daily indicate that black is beautiful. We must talk about
blackness differently. And we cannot do any of this
constructive action without first loving blackness.

To love ourselves, our blackness, we must be constandy

vigilant, working to resist white-supremacist thinking and
internalized racism. For some of us, this means cutting down
the number of hours we watch television so that we are not
subjected to forms of subliminal socialization shaping how
we see the world.
It means searching for decolonized black individuals who by
the way they live and work demonstrate their love of
blackness, their care of the self. Our love of blackness is
strengthened by their presence. It means cultivating non-black
allies who have worked to unlearn their racism. Black
women’s body esteem is strengthened by good nutrition,
exercise, and positive thoughts affirming that we deserve to
be well—that our bodies are precious.

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110
7
Facing and Feeling Loss
Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I
work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not
constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all of my
life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether
this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this
consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape
the words I speak, the way I love, my politics of action, the
strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my
appreciation of living.

—Audre Lorde, The Cancer journals

A few years ago I decided to write a book on

African-American ways of dying. I chose to call it When I
Die Tomorrow. The tide is from a spiritual from long ago that
can be heard in these contemporary times if you listen to the
black women’s musical group Sweet Honey in the Rock. The
lyrics I love to hear in this song exclaim: “When I die
tomorrow, I will say to the Lord, ‘Oh Lord you been my
friend. Thank you Lord you been my friend.’”

I began thinking and writing about traditional

African-American ways of dying when I left home and went
to college. It became apparent that this new life I was living
was not going to teach me anything about death and dying. In
it I would never be sitting near the bedside of someone close

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to death or see the dead lying still in a bedroom surrounded
by caring onlookers. And in this life I would not be in
people’s homes and hear them talking about who died and
how they died and when the funeral was going to be. Even
though in this bourgeois world I had entered people were
dying, it was a very hush-hush affair. Folks did not come
back from burying the dead and talk about how the dead had
been laid out—how they looked, what they were wearing,
whether or not the service was moving. Death was a hidden
and taboo reality. This distance from the dead and dying
seemed to make a profound difference in the way people lived
and treated one another.

When I first read Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross’ On Death and

Dying, I thought that I was not learning anything there that I
had not learned “down home” watching southern black people
cope with death and dying. Growing up, I learned to respect
the reality of dying, not to ignore or make light of it. Mama
would tell us often that “life was not promised,” teaching us
to live in the here and now. At the same time, we learned that
there was nothing to fear about death. Many of the songs we
sang at church celebrated death and dying as a transitional
state, taking a person from one realm of being into another. In
the traditional world of black folk culture, death was a time
for grieving and rejoicing. There was no attempt to mask grief
or to pretend in any way that losing a friend or loved one was
not a cause for anguish or sorrow. Death was one of the rare
moments when it was socially acceptable for folks to let go
emotionally, to break down and surrender to their grief. These
healthy approaches to death and dying made it possible for
black people to confront and cope with loss.

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Since not nearly enough has been written about death and
dying in black experience, we can turn to fiction and catch a
glimpse of those habits of being. In Toni Morrison’s novel
Song of Solomon, the funeral service of Hagar is both a time
of grief and rejoicing. Mother and grandmother come to
mourn the death of their “child.” The anguish Reba and Pilate
feel is expressed by their plaintive cry for “mercy.” The
mourners accept this invitation to acknowledge their pain in
the manner of call and response. When Pilate cries “mercy,”
they collectively say, “I hear you.” They sing this song:

In the nighttime.
Mery.
In the morning.
Mery.
At my bedside.
Mercy.
On my knees now.
Mercy. Mery. Mery. Mery.

After they acknowledge profound grief, after they mourn,

they then celebrate all that was joyous about Hagar, the love
they felt towards her, and this is the final message that they
share, “She was loved.”

Learning how to express and accept grief was absolutely

essential for black people living in the midst of profound
racial apartheid. Without adequate medical care, denied entry
to segregated hospitals, black folks could not keep death at a
distance. Although I grew up in the kind of black world where
folks really seemed to live to be so old (it was as though there
was no death), it was a world where even the longevity of
lives served as a constant reminder that death could come at

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any moment, that one had to be ready. We sang songs that
reminded us: “Hush, children. Hush, children. Somebody’s
calling my name. Oh, my Lord. Oh my Lordy, what shall I
do? Soon one morn, death is gonna creep into my room. Soon
one morn, death is gonna creep into my room. Oh my Lord,
Oh my Lordy, what shall I do?” We lived knowing death was
in our midst. And we learned to appreciate living well so that
we could meet death ready to go.

Back then, it was customary for the dying to gather loved

ones, to reconcile, to share parting messages. And folks knew
that even after all life had gone from the body, it was still
possible to sit with the dead and let them feel one’s presence,
one’s love and regard. The traditional “wake” remains a ritual
that keeps alive old-time beliefs that care must continue even
after the body passes. Many southern black people have held
to the belief that a human being possesses body, soul, and
spirit—that death may take one part even as the others
remain. In Patricia Jones-Jackson’s study of traditions on the
Sea Islands, When Roots Die, she discusses this concept of a
tripartite self, sharing these words of a very religious
man: “Listen to me good now: When you die in this world,
you see, the…the…the…soul of a man go home to the
Kingdom of God, but your spirit’s still here on earth.”
Jackson reports that “the spirit of one’s ancestors is
considered the closest link to the spirits of the ‘other’ world.
Thus on the Sea Islands, as well as in Africa, spirits are asked
to intervene on behalf of a living relative.” What she
describes are some of the secrets of healing that traditional
black people kept alive and used in healing processes that
could be labeled “psychoanalytical.” The purpose was to
understand complex mysteries in daily life and to create ways
to intervene and enhance health and well-being.

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I call attention to the old African-American ways of dying
because they are a rich legacy we can bring into the present.
Some of us have never relinquished those cultural practices
because we were taught that “a body that knows how to die
well, will know how to live well.” In our process of
self-recovery, black women must learn how to face death and
dying in a manner that enables us to restore and renew our
spirits. We can learn from the old ways. Living as many of us
do in communities where we are alienated from the world of
the dead and dying, where times of mourning and grief are
not seen as growth experiences, we are often overwhelmed
when we confront death. In her essay “Speaking of Grief:
Today I Feel Real Low, I Hope You Understand” (published
in The Black Women’s Health Book), Bridgett Davis shares
the insights that emerged after her personal confrontation with
grief after the tragic deaths of several family members:

I believe that on some deeper level, black women are used to

tragedy. We expect it. Death is not a stranger to our lives, to
our worlds. We’ve lost our fathers to hypertension and heart
attacks, our brothers to frontline batdes in American wars, our
husbands and lovers to black-on-black crime or police
brutality, and our sons to drug-laced streets or upstate prisons.
All this while grappling with the stress and burden of all that
is black life in America: Babies born to babies, dehumanizing
ghettos, inferior schools, low wages, on-the-job racism…the
slow but steady death of our people. We are just used to pain.

Being “used to pain” does not mean that we will know how to
process it so that we are not overwhelmed or destroyed by
grief.
Like many black folks facing death head-on in urban
environments, Davis struggled in isolation. Just the pace of

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life in cities makes constructive prolonged mourning in the
context of community nearly impossible.

Sharing with one another ways to process pain and grief,

black women challenge old myths that would have us repress
emotional feeling in order to appear “strong.” This is
important because botded-in grief can erupt into illness.
Jeffers reminds us in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway that
“acknowledgment of pain is very important; denial is deadly.”
Describing the case of a woman who developed epilepsy after
her son died, who opened herself to her grief nine years later,
and found that her health miraculously improved, Jeffers
shares, “Pain can be incredibly destructive if kept
submerged…unacknowledged pain is subtly destroying many
people’s lives.” Individual black women must ask ourselves,
“Where are the spaces in our lives where we are able to
acknowledge our pain and express grief?” If we cannot
identify those spaces, we need to make them.

Starting a support group can be a helpful place. Let us

imagine that D. is suffering from suppressed grief felt over
the unexpected death of her mother. To all outsiders looking
in, it appears that she has come to terms with this loss. In
actuality, she thinks about her mother daily and feels deep
down that her own life has somehow ended. If either D. or
someone close to her gathered together a small group of folks,
friends or acquaintances who may be grappling with grief in
their lives, and started a support group focusing on loss, this
setting could potentially be a place for healing. If D.
continues to suppress her feelings, always hiding the fact that
she feels her life has ended, she could enter a prolonged
self-destructive depression.

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There is not enough research about depression in black
women’s lives. How does it affect us? What can we do about
it? In Love, Medicine and Miracles, Bernie Siegel makes a
connection between depression and the breakdown of our
immune systems that leads to illness:

Depression as defined by psychologists generally involves

quitting or giving up. Feeling that present conditions and
future possibilities are intolerable, the depressed person ‘goes
on strike’ from life, doing less and less, and losing interest in
people, work, hobbies, and so on. Such depression is strongly
linked with cancer.

Although depressed black females may completely withdraw

in private life, in the public realm we will often continue to
present a mask of “normalcy” even when we know we are
suffering life-threatening “blues.” Many of us suffer periods
of suicidal depression that no one ever notices.

In black life, suicide, like so many other illnesses and

behaviors related to the realm of psychological breakdown,
tends to be seen as the gesture of a “weak” person. For years,
many black people perpetuated and believed the myth that
black folks did not commit suicide. That is a myth that is now
brutally shattered by the overwhelming evidence that black
folks—women, men, and children—are killing ourselves
daily. Still, in a context where suicide is still seen as a sign of
weakness, a character flaw, it is difficult for individuals to
“confess” suicidal states and suicidal feelings.

Slightly more than a year ago, I was going through a tenure

process at the college where I work. Being “judged” by my
peers was a process that caused me great anxiety. I had many

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flashbacks to childhood, to being negatively judged in my
family. During this time, I withdrew from colleagues. And, as
is so often the case when people evaluate one another, this
distance was more comfortable for both me and them. Often
reassured that there would be no problems with the tenure
decision, I felt silenced. I felt that I could not convey to
anyone the tensions and terrors being in this position had
evoked for me. And since I had ambivalent feelings about my
job, I was also uncertain about what getting tenure would
mean. I feared being locked into a comfortable job, a
comfortable life that was not really good for me.

During this time, and even after the process was successfully
completed, I had serious periods of depression, often feeling
suicidal. Then, I would think if I killed myself it would be
like all the
other suicides of successful black women professionals—the
people who knew me would say that I seemed all right, that
they just didn’t know I was having difficulties. Luckily for
me, my sister V., who is a friend, comrade, and a therapist,
was someone that I could share my feelings with. I went to
stay at her place for a month, “chilling out,” and doing what I
call “home psychoanalysis.” Together, we looked at the
messages we received in childhood that might be making it
difficult for me to accept “success.” She gave me an exercise
to do that was really helpful (one she had learned from a
self-help book). In two paragraphs I was to describe what I
would like my life to be like ten years from now. It took
several weeks for me to complete the paragraphs but they
conveyed to me that I really did have more of a “grip” on
what I wanted than I had previously seen. This experience
affirmed for me the importance of not suppressing suicidal
feelings.

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Like other black professional women who live alone and
work in predominandy white settings, I am deeply disturbed
whenever I hear that a sister/comrade in a similar situation
has committed suicide. I felt this way when the Chicago
journalist Leanita McClain killed herself at the age of
thirty-two. In a long article about McClain, “To Be Black,
Gifted, and Alone” black woman writer Bebe Moore
Campbell offered these explanations:

As her personal desires eluded her and the values of her old
and new worlds collided, close friends witnessed spells of
hysterical crying, brooding silence, and mounting depression.
She began stockpiling the potent antidepressant drug
amitriptyline prescribed by her physician. For all of her
accoutrements of professional success, McClain was as full of
despair as any ghetto dweller. On the night of what would
have been her tenth wedding anniversary, McClain swallowed
a huge overdose of amitriptyline and left both worlds behind.

Reading all the material I could find about McClain, both her
writings and the commentary on her by others, I felt enraged
at both the simplistic analysis that was often given to explain
her death and the tacit acceptance of her fate that subtiy
implied her dying was inevitable. Writers suggested
loneliness (not having a
man), job stress, and alienation were all the reasons behind
her suicide. And while these obvious reasons made sense,
there was no attempt made in any writing I read to look at her
childhood and make connections between that experience and
her adult life. A Foot in Each World, the collection of her
writings published after her death, was introduced by her
ex-husband and colleague who testified that “she constantly
lamented to me and other close friends that life for her no

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longer had much meaning.” Clearly, many people knew that
McClain was in crisis. I ask myself again and again why no
meaningful life-sustaining intervention took place. Could it be
possible that, within the context of white-supremacist
capitalist patriarchy, McClain’s “pain” was taken for granted,
that some people may have unconsciously perceived and
accepted it as the “deserved punishment” a black woman gets
when she pushes against set boundaries and excels against the
odds? Where was the circle of love that could have embraced
and held her while she surrendered to the grief and pain that
was within her? Why was there no healing place?

Recendy, hearing of yet another black woman whose death

had been declared a suicide, I once again thought about the
absent circle of love, the lack of a healing place. Many of the
same reasons that were given for McClain’s suicide were
evoked in this case. And I thought, well, if I had killed myself
two years ago, people would say this same shit: “She didn’t
have no man. She was lonely. She was having trouble relating
on the job.” I could hear them dredging up the gossip about
affairs here and there that did not work out. And I do not
think any of these issues, no matter how real they are in my
life, would have been accurate or adequate explanations. The
“depression” I was feeling was engendered by my need to be
creatively challenged in life. Having reached a point where I
was successfully completing a number of desired goals, I was
experiencing both a “void” and undergoing the kind of critical
self-examination that brought about a crisis in meaning. It
was a time for me to re-vision my life and chart new and
different journeys. I think it’s very hard for successful black
women (and

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black men) to turn away from achievements, high-status
positions with visibility, that may no longer be meeting our
growth needs.

What would have happened had McClain said to folks that

despite all her success she really needed to change everything
in her life—that she needed to start over. Writing “The
Middle-Class Black’s Burden” in 1980, McClain shared:

I am burdened daily with showing whites that blacks are

people. I am, in the old vernacular, a credit to my race. I am
my brother’s keeper, and my sister’s, though many of them
have abandoned me because they think that I have abandoned
them. I run a gauntlet between two worlds, and I am cursed
and blessed by both. I travel, observe, and take part in both; I
can also be used by both. I am a rope in a tug of war. If I am a
token in my downtown office, so am I at my cousin’s church
tea. I assuage white guilt. I disprove black inadequacy and
prove to my parents’ generation that their patience was indeed
a virtue.

However much she may have “gloried” in her success, in the

power of her achievements, McClain also knew that they took
a psychological toll daily. Would her life have ended
differendy if she had known a wise Sister of the Yam who
could have shared the critical insight that remaining always in
a stressful position, walking a tightrope, is not good for the
soul, that to live well and remain in this position one must
take time out to nurture and renew the spirit, to unwind, relax,
and recover? Would she have listened to wise Sisters of the
Yam telling her: “Girl, you burning out—you need a
change?” And would she have received unequivocal support
from colleagues and loved ones if she had announced, “This

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has been a great journey but it’s time for me to travel a
different road?”

In my own life, I have found that announcing the need for

change has usually led others to point out how successful I
am, and ask why I shouldn’t pause just when I have gathered
a certain momentum. They also frequendy ask, “What will we
do without you?” The support I have received has come from
Yams, from therapeutic sessions with friends and counselors,
who have been able to hear my pain, who have been willing
to listen and hear me say that I enjoy my successes and at the
same time I am in need of a change. Since my sister V. has
also been re-mapping her life, first
questioning whether a new job was really what she would like
to be doing and then leaving the high-powered administrative
position, we are able to give each other positive feedback for
taking risks and comfort when we make mistakes.

Unreconciled grief, sadness, and feeling that life has lost

meaning are all states of being that lead black women into
life-threatening depression. Loss is no respecter of age. Very
young children suffer debilitating depression. This is all the
more likely if they are living in an abusive, dysfunctional
family. For some grown black women, the depressions we
face can be traced back to childhood roots. Some of us hold
our pain through years and years, letting it trouble our health.
It would help contemporary black women to
re-institutionalize meaningful death and dying rituals that
older generations used that promoted healthy processes of
grief, which taught us when and how to let go. All change can
create sadness. It’s when the sadness lingers that we can
become stuck, mired, and unable to move. To the extent that
black women are able to grapple with the larger reality of

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death and dying, we are better able to confront and cope with
ongoing life-changes; we can move on. In the essay “Dying
as the Last Stage of Growth,” Mwalimu Imara argues that all
change is a bit like dying: “Abandoning old ways and
breaking old patterns is like dying, at least dying to old ways
of life for an unknown new life of meaning and relationship.
But living without change is not living at all, not growing at
all. Dying is a precondition for living.” With keen
long-lasting insight, the ancestors were wise to teach us that
“a body that knows how to die well will know how to live
well.” Collectively, black women will lead more
life-affirming lives as we break through denial, acknowledge
our pain, express our grief, and let the mourning teach us how
to rejoice and begin life anew.

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8
Moved by Passion: Eros and
Responsibility
Reading black women’s fiction we enter a world that
unashamedly exposes the crisis in our “erotic” lives. That we
have much to reconcile in relation to our sexualities and our
sensualities is evident, whatever the sexual preference of the
author. When I speak of eroticism here, it is not meant to
evoke heterosexist images. I want to speak to and about that
life-force inside all of us—there even before we have any clue
as to sexual preferences or practices—that we identify as the
power of the erotic. In her essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Audre
Lorde explains:

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the
personification of love in all of its aspects—born of Chaos,
and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak
of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force
of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge
and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our
history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives»

Significantly, black lesbian women have been at the forefront

of our efforts to transform black females’ relationship to the
erotic. Audre Lorde’s powerful essay was groundbreaking. It
not only provided us with a blueprint for rethinking the erotic
away from the context of patriarchy and heterosexism, it gave

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us permission to talk publicly about sexual pleasure. Black
lesbian writers like Diane Bogus share their efforts to
understand the development of their erotic politics by
re-examining childhood, their relationships
within family. Bogus writes about her mother in the essay
“Mom de Plume,” sharing:

So, I watched how you managed this married/single state.

Unaware that you were sick and growing sicker, I saw you
w^ork full time, cook, clean, see after my brothers and men,
and fill us with an indelible mother-wit. It is from here, then,
that my nameless, boundless adoradon, my emulation grew.
Maybe during those few, but intensely loving, copyist years, I
xeroxed a subliminal image of you which I have since applied
towards my own happiness. Maybe, then, my lesbianism is no
more than your manless self-reliance turned into itself.

By willingly, publicly, interrogating the realm of the erotic,

black lesbian feminist thinkers paved the way for all black
women to exercise our right to know and understand the
erotic politically.

Concretely, lesbian, bi-sexual, and black female sex radicals

challenge those black women trapped in the confines of a
hurtful oppressive heterosexist eroticism to recognize that we
have choices. In urging us to reconsider our relation to our
bodies, as well as the bodies of other black women, the field
of eroticism was expanded and with promise of greater
passion and pleasure. These positive interventions are crucial.
All our eroticisms have been shaped within the culture of
domination. Despite our choices and preferences, we act in an
erotic and liberatory way towards ourselves and others only if
we have dared to break free from the cultural norms.

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More than ever before in our history, black women are
working to articulate an “erotic metaphysic” that can give
direction and meaning to our experience. Borrowing this term
from philosopher Sam Keen, who uses it in his work The
Passionate Life, “an erotic metaphysics” evokes a vision of
life that links our sense of self with communion and
community. It is based on the assumption that we become
more fully who we are in the act of loving. Keen elaborates:
“Within the tradition of erotic metaphysics, which goes back
to Augustine and Plato, love is assumed to be prior to
knowledge. We love in order to understand.” To think of an
erotic metaphysics in black women’s lives is to automatically
counter that stereotype version of our
reality that is daily manufactured and displayed in
white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture.

Within a society where black women’s bodies, our very

beings, have been and are objectified in ways that deny our
subjectivity, it has been incredibly difficult for black women
to see the erotic as a space of power. Here it’s important to
distinguish the erotic from the sexual. Many black females
learn early on how to objectify themselves, their bodies, and
use their sexuality as a commodity that can be exchanged in
the sexual marketplace. The black women who have
internalized this way of thinking about their sexual selves,
though they may appear “liberated,” are in actuality
completely estranged from their erotic powers. Their
estrangement is just as intense as that of black females who
have learned from childhood on that they can protect
themselves from objectification, from commodification by
repressing erotic energy, by denying any sensual or sexual
dimension in themselves.

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Just as breaking through denial is an initial stage in the
healing process in other areas of our lives, it is equally true
that black women will not be able to heal the wounded
dimensions of our erotic lives until we assert our right to
healing pleasure. Some of us are unable to imagine and create
spaces of pleasure in our lives. When we are always busy
meeting the needs of others, or when we are “used to pain,”
we lose sight of the way in which the ability to experience
and know pleasure is an essential ingredient of wellness.
Erotic pleasure requires of us engagement with the realm of
the senses, a willingness to pause in our daily life transactions
and enjoy the world around us. For many black females, the
capacity to be in touch with sensual reality was perverted and
distorted in childhood. Raised by authoritative, coercive
parents who were only primarily concerned with producing
obedient children, many of us learned as litde girls that we
would always be punished for pleasure, for not keeping our
clothes neat, for any small act of spontaneity that did not
coincide with their objectification of us. We have all known
black parents who treat girl children like “dolls” and expect
them to behave as though they are puppets on a string
performing on command.

These environments did not promote the development of

creative imagination or affirm a child’s desire to explore the
world fully. Sam Keen reminds us that the world of the child
at play is the foundation that can shape or misshape our
ability to feel:

In the play of the senses the child burrows beneath the

boundaries of the persona. Touching, smelling, and tasting
allow us to discover for ourselves if, and to what extent, the
world makes sense. So long as we have bodies, we may

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retreat in to the sanctuary of experience. The senses are
private oracles. When we consult them we discover a sacred
bond that unites us to life.

For black children, this bond is often broken quite early.

Many of us were made to feel as children that the world was
completely unsafe, hence our capacity for wonder was
repressed and fear took its place.

Touching as a way to experience reality was denied many of

us as children. I was in a gift shop recently where a black
child wanted to touch objects, to pick them up and look at
them, the way other customers were doing. Her mother,
however, kept insisting that she not touch anything, that if she
did the people in the store might think she was stealing it. In
so many public spaces, we can witness daily the way in which
the curiosity of black children is suppressed. Taught not to
reach out and touch objects in the world that invite interest
and bring pleasure, many black children are socialized to
think that this desire is “bad” and brings punishment. They
learn to repress the desire to touch and the need to be touched.
One of my sisters had to confront relatives who felt that she
was touching her children “too much” and as a consequence
was making them soft. Again the idea that black children
must learn to be “tough” serves as the logic for denying them
forms of physical bonding that communicate that their flesh is
lovable, that it deserves tenderness and care.

Talking about ways individuals are rendered incapable of

experiencing pleasure, Keen asserts: “Deprivation of bonding
creates erotic poverty; erotic poverty gives rise to violence;
violence further inhibits eros. We can’t make love on a

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battlefield. The less care we receive, the less we are capable
of giving.” Young
black females often learn early that they will not get any of
their needs for physical touch and nurturance met in any
realm except the sexual. There are few studies that look at the
connection between early sexual experience, that may or may
not lead to teenage pregnancy, and the desire to find a space
where one can express the need to be touched. When black
females have been deprived of emotional nurturance that
includes touch at early ages, we may not know how to
distinguish those longings from sexual desire. Not knowing
the difference we may engage in early sexual encounters in an
attempt to meet needs that are not sexual.

How many young black girls are able to articulate to partners

they just need to be caressed, touched, or held? Does sex
become the only way they can experience touch because they
do not know how to ask? How many grown black females are
fully able to acknowledge the healing power of touch? Are we
touched enough? Do we give black children the touching they
need? Many of us were raised to be embarrassed by physical
displays of affection. In their autobiographical writings, black
women often describe growing up in families where there
were no physical expressions of care. In Young, Gifted, and
Black, Lorraine Hansberry confessed that her family did not
touch, did not ever even speak of love:

If we were sick, we were sternly, impersonally and carefully

nursed and doctored back to health. Fevers, toothaches were
attended to with urgency and importance, one always felt
important in my family. Mother came with a tray to your
room with the soup and Vick’s salve or gave the enemas in a
steaming bathroom. But we were not fondled, any of

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us—head held to breast, fingers about that head—until we
were grown, all of us, and my father died. At his funeral I at
last, in my memory, saw my mother hold her sons that way,
and for the first time in her life my sister held me in her arms
I think. We were not a loving people: we were passionate in
our hostility and affinities, but the caress embarrassed us. We
have changed little.

Many of us have had a similar experience. It is only when we

leave home and return as adults that expressions of love seem
possible. What is it about distance that enables us to
acknowledge emotional need? Does the caress embarrass us
because it serves as an active reminder that we are flesh and
in need of tender loving
care. Should we be surprised that a people whose bodies have
been perpetually used, exploited, and objectified should now
seek to turn flesh into armor?

When we consider the uses that this society has made of black
women’s bodies—as breeding machines, as receptacles for
pornographic desires, as “hot pussies” to be bought and
sold—surely our collective estrangement from a life-giving
eroticism makes sense. Given the way patriarchy and notions
of male domination inform the construction of heterosexual
identity, the realm of black heterosexual sexual expression is
rarely a place where black females learn to glory in our erotic
power. Whereas black women’s fictions narrate brutal
destructive expressions of sexuality that mask themselves as
desire between black men and women, black women’s
autobiographies rarely mention the realm of the sexual.

Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow is unusual

in its depiction of passionate lovemaking between a black

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man and woman that is rooted in mutual desire, in a shared
longing to remain connected to creative black culture.
Describing moments of sexual ecstasy that embrace this
experience as sacred, Marshall writes:

He would lie within her like a man who has suddenly found
himself inside a temple of some kind, and hangs back,
overcome by the magnificence of the place, and sensing
around him the invisible forms of the deities who reside there:
Erzulie with her jewels and gossamer veils; Yemoja to whom
the rivers and seas are sacred; Oya, first wife of the thunder
god and herself in charge of winds and rains.. Jay might have
felt himself surrounded by a pantheon of the most ancient
deities who had made their temple the tunneled darkness of
his wife’s flesh. And he held back, trembling a little, not
knowing quite how to conduct himself in their presence.

For Jay and Avey, sexuality is a place that allows them to

recover themselves, to be more fully alive. Yet, Marshall
depicts Jay as losing touch with his sensuality and his
sexuality when he becomes overly obsessed with acquiring
material goods, with gaining economic power. Marshall is
one of the few black writers who shows a connection between
advanced capitalism and black
folks’ consuming desire for goods that erases our will to
experience the realm of the senses as a location of power and
possibility.

If we listen to many contemporary black songs, rap and R&B,

we can hear endless messages that make the space of erotic
longing a site for exchange of goods, a site for the enactment
of aggression. Listening to the pugilistic expression of sexual
desire that is evoked in much male-centered rap music, we

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have to wonder what kind of sex young black people are
having and ask ourselves why it is they connect sex with
hostile aggressive acts, violence, even hatred. In
white-supremacist culture, “blackness” is always made to be a
sign of the anti-erotic. Whereas the black body may be
sexualized, it is perpetually associated with negative sex
thought (rape, disease). Fashion magazines tend to portray
black women in ways that make their bodies appear
“unnatural,” mannequin-like, twisted out of shape. Often
black females are displayed in pseudo street-corner style
clothing (as though we are prostitutes), wearing straight wigs,
and our features distorted. These sexualized images do not
empower black women onlookers. Are they there for the
voyeuristic white gaze, to render us as “objects” or
possessions once again?

To see black female bodies as sacred is to counter the cultural

insistence that they are worthless and expendable. Sacred
bodies enter the realm of sexuality knowing how to give
honor. Discussing the question of attitude in The Art of
Sexual Ecstasy, Margo Anand reminds us that self-love
enables us to experience pleasure, a sense of the ecstatic:
“Love begins at home, with loving yourself. By this I don’t
mean self-centered indulgence, but the ability to trust yourself
and to listen to you inner voice, the intuitive guidance of your
own heart. Loving yourself means that you realize that you
deserve the experience of ecstasy…” Many black women are
struggling to accept and love our bodies. For some of us that
means learning to love our skin color. Others of us may love
our blackness but mentally mutilate, cutting the body into
desirable and undesirable parts. In Toni Morrison’s novel
Beloved’ Baby Suggs preaches a prophetic sermon in the

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midst of nature, in the woods, calling on black folks to love
our flesh:

“Here,” she said, “in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps,
laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it
hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.
They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out.
No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay
it. And O, my people, they do not love your hands. Those
they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your
hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others
with them, pat them together, stroke them on you face ‘cause
they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!

Baby Suggs continues to name various parts of our bodies

calling us to love this flesh. For any black female working on
self-recovery issues around body esteem, this would be a
good meditation passage to read daily for insight and
reflection.

Loving our flesh, celebrating it, includes the eroticism of

language, the way we talk to one another. So often, we use
harsh tones. We raise our voices. We forget how to use black
vernacular speech in a manner that consoles, caresses, and
delights. Yet, much more than standard English, we can speak
in dialect or patois to bring an aura of pleasure and “down
home” delight to our intimate encounters. This is why Paule
Marshall calls attention to the way Jay and Avey talk to one
another during lovemaking, engaging in a mutual dialogue of
desire that intensifies their inter-subjectivity and diffuses the
possibility that they will become narcissistic and forget to
recognize one another. Dialogue is a powerful gesture of love.
Caring talk is a sweet communion that deepens our bonds.

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We can show the depths of our care by the way we speak in
all areas of our lives, both public and private. Our words can
evoke the sense of respect and profound acknowledgment of
how precious we are to one another. Language can convey a
sense of the sacred.

Sacred sexuality begins when we touch our bodies in daily

grooming. One of the truly special moments of tender
caregiving occurs in Praisesong for the Widow, when Rosalie
Parvey washes Avey’s soiled body after she has made the
difficult crossing to Carriacou. This bathing is ritualistic and
healing. For black women it is an enchanting invitation to
remember childhood baths when our bodies were touched and
cleaned. It is a celebration of tender care that one black
woman gives another even though they are
strangers. In this twilight sensual space, Avey experiences a
reawakening of her senses; she feels herself alive again to
touch, smell, and sound: “She gave herself over then to the
musing voice and to such simple matters as the mild fragrance
of the soap in the air and the lovely sound, like a sudden light
spatter of rain, as the maid wrung out the washcloth from time
to time over the water in the galvanized tub.” Shame about
our bodies often prevents black females from giving one
another affirmation and physical care. And then extreme
homophobic fear continues to inform black people’s inability
to touch one another. Eradicating homophobia would allow us
to embrace each other across sexual preferences without fear.

In the introduction to her new book of poems The Love Space

Demands, Ntozake Shange speaks to the way in which fear of
AIDS is leading some black folks to promote sexual
repression: “Our behaviors were just beginning to change
when the epidemic began, moving sex closer to shame now

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than anything since I’ve been alive. Words that undermine
trust and liberty to feel are creeping back into the bedrooms
and couches of our lives so that we are always second
guessing each other.” Margo Anand’s book affirms that
ecstatic sexual pleasure can be experienced within the context
of safe sex. The AIDS crisis, which is affecting our
communities greatly (more than 50 percent of the women
with AIDS are black), has heightened our awareness that we
can honor each other most in the context of shared eroticism
by bringing to desire an openness and willingness to share in
words who we are and what we have experienced as well as
what we want, all without fear.

This should always have been a dynamic in healthy sexual

experience. For many women, and in particular black women
who have never been able to articulate their sexual fears,
needs, or longings, it is difficult to engage in open discussion
prior to a sexual encounter. This fear leads many heterosexual
black women to accept being sexual without a condom,
because they do not wish to initiate the discussion of safe sex
with partners. A healing eroticism enables us to assume
responsibility for articulating all our concerns whenever we
are sexually interested and involved. Audre Lorde
emphasizes that eroticism is frightening because it is
life-affirming and calls us to resist any dehumanizing
encounter. It is dehumanizing for women to submit to sex
without condoms when they desire protection. As Lorde
reminds us:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives,
we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits
that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know
ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers

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us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of
our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in
terms of their relative meaning within our lives.

Empowered by a healing eroticism, black women are able to

envision and engage in sexual encounters that do not diminish
our well-being. A number of married black women that I
spoke to talked about continuing to feel compelled to have
sex with their partners against their will. We know that this
gesture is dangerous for it demands that we suppress
authentic feelings and pretend. That suppression alone acts to
estrange us from our bodies, to alienate us from our needs, so
that we lose touch. It must be resisted.

Since so many black women have experienced traumatic

physical abuse; we come to sexuality wounded. Irrespective
of our sexual preference, we need to be with partners who are
able to hear us define boundaries and limits. We need partners
who are able to give us the loving care that makes sexual
healing possible. Those of us who have learned to openly and
honestly name that we are abuse survivors find that our
willingness to take care of ourselves invites reciprocal
recognition and care from our sexual partners. Shange shares
the insight in The Love Space Demands that “when we don’t
know what we mean or why we are doing what we do, we are
only able to bring chaos and pain to ourselves and others.”
Keen, in The Passionate Ufe, calls us to enter sexual
encounters with our whole selves in a different way, but his
message is similar:

A purely sensational approach to sex misses the paradox of

pleasure. Human beings are not young forever, do not live in
the perpetual moratorium of the game, and cannot isolate

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present sensations from associated feelings. We are
multidimensional. Therefore pleasure is greatest when
sensation (present awareness) feeling (past associations)
and intentions (future expectations) are unified in a single
whole. If all the parts of the self are allowed to participate,
everything feels better.

At the core of an erotic metaphysics is the urgent call to know

and love who we are so that we can become more fully
ourselves in the space of passion and pleasure.

Black women are often more passionate in our rage and

suffering than we are in our loving. The energy that we bring
to situations that arouse hostility or pain can easily be
redirected. We can tell ourselves daily to direct our most
intense feeling to those areas of our lives that bring pleasure
and delight. To achieve this end we need to write ourselves
many recipes for tuning into healing erotic power and put
them in a box so that when we see our energies going toward
anger or suffering we can take a recipe from the box and
follow it. When I am in pain or feeling sad, I am often unable
to imagine what activities might create a shift in feeling. A
box full of ideas can serve as a reminder. Singing, dancing,
walking, or sitting meditation can all be used as a practice to
bring us back in touch with our bodies. Learning to be still, in
sitting meditation, is one way we can be one with our bodies.
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that living in
awareness, living mindfully, enables us to heal the wounded
parts of ourselves. He encourages us to smile and smile often.
We all know that black women often shut our faces down,
turn them into impenetrable masks. Opening up our gaze is a
gesture that can bring us closer to the outside world, making it
more possible for us to experience joy and gratitude that we

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are alive, that we have another day on this earth in our bodies,
that we can feel the body ecstatic.

As we attempt to envision a healing eroticism, Keen also

encourages us to ask the question: “What forms of passion
might make us whole? To what passions may we surrender
with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish
the promise of our lives? Where may we look to catch a
glimpse of the kind of passionate life that would heal both the
psyche and the body politic?” These are important questions
for black women seeking self-recovery. Those of us with
feminist awareness find that the experience of passion in a
non-sexist context is amazingly healing.
Without knowing that we hold within ourselves so much fear,
we find in encounters with one another, with caring partners,
that sexuality has often been a fearful site but that it can be a
place where we can let the fear go, where we can recover and
come back to ourselves. We find that celebrating our union
with the natural world and our natural selves awakens our
senses and gives us pleasure. We find that there is a healing
eroticism in liberation struggle when we actively engage
every aspect of our being to bring to black experience beauty,
honor, respect, and vigilant caretaking. Recovering a healthy
passion, black women discover that we can pause in the midst
of everyday activities and feel again the sense of wonder, of
pleasure that we are flesh, that we are one with the universe,
that there is a life-force within us charged with erotic power
that can transform and heal our lives.

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9
Living to Love
Love heals. We recover ourselves in the act and art of loving.
A favorite passage from the biblical Gospel of John that
touches my spirit declares: “Anyone who does not know love
is still in death.”

Many black women feel that we live lives in which there is

little or no love. This is one of our private truths that is rarely
a subject for public discussion. To name this reality evokes
such intense pain that black women can rarely talk about it
fully with one another. The Black Women’s Health Book had
no chapter focusing specifically on love. And the only time
the word was evoked in a chapter heading, it was in a
negative context. The subject was domestic violence, the title
“Love Don’t Always Make It Right.” Already, this title
distorts the meaning of genuine love—real love does make it
right. One of the major tasks black women face as we work
for emotional healing is to understand more fully what love is
so that we do not imagine that love and abuse can be
simultaneously present in our lives. Most abuse is
life-threatening, whether it wounds our bodies or our psyches.
Understanding love as a life-force that urges us to move
against death enables us to see clearly that, where love is,
there can no disenabling, disempowering, or life-destroying
abuse.

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Because many black women make care synonymous with
love, we confuse the issue. Care can take place in, for
example, a familial context where there is also abuse, but this
does not mean that love is present. In this chapter, I would
like to offer ways to think about love that deepen our
understanding of its meaning and practice. I
want to shed light on the way our specific historical
experience as black people living in a racist society has made
it difficult and at times downright impossible for us to
practice the act and art of loving in any sustained way.

It has not been simple for black people living in this culture to
know love. Defining love in The Road Less Traveled as “the
will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s
own or another’s personal growth,” M. Scott Peck shares the
prophetic insight that love is both an “intention and an
action.” We show love via the union of feeling and action.
Using this definition of love, and applying it to black
experience, it is easy to see how many black folks historically
could only experience themselves as frustrated lovers, since
the conditions of slavery and racial apartheid made it
extremely difficult to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual
growth. Notice, that I say, difficult, not impossible. Yet, it
does need to be acknowledged that oppression and
exploitation pervert, distort, and impede our ability to love.

Given the politics of black life in this white-supremacist

society, it makes sense that internalized racism and self-hate
stand in the way of love. Systems of domination exploit folks
best when they deprive us of our capacity to experience our
own agency and alter our ability to care and to love ourselves
and others. Black folks have been deeply and profoundly
“hurt,” as we used to say down home, “hurt to our hearts,”

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and the deep psychological pain we have endured and still
endure affects our capacity to feel and therefore our capacity
to love. We are a wounded people. Wounded in that part of
ourselves that would know love, that would be loving. The
choice to love has always been a gesture of resistance for
African-Americans. And many of us have made that choice
only to find ourselves unable to give or receive love.

Our collective difficulties with the art and act of loving began
in the context of slavery. It should not shock us that a people
who were forced to witness their young being sold away; their
loved ones, companions, and comrades beaten beyond all
recognition; a people who knew unrelenting poverty,
deprivation, loss, unending grief, and the forced separation of
family and kin; would emerge
from the context of slavery wary of this thing called love.
Yet, some slaves must have dreamed that they would one day
be able to fully develop their capacity to love. They knew
first-hand that the conditions of slavery distorted and
perverted the possibility that they would know love or be able
to sustain such knowing.

Though black folks may have emerged from slavery eager to

experience intimacy, commitment, and passion outside the
realm of bondage, they must also have been in many ways
psychologically unprepared to practice fully the art of loving.
No wonder then that many black folks established domestic
households that mirrored the brutal arrangements they had
known in slavery. Using a hierarchical model of family life,
they created domestic spaces where there were tensions
around power, tensions that often led black men to severely
whip black women, to punish them for perceived wrongdoing,
that led adults to beat children to assert domination and

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control. In both cases, black people were using the same harsh
and brutal methods against one another that had been used by
white slave owners against them when they were enslaved.
We know that life was not easy for the newly manumitted
black slaves. We know that slavery’s end did not mean that
black people who were suddenly free to love now knew the
way to love one another well.

Slave narratives often emphasize time and time again that

black people’s survival was often determined by their
capacity to repress feelings. In his 1845 narrative, Frederick
Douglass recalled that he had been unable to experience grief
when hearing of his mother’s death since they had been
denied sustained contact. Slavery socialized black people to
contain and repress a range of emotions. Witnessing one
another being daily subjected to all manner of physical abuse,
the pain of over-work, the pain of brutal punishment, the pain
of near-starvation, enslaved black people could rarely show
sympathy or solidarity with one another just at that moment
when sympathy and solace was most needed. They righdy
feared reprisal. It was only in carefully cultivated spaces of
social resistance, that slaves could give vent to repressed
feelings. Hence, they learned to check the impulse to give
care when it was
most needed and learned to wait for a “safe” moment when
feelings could be expressed. What form could love take in
such a context, in a world where black folks never knew how
long they might be together? Practicing love in the slave
context could make one vulnerable to unbearable emotional
pain. It was often easier for slaves to care for one another
while being very mindful of the transitory nature of their
intimacies. The social world of slavery encouraged black
people to develop notions of intimacy connected to expedient

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practical reality. A slave who could not repress and contain
emotion might not survive.

The practice of repressing feelings as a survival strategy

continued to be an aspect of black life long after slavery
ended. Since white supremacy and racism did not end with
the Emancipation Proclamation, black folks felt it was still
necessary to keep certain emotional barriers intact. And, in
the world view of many black people, it became a positive
attribute to be able to contain feelings. Over time, the ability
to mask, hide, and contain feelings came to be viewed by
many black people as a sign of strong character. To show
one’s emotions was seen as foolish. Traditionally in southern
black homes, children were often taught at an early age that it
was important to repress feelings. Often, when children were
severely whipped, we were told not to cry. Showing one’s
emotions could lead to further punishment. Parents would say
in the midst of painful punishments: “Don’t even let me see a
tear.” Or if one dared to cry, they threatened further
punishment by saying: “If you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give
you something to cry about.”

How was this behavior any different from that of the slave
owner whipping the slave but denying access to comfort and
consolation, denying even a space to express pain? And if
many black folks were taught at an early age not only to
repress emotions but to see giving expressions to feeling as a
sign of weakness, then how would they learn to be fully open
to love? Many black folks have passed down from generation
to generation the assumption that to let one’s self go, to fully
surrender emotionally, endangers
survival. They feel that to love weakens one’s capacity to
develop a stoic and strong character.

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When I was growing up, it was apparent to me that outside
the context of religion and romance, love was viewed by
grown-ups as a luxury. Struggling to survive, to make ends
meet, was more important than loving. In that context, the
folks who seemed most devoted to the art and act of loving
were the old ones, our grandmothers and great grandmothers,
our granddaddys and great granddaddys, the Papas and Big
Mamas. They gave us acceptance, unconditional care,
attention, and, most importantly, they affirmed our need to
experience pleasure and joy. They were affectionate. They
were physically demonstrative. Our parents and their
struggling-to-get-ahead generation often behaved as though
love was a waste of time, a feeling or an action that got in the
way of them dealing with the more meaningful issues of life.

When teaching Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, I am never

surprised to see black female students nodding their heads in
recognition when reading a passage where Hannah, a grown
black woman, asks her mother, Eva: “Did you ever love us?”
Eva responds with hostility and says: “You settin’ here with
your healthy-ass self and ax me did I love you? Them big old
eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I
hadn’t.” Hannah is not satisfied with this answer for she
knows that Eva has responded fully to her children’s material
needs. She wants to know if there was another level of
affection, of feeling and action. She says to Eva: “Did you
ever, you know, play with us?” And again Eva responds by
acting as though this is a completely ridiculous question:

Play? Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895. Just ‘cause you got it

good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a
killer girl. Things was bad. Niggers was dying like flies…

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What would I look like leapin’ ‘round that litde old room
playin’ with youngins with three beets to my name?

Eva’s responses suggest that finding the means for material

survival was not only the most important gesture of care, but
that it precluded all other gestures. This is a way of thinking
that many black people share. It makes care for material
well-being
synonymous with the practice of loving. The reality is, of
course, that even in a context of material privilege, love may
be absent. Concurrently, within the context of poverty, where
one must struggle to make ends meet, one might keep a spirit
of love alive by making a space for playful engagement, the
expression of creativity, for individuals to receive care and
attention in relation to their emotional well-being, a kind of
care that attends to hearts and minds as well as stomachs. As
contemporary black people commit ourselves to collective
recovery, we must recognize that attending to our emotional
well-being is just as important as taking care of our material
needs.

It seems appropriate that this dialogue on love in Sula takes

place between two black women, between mother and
daughter, for their interchange symbolizes a legacy that will
be passed on through the generations. In fact, Eva does not
nurture Hannah’s spiritual growth, and Hannah does not
nurture the spiritual growth of her daughter, Sula. Yet, Eva
does embody a certain model of “strong” black womanhood
that is practically deified in black life. It is precisely her
capacity to repress emotions and do whatever is needed for
the continuation of material life that is depicted as the source
of her strength. It is a kind of “instrumental” way of thinking

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about human needs, one that is echoed in the contemporary
song Tina Turner sings—“What’s love got to do with it?”

Living in a capitalist economy clearly informs the way black

people think about love. In his essay, “Love and Need: Is
Love a Package or a Message?” the Catholic monk Thomas
Merton explains the way we are taught, via a market economy
and the mass media that promotes it, to think of ourselves and
of love as a commodity. His comments are worth quoting at
length:

Love is regarded as a deal. The deal presupposes that we all

have needs which have to be fulfilled by means of exchange.
In order to make a deal you have to appear in the market with
a worthwhile product, or if the product is worthless, you can
get by if you dress it up in a good-looking package. We
unconsciously think of ourselves as objects for sale on the
market…In doing this we come to consider ourselves and
others not as persons but as products—as “goods,” or in other
words, as packages. We appraise one another commercially.
We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own
profit. We do not give ourselves in love, we make a deal that
will enhance our own product, and therefore no deal is final.

Since so much of black life experience has been about the

struggle to gain access to material goods, it makes sense that
many of us not only over-value materiality but that we are
also more vulnerable to the kind of thinking that commodifies
feelings and makes it appear that they are only another kind
of “material” need that can be satisfied within the same
system of exchange used with other goods.

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The combined forces of racist and sexist thinking have had a
particularly negative influence on black women’s attitudes
about our relation to material goods. Not only have we been
socialized to think of our bodies as a “product” to be
exchanged, we are also made to feel that it is our
responsibility to deliver needed products to others. Given that
so many black women are the sole providers in black
households, as Eva is in Sula, it is not surprising that we are
often obsessed with material comfort, with finding the means
to provide material well-being for ourselves and others. And,
in this role, black women may be most unwilling to cultivate
the practice of loving. We may be quite dedicated to caring
for the needs of others, particularly material needs. Our need
to love and be loved may be fundamentally denied, however.
After all, it is ultimately “easier to worry about how you
gonna’ get a dollar to buy the latest product than it is to worry
about whether there will be love in your house.”

Love needs to be present in every black female’s life, in all of

our houses. It is the absence of love that has made it so
difficult for us to stay alive or, if alive, to live fully. When we
love ourselves we want to live fully. Whenever people talk
about black women’s lives, the emphasis is rarely on
transforming society so that we can live fully, it is almost
always about applauding how well we have “survived”
despite harsh circumstances or how we can survive in the
future. When we love ourselves, we know that we must do
more than survive. We must have the means to live fully. To
live fully, black women can no longer deny our need to know
love.

If we would know love, we must first learn how to respond to

inner emotional needs. This may mean undoing years of

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socialization where we have been taught that such needs are
unimportant. Let me give an example. In her recently
published book, The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s
Strategies for Life, Kesho Scott opens the book sharing an
incident from her life that she feels taught her important
survival skills:

Thirteen years tall, I stood in the living room doorway. My

clothes were wet. My hair was mangled. I was in tears, in
shock, and in need of my mother’s warm arms. Slowly, she
looked me up and down, stood up from the couch and walked
towards me, her body clenched in criticism. Putting her hands
on her hips and planting herself, her shadow falling over my
face, she asked in a voice of barely suppressed rage, “What
happened?” I flinched as if struck by the unexpected anger
and answered, “They put my head in the toilet. They say I
can’t swim with them.” “They” were eight white girls at my
high school. I reached out to hold her, but she roughly
brushed my hands aside and said, “Like hell! Get your coat.
Let’s go.”

Straight-away it should be evident that Kesho was not

learning that her emotional needs should be addressed at this
moment. In her next sentences she asserts: “My mother taught
me a powerful and enduring lesson that day. She taught me
that I would have to fight back against racial and sexual
injustice.” Obviously, this is an important survival strategy
for black women. But Kesho was also learning an unhealthy
message at the same time. She was made to feel that she did
not deserve comfort after a traumatic painful experience, that
indeed she was “out-of-line” to even be seeking emotional
solace, and that her individual needs were not as important as
the collective struggle to resist racism and sexism. Imagine

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how different this story would read if we were told that as
soon as Kesho walked into the room, obviously suffering
distress, her mother had comforted her, helped repair the
damage to her appearance, and then shared with her the
necessity of confronting (maybe not just then, it would
depend on her psychological state, whether she could
emotionally handle a confrontation) the racist white students
who had assaulted her. Then Kesho would have known, at age
thirteen, that her emotional well-being was just as
important as the collective struggle to end racism and
sexism—that indeed these two experiences are linked.

Many black females have learned to deny our inner needs

while we develop our capacity to cope and confront in public
life. This is why we can often appear to be functioning well
on jobs but be utterly dysfunctional in private. You know
what I am talking about. Undoubtedly you know a black
woman who looks together, in control on the job, and when
you drop by her house unexpectedly for a visit, aside from the
living room, every other space looks like a tornado hit it,
everything dirty and in disarray. I see this chaos and disorder
as a reflection of the inner psyche, of the absence of
well-being. Yet until black females believe, and hopefully
learn when we are litde girls, that our emotional well-being
matters, we cannot attend to our needs. Often we replace
recognition of inner emotional needs with the longing to
control. When we deny our real needs, we tend to feel fragile,
vulnerable, emotionally unstable, and untogether. Black
females often work hard to cover up these conditions. And we
cover up by controlling, by seeking to oversee or dominate
everyone around us. The message we tell ourselves is, “I can’t
be falling apart because I have all this power over others.”

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Let us return to the mother in Kesho’s story. What if the sight
of her wounded and hurt daughter called to mind the mother’s
deep unaddressed inner wounds? What if she was critical,
harsh, or just downright mean, because she did not want to
break down, cry, and stop being the “strong black woman?”
And yet, if she had cried, her daughter might have felt her
pain was shared, that it was fine to name that you are in pain,
that we do not have to keep the hurt botded up inside us.
What the mother did was what many of us have witnessed our
mothers doing in similar circumstances—she took control.
She was domineering, even her physical posture dominated.
Clearly, this mother wanted her black female presence to have
more “power” than that of the white girls.

A fictional model of black mothering that shows us a mother

able to respond fully to her daughters when they are in pain is
depicted in Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress and
Indigo.
Throughout this novel, Shange’s black female characters are
strengthened in their capacity to self-actualize by a loving
mother. Even though she does not always agree with their
choices she respects them and offers them solace. Here is part
of a letter she writes to Sassafrass who is “in trouble” and
wants to come home. The letter begins with the exclamation:
“Of course you can come home! What do you think you could
do to yourself that I wouldn’t love my girl?” First giving love
and acceptance, Hilda later chastises, then expresses love
again:

You and Cypress like to drive me crazy with all this

experimental living. You girls need to stop chasing the coon
by his tail. And I know you know what I’m talking
about…Mark my words. You just come on home and we’ll

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straighten out whatever it is that’s crooked in your thinking.
There’s lots to do to keep busy. And nobody around to talk
foolish talk or experiment with. Something can’t happen
every day. You get up. You eat, go to work, come back, eat
again, enjoy some leisure, and go back to bed. Now, that’s
plenty for most folks. I keep asking myself where did I go
wrong? Yet I know in my heart I’m not wrong. I’m right. The
world’s going crazy and trying to take my children with it.
Okay. Now I’m through with all that. I love you very much.
But you’re getting to be a grown woman and I know that too.
You come back to Charleston and find the rest of yourself.
Love, Mama

It troubled me that it was difficult to find autobiographical

narratives where black daughters describe loving interactions
with black mothers. Overall, in fiction and autobiography,
black mothers are more likely to be depicted as controlling,
manipulative, and dominating, withholding love to maintain
power over. If, as Jessica Benjamin suggests in The Bonds of
Love, it is “mutual recognition” that disrupts the possibility of
domination, then it is possible to speculate that black women
who suffer a lack of recognition often feel the need to control
others as a way to be noticed, to be seen as important. In
Kesho’s story the mother refuses to see her daughter’s pain.
By erasing her pain, she also erases that part of herself that
hurts. And the message she gives is you can deny pain by the
experience of power, in this case the power to return to a
setting where you have been hurt and demand retribution. If
black women were more loved and loving, the need
to dominate others, particularly in the role of mother, would
not be so intense. It is healing for black women who are
obsessed with the need to control, to be “right,” to practice
letting go.

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The great black civil rights activist Septima Clarke names that
her personal growth was enhanced by letting go of the need to
be in control. For her this meant unlearning dependency on
hierarchical models that suggest the person in power is
always right. At one time she believed that whites always
knew better than blacks what was good for our well-being. In
Ready from Within, she declares:

Because I had a very strong disciplined mother, who felt that

whatever she had in her mind was right, I felt that whatever I
had in my mind was right, too. I found out that I needed to
change my way of thinking, and in changing my way of
thinking I had to let people understand that their way of
thinking was not the only way.

The art and practice of loving begins with our capacity to

recognize and affirm ourselves. That is why so many self-help
books encourage us to look at ourselves in the mirror and talk
to the image we see there. Recendy, I noticed that what I do
with the image that I see in the mirror is very unloving. I
inspect it. From the moment I get out of bed and look at
myself in the mirror, I am evaluating. The point of the
evaluation is not to provide self-affirmation but to critique.
Now this was a common practice in our household. When the
six of us girls made our way downstairs to the world
inhabited by father, mother, and brother, we entered the world
of “critique.” We were looked over and told all that was
wrong. Rarely did one hear a positive evaluation.

Replacing negative critique with positive recognition has

made me feel more empowered as I go about my day.
Affirming ourselves is the first step in the direction of
cultivating the practice of being inwardly loving. I choose to

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use the phrase “inwardly loving” over self-love, because the
very notion of “self’ is so inextricably bound up with how we
are seen by and in relation to others. Within a racist/sexist
society, the larger culture will not socialize black women to
know and acknowledge that our inner lives are important.
Decolonized black women must name that reality in accord
with others among us who understand as well that
it is vital to nurture the inner life. As we examine our inner
life, we get in touch with the world of emotions and feelings.
Allowing ourselves to feel, we affirm our right in be inwardly
loving. Once I know what I feel, I can also get in touch with
those needs I can satisfy or name those needs that can only be
satisfied in communion or contact with others.

Where is the love when a black woman looks at herself and

says: “I see inside me somebody who is ugly, too dark, too
fat, too afraid—somebody nobody would love, ‘cause I don’t
even like what I see;” or maybe: “I see inside me somebody
who is so hurt, who is just like a ball of pain and I don’t want
to look at her ‘cause I can’t do nothing about that pain.” The
love is absent. To make it present, the individual has to first
choose to see herself, to just look at that inner self without
blame or censure. And once she names what she sees, she
might think about whether that inner self deserves or needs
love.

I have never heard a black woman suggest during

confessional moments in a support group that she does not
need love. She may be in denial about that need but it doesn’t
take much self-interrogation to break through this denial. If
you ask most black women straight-up if they need love—the
answer is likely to be yes. To give love to our inner selves we
must first give attention, recognition, and acceptance. Having

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let ourselves know that we will not be punished for
acknowledging who we are or what we feel we can name the
problems we see. I find it helpful to interview myself, and I
encourage my sisters to do the same. Sometimes it’s hard for
me to get immediately in touch with what I feel, but if I ask
myself a question, an answer usually emerges.

Sometimes when we look at ourselves, and see our inner

turmoil and pain, we do not know how to address it. That’s
when we need to seek help. I call loved ones sometimes and
say, “I have these feelings that I don’t understand or know
how to address, can you help me?” There are many black
females who cannot imagine asking for help, who see this as a
sign of weakness. This is another negative debilitating world
view we should unlearn. It is a sign of personal power to be
able to ask for help when you need it. And we
find that asking for what we need when we need it is an
experience that enhances rather than diminishes personal
power. Try it and see. Often we wait until a crisis situation
has happened when we are compelled by circumstance to
seek the help of others. Yet, crisis can often be avoided if we
seek help when we recognize that we are no longer able to
function well in a given situation. For black women who are
addicted to being controlling, asking for help can be a loving
practice of surrender, reminding us that we do not always
have to be in charge. Practicing being inwardly loving, we
learn not only what our souls need but we begin to understand
better the needs of everyone around us as well.

Black women who are choosing for the first time (note the
emphasis on choosing) to practice the art and act of loving
should devote time and energy showing love to other black
people, both people we know and strangers. Within

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white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, black people do not
get enough love. And it’s always exciting for those of us who
are undergoing a process of decolonization to see other black
people in our midst respond to loving care. Just the other day
T., whom I mention in another chapter, told me that she
makes a point of going into a local store and saying warm
greetings to an older black man who works there. Recently,
he wanted to know her name and then thanked her for the care
that she gives to him. A few years ago when she was mired in
self-hate, she would not have had the “will” to give him care.
Now, she extends to him the level of care that she longs to
receive from other black people when she is out in the world.

When I was growing up, I received “unconditional love” from

black women who showed me by their actions that love did
not have to be earned. They let me know that I deserved love;
their care nurtured my spiritual growth. Black theologian and
mystic Howard Thurman teaches us that we need to love one
another without judging. Explaining this in an essay on
Thurman’s work, Walter Fluker writes:

According to Thurman, there is within each individual a basic

need to be cared for and understood in a relationship with
another at a point that is beyond all that is good and evil. In
religious experience, this inner
necessity for love is fulfilled in encounter with God and in
relation to others, the person is affirmed and becomes aware
of being dealt with totally.

Many black people, and black women in particular, have

become so accustomed to not being loved that we protect
ourselves from having to acknowledge the pain such
deprivation brings by acting like only white folks or other

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silly people sit around wanting to be loved. When I told a
group of black women that I wanted there to be a world where
I can feel love, feel myself giving and receiving love, every
time I walk outside my house, they laughed. For such a world
to exist, racism and all other forms of domination would need
to change. To the extent that I commit my life to working to
end domination, I help transform the world so that it is that
loving place that I want it to be.

Nikki Giovanni’s “Woman Poem” has always meant a lot to

me because it was one of the first pieces of writing that called
out black women’s self-hatred. Published in the anthology
The Black Woman, edited by Toni Bambara, this poem ends
with the lines: “face me whose whole life is tied up to
unhappiness cause it’s the only for real thing i know.”
Giovanni not only names in this poem that black women are
socialized to be caretakers, to deny our inner needs, she also
names the extent to which self-hate can make us turn against
those who are caring toward us. The black female narrator
says: “how dare you care about me—you ain’t got no good
sense—cause i ain’t shit you must be lower than that to care.”
This poem was written in 1968. Here we are, more than
twenty years later, and black women are still struggling to
break through denial to name the hurt in our lives and find
ways to heal. Learning how to love is a way to heal. That
learning cannot take place if we do not know what love is.
Remember Stevie Wonder singing with tears in his eyes on
national television: “I want to know what love is. I want you
to show me.”

I am empowered by the idea of love as the will to extend

oneself to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth
because it affirms that love is an action, that it is akin to work.

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For black people it’s an important definition because the
focus is not on
material well-being. And while we know that material needs
must be met, collectively we need to focus our attention on
emotional needs as well. There is that lovely biblical passage
in “Proverbs” that reminds us: “Better a dinner of herbs,
where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”

When we as black women experience fully the transformative

power of love in our lives, we will bear witness publicly in a
way that will fundamentally challenge existing social
structures. We will be more fully empowered to address the
genocide that daily takes the lives of black people—men,
women, and children. When we know what love is, when we
love, we are able to search our memories and see the past
with new eyes; we are able to transform the present and
dream the future. Such is love’s power. Love heals.

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10
Sweet Communion
Though I’ve been writing this book sitting alone in a tiny
study full of books, it has felt like a communal project. When
I talk with black women friends, the Yams, and tell them,
“It’s finally happening—I’m doing the Yam book, you know
the one on black female self-recovery,” they say, “It’s about
time!”

Each step of the way during this writing I have been in

ongoing conversations with black women who are passionate
about recovery, with folks who feel they are struggling to find
a healing place. In the midst of this writing, C., who had once
been in a Sisters of the Yam support group (and who has been
in a prolonged depression since a love affair ended), called in
the late night frantically crying, saying: “This is it. I’m sitting
here with fifty pills daring myself to take them, to get it over
with. I’m just so tired.” That sense of overwhelming loss and
weariness that I hear in her voice is so familiar. It reminds me
that there is a “world of hurt” inside us. It reminds me of a
conversation I had with a black woman I met in the south
months ago who held my hands tight and said again and
again, “There’s been so much hurt in me.” Listening to C.
struggle with the longing to just give up, I think about the
healing community that surrounds Velma in The Salt Eaters
and I wonder if I can be that—a healing community.

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I ask C., once a student in my black women’s writers class, if
she remembers reading Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo and
tell her that if it uplifted her spirits then she should read it
again. But I mostly want to remind her of the recipes for
healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for
the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get
a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start
working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item
on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living
someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no
community, it is time to leave town—to pack up and go (you
can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place
where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you
go.”

We talk again, when she has come back to herself. Still I

remind her of this last remedy. Then I tell her: “Girlfriend,
I’m struggling with whether or not to write a chapter on
relationships. I can’t think of anything new to say. I don’t
wanna repeat all that stuff about black women and loneliness,
and not having a man, cause every black woman don’t even
want a man, and do you have any thoughts on the subject?”
Her contribution: “This man thing is not where it’s at. And
anyway, what’s wrong with these dudes? And when are they
gonna see that caring and being a friend is what’s
happening?” We talk and talk, agreeing that the real deal is
learning to live and love in community. I share that, though I
would like to have a committed relationship, I no longer
believe that to be all that’s necessary, and that I really want to
build community. Remembering single black professional
women in my childhood, who were all pretty much school
teachers (some of whom had begun their careers at that
historical moment when to make that choice was also to elect

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to remain unmarried since married women were not allowed
to teach), I could not recall any of them lamenting their
life-choices. Indeed, they were women of power leading
fulfilled lives. And even though I know that they were lonely
at times, that they did not have children they gave birth to,
they were black women living in community. In profound
ways, they were not alone. I have had the good fortune
through my adult life to go “home” and talk with my teachers,
those whose spirits guide and watch over me, and so my sense
of their lives is not rooted in romantic fantasy.

Living in community, they found ways to cope with the gaps

in their lives. It did not matter if they did not have children,
for there was always some needy child in their midst upon
whom they could
shower love and care. They had their women’s group, usually
church related. And they had their romantic relationships, no
doubt clandestine, but, of course, always known as everything
in a small community is known. More than a year ago, my
dearest friend from childhood days decided to come live in
the same town as I live in. We have nurtured and sustained
our care for one another through long years. Just the other day
we were talking about our lives, our hometown, and the black
women we knew there whose lives did not fit the “norm.” I
asked Ehrai: “Do you think we will ever be able to know the
kind of sweet long-lasting sense of community that they
know? Do you think we can make it?” And with her usual
wit, she answered: “There’s always me, you, and Carre (her
daughter), that’s a start. You just need to find us a place.”

Again and again, when I talk with black women who are
engaged in a recovery and liberation process, whether they
are in primary relationships or living as single parents or

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alone, I hear from all of us a concern about building a greater
sense of community. It was maybe four years ago that I sat
with Ntozake Shange and raised this question in relation to
black women: “Where is the healing place?” That evening we
had no answer. Now, I am more confident that community is
a healing place. As black women come together with one
another, with all the other folks in the world who are seeking
recovery and liberation, we find the will to be well affirmed,
we find ways to get what we need to ease the pain, to make
the hurt go away. Some of us are more involved in structured
recovery programs, in intense ongoing therapy, others of us
do a lot of “home psychoanalysis” (my term for the therapy
that friends, comrades and loved ones can do together daily).
We are all discovering that the experience of community is
crucial to wellness.

Much that is beautiful, magical, and unique in black culture

has come from the experience of communal black life. Our
communities have been truly undermined by addiction,
whether they are rural or urban. Ironically, many of the drugs
folks are addicted to, such as crack/cocaine, boost
individualism and
provide a false sense of agency and personal power. These
drugs destroy the individual’s capacity to experience
community. When I first read Stanton Peele on addiction I
was most struck by his insistence that addiction is not about
relatedness, that helped me to begin to think about the way
drug addiction has undermined black life by undermining our
capacity to build and sustain community. In Love and
Addiction, Peele offers the insight that “the antithesis of
addiction is a true relatedness to the world.” By showing the
ways our notion of relationship, of love, promotes the
development of unhealthy dependencies, Peele calls attention

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to the need to transform relations as we know them. To
reconceptualize our relational lives in terms of building
community is a way to counter the addictive pattern. Peele
asserts:

The interdependency of all individuals and organizations

makes the elimination of addiction contingent upon basic
social change. But this same interdependency means that if
we work to influence those institutions that we normally deal
with, we can make a contribution which will be felt
throughout the entire system. In particular, the family is a
place where any individual can be an immediate force for
change. When we find new ways to relate to our parents, our
mates, and our children—say, by making those relationships
less exclusive and obligatory—we have an impact on all
aspects of our social structure. When individuals practice the
art of loving in a context where they make various trusting
relationships, we are less likely to reproduce the notion that it
is “enough” to love just one person in a primary relationship.

One of the most harmful cultural myths that circulates in our

daily lives is the notion that we can leave dysfunctional
family settings and be ready to love when we meet that “one”
special person. By seeking to transform and heal all our
various relationships, we begin to create a communal ethos
where we learn how to experience intimacy and how to love.
In families where the notion of domination reigns supreme,
where exercising power and control by any means necessary
is the norm, there is litde hope that this will be a place where
people can learn how to love. In Lost in the Land of 0%
Madonna Kolbenschlag suggests that the contemporary crisis
in family life, the exposure to family violence, may generate
the

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will to change. She, too, sees the development of community
as necessary to promote and sustain change:

Men and women cannot solve their problems of power,

responsibility, and relationship alone. We are, whether as
individuals, couples, or nuclear families, dwarfed by the task.
We cannot evolve new roles and new familial arrangements
without support, without a caring and intervening community,
and most certainly not without a social order and social policy
that promotes these ends…Honestly facing the abandonment
and absence of a caring social environment, which is the real
situation for most of us, can create the energy for imaginative
restructuring of the shape of our lives. Hurt is hope’s
home—if we truly acknowledge that we are hurt and broken.

The focus on building community necessarily challenges a

culture of domination that privileges individual well-being
over collective effort. The rise of narcissistic individualism
among black people has undermined traditional emphasis on
community. The culture of poverty that led to the
development of a strong ethic of communalism among the
black poor, an emphasis on sharing skills and resources, is
swiftly eroding. In part, television plays a tremendous role in
advancing both the cause of individualism and the
identification of the poor with the values and ethos of the
ruling class. When we consider, too, what the feminization of
poverty means for black life, it is tragically evident that
masses of black women are and will be struggling to make
ends meet, to raise families with litde or no material
resources. Given this situation, black women have a particular
investment in bringing to our families, to black life in general,
a renewed concern with making community.

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Ironically, just when black people need to affirm the
importance of community, when we need to redevelop an
ethos that emphasizes collective well-being, we are
witnessing a proliferation of the false assumption that
somehow black life can be redeemed if we develop strong
black patriarchies. This is certainly the reactionary message
of Shahrazad All’s The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding
the Blackwoman. All our observations of patriarchal white
families in the United States should indicate that reproducing
this unhealthy model in black face would do little to
heal the woundedness and brokenness in black life. While it is
important that we call attention to the particular ways black
men are assaulted, brutalized, dehumanized, and slaughtered
in this society, we must simultaneously acknowledge how
much of this violence is promoted by patriarchal thinking.
Hence, it cannot be meaningfully addressed by black people
promoting patriarchy.

Recently, appearing on a television talk show focusing on

black family life, I was stunned to hear a young black male
filmmaker (who has made a film in which the downtrodden
black patriarchal husband brutally murders his wife) and a
black male congressperson insist that black men do not need
mental health care; “They need jobs, they need spending
money to have self-esteem.” Intervening, I suggested that it is
no longer useful for black people struggling to survive and
recover ourselves to think in either/or terms. Yes! Black men
need jobs, but being employed will not automatically mean
that they will use the money they earn to take care of families
(there are many employed male patriarchs of all races who do
not provide for families) or enhance self-esteem. Yet, there is
a dignity to be found in work and in being able to provide for
one’s material needs. We still have to keep in mind though

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that there are many men, and many black men, who make lots
of money but have low self-esteem, who are violent in
domestic life.

Breaking with traditional patriarchal thinking, and the

negative masculine identity it promotes, would enable black
men to take seriously their mental health and well-being. If
black people disinvest from the patriarchal notion that “real”
men do not need to address their emotional life and their
psychic well-being, we can begin to create strategies for
social change that will enhance black male life and as a
consequence all our lives. As more black men become critical
of sexism and seek to reconstruct masculinity, we will see a
change in the quality of black male life. One of the tragic
implications of black communities’ embracing All’s work is
its promotion of the kind of patriarchal thinking that holds
black women responsible for the well-being of black men.
Black male writer and publisher Haki Madhubuti correcdy
identifies this book
as a “never-ending guide for non-functional relationships.”
He states further: “It is a call to return to the unquestioned,
uncritical patriarch, the return of the mythic Black king. This
is a call to put and keep Black women in their ‘place’ as
defined by Black men.” Yet many black women who have
internalized sexist thinking are attempting to adapt their
behavior to the model set forth in Ali’s book.

In no way breaking from white, patriarchal norms, The

Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman extols
the virtues of the dominated submissive female. Black women
who feel “guilty” about the hurt and woundedness of black
men in this society are vulnerable to the kind of thinking that
suggests we are not only responsible for this hurt but able to

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make life better by being submissive. Sadly, this assumption
intensifies our problems since it is an unrealistic assessment
of all the factors that contribute to pain in black life, in black
men in particular. Collective black self-recovery, and the
self-recovery of black women in particular, must have a
feminist dimension if black women want to accurately name
the factors, the forces of domination, that undermine black
life. Until masses of black women understand what sexism is
and how it leads to the denigration and devaluation of black
womanhood and black life, there will be no collective
understanding of the ways in which life-threatening
patriarchy, misogyny, and male domination are destructive
forces in our lives that must be challenged and changed.

There is no black woman I know who is engaged in a process

of self-recovery who is not also involved with rethinking the
sexist attitudes towards women that are the norm in this
society. Though many of these women do not call themselves
“feminist,” they are using feminist thinking to inspire and
affirm changes that they are making in their personal lives.
Watching Spike Lee’s film Mo’Better Blues, black women of
all ages were disturbed by the portrait of black
heterosexuality this film promotes. Lee presents a
conventional image of the dominating black female and the
creative black man who is beaten down both by her and
society. Even though the black male “hero” ultimately comes
to a black
woman, pleading with her to “save his life,” this vision is so
limited as to offer us no possibility for redemptive change.
Black women have tried for years to save the lives of black
men. We have stayed in destructive relationships trying to
hold it all together. And one of the most meaningful lessons
self-recovery teaches us is that it is the individual’s

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acceptance of responsibility for changing, for “saving” his or
her own life, that leads to transformation. That is why no
matter how great the healing powers are of the black female
elders in The Salt Haters, they can heal Velma only if she
wants to be well.

When black men work against the racist/sexist thinking that

socializes them to devalue their own lives, and choose to
work for self-recovery, black women can affirm this process
without being seduced into unproductive co-dependent
relationships. Since healthy black women do not see
ourselves in competition with black men, we want to share
with them the joy of recovery and look forward to those
moments of mutual recovery. Significandy, gay black men are
at the forefront of black male groups who are most concerned
with rethinking masculinity, with letting go of old sexist
paradigms and changing the way they relate to black women
and one another.

When we think of collective black self-recovery in communal

terms, we have a paradigm for well-being that does not
reproduce the heterosexism that is the norm in this culture.
Working to end homophobia, in fact, is central to our
self-recovery. In authentic life-sustaining black communities,
there is a place for all of us in our diversity of sexual needs,
desires, practices, and commitments. Traditional black
communities, though homophobic, did not deny or hide the
contribution of black gay people. The current movie A Rage
in Harlem depicts a meaningful bond between a black straight
man and a gay man, showing that their sense of community
and kinship is life-sustaining. This portrayal reminds us of the
ways in which traditional black communities were not
invested in the politics of inclusion and exclusion that has

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become more the norm now as we have assimilated the
dominant culture’s notions of what is appropriate. In both her
nonfiction writing and her fiction, Toni Morrison has
consistendy worked to create awareness that such
communities existed, that they were characterized by the way
“difference” was welcomed and accepted, by an openness and
generosity of spirit that was the underlying value system
shaping human relations. We can learn progressive models of
social organization by studying the past, by looking at these
black communities.

Despite an emphasis on racial uplift and black pride, these

communities did not engage in a narrow nationalism rooted in
the politics of domination and exclusion. White people, and
any “others,” who wanted to find a place in those
communities were not rejected. They were taught instead how
to live with and among black people in the spirit of true
community. These traditional black communities are similar
to what Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls “communities
of resistance.” They were places where black people could
retain our sense of wholeness and integrity. Nhat Hanh
teaches that “communities of resistance should be places
where people can return to themselves more easily, where the
conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover
their wholeness.” Black people are desperately in need of
such communities today.

Historically, black women were fully engaged in constructing

communities of resistance. The sexist thinking of black men
may have inhabited their involvement but it did not make
them quit or give up. Contemporary black females seeking
self-recovery can renew our commitment to building
communities of resistance, by carrying on this legacy. That

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practice can start in our homes. Thich Nhat Hanh says that the
purpose of resistance is “to seek the healing of yourself in
order to be able to see clearly.” He helps us to understand that
the environments we live in determine and influence our
ability to heal:

A pagoda, a temple, a church, is built in a way that when you

enter you recover yourself, you come into contact with the
absolute reality, with God, with Buddha, with Buddhahood.
And that is why the recovering of self is seen in architecture,
in decorative art, in sacred music, in many things like that. So
that when you come to the church or the temple you are
helped by these things to return to yourself. I think our
communities of resistance should be built like a church or a
temple where everything you see expresses the tendency to be
oneself, to go back to oneself, to come into communion with
reality.

In black life our homes can be such places, irrespective of our

class status. We do not need lots of money to create
environments that are, to use Nhat Hanh’s words, “beautiful,
healing, refreshing both in surroundings and in substance.”

In many of the preceding chapters, I have called attention to

the way our sense of community is deepened when we love
ourselves and one another. Often black women are very
judgmental of one another. We understand that this practice
of harsh critique has cultural roots yet it breeds discord and
discontent among us. Unlearning the need to judge others
mean-spiritedly is crucial if we are to make beloved
communities and healing places. Thich Nhat Hanh makes this
contribution to our thinking about building community: “Do
not judge each other too easily, too quickly, in terms of

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ideology, of point of view, strategies, things like that. Try to
see the real person, the one with whom you live. You might
discover aspects that will enrich you. It’s like a tree that can
shelter you.” Working together to build communities that
foster a sense of kinship that goes beyond blood ties or bonds
of friendship, black women expand our horizons. When
communities of resistance are everywhere the norm in our
lives, we will not be without a circle of love or a healing
place.

Such communities of resistance can emerge around our

struggles for personal self-recovery as well as our efforts to
organize collectively to bring about social change. We grow
closer in struggle. The civil rights movement is a grand
example of the way working to transform society can sweeten
and strengthen community bonds. While I have emphasized
the importance of working for self-actualization in the
individual’s life, we learn about ourselves and test our values
in active practice with others. Choosing to be self-actualized
and then working to build communities of resistance that are
particularly focused on social and political concerns is always
necessary.

Organizations like The Black Women’s Health Project that

begin with small groups of black women coming together and
then expand to national organizations show the power of our
coming together to serve one another collectively. Small
presses like
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press are another example of
the ways we move our individual quest for self-recovery into
a larger arena. Significantly, we can begin this process
wherever we are. The Sisters of the Yam support groups
began in my office, then in dormitories, and finally in homes.

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While we focused on personal concerns, we linked those
concerns to institutional issues and connected the two. No
level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the
marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective
struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outward,
into the world.

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11
The Joy of Reconciliation
Over the years I have worried about losing not only my
mother and other members of my family, but also poets,
singers, philosophers, prophets, political activists. And many
of these we have all lost, sometimes to sickness, accident or
disease; sometimes to assassination. But I have found that
where there is spiritual union with other people, the love one
feels for them keeps the circle unbroken and the bonds
between us and them strong, whether they are dead or alive.
Perhaps that is one of the manifestations of heaven on earth.

—Alice Walker, Living by the Word

Healing inner wounds makes reconciliation possible.

Reconciliation is one of my favorite words. Evoking our
capacity to restore to harmony that which has been broken,
severed, and disrupted. The very word serves as a constant
reminder in my life that we can come together with those who
have hurt us, with those whom we have caused pain, and
experience sweet communion.

To be at peace, black women, especially those among us who

have been deeply wounded and hurt, must release the
bitterness we hold within us. Bitterness is like a poison. When
it’s inside us, it spreads even to the parts of the self that allow
us to feel joy and a spirit of celebration. Yet many of us
choose to hold onto pain through the cultivation of bitterness

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and an unforgiving heart. Holding onto pain with bitterness
may also be a way we hold on to our attachment to
individuals who should no longer control our
lives but continue to do so because our bitterness lets them.
For example, black women in long-time marriages with men
who psychologically abuse them often become obsessed with
remaining at the center of this negative drama. Bitterness and
hatred keep their negative connection to their partners alive,
keep the drama happening. Even though it is wounding, each
party clings to these feelings. When we remain unreconciled
with those who have hurt us, it is usually a sign that we have
not fully reconciled with ourselves. When we give ourselves
love and peace, we can give these gifts to others. It’s really
impossible to live a life in love while hoping that harm and
hurt will come to others.

Throughout our history in the United States, black people

have suffered so much, and yet collectively, at those historical
moments when our suffering was most intense, we practiced
the art of compassion and forgiveness. It seems that back
then, wise black elders knew that our inner peace, our
capacity to know joy as a people, was intimately linked to our
ability to let go of bitterness, to forgive. Black southern
midwife Onnie Lee Logan’s oral autobiography Motherwit
shares this wisdom throughout its pages as she describes
dedicating her life to bringing black and white children safely
into the world. Sharing memories passed down in her family
history of the pain slavery caused (Miss Onnie was born in
the early 1900s), she names those sorrows while evoking the
need for black people to let go bitterness:

Out of all that we went along like happy-go-lucky. No ill will

in our heart or mind or nothin. We lived like human bein’s

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supposed to live. That hasn’t made me resentful at all. I’m
glad God kep’ me. I’m so happy I don’t know what else I’d
want to do. You know why? It’s paying off. Indeed white
people have done black people wrong. And you know what:
The general run of em know it. They admit it. A lot of em that
won’t admit it knows it. But there’s a plenty of em that admit
it. God did not let it deal with me too much and I’s glad cause
if you get yo’ mind set on that you cain’t go on to nothin else.

This passage makes clear that Miss Onnie did not see the
need to forgive or be compassionate as synonymous with
ceasing to hold people accountable for wrongdoing. In their
historical role as caretakers, black women practiced the art of
compassion and knew
that forgiveness not only eased the pain of the heart but made
love possible.

This powerful legacy, handed down by generations of caring

black women, was undermined by contemporary black
liberation struggles that devalued these women’s legacy. The
inability of the sixties’ struggle for black liberation to
fundamentally transform this society by ending racism
created a lot of despair in the minds and hearts of black
people. Many of us ceased to hope that a real change would
ever come. And there was a great welling up of bitterness and
hatred toward white people (conservative and liberal alike)
who showed themselves unwilling to divest of white
supremacy and fully resist racism. That bitterness has
lingered in the collective psyche of black people and poisons
our relationships with one another.

Compelled by the desire to forge militant struggle against

racist domination, many black people felt we had to discard

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the idea that it was important to love one’s enemies, to
forgive. These values came to be seen by many as signs of
weakness. Such thinking was fundamentally misguided. In his
powerful sermon opposing the Vietnam War, “A Time to
Break Silence,” Martin Luther King reminded us that we
needed a “genuine revolution of values” that would enable
everyone to militantly oppose oppression here and globally
without forsaking our capacity to love. Calling for the
development of a universal loyalty to world community, King
spoke of love as a revolutionary, empowering force:

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly

concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality
a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.
This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept—so
readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak
and cowardly force—has now become an absolute necessity
for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not
speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am
speaking of that force which all of the great religions have
seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is
somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to
ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about
ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of
Saint John: “Let us love one another; for love is God and
everyone that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for
God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and
his love is perfected in us.”

It was uplifting to black people’s Spirit to cultivate love. And

by so doing we nurtured our capacity to forgive, to be

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compassionate. Shutting the doors of the self that could be
compassionate towards white people meant that we also shut
the doors that would enable us to show compassion to one
another.

Compassion is rooted in understanding. When I critically

examine my parents’ lives, all that they suffered and endured,
the many ways they did not receive the tender loving care that
should have been their birthright, I cannot maintain anger or
bitterness towards them. I understand them and the forces that
made them who they are. And this understanding enables me
to feel compassion, to let go of all willingness to blame. Our
capacity to forgive always allows us to be in touch with our
own agency (that is the power to act on our own behalf to
change a situation). Enslaved black people clearly understood
the need to remain in touch with all those aspects of the self
that enabled them to experience agency. Without agency we
collapse into passivity, inertia, depression, and despair.

In Peace, Lope and Healing, Bernie Siegel makes the point

that “people may learn helplessness if they have had repeated
experiences of being unable to change external circumstances
through their own efforts” resulting in their feeling “a kind of
fatalism that will be applied to all the events that befall them
in a lifetime.” I believe that now more than ever before in our
history black people are victimized by learned helplessness,
that renewing our collective capacity to know compassion, to
forgive, would be healing to our spirit, restoring to many of
us a lost sense of agency.

When black women recover fully and exercise our will to be

compassionate, to forgive, this will have a healing impact on
black life. The sexism of the sixties’ black power movement

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devalued the necessary life-sustaining contributions black
women had made to liberation struggle, and this generated not
only a lot of despair in black women but unexpressed rage.
There are many black women
who hold within them intense anger toward black men for not
making life better for them. Certainly, these are the women
who most internalize sexist assumptions that it is the male
responsibility to maintain life, to provide. In reality, that
responsibility is mutual and must be shared.

As black women collectively act compassionately toward

ourselves, we will be able to extend a more loving
compassion to black men as well. This compassion will be
rooted in understanding all that black men experience and
will not be the kind of negative sympathy that is expressed
when black women act as though we somehow need to “pity”
black men because “they just can’t deliver.” Were all black
people to collectively release the feelings of bitterness we
hold towards one another, there would be a great renewal of
spiritual strength.

Compassion and forgiveness make reconciliation possible.

Compassion combines the capacity to empathize with
another’s distress and the will and desire to ease that distress.
As black women learn how to ease the distress we feel, our
ability to generously give to others (not as self-sacrificing
martyrs) will be strengthened. We will then have no need to
control and bind others to us by always reminding them about
what we have done on their behalf. Rather than seeing giving
care as diminishing us, we will experience the kind of
caregiving that enriches the giver. When we feel like martyrs,
we cannot develop compassion. For compassion requires that
we be able to stand outside ourselves and identify with

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someone else. It is fundamentally rooted in the ability to
empathize.

My understanding of the way of compassion has been

deepened by the teachings of Vietnamese Buddhist monk and
peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. In Peace Is Every Step, he
teaches about “understanding” by sharing the story of a
brother who goes to wake his sister one morning. She
responds with hostility. Before her brother can retaliate in
kind:

He remembers that during the night his sister coughed a lot,

and he realizes that she must be sick. Maybe she behaved so
meanly because she has a cold. At that moment, he
understands, and he is not angry at
all anymore. When you understand, you cannot help but love.
You cannot get angry. To develop understanding, you have to
practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of
compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love.
And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can
relieve the suffering of people.

Judging others, presuming to know why they are doing what

they are doing, blocks our capacity to know compassion.
Often black women judge each other harshly. Cultivating our
capacity to empathize would deepen our bonds with one
another.

Often we do not realize that the black woman we see as

competing with us or treating us with disregard may be in
need of sisterly care and recognition. If we cannot look past
the surface and see what lies underneath we will not be able
to give to one another the compassionate understanding we

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also need in our daily lives. It’s important for us to remember
that even the most trivial gesture can have a meaningful
transformative impact in someone’s life.

I gave a talk recently and, though there were many people

pouring in, a lone black woman caught my eye. When she
found her seat, I went over to greet her. Weeks later I
received a note from her. In it she wrote: “I was stunned by
the spontaneous lovingness of a gesture you made towards
me. It will take some time before I fully internalize the
lessons of relatedness and sisterhood it showed me.” Sisters,
we need to ask ourselves how do we greet and meet one
another in daily life, if it seems strange, odd,
out-of-the-ordinary to show one another regard and
recognition.

Significandy, we are often competing with one another, with

other black women we do not even know. The roots of this
competition are again related to most black women’s feelings
that we are invisible. And that when visible we are competing
for the “only one black woman allowed recognition here” slot
constructed by racism and sexism. To resist this socialization,
we need to cultivate compassion that is rooted in vigilant
awareness of the positive life-affirming impact our presence
can have on one another. Since we know that we are
wounded, since we know in our hearts that racism and sexism
hurt, that many of us are walking around surrounded by a wall
to keep any more pain from coming
in, then this knowledge should create awareness, and this
awareness should deepen our compassion.

If black women look at the world from a conventional

negative perspective that would have us all believe there is

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only this litde bit of anything good to go around and we must
fight to get our part, then we can’t really love one another.
Black women who see the world as one big system of
diminishing returns can only feel a constant fear that someone
else’s gain means that they will suffer deprivation. This way
of thinking mirrors the overall rise in cultural narcissism and
narrow notions of individualism that are life-threatening to
black people because we need an ethic of communalism to
live with dignity and integrity. And black women must be
willing to take a major role in communicating this fact to the
world. Concurrendy, in our roles as mothers, or as “pretend”
mothers (people like me who do not have blood children but
who joyously adopt and parent here and there), we can do so
much to transform the violence and pain in black life by
giving peace and understanding, by showing compassion.

Just yesterday I spoke with a working mother who was

expressing concern about the “hatefulness” that she hears in
her children’s voices when they talk to one another. I
suggested that she talk openly and honestly with them about
why it is important for black people to be good to one
another, about the bonds of love that make us a family. I
urged her to tape their conversations so that they can hear
how they speak to one another and interpret what it means to
them. Once that was done, I thought, she could figure out and
create rewards with them for a change in behavior.

Individually, when we practice forgiveness in our lives we

cleanse our spirit of negative clutter and leave our souls free.
As Arnold and Barry Fox suggest in Wake Up! You’re Alive:

Forgiveness is a glorious feeling that sets you free. But even

if you already have the feeling of forgiveness inside of you,

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you must still say the words “I forgive you” out loud. That is
vital. The words are in a sense an affirmation with a hidden
meaning…Forgiveness instructs your subconscious to banish
negative feelings from your mind. When you say, “I forgive
you” to someone you are also saying, “I want to be healthy”
to yourself.

Genuine desire to change our world by cultivating

compassion and the will to forgive should make us more able
to vigilantly resist oppression and exploitation, to joyfully
engage in oppositional struggle. I know that there are those
among us who worry that being too forgiving will somehow
diminish our ability to sustain resistance. Again, I think it
important that we remember that forgiveness does not mean
that we cease to assertively identify wrongs, hold others to
account, and demand justice. It is because we can practice
“forgiveness” and be transformed that we have the
compassion and insight to see that the same is true for those
who might appear to be “enemies.” This is the true realization
of justice—that we want what is peaceful and life-sustaining
for all and not just for ourselves.

In my own life, I do “forgiveness” meditations. Sitting quietly

in a peaceful location where I will not be disturbed, I
visualize the image of individuals who I feel have hurt or
injured me and I talk to them about what happened, how I
feel, and express forgiveness. Yet, whenever we can, it is also
important to express forgiveness directiy, through the mail,
over the phone, or in face-to-face conversation. Most of us
who have been abused know that it is a healing moment when
you are able to name to that person that you forgive them or,
if they seek forgiveness, you respond with regard and
compassion. Sometime this generous act makes reconciliation

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possible. Often when folks wrong us, they engage in
self-punishment by no longer allowing themselves to
experience our love and care.. They may feel unworthy of our
kindness. Forgiveness enables the restoration of mutual
harmony. We can both start over again on an equal footing,
no longer separated by whatever wrong occurred.

When I was growing up, my parents were not the only family
members who hurt and wounded me, my siblings also
persecuted me. More than ten years ago, one of my sisters,
whom I was never close to, came to visit me. And I was so
happy that we were having this reunion, this opportunity to
get to know one another, I did not want to talk about the past.
She felt a strong need to speak about the past and to ask
forgiveness for the hurt she had caused me in
childhood. The sweetness of her actions was revealed not
only in the confirmation that what I remembered had really
happened, but in the way it freed us to start anew. Today, she
is a true friend and comrade in my life. And yet I know that
we would not be in this marvelous sisterly bonding had she
not had the courage to ask forgiveness and if I had not had the
will to forgive. She was able to truly see that there was no
bitterness in my heart about the past.

We have to forgive with our whole hearts. If we forgive in

words but continue to harbor secret resentment, nothing really
changes. When forgiveness happens, when there is
compassion, the groundwork for reconciliation is possible.
For me that is the ultimate joy: That we learn that there are no
broken bonds that cannot be mended, no pain that cannot be
assuaged.

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Touching the Earth
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good,
that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore,
since I have known all these things, I have found them to be
reason enough and—I wish to live. Moreover, because this is
so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and
generations and generations.

—Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young Gifted, and Black

When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more

fully. I believe this. The ancestors taught me it was so. As a
child I loved playing in dirt, in that rich Kentucky soil, that
was a source of life. Before I understood anything about the
pain and exploitation of the southern system of
sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved
the land. I could stand with my grandfather Daddy Jerry and
look out at fields of growing vegetables, tomatoes, corn,
collards, and know that this was his handiwork. I could see
the look of pride on his face as I expressed wonder and awe at
the magic of growing things. I knew that my grandmother
Baba’s backyard garden would yield beans, sweet potatoes,
cabbage, and yellow squash, that she too would walk with
pride among the rows and rows of growing vegetables
showing us what the earth will give when tended lovingly.

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From the moment of their first meeting, Native American and
African people shared with one another a respect for the
life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African setders in
Florida taught the
Creek Nation runaways, the “Seminoles,” methods for rice
cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks
all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we
grew up eating came to our black southern diet from the
world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth,
black and red people helped one another remember that,
despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone.
Listen to these words attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The
idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air
and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every
part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine
needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods,
every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and
experience of my people… We are part of the earth and it is
part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the
horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky
crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony,
and man—all belong to the same family.

The sense of union and harmony with nature expressed here is

echoed in testimony by black people who found that even
though life in the new world was “harsh, harsh,” in
relationship to the earth one could be at peace. In the oral
autobiography of granny midwife Onnie Lee Logan, who
lived all her life in Alabama, she talks about the richness of
farm life—growing vegetables, raising chickens, and smoking
meat. She reports:

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We lived a happy, comfortable life to be right outa slavery
times. I didn’t know nothin else but the farm so it was happy
and we was happy…We couldn’t do anything else but be
happy. We accept the days as they come and as they were.
Day by day until you couldn’t say there was any great hard
time. We overlooked it. We didn’t think nothin about it. We
just went along. We had what it takes to make a good livin
and go about it.

Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has

been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and
foremost a people of the land, farmers. It is easy for folks to
forget that at the first part of the 20th century, the vast
majority of black folks in the United States lived in the
agrarian south.

Living close to nature, black folks were able to cultivate a

spirit of wonder and reverence for life. Growing food to
sustain life and flowers to please the soul, they were able to
make a connection with the earth that was ongoing and
life-affirming. They were witnesses to beauty. In Wendell
Berry’s important discussion of the relationship between
agriculture and human spiritual well-being, The Unsettling of
America, he reminds us that working the land provides a
location where folks can experience a sense of personal power
and well-being:

We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow

creature of the plants, animals, material, and other people we
are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us
home from pride and despair, and places us responsibly
within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good

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to work without our bodies, but too good to work poorly or
joylessly or selfishly or alone.

There has been little or no work done on the psychological

impact of the “great migration” of black people from the
agrarian south to the industrialized north. Toni Morrison’s
novel The Bluest Eye attempts to Actively document the way
moving from the agrarian south to the industrialized north
wounded the psyches of black folk. Estranged from a natural
world, where there was time for silence and contemplation,
one of the “displaced” black folks in Morrison’s novel, Miss
Pauline, loses her capacity to experience the sensual world
around her when she leaves southern soil to live in-a northern
city. The south is associated in her mind with a world of
sensual beauty most deeply expressed in the world of nature.
Indeed, when she falls in love for the first time she can name
that experience only by evoking images from nature, from an
agrarian world and near wilderness of natural splendor:

When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all
the bits of color from that time down home when all us
chiPren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in
the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and
stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and
it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that
purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to
make when Pap came in out of the fields. It be cool and
yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that
streak of green them june bugs
made on the dress that night we left from down home. All of
them colors was in me. Just sitting there.

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Certainly, it must have been a profound blow to the collective
psyche of black people to find themselves struggling to make
a living in the industrial north away from the land. Industrial
capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work
life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to
survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered
black people’s relationship to the body. It is the loss of any
capacity to appreciate her body, despite its flaws, Miss
Pauline suffers when she moves north.

The motivation for black folks to leave the south and move
north was both material and psychological. Black folks
wanted to be free of the overt racial harassment that was a
constant in southern life and they wanted access to material
goods—to a level of material well-being that was not
available in the agrarian south where white folks limited
access to the spheres of economic power. Of course, they
found that life in the north had its own perverse hardships,
that racism was just as virulent there, that it was much harder
for black people to become landowners. Without the space to
grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the
starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people
experienced profound depression. Working in conditions
where the body was regarded solely as a tool (as in slavery), a
profound estrangement occurred between mind and body. The
way the body was represented became more important than
the body itself. It did not matter if the body was well, only
that it appeared well.

Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body

splits made it all the more possible for black people to
internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black
identity. Learning contempt for blackness, southerners

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transplanted in the north suffered both culture shock and soul
loss. Contrasting the harshness of city life with an agrarian
world, the poet Waring Cuney wrote this popular poem in the
1920s, testifying to lost connection:

She does not know her beauty

She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.
If she could dance naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.
But there are no palm trees on the street,
And dishwater gives back no images.

For many years, and even now, generations of black folks

who migrated north to escape life in the south, returned down
home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was
fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to
nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit
on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. If we think
of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept
a mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we
can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in
the black psyche. And we can know that when we talk about
healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our
connection to the natural world.

Wherever black folks live we can restore our relationship to

the natural world by taking the time to commune with nature,
to appreciate the other creatures who share this planet with
humans. Even in my small New York City apartment I can
pause to listen to birds sing, find a tree and watch it. We can

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grow plants—herbs, flowers, vegetables. Those novels by
African-American writers (women and men) that talk about
black migration from the agrarian south to the industrialized
north describe in detail the way folks created space to grow
flowers and vegetables. Although I come from country people
with serious green thumbs, I have always felt that I could not
garden. In the past few years, I have found that I can do
it—that many gardens will grow, that I feel connected to my
ancestors when I can put a meal on the table of food I grew. I
especially love to plant collard greens. They are hardy, and
easy to grow.

In modern society, there is also a tendency to see no

correlation between the struggle for collective black
self-recovery and ecological movements that seek to restore
balance to the planet by changing our relationship to nature
and to natural resources. Unmindful of our history of living
harmoniously on the land, many contemporary black folks see
no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology
and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns.
Recalling the legacy of our ancestors who knew that the way
we regard land and nature will determine the level of our
self-regard, black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy
where we connect our well-being to the well-being of the
earth. This is a necessary dimension of healing. As Berry
reminds us:

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to
disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable,
health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases
and dependencies—by failing to see the direct connections
between living and eating, eating and working, working and

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loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to
feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for
excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus
makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive,
and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This health,
wholeness, is a source of delight.

Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to

renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the
way of our ancestors. When the earth is sacred to us, our
bodies can also be sacred to us.

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13
Walking in the Spirit
Writing was always a sanctuary for me in my wounded
childhood, a place of confession, where nothing had to be
hidden or kept secret. It has always been one of the healing
places in my life. At the end of William Goyen’s essay
“Recovering,” he states, “It is clear that writing—recovering
life—for me is a spiritual task.” Like Goyen, I believe that
writing is “the work of the spirit.” Lately, when I am asked to
talk about what has sustained me in my struggle for
self-recovery, I have been more willing to talk openly about a
life lived in the spirit than in the past. In part, I have
responded to the urgency and need I have witnessed in
younger black females who speak with grave uncertainty and
fear as they ponder whether or not they will be able to survive
life’s difficulties. And I have wanted to tell them the truth,
that I am sustained by spiritual life, by my belief in divine
spirits, what other folks often call “higher powers.”

Spirituality sustains most black women I know who are

engaged in recovery processes. For some of us, spiritual life is
linked to traditional Christian faith. Others of us expand our
horizons as we seek to give expression to our faith in gods,
goddesses, or in higher powers. In Feel the Fear and Do It
Anyway, Susan Jeffers acknowledges that many nonreligious
folks are uncomfortable with the idea of the spiritual.
Describing in a clear manner what is meant by this term, she
explains, “When I speak of the spiritual, I speak of the Higher

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Self, the place within that is loving, kind, abundant, joyful…”
Throughout our history in this country, black women have
relied on spirituality to sustain us, to
renew our hope, to strengthen our faith. This spirituality has
often had a narrow dimension wherein we have internalized
without question dogmatic views of religious life informed by
intense participation in patriarchal religious institutions. My
purpose here is not to critique more conventional expressions
of religious life. Indeed, the spiritual and the religious are not
necessarily one and the same. My intent is to share the insight
that cultivating spiritual life can enhance the self-recovery
process and enable the healing of wounds. Jeffers suggests:

Too many of us seem to be searching for something “out

there” to make our lives complete. We feel alienated, lonely
and empty. No matter what we do or have, we never feel
fulfilled. This feeling of emptiness or intense loneliness is our
clue that we are off course, and that we need to correct our
direction. Often we think that the correction lies in a new
mate, house, car, job, or whatever. Not so. I believe what all
of us are really searching for is this divine essence within
ourselves.

In fiction by contemporary black women writers, healing

takes place only when black female characters find the divine
spirit within and nurture it. This is true for Avey in Praisesong
for the Widow, for Celie in The Color Purple, for Baby Suggs
in Beloved, for Indigo in Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, and
coundess other characters. For some of these characters,
spirituality is linked to Christian faith, for others, African and
Caribbean religious traditions. And in some cases, like that of
Shug in The Color Purple, a break must occur with
Christianity in order for a new spirituality to emerge. Jeffers

198
suggests that unless we “consciously or unconsciously tap
that spiritual part within” ourselves, “we will experience
perpetual discontent.” This same message is conveyed in
black women’s fiction. However, black women seeking
healing want to know how we can actualize divine essence in
our everyday lives.

Living a life in the spirit, a life where our habits of being

enable us to hear our inner voices, to comprehend reality with
both our hearts and our minds, puts us in touch with divine
essence. Practicing the art of loving is one way we sustain
contact with our “higher self.” In Linell Cady’s essay “A
Feminist Christian Vision,”
she suggests that the divine is not a being but rather the
unifying of being:

The divine spirit of love motivates and empowers humans to

see more clearly and to act more justly by identifying the self
with that which lies beyond its narrow borders. Notice the
correlation between the self and the divine in this theological
vision. From this perspective the self is not a substantial
entity, complete and defined, but a reality always in the
process of being created through the dynamic of love, which
continually alters its boundaries and identity. Similarly, the
divine is not perfected and completed being but processes that
seek to expand and perfect being.

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching

God,’ Janie is able to experience her divine essence first
through union with nature and then through the experience of
erotic love. Yet, she ultimately fashions a life in the spirit that
is fundamentally rooted in her understanding of the value of

199
human life and intersubjective communion where she
experiences the unity of all life.

Taking time to experience ourselves in solitude is one way

that we can regain a sense of the divine that can feel the spirit
moving in our lives. Solitude is essential to the spiritual for it
is there that we can not only commune with divine spirits but
also listen to our inner voice. One way to transform the lonely
feeling that overwhelms some of us is to enter that lonely
place and find there a stillness that enables us to hear the soul
speak. Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude, reminds us to
attend to our need for solitude: “Somewhere we know that
without a lonely place our lives are in danger. Somewhere we
know that without silence words lose their meaning, that
without listening speaking no longer heals. Somewhere we
know that without a lonely place our actions quickly become
empty gestures.”

Black women have not focused sufficientiy on our need for

contemplative spaces. We are often “too busy” to find time
for solitude. And yet it is in the stillness that we also learn
how to be with ourselves in a spirit of acceptance and peace.
Then when we re-enter community, we are able to extend this
acceptance to others. Without knowing how to be alone, we
cannot know how to be with others and sustain the necessary
autonomy. Yet, many of
us live in fear of being alone. To meditate, to go into solitude
and silence, we find a way to be empowered by aloneness. It
is helpful to have days of silence, times that allow us to
practice what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “the miracle of
mindfulness.” He uses the term mindfulness to “refer to
keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality.”
Worry and stress often keep us fixated on the future, so that

200
we lose sight of the present, of what it means to be here and
now. Mindfulness helps us find a way back to the present.
Black women’s lives are enriched when we are able to be
fully aware, to be mindful. Meditation enhances our capacity
to practice mindfulness and should not be dismissed.

Black women who are more engaged with conventional

religious life may find it helpful to engage both in silent and
spoken prayer. In his essay “Pray for Your Own Discovery,”
Thomas Merton suggests that we “seek God perfectly” when
we “entertain silence” in our hearts and “listen for the voice
of God.” Prayer allows the individual to speak direcdy with
God, with spirits and angels. In the act of prayer, individual
black women who may have tremendous difficulty baring
their soul can find a space to speak, to pour out their hearts’
longing and, in the act of praying, gain a sense of direction.
Prayers often guide, leading us into fuller awareness of who
we are and what we are meant to do.

Dreams can also serve as guides to the spirits. Black women

have had long traditions of dream interpretation, passing these
skills from generation to generation. I grew up in a world of
black women who were serious about the interpretation of
dreams, who knew that dreams not only tell us what we need
to know about the self but guide us when we are lost. Yet
when I went to college, I abandoned the practice of giving
close attention to my dream life. I have returned to that
practice, recognizing it to be a space of empowerment. When
we are in need of greater self-understanding or guidance, it
can be helpful to keep a dream book, a notebook where we
write down our dreams and our reflections and thoughts about
them.

201
Living a life in the spirit, whatever our practices, can help
black women sustain ourselves as we chart new life journeys.
Many of us
have lifeways very different from those any other generation
of black women have known. Madonna Kolbenschlag
suggests in Lost in the Land of 0% that all women today will
know seasons of loneliness unlike those experienced by
previous generations: “Women, more so than men, are trying
out a new myth. They have no role models or generational
anchors to lean on in trying out a new story, and so it is scary
and lonely…The orphaned woman has broken with many of
the old codes of normality, but has not yet found what will
take its place.” Nurturing our spiritual selves we can find
within the courage to sustain new journeys and the will to
invent new ways to live and view the world. In The Feminist
Mystic, Mary Giles invites us to celebrate this positionality,
where we are poised between the old and the new, and urges
us to be guided by a dynamic love:

To live and to love and to create are one. In living, loving,

and creating we move in mystery, alert to possibility, bereft of
models from the past and without hint of one to come. In the
absence of models we experience absolute freedom, and in
freedom, risk, responsibility and the joy of being opened to
whatever the moment may bring forth in us.

Certainly black women seeking self-recovery are charting

new journeys. Although I have read coundess self-help books,
the vast majority do not even acknowledge the existence of
black people. It is a new journey for black women to begin to
write and talk more openly about aspects of our reality that
are not talked about.

202
At times I found writing about some of the issues in this book
very saddening. And I would say to Tanya, my play daughter
and comrade, that I felt writing this book would “break my
heart.” We talked often about why individuals who suffer
intensely often cannot find ways to give their anguish words.
To speak about certain pains is also to remember them. And
in the act of remembering we are called to relive, to know
again much that we would suppress and forget. This book
hardly speaks to all that needs to be said. And yet so much of
it was hard to say. And sisters have asked me: “Aren’t you
afraid that black people will punish you for saying things
about black experience they feel should not be said?” I gain
courage from my spiritual life, from the sense that I
am called in writing to give testimony, that it is my spiritual
vocation. I call to mind the biblical passage from “Romans”
that says: “Do not be conformed to this world but be ye
transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may
know what the will of God is.” Reading inspirational writing
is an essential part of self-recovery. We are sustained by one
another’s testimony when we find ourselves faltering or
falling into despair.

Although I had been thinking for years that I would write this
book, it never came. Thoughts, ideas, and memories were
inside me but they did not manifest themselves in words.
Suddenly, in the past months, black women were asking me
where they could find the Sisters of the Yam book. And there
would be such disappointment when I would say that it had
not yet been written. Again it was the sense of urgency I felt
from sister comrades that made me think “now is the time.”
Yet as the writing progressed, I began to feel depressed and
frustrated that other plans had fallen through. One evening as
I sat in stillness, I heard an inner voice telling me that I was

203
meant to be here in my house doing this book right now. And
I felt peaceful and calm. This to me is a manifestation of the
power that comes from living a life in the spirit. In his essay
“Healing the Heart of Justice,” Victor Lewis shares the
insight that it is a necessity for us to move against fear and
despair to embrace healing visions:

To value ourselves rightly, infinitely, released from shame

and self-rejection, implies knowing that we are claimed by the
totality of life. To share in a loving community and vision that
magnifies our strength and banishes fear and despair, here, we
find the solid ground from which justice can flow like a
mighty stream. Here, we find the fire that burns away the
confusion that oppression heaped upon us during our
childhood weakness. Here, we can see what needs to be done
and find the strength to do it. To value ourselves rightly. To
love one another. This is to heal the heart of justice.

The purpose of this writing was to add to that growing body

of literature that hopes to enable us to value ourselves, righdy,
fully. In spiritual solidarity, black women have the potential
to be a community of faith that acts collectively to transform
our world. When we heal the woundedness inside us, when
we attend to the
inner love-seeking, love-starved child, we make ourselves
ready to enter more fully into community. We can experience
the totality of life because we have become fully
life-affirming. Like our ancestors using our powers to the
fullest, we share the secrets of healing and come to know
sustained joy.

204
205
Selected Bibliography
Ali, Shahrazad. The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the
Blackwoman. Philadelphia: Civilized Publications, 1989.

Anand, Margo. The Art of Sexual Ecstasy. Los Angeles:

Jeremy Tarcher, 1989.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New

York: Bantam, 1970.

Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random

House, 1981.

Bambara, Toni Cade, ed. The Black Woman. New York: New
American Library, 1970.

Benjamin, Jessica. Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism

and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Berrigan, Daniel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. The Raft Is Not the
Shore. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and

Agriculture. New York: Avon, 1977.

Beverly, Victoria. Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls. Ithaca, NY:

ILR Press, 1986.

206
Clark, Septima Poinsette. Ready from Within: Septima Clark
and the Civil Rights Movement. Navarro, CA: Wild Trees
Press, 1986.

Cleage, Pearl. Mad at Miles. Southfield, MI: Cleage Group,

1990.

Chisholm, Shirley. Unbought and Unbossed. New York:

Avon, 1970.

Cooley, Paula, et al., eds. Embodied Eove: Sensuality and

Relationship as Feminist Values. San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1987.

Cowan, Lynn. Masochism: A Jungian View. Dallas, TX:

Spring Publications, 1982.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul

Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1980.

Fox, Arnold, and Barry Fox. Wake Up! You’re Alive.

Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1988.

Fox, Matthew. “Honoring Howard Thurman,” Oakland, CA:

Creation, Volume VIII, Number 2, March—April 1991.

Fry, Gladys Marie. Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from
the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Giles, Mary, ed. The Feminist Mystic. New York: Crossroad,

1982.

207
Grudin, Eva. Stitching Memories: African American Story
Quilts. Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art,
1990.

Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Youngs Gifted, and Black. New

York: New American Library, 1969.

Hay, Louise. The AIDS Book. Carson, CA. Hay House, 1988.

Hay, Louise. You Can Heal Your Life. Carson, CA. Hay
House, 1987.

hooks, bell. Talking Back. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

Written by Herself. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987.

Jeffers, Susan. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. New York:

Fawcett Columbine, 1987.

Jones-Jackson, Patricia. When Roots Die. Athens: University

of Georgia Press, 1987.

Keen, Sam. Apology for Wonder. New York: Harper and

Row, 1969.

Keen, Sam. The Passionate Life: Stages of Learning. New

York: Harper and Row, 1983.

208
King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Testament of Hope, edited by
James Melvin Washington, New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Kolbenschlag, Madonna. Lost in the Land of Oz. New York:

Harper and Row, 1989.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, ed. Death: The Final Stage of

Growth. New York: Simon and Schuster,!975.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. New York:

Macmillan, 1969.

Lane, Lunsford. “The Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” Five

Slave Narratives. William L. Katz, ed. New York: Arno
Press, 1968.

Lerner, Harriet Goldhor. The Dance of Anger. New York:

Harper and Row, 1985.

Lerner, Harriet Goldhor. The Dance of Intimacy. New York:

Harper and Row, 1989.

Logan, Onnie Lee, as told to Katherine Clark. Motherwit.

New York: Dutton, 1989.

Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicom. New York: W. W. Norton,

1978.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Oakland, CA: Aunt Lute,

1980.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press,

1984.

209
Lorde, Audre. Zami. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1982.

Madhubuti, Haki, ed. Confusion by Any Other Name.

Chicago: Third World Press, 1990.

Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, 1983.

McClain, Leanita. A Foot in Fach World: Articles and Essays.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986.

Merton, Thomas. Love and Living. New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York:

New Directions, 1961.

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York:

Dell Publishing, 1968.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987.

Morrison, Toni. TheBluestEye. New York: Pocket Books,

1970.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: New American

Library, 1977.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: New American Library,

1973.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of Understanding. Berkeley,

CA: Parallax Press, 1988.

210
Nhat Hanh, Thich. Interbeing. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press,
1987.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1975.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. Peace Is Every Step. New York: Bantam,

1991.

Nouwen, Henri. Out of Solitude. Indiana: Ave Maria Press,

1974.

Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled. New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1978.

Peele, Stanton. Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment

Out of Control. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Peele, Stanton. Love and Addiction. New York: New

American Library, 1975.

Scott, Kesho Yvonne. The Habit of Surviving: Black

Women’s Strategies for Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1991.

Shaef, Anne Wilson. When Society Becomes an Addict. New

York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Shange, Ntozake. The Love Space Demand: A Continuing

Saga. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Shange, Ntozake. Riding the Moon in Texas. New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1987.

211
Shange, Ntozake. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Siegel, Bernie. Love, Medicine and Miracles. New York:

Harper and Row, 1986.

Siegel, Bernie. Peace, Love and Healing. New York: Harper

and Row, 1989.

Sinetar, Marsha. Do What You Love, The Money Will

Follow. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Trungpa, Chogyam. Shambhala. Boston: Shambhala

Publications, 1984.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1982.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. New

York: Harvest/HBJ, 1983.

Walker, Alice. Living by the Word. New York: Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Walker, Alice. The Temple of My Familiar. New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanivich, 1989.

White, Evelyn. The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking

for Ourselves. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1990.

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213
An Interview with bell hooks
Question editor and publisher Jill Petty interviewed author
and activist bell hooks in New York City in June, 2004.

Question: Sisters oj the Yam was first published in 1994.

How was the book informed by the literature of the time?

bell hooks: Sisters of the Yam came out just as people were
discovering black women as writers and readers, but we were
primarily reading fiction that emphasized various forms of
trauma in black women’s lives. Whether reading about rape,
incest, domestic violence, white racial abuse, these stories
were the stories of trauma. Black women’s fiction became an
emotional trigger which stirred up lots of repressed, unspoken
pain and emotion. Yet one can not really process this trauma
in fiction. That’s not, in fact, the point of fiction.

For instance, I remember sitting at one of the first showings

of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered
suicide I when the rainbow is enuf in the 1970s and being
amazed at the level of release—people were crying
hysterically and unleashing so much of their stored anguish. I
became really concerned about the context of this release. I
began seeking out non-fiction writing, therapeutic writing,
scholarly literature, and more popular writing that actually
addressed trauma in ways that went beyond allowing for
catharsis to actually offering practical guidelines for how you
might begin the process of self-help and healing.

214
Today, we have wonderful books on emotional health for
black and white women. But even now, Sisters of the Yam
stands apart from
the many, many other self-help books that are widely
available. And the difference is the link between self-recovery
and political resistance—this marked Sisters of the Yam as a
radical departure. The political content distinguishes the book
from other self-help literature, one of the most popular genres
of books among women readers.

Question: Do you think your work has had something to do

with the increasing popularity of the genre, and indeed, with
the increasing visibility of black women as writers?

bell hooks: I feel very much that it was the mood of the times.
The wellspring of literature by black women created greater
public awareness of our emotional lives. Toni Morrison and
Alice Walker wrote books that uncovered levels and degrees
of pain, anguish, and unresolved trauma. In her work, Audre
Lorde created a much more intimate, autobiographical
examination of black female pain, one that focused directly
and honestly on health. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence
that around the same time, in the 1980s, the National Black
Women’s Health Project [now the National Black Women’s
Health Imperative] was formed.

So over the years, there has been a critical awakening in the

US, across racial lines, of the need for self-help. This
realization hit black women first and foremost, because of our
greater vulnerability. For instance, we know that black
women die of breast cancer at earlier ages and at a
disproportionate rate. Lung cancer, heart disease, and AIDS
kill huge numbers of black women every year. Because of all

215
of this, Sisters of the Yam was a crucial intervention for many
people. Readers have told me they felt that it let them know
they weren’t alone, that their suffering was a part of a
collective anguish. It is also part of being the marked
recipients of political assault.

Question: In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde says black women

metastasize hate like daily bread.

bell hooks: Absolute hate. And in dominator culture, we

know that we are impinged upon by a system of oppressions
related to race, gender, class, and sexual preference. This has
been one of the unique aspects of my work—not choosing
one subject over the other and saying, “this is vital” or “this is
important,” but saying, “we are harmed by this system.”

If you think about the brave books dealing with black

womanhood from the 1960s and 1970s, so many of them had
to span pages and pages dealing with the “Are you black first
or are you a woman first?” question. So it’s a relief to come to
a moment in our political growth as a people, as
African-American people in resistance, where individual
black women writers can say that there is an interlocking
system of domination that impinges on our lives in life
threatening ways, and we will not be able to address our lives
and our mental and physical health adequately if we can not
address the interlocking systems. This vital cultural and
political reading of the nature of black women’s pain makes
Sisters of the Yam such a timely book today.

Question: You start the book by looking at the racism in the

white mass media and its impact on black women. I’m
wondering if you can talk about the toxic representations of

216
black women that are circulating now. Ten years out, what do
you see?

bell hooks: As a consequence of my work, and the work of

other people like Michelle Wallace, Kimberly Crenshaw,
Angela Davis, Patricia Rose, and on and on, I believe changes
have occurred. Much more work that has helped us better
understand how forces in this country affect black women has
been published. What has fundamentally changed is our level
of awareness. Part of the incredible cultural work that black
women writers did in the 1980s and 1990s was to create a
collective awareness of our pain, and of the fact that we
needed to deal with and confront the psychic and physical
pain in our lives. This heightened state of awareness, which
has led to more constructive action on behalf of our own
lives, has helped black women.

I often talk with groups of professional black women—there

are many more of us than ten years ago. Yet, even as many of
us have moved from invisibility to great visibility, from
poverty wages to being quite well-off, we still face
debilitating conditions on the job. We still are disrespected.
How do we deal with that? Where is the therapeutic body of
work that allows us to make that difficult transition? Many of
us, including myself, believed that once we had access to
seats of power, especially once we went to the very top of the
ladder, we might be more protected. Think about me: when
Sisters of the Yam was first published, I was a poorly-paid
academic who had just started her teaching career. Ten years
later, I had become a well-paid, internationally known
intellectual. Major, major shifts have happened in my life.
This has been true for many black women, because black
people are often coming from the very bottom of the class

217
hierarchy. However, when black women are rising, we
experience greater tensions than, for instance, white women
or Asian women who may be moving from the middle class
into upper class backgrounds, or solidifying their class
positions. And as we make these transitions, many of us lack
the psychological strategies necessary to fully maintain our
physical and mental health.

Part of the beauty of Sisters of the Yam, which I was not

consciously aware of at the time, is its real emphasis on a
holistic model. It isn’t just what happens at your job that
matters, it’s not just how someone speaks to you at your job.
It’s how someone speaks to you at home. It’s how you speak
to your children. All of those things matter. And over and
over, black women from a range of backgrounds have come
up to me at readings and events, saying “This book is my
bible.”

Question: Keeping the focus on changes since Sisters of the

Yam was first published, what is your take on the impact of
mainstream hip hop culture on black women? For instance,
what do you make of the activists at Spelman College who
recently and very publicly criticized Nelly’s “Tip Drill”
video, where an ATM card is run down a black woman’s
behind?

bell hooks: When I thought about the individual black women

with whom I was in great solidarity at the times of writing
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and Sisters of the
Yam, one of them was Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who is now
head of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at
Spelman. Since the book, there has been tremendous growth
there. I visited earlier this year and gave the Toni Cade

218
Bambara memorial lecture. We expected maybe forty to fifty
people would come out, but there were seven hundred at the
lecture, and many of those people were men. To me, it was an
indication of how concerned black people are about questions
of gender, and also shows more awareness of the sexism in
our communities. We can no longer dismiss it as a “white
thing” or as a “white lesbian thing.” We really have to be
ready and open to considering these issues in a different way.

Being there was almost like witnessing a revolution in

consciousness, as compared to the “hush, hush let’s not talk
about it” world of Spelman College ten or so years ago! Back
then, if a black woman was raped, she was more likely to be
told she had to leave than to see any actions taken against the
man who raped her. There is such a growing consciousness at
Spelman, a collective consciousness of the need to resist
sexism and the devaluation of black womanhood.

Significandy, awareness has grown, but the conditions of our

oppression, depression, and discrimination have also
intensified. For instance, we have greater awareness about
domestic violence, but we don’t see a major decline in
domestic violence. We have greater awareness of incest, but
we do not see a decline in incest. In fact, we’re actually
seeing an intensified anti-feminist backlash and more public
dismissal of these issues. We have the rhetoric of awareness
without the will to change. For instance, as feminists try to
bring the abuse of children to public consciousness, the media
sexualizes images of younger and younger women.

Question: A 1998 study by the National Center for Health

Statistics showed that black women were three times more

219
likely than white men to report being depressed and anxious
and were
the “least happy Americans.” And recently there was an
article in the Washington Post about study groups being done
throughout the country with high school women on
self-esteem. Despite historical research which has suggested
that young black women, were healthier and more mature
than young black men or young white women, these studies
were showing young black women are becoming just as
unhealthy.

On another level, government studies show the growing

number and proportion ofblack women affected by HIV/
AIDS. In 29 states, these studies show, a black woman was 23
times more likely to be infected with HIV than a white
woman. And black women accounted for 72 percent of new
HIV cases in the US from 1999 to 2002. As you said, there’s
more awareness, but the situation seems as grave.

bell hooks: If not graver in many ways. Currently, we’re

living in a culture of enormous contradictions. On the one
hand, women have been given unprecedented rights in public
policy and civil rights, but the culture is simultaneously
working to take those rights away. It’s a moment of continued
chaos, where young people—and young women
particularly—are genuinely confused about “what to do.” In
my recent discussions with young black women between the
ages of 16 and 20, I find that many of them are independent
thinkers and believe that they should work, but they still long
to find a rich husband who will support them. These lived
contradictions create enormous emotional stress.

220
Another major difference that we can talk about since the
publication of Sisters of the Yam is the accepted prescription
and use, especially among gifted, young women of all races,
of mood altering drugs for depression, like Zoloft, Xanax, or
Prozac. When they first came on the market, there couldn’t
have been a book like Prozac Nation for young black women,
but there could be one now. Part of the phenomenon of racial
integration, of the change in the construction ofblack female
identity that took place between 1980 and the very beginning
of the 1990s, was that young black women began to look
towards mainstream white culture for validation.

I grew up in a home and culture where all our magazines were

black magazines, except for Women’s Day and others that
were more household oriented. The idea that a large number
of black women in the late 1970s and early 1980s might look
to white fashion magazines to construct their identity would
have been unheard of. Everything has changed in terms of
where and how many young black women derive their sense
of self and identity. That’s why we’re seeing increasing rates
of anorexia and bulimia among black women.

Question: Do you see use of medications for depression by

black women as a symptom of immersion in white culture?
Or as something more hopeful, like a rejection of the “strong
black woman” myth?

bell hooks: Whenever we talk about a medicalized approach

to mental health, it simply focuses on drugs. We’re not really
talking about a movement for holistic, therapeutic models of
healing. The best therapies that utilize drugs also recognize a
world beyond drugs. When the focus is on black women’s
health, I see a hostile backlash as we break out of the many,

221
many shackles that weighed us down before the 1980s. Part
of the backlash is a public construction of black women as
crazy, as bitches, and as out of control. There’s a tremendous
link between that public construction of black women and
dominator culture.

Question: How is this different or new?

bell hooks: The difference is one of intensity. As black

women have gained new forms of power, we experience more
overt attempts to dehumanize us. We can see that even
recently with our nation’s overwhelming acceptance of
Condoleeza Rice when she’s talking about how much she
adores George Bush, how much she loves the Republican
party. But when there needs to be a fall guy for 9/11, someone
to hold accountable for “intelligence failures,” suddenly
Condoleeza, the adored symbolic “black women have
made it” figure, becomes the despised symbol of a kind of
hard brutality. We see white supremacist hatred directed at
other black women as they ascend—we are always in great
danger of being silenced by this image of us as crazy, as
brutal, as bitches. Think about the brutal fight scene in
Bringing Down the House, the Queen Latifah movie that she
helped produce and starred in with Steve Martin, between her
and a white woman. Even though the white woman is evil,
Queen Latifiah’s character is portrayed as much more
viciously brutal and patriarchal. The white woman is
positioned as your thin, feminist professional who isn’t going
to see a black woman as a victim—“I’m gonna whip her butt
as an equal.” But we watch this black woman go out of
control, and hang her up on a meat hook after the fight ends.

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If I were an aware white woman looking at that particular
image I would think, “this is the black woman of an
unenlightened white women’s unconsciousness.” If I were
unenlightened, I would see this as confirmation of the idea
that black women are the enemy. It would support my fear of
black women as monsters, and my belief that if black
women’s rage was unleashed, white women would be
slaughtered. That’s deep! And I’m saying to you that this
image of black and white womanhood would not have been
allowed in 1980. But now it’s part of the extreme white
supremacist patriarchal backlash against white women; it’s
part of a conservative, white dominated mass media using
black women to put the white woman in her place. The black
woman simply becomes an extension of patriarchy, a more
brutal extension of it

Question: We’ve been talking about things that are hard, and
can make people feel discouraged. What’s making you feel
hopeful?

bell hooks: What’s making me feel hopeful is the work that

enlightened black women are doing, on all fronts, to try to
create not only greater awareness, but concrete practices and
structures of change that support black women, black people.

And once again, think about the fact that it’s only really been
in the last few years that we’ve been able to read constructive
work on self-esteem. We have a younger generation of black
people who have been much more educated by the pedagogy
of hedonistic consumerism—whether you have the trappings
of success, the right clothing, the right car, the right amount
of money, the right jewelry—so that we haven’t been able to
engage in a public discourse about black self esteem that goes

223
beyond the 1960s push to “love your skin color, to love your
natural hair.”

And again, let’s talk about the contradictions that we live

with. That many black people with dreadlocks never speak to
other black people or don’t want to engage in blackness in
any way, but are engaged with white people who “love their
dreadlocks” and are attracted to them because of their hair. So
we see again the craziness and zaniness of this kind of
culture. Dominator culture is so skillful in turning everything
into commodities, which I think has made young black
females particularly feel like asking “where do I stand?”

Recendy in the US, a spotlight has been put on black female

sexuality, but it seems to be conveying the notion that black
women are very stupid and desperate. For instance,
mainstream media coverage of “the down low”
phenomenon—of black men who are bisexual or gay and
closeted, and in sexual relationships with women—often
focuses on this message. I can link Ellis Cose’s Newsweek
piece on black women, which focuses on our inability to find
partners and our “sexual desperation,” to Oprah’s show on
“the down low” and find the same stereotype. And then I have
to ask myself, “Why am I sitting in Kentucky reading a white
newspaper that never carries anything about black people, but
is carrying some story about black men on the down low and
infecting these black women with disease because we’re so
stupid and desperate?” These are just additional reproductions
of the nineteenth-century racist, sexist iconography which
deems black women as incapable of critical thought and
reflection. These stereotypes are about the continued
devaluation of black womanhood because the emphasis isn’t
on the pathology of the

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men who are doing this. Instead of the focus being on men
who are lying, who have low self-esteem, and who are not
able to openly claim their sexualities, it’s on black women.
We’re depicted as passive, unable to discern reality, and so
caught up in a fantasy of the idealized man that we can’t
“tell” a gay man from a straight man, ask the right questions,
or use a condom.

It’s no accident that in a racist, sexist culture, that black

women get constructed as this desperate group. There’s an
overall desperation in the culture as a whole for an emotional
connection. It’s just easier for white people to negotiate that.
The popularity of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives
exploits the real desperation white women feel. And it
shouldn’t strike us as surprising that message that black
women are lonely and desperate should come at a time when
more and more black women are self-actualizing, powerful,
and have greater visibility.

Question: It makes me return to what you’ve said in your

writings’ and lectures—that it’s crucial for black women
writers to tell their own personal stories. You’ve also talked
about gaps in our stories around sexuality, ethics, and other
personal choices. In terms of looking for counternarratives to
stories that have big gaps, or are just plain distorted, to whom
or what do you look?

bell hooks: I continue to look to the example and the writings

of black women, both alive and dead, whom I admire. I’ve
always been a major admirer of Lorraine Hansberry, not
simply because of her great skill as a playwright, but because
of her great political activism. We also share many concerns.
For instance, Hansberry was raising the question of whether

225
black people were lovable in To be Young, Gifted and Black.
When she was saying “My parents didn’t love us. They
bought us things,” she was asking how are we going to create
a different world for black children so they can have healthy
self esteem.

Contrast this with the cult of Zora Neale Hurston, which is

still in many ways a fascination with “the crazy, mad black
woman” who ends up alone. It is interesting to compare this
with the
overlooked realities of Lorraine Hansberry’s life. Hansberry
was a powerful figure on the left, acting at a particular
historical moment, who was concerned about Africa, about
struggles for independence in Ethiopia and other places. And
she becomes the lesser known of those two, because she can
not be reinvented as this sort of wild, reckless figure.

Question: Do you think her sexuality may have something to

do with the fact that she’s not as well-known?

bell hooks: No, because even before people really were aware
that Lorraine Hansberry was a lesbian, she still was not the
same kind of iconic figure. Zora Neale Hurston is so much
funkier—it’s all about kind of the funk and the folksy with
Zora—Lorraine was a dissident thinker raising questions
about capitalism. In Raisin in the Sun, which can be seen as a
conservative drama, Mama asks “Since when did money
become life?” She’s really raising a critique of capitalism,
reminding her family of a counterhegemonic vision of life,
where people and community matter and where spiritual and
emotional growth matter.

226
Unbought and Unbossed, Shirley Chisholms’s autobiography,
remains one of those books I go back to as I struggle to
maintain my integrity as a black woman in this world and to
know that I can stand strong in myself. Of course, I think each
of us is looking around to see who can mentor us, who can we
be close to? How can we carry on a dialogue that is life
sustaining? This search has led many black women, certainly
away from fundamentalist Christianity and towards new age
thinking, towards Buddhism, or towards Yoruba or
Santeria—forms of religious practice that link us more with
the diasporic sense of black women’s selfhood.

Question: What connections between African-American

women and black women internationally does Sisters of the
Yam make?

bell hooks: Of all of my books, Sisters of the Yam is the one

that has been most engaged black women readers globally.
Whether you’re talking about the racialized sexual
stereotypes of Nigerian women in Italy, where they are seen
as prostitutes, or the fate of Winnie Mandela. We have Nelson
Mandela, radical and progressive on race, but coming out of
prison saying his enduring image of Winnie was of her
ironing his shirts. And then there’s Winnie, trying to maintain
a revolutionary, militaristic resistance, for which she’s
denounced. Her fate as a powerful political dissident is
connected to the fate of radical black women everywhere.
Again, we’re back to where we started with this image of
black women as more brutal, unnecessarily violent, more
sexual, all of those things. The global construction ofblack
female images becomes more similar and more homogenous
as we have a global media that is homogeneous.

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Question: And as mainstream media in the US exports images
of African-American life and culture.

bell hooks: Exactly. MTV dictates to young people all over

the world what black womanhood is. Regarding the diaspora,
I think it’s important to also remember that Sisters of the Yam
was one of the first books that addressed black people’s
relationship to the earth and the planet; that linked our healing
and well-being with the healing of the earth; and that
reminded us of our agrarian heritage, of the long legacy from
Africa to Central America, South America, and North
America.

Question: In Sisters of the Yam, you wrote, “When I told a

group of black women that I wanted there to be a world where
I can feel love, feel myself giving and receiving love, every
time I walk outside my house, they laughed.” And I wonder
ifyou were to say that now, do you think like you’d get the
same reaction, given how urgent these issues are?

bell hooks: No way. The reaction would be totally different.

Among other forces, Oprah and the writings of Iyanla
Vanzant have given black women, across class lines,
permission to talk about emotional needs and link their
concerns with the those of other women in our society. In the
four books on love that I’ve written—All About Love: New
Visions; Salvation: Black People and Love; Communion: The
Female Search for Love, and now The Will to Change: Men,
Masculinity, and Love—it’s not really highlighted that I’m
black and female or feminist. While they’re certainly written
from a perspective that embraces a nonsexist bias, that’s
never been at the core.

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Interestingly, as I’ve traveled and spoken about these books,
people have asked me, “Why are you just now turning to
love?” That’s because these people never read Sisters of the
Yam, probably because of its subtitle, Black Women and Self
Recovery. But Sisters was never marketed as a book just for
black women! It was marketed as a book for anyone who
wished to understand the holistic construction of self and
identity of black women. And while it is exciting to me that
Sisters is still so relevant, it’s saddening to me that we see an
intensification of psychological pain and woundedness as so
many black people are being aggressively
disenfranchised—through attacks on public education,
affirmative action, and the entire public infrastructure. Masses
of black people are losing ground economically, and with
these losses, we face new and unprecedented psychological
difficulties. These are the contradictions that we’re living
within, and they are producing, a nihilistic and cynical culture
which is characterized by profound despair.

Our collective despair has intensified as many of our

individual lives have improved, precisely because many of us
have done more work towards self-care. We’ve also had so
many more “public” deaths, which makes us reflect. I think of
Audre Lorde. And when we look at the world of famous black
women thinkers and writers, there have been deaths
disproportionate to our numbers. For a while there, it was like
every year somebody was passing and that somebody was
under the age of 60.

Question: Audre Lorde, Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Toni

Cade Bambara …

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bell hooks: Claudia Tate. We could go on for a while. And
this creates an intense concern and awareness of the fact that
we must be about the business of saving ourselves, and of
calling attention to all that is keeping us from being whole. It
is important that we have had so many more black women
writing nonfiction works. This is the place of hope. So is the
fact that more black people, across class lines, are concerned
about the question of healing and see the links between being
in touch with one’s core self and being functional and being
able to have black self-determination. We have witnessed
generations of activists, like the Black Panthers who did
incredibly positive work on the behalf of freedom, but in
many ways the work they did was undermined by
dysfunctional behaviors and beliefs that had a lot to do with
family of origin issues. Many of them needed emotional
healing.

Question: In Sisters of the Yam, you write that within the

tradition of erotic metaphysics, which goes back to Augustine
and Plato, love is assumed to be prior to all knowledge. We
love in order to understand. It seems you’ve been working on
that premise in much of your more recent work. Do you see
Sisters as a launching point for your other books on
relationship and love?

bell hooks: Absolutely. And that’s why when people ask me

about my writing, “What’s happened?” I think, nothing’s
happened. Or actually, one can talk about the greater
fulfillment of a vision. That vision was present as the
foundation to Sisters of the Yam. I see myself on a continuum
of growth and I definitely have shifted myself. If you had
interviewed me when Sisters was first published, I would
have seen it as a kind of meaningful digression from the

230
theoretical feminist work and cultural criticism that I was
more obsessed with and committed to.

Question: In terms of your own spiritual growth, you’ve

chosen Buddhism. Can you speak about this choice?

bell hooks: I blend together Buddhist and Christian

awarenesses. I meditate, and I also pray everyday. Buddhism
is useful to me, as it is for many black men and women, even
our brothers and sisters who are in prison. We use meditation
largely because of its emphasis on right livelihood, it’s a kind
of practical application. There are many people who think
Buddhism is a very theoretical, very abstract spiritual path.
But in fact, there is much crucial emphasis on mindfulness in
daily life.

I always find it deeply moving and inspiring that there was a

connection between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat
Hanh. King saw that these spiritual leaders—these men of
color from the east who were bringing a different way of
being to the west—were offering something very meaningful.

Question: What’s the connection between King and Thich

Nhat Hanh?

bell hooks: They both encountered each other through the

Fellowship of Reconciliation. King first nominated Hanh for
a Nobel Peace prize. It’s important for us to think about the
place of spirituality in healing. As the Dalai Lama so
beautifully says in his Ethics for a New Millennium, we may
be able to do without organized religion as we know it, but
we can’t do without spirituality. If I were writing Sisters of
the Yam today, I would include more of a critique of

231
fundamentalist religious practices in all their forms, including
fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.
Because whenever we are engaged with fundamentalist
thinking, we’re usually talking about the shutting down of the
mind and the heart, the control of women’s bodies, the hatred
of homosexuality. We have so many abundant, life-affirming,
new age ways of thinking about the Bible, about life in
general for us to choose from. We do not need to see
fundamentalist religion as the only path to God.

Question: Have you found that religious women have been

able to read themselves into Sisters of the Yam?

bell hooks: Black women read themselves into the book

because there isn’t a critique of Christianity per se. There is
more of an emphasis on spirituality, so readers feel these
ideas can coexist. Womanist theology, which has had such a
growth since the early years of feminism, has also become a
place where Christian black women can grow spiritually. The
writings of Kade Cannon, Renita Weems, and Anne Kelly, to
name a few, have offered us new ways to think about black
women and feminist theology.

But many of the psychologists who’ve done work on black

women and mental illness have found that many black
women perceive seeking therapy as a sign that their faith is
lacking. We need to understand that it is testament to the
power of spiritual faith that we can seek therapeutic help. But
while we can talk about the need for black women to seek
therapeutic care, we don’t have a therapeutic community that
is actually ready to receive black women, particularly a
non-sexist biased therapeutic community. What we have,
instead, are wonderful individual healers.

232
I think, for example, we’re being told more and more that 60
percent of black women suffer from depression, but the fact
is, who could be aware of the interrelating dynamics of
domination and not be depressed? I spoke to a black woman
recently whose two sons had been murdered, and she was
trying to figure out why she was depressed because people
kept telling her that God had called her boys. And she was
saying, “I can’t summon the will to keep going in the way
that I feel I should.” And I responded, “Maybe this isn’t about
a time to summon will power, but a time to really let go,
surrender, and grieve.” And so once again, there are two
impediments in her life. Both the kind of fundamentalist
Christianity that says, “If you’re really emotionally distraught
about this, you haven’t fully submitted to the will of God,”
and the western metaphysics of healing that would prescribe a
drug to also alleviate her grief, rather than find a location
where that grief can be honored. I barely touched on this in
Sisters, but in my later works I
do address the fact that there have been few places for black
people to collectively grieve in this nation. And the same, of
course, is true for black men.

The fundamentalist church, because it’s so much a corporate

entity in our nation, has been less a place for community
building and the sustenance of black people than the
maintenance of black allegiance to a patriarchal Christian
heritage. When we talk about the future of black women’s
healing and our healing as a people, we have to talk more
about learning and embracing new age spirituality. The point
is not to give up Christianity if that’s your chosen path, but to
not engage in the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that is
homophobic, that is anti-woman, that is fundamentally
militaristic and anti-life. This is very difficult at this moment

233
in history, because we are seeing a resurgence of religious
fundamentalism that is especially intoxicating to young
people, who want clear answers and rules. We must advocate
for new notions of discipline, new notions of religious
practice as part of a holistic, progressive beacon of
self-recovery.

Question: Can you speak more about fundamentalisms?

bell hooks: There’s a parallel between the fundamentalist

thinking in Christianity and other religions and the
fundamentalism of western medicine. To talk about black
women and healing, we have to talk first and foremost about
an imperialist white supremacist, patriarchal domain that has
never taken our bodies seriously. We may take ourselves to
the “best” doctors—who most often are white men—where
we are not necessarily treated with respect. Even when we are
able to access the health care system, our bodies are not often
given the care that they need. My black woman doctor,
Cordia Beverly, is fabulous. She focuses on preventive health
care for black folks—publishing a newsletter, and acting as an
advocate in every way—and has made a lifetime commitment
to healing. We get the best care when we seek out healers that
other black women have found to be helpful. When we
don’t—or can’t—seek out better health care, we can get stuck
in a system that keeps us unhealthy.

For example, black women deal with obesity more than other
group in this country. An obese woman who is suffering with
her knees will be, in fact, told by the unenlightened, white,
patriarchal medical industry, “Go have knee replacement
surgery.” She won’t be told, “Take yourself off to a weight
reduction place and lose weight, look at what’s giving you

234
stress, and examine your overall life.” While there’s been
increased awareness of black women’s health issues, this has
led more black women into medicalized relationships that
aren’t holistic and or about our well being. Everyday,
physicians tell someone who’s overweight and on shaky
knees, “Sit down in a wheelchair,” or “Have knee
replacement surgery,” instead of “The first thing we need to
do is for you to begin to lose weight so you can be healthier
overall.” At one point in history, African-American women
received hysterectomies at a rate vastly disproportionate to
our numbers. Knee and hip replacement surgery may turn out
to be the “new hysterectomies” for black women.

Question: More upsetting medical news is in found in stories

with headlines like “Black Women, Mental Health Needs
Unmet.” As you mentioned, one recent report suggests that 60
percent of African American women suffer from depression.
In California, African American women have the shortest life
expectancy among women of all racial and ethnic groups.

bell hooks: These statistics are dangerously distorting,

because there is a “healthy depression” which is a response to
what’s going on in this world. But we also share a basic need
to confront debilitating depression, and to find and maintain
spaces of joy. Unfortunately, for many black people, it is
becoming more difficult to find these spaces of joy, especially
when we are much more concerned with materialism or
affluence than happiness. Studies used to show that children
hoped to marry and have families when they grew up. Today,
most children say they want to be wealthy, because they
understand the link between certain forms of excess
power and wealth. At six years old, I don’t think I had even
thought about wealth.

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Question: This may be linked to the shame around poverty
that you write about in Sisters. It’s not acceptable to be poor
or working-class in this country, and there is a lot of
repression and’ silence around it. It’s very interesting that
mainstream hip hop has followed a similar trajectory—it
moved from being full of political potential to being obsessed
with labels, things, and “bling bling.”

bell hooks: Hip hop moved from political resistance to

gangster capitalism, saying, “You too can be a part of the
mainstream, here.” There’s also a parallel in publishing,
between what is offered up by the mainstream and what is
offered up elsewhere. As you know, here’s this small
independent press that published Sisters of the Yam, has kept
it alive, and has helped to maintain a kind of parallel universe
to what is offered up by corporate publishing houses. There
are other books that are much more shallow, but that reach a
much wider popular audience than Sisters of the Yam. And
sometimes I think that’s really sad, because it’s sort of like
the difference between junk food and substantive, real,
nurturing food. Often the books that could help us the most,
we don’t know about them. People haven’t rejected these
books, they simply don’t know about them.

In this South End Press Classics edition of Sisters of the Yam,

I want to publicly celebrate those black women readers who
have bought dozens of copies of this book to pass on. This
probably is the most shared of all of my books because black
women who read it—whether it’s a group of battered women
in Shreveport, Louisiana or a book club made up of
professional women in Detroit—feel understood. Sisters
speaks to the diversity of our needs and our longings.

236
I feel enormously blessed to have written Sisters of the Yam.
Rereading it after all these years, I am awed to find that the
issues it addresses are still so timely. Black women deserve to
have multiple
paths of healing, multiple ways of thinking about spirituality,
multiple paths toward recovery. The way is one, and the paths
are many. We all need to go somewhere to restore our souls.
We need to be on that path to recovery and to wholeness.
Healing body, mind, and spirit redeems us, no matter where
we are in our life—lost or found. When we choose to heal,
when we choose to love, we are choosing liberation. This is
where all authentic activism begins.

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238
Index
A

addiction: definition, 49; to food, 52; internalized racism and,

4; loneliness and, 114–115; recovery from, 49–57; to
shopping, 52

Adisa, Opal Palmer, 45

African traditions, 2

agency, experience of, 128

Agrarian communities, 136–138

aid recipients, 17–18

AIDS, 66, 93, 156, 160

The AIDS Book, 66

Ali, Shahrazad, 117–120

Anand, Margo, 91, 93

anorexia, 161

anxiety, 5, 40, 160

apartheid, mask wearing and, 13–14

239
appearance, valuation of, 15

The Art of Sexual Ecstasy (Anand), 91

backlash, x, 159, 161

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (Faludi), x

Bambara, Toni Cade, xi, 5, 6, 110, 120, 168

beauty, 59–73

behavior. See also addiction: anti-social, 51; caring, 24, 26;

changing, 27; emotional, 100, 104–105; standards for, 23

Beloved (Morrison), 91–92

Benjamin, Jessica, 106–107

Berry, Wendell, 137

bitterness, effects of, 125

“black is beautiful,” xii, 72

black liberation struggles, 7–8, 127

black masculinity, x

black men, 14, 117–120, 129, 163–164

black-owned businesses, 69

240
Black Panthers, 168

black power movement, 128–129

The Black Woman anthology (ed. Bambara), xi, 110

The Black Women’s Health Book, 6, 16, 97

The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman

(Ali), 117–120

blackness, magic of, 59

The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 52–53, 137

Bogus, Diane, 85–86

bonding, deprivation of, 88

The Bonds of Love (Benjamin), 106–107

breast cancer, 156

Bringing Down the House, 162

Buddhist traditions, 30, 32, 95, 121–122, 169

burn-out, 35, 83

Cady, Linell, 142

Campbell, Bebe Moore, 81

241
Campbell, Naomi, 70

The Cancer Journals (Lorde), 75

candy, cravings for, 52

Cannon, Katie Geneva, 29, 170

career choices, 34–35

caring: co-dependency and, 55; serving and, 67; talk, 92;

touch and, 89–90

change: coping with, 8, 75–84, 158; countermoves and, 67;

desire for, 132; empowerment for, 45; powerlessness and, 40

Chapman, Tracy, 70

children. See also mother-daughter relationships; parent-child

relationships: building self-esteem, 71; control of, 22–28;
depression in, 84; food addictions in, 52

Chisholm, Shirley, 47, 165

churches, hypocrisy and, 20. See also spiritual world views

cinematic racism, 60–61

Clarke, Septima, 107

clothing, choices, 68–69

co-dependency, 55, 120

242
color, desirability and, 69–70

The Color Purple (Walker), 16, 142

communalism, poverty and, 117

communication: caring talk, 92; criticism, 21–28; importance

of, 8; information as power, 18–20; silences and, 143;
speaking the truth, 11–20; conversational traditions, 8

communities: agrarian lifestyle, 136–138; choice of, 44–45;

impact of industrialism, 138; living in, 114–115; segregated,
40; sexism within, 159; spiritual power and, 2–4; support
groups as, 42–43

communities of resistance, 40, 60–61, 121–122

compassion, 128, 133

competitiveness, 130–131

compulsive eating, 52

confidences, keeping of, 19

constructive confrontation, 27

contemplative spaces, 143–144

control. See also mother-daughter relationships; parent-child

relationships: addictions and, 53; in family life, 99; parental,
22–28; stress and, 39

243
conversation, traditions of, 8

Cose, Ellis, 163

countermoves, change and, 67

Craving for Ecstasy, 52

creating thinking, 60

Creek Nation, 136

critical affirmation, 27, 107

criticism, harsh, 21–28

Cuney, Waring, 138–139

Dalai Lama, 169

The Dance of Anger (Lerner), 67

Davis, Bridgett, 78–79

death, facing, 75–84

debts, stress and, 43–44

decolonization, x

denial, 15, 105, 108

244
depression: definition, 80; health and, 79–80, 82–84; healthy
form of, 172; lack of agency and, 128; life expectancy and,
172; oppression and, 159–160

Diseasing of Americans (Peele), 56

disempowerment, 15–16

dissimulation, 15–16. See also lies

Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow (Sinetar), 32, 37

dolls, 62, 63; girls and, 87

domestic violence, 14, 97, 116–117, 118, 126

domination: addiction and, 49–50, 55; caring and, 26;

depression and, 170; effects of, xi; eroticism within, 86; in
family life, 99; lying and, 11–12; parental control and, 24–25;
structures of, 6–7

Douglass, Frederick, 99

dreaming, 60, 144

drug therapy, 160–161

Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 13

“Dying as the Last Stage of Growth” (Imara), 8, 84

245
ecological movements, 140

emotions, 100, 104–105, 118

empowerment. See also disempowerment: by aloneness, 144;

for change, 45; love and, 110–111, 127–128; threats
engendered by, x

entitlement, sense of, 33, 45

eros, responsibility and, 85–96

eroticism, 87, 94

estrangement, 5

Ethics for a New Millennium (Dalai Lama), 169

“Eye to Eye” (Lorde), xiii

Faludi, Susan, x

family life, television and, 118

fashion, economics of, 68

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Jeffers), 36, 47, 79,

141–142

feet, painful, 69

“A Feminist Christian Vision” (Cady), 142

246
feminist movement, x, 17, 95

The Feminist Mystic (Giles), 145

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks), 159

financial security. See also addiction; debts: caring and, 102;

risk taking and, 36; stress about, 43; women as providers, 40

Fluker, Walter, 109–110

food addictions, 52, 67–68

A Foot in Each World (McClain), 82

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the

rainbow is enuf (Shange), 155

forgetfulness, addiction and, 51

forgiveness, benefits of, 131–132

Fox, Arnold, 131

Fox, Barry, 131

fundamentalism, 169, 170, 171

Giles, Mary, 145

Giovanni, Nikki, 110

247
government aid, 31–32

Goyen, William, 141

grief, immune systems and, 79–80

grooming, self-esteem and, 64

guilt, relationships and, 119

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, 159

The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life

(Scott), 104

hair, 63–65, 71, 163

Hansberry, Lorraine, 89, 135, 164

Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls (Cannon), 29

Hay, Louise, 66

healing: after abuse, 94; choice of wellness, 7; communities

of resistance and, 61; denial and, 87; love and, 97–111;
passion and, 95–96; psychic wounds, 4–5; reconciliation and,
125–133; sacred sexuality, 92–93; spiritual power and, 2;
support groups and, 113–114; testimony and, 16; touch and,
1; visions of, 146

“Healing the Heart of Justice” (Lewis), 146

248
healthcare, 156, 160–161, 171 See also AIDS; National Black
Women’s Health Project; The Black Women’s Health Book

higher powers, belief in, 2

Hill, Anita, x

hip hop culture, 158, 173

HIV, xii, 66, 93

Hochschild, Arlie, 40

home psychoanalysis, 66, 81, 115

honesty, 18–19, 22

humiliation, 21–22

Hurston, Zora Neale, 143, 164, 165

hypocrisy, churches and, 20

imagery, 62–63

Imara, Mwalimu, 8, 84

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 12

individualism, threats of, 131

industrial capitalism, 138–139

249
information, as power, 18–20

integration, 23, 40, 60, 160

interdependency, 116

internalized racism: addiction and, 51; manifestations of, 4;

notions of beauty, 63

international connections, 165–166

Islam, 169

Jacobs, Harriet, 12

Jeffers, Susan, 36, 47, 79, 141–142

Jones-Jackson, Patricia, 77–78

Keen, Sam, 86, 88, 94–95

Kelly, Anne, 170

King, Martin Luther Jr. (Rev.), 47, 127–128, 169

kinship ties, 4

Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 123

Kolbenschlag, Madonna, 116–117, 145

250
Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, 76

Lane, Lunsford, 13

Lee, Spike, 119–120

Lerner, Harriet, 67

lesbian women, 85

Lewis, Victor, 146

lies, 11–12, 19

“Litany for Survival” (Lorde), 16

living in community, 114–115

Logan, Annie Lee, 37, 126, 136

loneliness, 5, 81–82, 114–115

Lorde, Audre: The Cancer Journals, 75; death of, 162; on

eroticism, 93–94; “Eye to Eye,” xiii; “Litany for Survival,”
16; Sister Outsider,
156; “Uses of the Erotic,” 85; Zami, 25

Lost in the Land of Oz (Kolbenschlag), 116–117, 145

251
love: attitudes toward, 100–101; force of, 127–128;
interdependency and, 116; need for, 104; seeking help,
108–109

Love, Medicine, and Miracles (Siegel), 79–80

Love and Addiction (Peele), 116

“Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message” (Merton),

102–103

The Love Space Demands (Shange), 93, 94

Madhubuti, Haki, 118–119

magic: of growth, 136; healing and, 1; traditions of, 2;

vernacular speech and, 46; of women, 59

Mandela, Nelson, 162

Mandela, Winnie, 162

manipulation, power of, 19

Marshall, Paule, 1, 90, 92, 142

martyr syndrome, 35, 67, 129

masks: collective unmasking, 16–17; emotional barriers and,

100; grief and, 76; of normalcy, 80; sexuality and, 90, 95;
strength as, 51–52; truth and, 13–14; use of, 95

252
mass media: cinematic racism, 60–61; disabling imagery,
15–16, 161, 162; exported images, 166; fashion in, 68;
government aid recipients and, 17–18; images of black
femaleness, 62–63; images offered by, ix; representation of
black women, 156; ruling class ethos in, 117–118; sexual
desire in, 91; sexualized images in, 159; subliminal
socialization via, 72–73; white women in, 161

master-slave relationships, 25

McClain, Leanita, 81–83

meditation: benefits of, 48, 169; contemplative spaces,

143–144; on forgiveness, 132; healing and, 1

mental health: attitudes toward, 79–81; attitudes toward

therapy, 54; black men, 118; drug therapy, 160–161; job
stress and, 36; lies and, 11–12; medicalized approach, 161;
repression of emotions, 100; unmet needs, 172

Merton, Thomas, 102–103, 144

“The Middle-Class Black’s Burden” (McClain), 83

Mo’ Better Blues, 119–120

“Mom de Plume” (Bogus), 85–86

money, 14, 44. See also debts; financial security

Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 91–92; The Bluest Eye, 52–53, 137;

communities in works of, 120–121; pain in works of, 156;

253
Song of Solomon, 76–77; spiritual world in works of, 1; Sula,
101–102

mother-daughter relationships, 22–28, 101–102, 104–105,

106

mothers, 26, 55–56. See also mother-daughter relationships

Motherwit (Logan), 37, 126

MTV, 166

music, sexual desire in, 91

The Narrative of Lunsford Lane (Lane), 13

National Black Women’s Health Project, 122–123, 156

National Center for Health Statistics, 159

Native Americans, 2, 61, 135–136

negative thought patterns, 46

Nhat Hanh (Thich), 95, 121–122, 129, 144, 169

Nouwen, Henri, 143

obedience, 24–25, 56, 87

254
obesity, 52, 66, 67–68, 172

On Death and Dying (Kubler-Ross), 76 Oprah, 163

Osofsky, Gilbert, 12

Out of Solitude (Nouwen), 143

overworking, 35, 66–67

pain, destructiveness of, 79

parent-child relationships, 22–28, 56, 87, 92–93, 101–102

passion, 85–96

The Passionate Life (Keen), 86, 94–95

patriarchy, xi, 7, 118–120

Peace, Love and Healing (Siegel), 128

Peace in Every Step (Nhat Hanh), 129

Peck, M. Scott, 11, 19, 98

Peele, Stanton, 49, 55, 116

Petty, Jill, xi

pleasure: hair grooming and, 64–65; numbing pain and,

50–51; punishment and, 88; spaces of, 87

255
positive thinking, 45–47

poverty: addiction and, 50; caring and, 102; communalism

and, 117; communities of resistance, 60; erotic, 88; shame
and, 18–19

Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), 90, 142

“Pray for Your Own Discovery” (Merton), 144

Puttin’ On Ole Massa (Osofsky), 12

Queen Latifah, 162

quilts, 61–62

racism. See also internalized racism: antifeminism and, x;

cinematic, 60–61; in integrated settings, 40; skin-color
politics, 70; in white mass media, 157

A Rage in Harlem, 120

A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry), 165

rap music, 91

R&B music, 91

Ready from Within (Clarke), 107

256
recognition, need for, 37

reconciliation, 125–133

“Recovering” (Goyen), 141

relaxation, 48

religion. see spiritual world views

respect of elders, 56

Rice, Condoleeza, 161–162

“right livelihood,” 30, 32–33, 36–38, 169

The Road Less Traveled (Peck), 11, 98

“Rocking in the Sunlight: Stress and Black Women” (Adisa),

45

sacred sexuality, 92–93

safe sex, 93–94

safety, trust and, 23

The Salt Eaters (Bambara), 5, 6, 46, 113, 120

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (Shange), 105–106, 142

Schaef, Anne Wilson, 55

257
Scott, Kesho, 104

Seattle, Chief, 136

segregation, communities within, 40

self-esteem: addiction and, 50; advances in, 163; black men,

118; body issues, 60–73; in children, 71; fashion choices,
68–69; food addiction and, 52–53; high school women, 160;
internalized racism and, 4; job stress and, 33–34; racism and,
61; right-livelihood and, 33

self-help literature, xii, 107, 156

Seminoles, 136

sexism: awareness of, 159; backlash and, xi; black power

movement and, 128–129; internalized
racism and, 4; notions of beauty, 63

sexual identity, 90, 163–164

sexuality: eroticism and, 87; mass media approach, 163–164;

repression of, 93; sacred, 92–93

shame, 173; about bodies, 93; poverty and, 18–19; work and,
30

Shange, Ntozake, 1, 93, 94, 105–106, 115, 159

shoes, choices, 69

shopping addictions, 52

258
Siegel, Bernie, 79–80, 128

Sinetar, Martha, 32, 37

Sister Outsider (Lorde), 156

skin color, desirability and, 69–70, 163

slavery: attitudes toward blackness, 61–62; love in the context

of, 98–100; narratives, 12; work ethic and, 41

social service workers, 31

solitude, 143

Song of Solomon (Morrison), 76–77

“Speaking of Grief: Today I feel Real Low, I Hope You

Understand” (Davis), 78–79

Spelman College, 158–159

spiritual world views: black world, 2; death and dying, 78;

dream interpretation and, 144; fundamentalism, 169, 170,
171; sacred sexuality, 92–93; selfhood and, 165; sustenance
from, 141; writing in, 141

stereotypes, resistance against, xi

Stitching Memories: African-American Story Quilts, 61–62

storytelling traditions, 8, 12

259
stress: addiction and, 50; effects of, 39–40; ending, 39–48;
immune systems and, 79–80; integration and, 40; loss of
community and, 5; meditation and, 144; professional success
and, 32; work-related, 41–42

substance abuse, 49–57

suicide, 5, 80–81

Sula (Morrison), 101–102, 103

support groups: healing and, 113–114; help from, 79; seeking

help through, 108–109; stress reduction and, 42–43

survival strategies, 11–20, 14, 64

Sweet Honey in the Rock, 75

Talking Back (hooks), 19

television. see mass media

“telling it like it is,” 21–22

A Testament of Hope (King), 47

testimony, 16, 146

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 143

therapy, 7–8, 54

260
Thomas, Clarence, x

Thurman, Howard, 109–110

“A Time to Break Silence” (King), 127–128

“Tip Drill” video, 158

“To Be Black, Gifted, and Alone” (Campbell), 81

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (Hansberry), 89, 135, 164

tongue lashings, 22–28

Toni Cade Bambara memorial lecture, 159

touch: experience of, 88–89; healing and, 1; sacred sexuality,

92–93

trust, safety and, 23

truth, 11–20, 21–28

Turner, Tina, 102

Unbought and Unbossed (Chisholm), 47, 165

Unsettling of America (Berry), 137

“Uses of the Erotic” (Lorde), 85

261
verbal abuse, 22–28

vernacular speech, 46

victims, self-image as, 4, 34

visualization techniques, 43, 60

Voudoun, 2

Wake Up! You’re Alive (Fox and Fox), 131

wakes, 77

Walker, Alice, 16, 156

Washington Post, 160

welfare. see government aid

wellness, choice of, 7

When I Die Tomorrow (hooks), 75

When Roots Die (Jones-Jackson), 77–78

When Society Becomes an Addict (Schaef), 55

White, Evelyn, 6

white settings, 3–4

262
“Woman Poem” (Giovanni), 110

Women Who Love Too Much (Norwood), xi

Wonder, Stevie, 110

work: compulsions about, 41; quitting, 41–42; respect in the

workplace, 158; unsatisfying, 32; value of, 29–38

worry, 45–46, 144

yams, symbolism of, 6

You Can Heal Your Life (Hay), 66

Zami (Lorde), 25

263