LIBERATORY EXPRESSIONS: BLACK WOMEN, RESISTANCE AND THE CODED WORD, AN AFRICOLOGICAL EXAMINATION PDF Free Download
1 / 146/146
100%
LIBERATORY EXPRESSIONS: BLACK WOMEN,
RESISTANCE AND THE CODED WORD,
AN AFRICOLOGICAL EXAMINATION
A Dissertation
Submitted to
The Temple University Graduate Board
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
AFRICOLOGY & AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
by
Alice Lynn Nicholas
May 2019
Examining Committee Members:
Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, Advisory Chair, Africology and African American Studies
Dr. Ama Mazama, Africology and African American Studies
Dr. Christopher Johnson, Africology and African American Studies
Dr. Kimani Nehusi, Africology and African American Studies
Dr. Christel Temple, External Member, University of Pittsburgh
ii
©
Copyright
2019
by
Alice L. Nicholas
All Rights Reserved
iii
ABSTRACT
Word coding can be traced to the ancient Kemetic practice of steganography
(referring to hiding place or hidden message). Unless the reader is aware of the
meaning, the Coded Word can often appear as just art. Afrocentric scholarship
however, also incorporates the idea of functionality. Aesthetics, throughout
African history, and to this day, serve a purpose. The beautiful quilts sewn by
enslaved Black women served dual functions, as bed coverings and as symbols of
resistance and liberation. The decorative wrought-ironwork found on gates and
doors throughout the United States serves as a Sankofic reminder and protector.
The highly coded language in the aesthetics of the Black Power/Black Arts
Movement, shifted paradigms. Though the practice of word coding remains an
active part of contemporary Black culture, there is a disconnection between the
action and the aim (or function); a direct result of the destructive efforts of
colonization.
Today’s racially charged and oftentimes dangerous climate calls for a
reexamination of word coding as a liberatory tool. I created the theory of the
Coded Word to analyze three novels by Black women who are unique in their
forms of word coding, just as they are characteristically distinct in their forms of
expression. The findings for the three novels have resulted in the first three
entries into the Glossary of the Coded Word, a resource to be used by Black
people in resistance to oppression and in the struggle for liberation of all Black
people.
iv
DEDICATION
For my mother
Deloris Lucy Nicholas
who has risen in power
to the realm of the ancestors.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As a believer, I first acknowledge and give thanks to the Most High.
Secondly, I honor my ancestors on whose shoulders I stand, and in whose prayers
I fly.
To my Temple University Department of Africology and African American
Studies family, I am grateful to have had this time and space with you, and I look
forward to celebrating our tomorrows! TU – AfAm!
To my professors, Dr. Sonja Peterson-Lewis, Dr. Jacqueline Wade, Dr.
Regina Jennings, thank you for your wisdom and your careful crafting of this,
and future, Africologists.
A special thank you to my Chair and mentor, Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, and
to my dissertation committee, Dr. Ama Mazama, Dr. Christopher Johnson, Dr.
Kimani Nehusi, and my external member, Dr. Christel Temple, what an honor it
is to stand in your light.
To my loved ones, heart-to-heart, I am beholden to you. Thank you for
your love, your encouragement, your patience, your reminders to stay focused
and balanced, and your home-cooked meals! It has taken my entire village to get
me here, and for you, I am eternally grateful.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ iii
DEDICATION ....................................................................................................... iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................... v
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................ viii
CHAPTERS:
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1
“The Most Important Person in the Underground Railroad” ..... 5
From Voice to Vision: Quilting the Coded Word ........................... 10
Definition of Terms ................................................................................ 16
Purpose of Study ...................................................................................... 17
Research Questions ............................................................................... 21
Barracoon: The Last Black “Cargo” ................................................. 22
Statement of Problem ........................................................................... 27
Rationale ................................................................................................... 31
CHAPTER 2: METHODS: BLACK WOMEN’S LITERATURE .................. 33
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY: THE CODED WORD .............................. 35
The Theory of the Coded Word ........................................................... 37
African Retentions in the Coded Word ............................................ 38
Tenets of the Coded Word .................................................................... 43
Seven Components of Afrocentric Theory ....................................... 50
Limitations ............................................................................................... 54
vii
CHAPTER 4: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ........................................... 55
CHAPTER 5: THE AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS ................................. 62
Zora Neale Hurston – Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) ................ 62
Toni Morrison - God Help the Child (2015) ..................................... 75
Toni Cade Bambara - Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999) ..... 89
Indicators of the Coded Word ............................................................ 101
Coded Sound .......................................................................................... 103
Coded Sight ............................................................................................ 107
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ........................................................................... 111
CHAPTER 7: GLOSSARY OF THE CODED WORD ................................... 112
REFERENCES .................................................................................................... 118
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Figure 1. Andikra (Sankofa) Symbols ................................................. Page 14
2. Figure 2. Section of Wrought-Iron Fence ........................................... Page 15
1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
All things that are, exist through speech. Without speech there is nothing
… Whatever a person speaks, has reality to that person … This is the power
of speech … No spoken word can be ignored. Once it is spoken, it exists.
(Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, 2003)
For Black people, speech is more than the spoken word. “Speech” includes
many forms of expression. Speech is a raised fist, or a knitted eyebrow. It is a
“humph!” or a “hum.” It is a hairstyle or a pattern in a quilt. Any behavior, word
and sound can be used to communicate ideas. Molefi Kete Asante (2010) notes,
“We have often murdered insult with the sharp glance of our eyes, the sucking of
our teeth, and the bold akimbo” (p. 237). I posit, that these communication
patterns have been used to share ideologies of resistance between Black people
that lead to liberatory imaginations.
There are times in African history when speaking was dangerous for Black
people. Even the playing of the drum (a messenger) was outlawed because of the
power of its “speech.”
1
To prevent communication between enslaved Black
people, enslavers outlawed the drum, reading and writing, all ancient African
traditions
2
. To ensure unfettered communication, Black fwomen practiced covert
1
See Asante, Molefi Kete. (2003). The Afrocentric Idea. Speaking includes the drum, the written word and
“a vocal-expressive modality [which] dominates all communication culture” (p. 71). See also, Welsh-
Asante, Kariamu. (1993) The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions. Westport: Greenwoord Press.
“[T]he fact that Africans were prohibited from using the drums during the Enslavement meant that the
percussive element of the aesthetic had to be expressed in other material ways” (p. 54).
2
According to Kimani Nehusi (2001), “The myth that Afrikans do not possess a scribal tradition is
exploited by the very fact of Medew Netjer, which is the first language ever to be written in this world and
was in constant use for over 3,000 years, constituting the longest written tradition ever” (pp. 10-11).
2
(though, not necessarily concealed) forms of expression. Coding the word became
a common practice, and the word itself became fluid. Word coding, the ancient
practice of transferring ideas into tangible communication,
3
was refined during
enslavement when it was especially useful for resistance and liberation efforts.
Trinidadian writer and playwright, M. Nourbese Philip (1989), in her
poem, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” laments the loss of her mother-
tongue (her maternal language and cultural connection to Africa)
4
, and resents
the forced adoption of a new, English tongue; “English is my mother tongue, a
mother tongue is not a foreign, lang lang lang language, languish anguish, a
foreign anguish” (p. 30). The English language, Philip argues, is in reality, a
“father-tongue” (a reference to racism and patriarchy). She asserts, “I have no
mother tongue, no mother to tongue, no tongue to mother to mother tongue me, I
must therefore be dumb tongue” (p. 30). This is in reference to the Eurocentric
invention of African inferiority as justification for its brutality. Ama Mazama
(2003) asserts that an essential element of colonialism is the “ontological
reduction of colonized people,” through the use of “reductive discourse” (p. 4).
Philip codes the foreign tongue to communicate her message. Her spelling
and structure clearly illustrate a disconnection in any language.
5
The poem itself
3
One of the earliest forms of coding is demonstrated in Kemet. In the writing of the hieroglyphs, in
addition to representing material objects, the ancient scribes created visual (tangible) representations of
sounds and ideas.
4
See Asante, Molefi Kete. (2003). The Afrocentric Idea. “Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist, has
argued that the imposition of European languages on Africans furthers the oppression of the people by
making their chances for mental liberation remote” (p. 183).
5
See Appendix 1, Figure 1.
3
demonstrates a victory in her ability, as a Black woman, to code the word
visually; a practice that is characteristic, yet understudied in Black women’s
literary expression. Philip, in essence, overcomes the forced tongue by modifying
it to fix her needs. In her concrete poem
6
, written both vertically and horizontally,
up and down the page, in and out of the margins and, in seemingly detached
blocks of verse that represent the struggles and the “anguish” of a foreign tongue,
Philip (1989) resists another tactic (divide and conquer) used to support
continued colonialist aims:
Every owner of slaves shall, wherever possible, ensure that his
slaves belong to as many ethnolinguistic groups as possible. If they
cannot speak to each other, they cannot then foment rebellion and
revolution (p. 30).
7
Yet the rebellions and revolutions continued. Prior to 1865, Black people
repeatedly liberated themselves and even created maroon communities literally
under the noses of their former enslavers (Price 1996, Thompson 2006, Diouf
2014). Black women were key to the successes of these resistance and liberatory
efforts, and their unique forms of expression, refined by multiple oppressions,
including extreme marginalization, invisibility, and suppression of their voices
6
Concrete poetry is visual, and takes on the shape of its subject matter. For example, a poem about the
earth or sun may be round, and another, about the pyramids may be triangular.
7
The struggles for Black liberation continued many years after the establishment of America’s
independence on July 4, 1776. Those known and reported include Mina, Louisiana 1791; Point Coupee,
Louisiana 1794; Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion, Virginia 1800; Igbo Landing, Georgia 1803; Chatham Manor,
Virginia 1805; German Coast, Louisiana 1811; George Boxley’s Rebellion, Virginia 1815; Denmark
Vesey’s Rebellion, South Carolina 1822; Nat Turner Rebellion, Virginia 1831; Black Seminole Rebellion,
Florida 1835-1838; Cherokee Nation Revolt, Oklahoma 1842; and John Brown’s Raid, Virginia 1859.
4
(Spelman 1982, McCluskey1994, RoseGreen-Williams 2002), aided in the
successful coding and transmission of covert messages.
5
“The Most Important Person in the Underground Railroad”
She was called Moses. Some theorize that this name was in reference to
Moses, the Israelite, who led his people out of enslavement in Egypt and into the
Promised Land, Canaan.
8
Afrocentric historians, however, consider an ancient
African root, with an etymology founded in Kemet, and in names like Thutmose
(of the 18th dynasty) and Ramesses (of the 19th dynasty). Renford Reese (2011)
asserts that Harriet Tubman,
was the most important person in the Underground Railroad …
She was rooted in Christianity and never wavered from her strong
faith in God. As a slave it was the story of the exodus of the Children
of Israel being held captive in a foreign land that inspired Tubman
and other Black slaves to escape (p. 210).
The justification for the enslavement of Black people was supported by biblical
verses like Genesis 9:18-27, which recounts Noah’s curse on the children of
Canaan,
Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his
brethren … Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be
his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the
tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. (King James
Version)
Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will be his brothers … Praise
be to the Lord, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
May God extend Japheth’s territory, may Japheth live in the tents
of Shem and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth. (New
International Version)
8
Ama Mazama (2001) notes, “Afrocentricity contends that our main problem as African people is our
usually unconscious adoption of the Western worldview and perspective and their attendant conceptual
frameworks” (p. 387).
6
Over the centuries, the telling of the passage has been modified and the people
have been colorized, with Black people becoming the cursed children of Ham (the
father of Canaan). Reese (2011) questions how the sons of Noah could become
different races.
Harriet Tubman did not read or write, and it stands to reason that she
would have been indoctrinated with this version of the story. Why then, would
she choose the path of resistance (the path to liberation)? Why, as a Christian
woman, would she reject (or resist) her assigned station in life as Ephesians 6:5-7
instructs?
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to
the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as
unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the
servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good
will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that
whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of
the Lord, whether he be bond or free. (King James Version)
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with
sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not
only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of
Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly,
as if you were serving the Lord, not people. (New International
Version)
She most likely would have aimed for, and achieved, liberation for herself and
others regardless of whether she was Christian or not. It is also possible that
Tubman’s Christianity was rooted in African cosmology. She possessed an innate
consciousness of victory,
9
and not the acceptance and nihilism that the institution
9
See Mazama, Ama (2003), The Afrocentric Paradigm; “Afrocentricity stresses the importance of
cultivating a consciousness of victory” (pp. 6, 12).
7
of enslavement aimed to create in enslaved Black people. Tubman, in whatever
free time she could find while she was enslaved, worked side jobs and “always
had a little money of her own” (Petry, 1955; p. 82). She instinctively knew that
something was not right and planned her escape. Once she had liberated herself,
and was living in Canada, she recalled her earlier life as an enslaved Black
woman,
I grew up like a neglected weed – ignorant of liberty, having no
experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I
saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away. I had two
sisters carried away in a chain-gang – one of them left two children.
We were always uneasy … I know what a dreadful condition slavery
is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who
was willing to go back to be a slave … I think slavery is the next
thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he
would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell, if he
could” (Drew, 2008: p. 52).
The daughter of a Christian minister, Zora Neale Hurston (1934), in
“Characteristics of Negro Expression,” asserts that “the Negro is not a Christian
really” (p. 36). She restates this theory in her essay, “The Sanctified Church”
(1981), when she notes, “[T]he Negro has not been Christianized as extensively as
is generally believed” (p. 103). One of the first Black churches in America also
may not be as Christianized as believed.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church was the first independent Black
denomination in America. One of its member churches, Mother Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church, located in Charleston, SC, was co-founded in 1818
8
by Denmark Vesey.
10
Mother Emanuel was originally founded as the African
Church in the 1790s, before being renamed Hampstead Church, which was part
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in Philadelphia, PA in 1816
by Richard Allen.
11
Mother Emanuel was burned down in 1822 by irate white
people after Vesey’s planned rebellion.
12
The church was rebuilt, but went
underground when the city of Charleston banned Black churches in 1834 after
Nat Turner’s rebellion. The long history of Mother Emanuel also includes a very
African practice, libation, an ancient ritual that “has been taken across the
Atlantic and preserved almost intact in Afrikan communities of resistance outside
of Afrika” (Nehusi, 2016; p. 2). Nehusi further defines libation as,
A highly distinctive combination of thought, word and gesture
which together constitute a ritual drama that has been sacred to
Afrikans for as long as humanity has counted time, and perhaps
even before then. It is a powerful moment of profound significance
in which divinity and ancestors are invoked, the environment
acknowledged, and all the generations within the entire time/space
correlation represented by the experience of living are united before
the invoked forces. Libation therefore crosses many boundaries to
unite forces from every domain of the cosmos in a fusion of space:
the here/not here, and a fusion of time: the past/present/future. At
this most potent moment of this ritual process a drink offering is
made and favours sought (pp. 13-14).
10
See, Williams, F. Leonard. Richard Allen and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Philadelphia: Historical Commission of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, 1972.
11
On June 17, 2015, the 193rd anniversary of the thwarted Denmark Vesey revolt, a white nationalist who
assumed supremacy (Dylann Roof) massacred nine church members inside of Mother Emanuel; Reverend
Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, Reverend DePayne
Middleton-Doctor, Reverend Daniel Simmons, Sr., Myra Thompson, and Reverend Sharonda Coleman-
Singleton. Eight of the nine members were of the Gullah/Geechee Nation.
12
Some argue that Vesey, a prosperous carpenter, was framed. The Black “witnesses” confessed “only after
being beaten and tortured.” See Smith, Dinitia. “Challenging the History of a Slave Conspiracy.” The New
York Times. (Feb. 23, 2002) p. B11
9
In Paul Bowers’ article, “Mother Emanuel Shooting Was a Loss for the
Gullah/Geechee” (2015), head of state of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, Queen Quet
Marquetta Goodwine asserts, libation “is a traditional African ceremony, and you
can still see it done in various parts, especially West Africa … Before you enter
into anything you're going to do, you give honor to God and give honor to the
ancestors." In 2013, prior to the church shooting on June 17, 2015, the members
of Mother Emanuel assembled for a libation ceremony held inside of the church.
Though it is not clear whether this was the first such ceremony, it was not to be
the last. Soon after the massacre, Goodwine shared plans to gather again for a
libation ceremony in honor of the nine church members slain in the attack.
This same spirit of resistance active in Mother Emanuel, was alive in
Harriet Tubman and was demonstrated in her liberatory efforts and successes.
She may have used the words and stories of the Christian Bible, but she coded
them in a very Pan-African way. Tubman led nineteen missions, liberating over
300 people along the Underground Railroad, which ultimately guided
approximately 100,000 Black people out of enslavement and into the Promised
Land, Canada
13
from 1810-1850 (Reese, 2011, p. 208). When enslaved Black
people, especially those involved in liberation efforts, heard the name Moses,
they knew that either Tubman herself or another conductor on the Underground
Railroad, was near. Jane Beem (2004) asserts, “When Tubman sang the song ‘Go
13
See Reese, Renford. “Canada: The Promised Land for U.S. Slaves.” The Western Journal of Black
Studies. 35.3 (Fall 2011): p.208
10
Down Moses’ two times in a row, fugitive slaves knew they were safe. If she sang
only once, they knew she was telling them to hide” (p. 18).
Singing, asserts Kenyatta Berry, “as a form of communication, is deeply
rooted in the African American culture” (2017). Enslavers, wary of the messages
in the spirituals, like “Go Down Moses” and “Wade in the Water,” and in the “sad
songs,” of Black prisoners, prohibited singing, and severely punished, extremely
tortured, and often executed the singers (the messengers) (Munro, 2010). In
resistance, and with the aim of liberation, Black people further coded the word.
From Voice to Vision: Quilting the Coded Word
When voice was suppressed, vision was employed. Using colors, shapes,
patterns or particular pieces of material, enslaved Black women, coded messages
into quilts. Wives of their enslavers unknowingly spread the liberatory messages
when they had the quilts hung outside to air out each morning (Skalland, 2002).
Cuesta Benberry, in the foreword to Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G.
Dobard’s (1999) Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the
Underground Railroad, defines the Quilt Code as “a mystery-laden, secret
communication system of employing quilt making terminology as a message map
for slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad” (p. 3).
14
The Quilt Code theory has been met with some resistance. Critics have
challenged the idea of Black women coding messages into quilts, due in part to
14
See Appendix 2, Figure 1.
11
the oral nature of their recounting. John Blassinghame (1977) reasons a limited,
Western perspective occurs, “Because of his traditional fascination with the
written word, the American historian when confronted with oral lore … has no
methodological tools applicable to them” (p. xiii). Though many enslaved Black
people could (and did) read and write, they were forbidden to do so. In addition,
the Quilt Code, for obvious reasons, was kept secret and would not have been
written down. Stephanie Bohde (2004) asserts, “Many times, ancestors of some
of these escaped slaves recall being told the story of the quilt code, and then
warned against disclosing the information” (p. 72).
15
Quilts acted as silent, visual, and unifying communication for Black people
in the American South who were taken mainly from West and Central Africa, and
who spoke numerous languages.
16
In support of the Quilt Code theory, Floyd
Coleman (1999) notes that Tobin & Dobard,
by firmly linking the art of quilt making to the struggle for freedom
… advance our understanding and appreciation of the role of
women, of free blacks, and others who aided the cause of black
liberation … [they show] how quilt patterns and stitches were used
in the struggle for freedom – as codes that could be read by
enslaved blacks as they traveled along the Underground Railroad
(p. 6).
15
The Quilt Code included ten main patterns; the monkey wrench, the wagon wheel, the bear paw, the
crossroads, the log cabin, the shoofly, the bow ties, the flying geese, the drunkard’s path, and the stars, each
used one at a time to provide messages and directions for runaways. See Tobin & Dobard (1999), and
Bohde (2004).
16
In Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis (1974), Cheikh Anta Diop called for Wolof as the
official language of Senegal, with the aim of working with other African nations, toward a unified,
continental language. Black women working along the Underground Railroad, created a form of unified
language through quilting.
12
Performing traditionally feminine acts and women's work (sewing and
housekeeping), Black women quietly resisted
17
, fomented rebellion and aided in
liberation efforts. Arnet (1999, cited in Tobin & Dobard’s Hidden in Plain View),
notes,
Every great quilt, whether it be a patchwork, appliqué, or strip quilt,
is a potential Rosetta stone. Quilts represent one of the most highly
evolved systems of writing in the New World. Every combination of
colors, every juxtaposition or intersection of line and form, every
pattern, tradition or idiosyncratic, contain data that can be
imparted in some form or another to anyone. All across Africa,
geometric designs, the syntax of quilt tops, have been used to
encode symbolic or secret knowledge. Bodily decoration and
costumes, architectural ornamentation (including painting), and
relief carving have been primary media. Geometric designs painted
on homes were reportedly formerly used as a means of covert social
protest against apartheid by Sotho-Tswana women in South Africa
(p. 8-9).
Maude Southwell Wahlman (1999) also notes the continued, and
connected practice of visual word coding throughout the African
continent,
African secret society
18
signs and symbols are still hidden in
decorative textile designs. Examples include Bogolanfini cloth
painted by Bamana women in Mali; Adinkra cloth stamped by
Ashanti men in Ghana; Adire cloth painted by Yoruba women with
designs said to have been given to them by Oshun, the goddess of
wealth and fertility in Nigeria; Epke (Leopard) society cloth resis-
dyed by Ejagham women with nsibidi
19
secret society signs in
17
These acts of quiet resistance follow Zora Neale Hurston’s theory of “featherbed resistance; “The Negro,
in spite of his open-faced laughter … offers a featherbed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it
never comes up. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries” (qtd. in Kaplan, 2005; p. 4).
18
Asar Sa Ra Imbotep (2009) refers to these as “African Societies of Secrets,” whose purpose is to “help
sustain and regulate the development of the ancient wisdom. Their most distinguishing factor is their
adherence to secrecy. Information regarding the collective wisdom is held secret by its members and is
only revealed to those deemed worthy by elders, primarily during and after a rites-of-passage process” (p.
620).
19
Nsibidi is an African writing system that includes taxonomic (signs) and genealogical (origin) elements.
See, Molefi Kete Asante (1998). The Afrocentric Idea. “Nsibidi is an Efik writing system that shows no
13
Nigeria; and Kuba cloth woven with designs which allude to the
central African Kongo cosmogram, a diamond or a cross which
represent the four moments of the sun or the soul: birth, life, death,
and rebirth in the watery ancestral realm” (p. 9).
Adinkra symbols, created by the Akan in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, hold both
secrets and magic. The symbols are commonly included on religious and sacred
items. Akan legend tells of the king of the Gyaman Nation (an Akan rival), who
had the Adinkra symbols copied because it was believed that they provided
protection and power. One of these symbols, Sankofa, (San: Return, Ko: Go, Fa:
See/Fetch) is presented in two ways, a heart-shaped symbol and a bird with its
head turned backward (sometimes holding an egg in its mouth) and its feet facing
forward, both sharing the same message; “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a
yenkyi.”
20
Dona Richards (Marimba Ani) (1981), connects the significance of the
ironwork to the importance of the blacksmith in African culture,
The blacksmith in traditional Africa is always a spiritually powerful
person. He is often a religious leader, a surgeon, a diviner, an
important person in the sociopolitical structure of the community.
The blacksmith is a toolmaker and a scientist, not in spite of but
because of his spiritualty, because he has access to the awesome,
beautiful and sacred mysteries of the universe” (p .237).
outside or Western influence. Robert Farris Thompson says: ‘The moral and civilising impact of nsibidi
betrays the ethnocentrism of an ideology that would exclude ideographic forms from consideration in the
history of literacy. Educated Western persons continue to assume that . . . traditional Africa was culturally
impoverished because it lacked letters to record its central myths, ideals, and aspirations. Yet the Ejagham
and Ejagham-influenced blacks who elaborated a creole offshoot of nsibidi in Cuba have proven
otherwise’". Also, See Maik Nwosu. “In the Name of the Sign: The Nsibidi Script as the Language and
Literature of the Crossroads.” Semiotica 182.1-4, pp. 285-303.
20
"It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." (Swahili)
14
Figure 1. Adinkra (Sankofa) Symbols
Sankofa, as a symbol of magic, protection and power, is found in its heart-
shaped form, on wrought iron gates and doors throughout America.
21
Though
their spiritual significance is often forgotten (another unfortunate result of the
destructive and divisive effects of colonialism), the decorative gates are to be read
as Coded Word. This is why legendary blacksmith, Philip Simmons, can so easily
be referred to as “a poet of ironwork. His ability to endow raw iron with pure
lyricism is known and admired throughout, not only in South Carolina, but as
evidenced by his many honors and awards, he is recognized in all of America”
(Huguley, qtd in Greenlaw, 2016).
As the struggles continue, so should the resistance. I posit that these symbols
sounds and sights, embedded in the drum rhythms, the songs, the quilts, the
cloths, and even the iron gates, are also embedded (and under-explored) in the
contemporary literature, and are waiting to be empowered once again. A closer
look and a (re)centered perspective may uncover unique (re)interpretations and
(re)imaginations for Black liberation.
21
See www.philipsimmons.us.
15
Figure 2. Section of Wrought-Iron Fence.
Photo by Cfreedom Photography
16
Definition of Terms
This study uses the following terms:
1. Black refers to people of African descent living throughout the African
Diaspora. Related terms include African American, African and Afrikan.
2. Coded Word: A form of cultural communication used by Black women in
resistance to oppression, with the aim of Black liberation. The Coded
Word is not necessarily a “word,” and uses both sound and sight as
communication devices.
3. Contemporary refers to the 20th and 21st centuries.
4. Enslaved is a word used in this study to describe Black people who were
enslaved. The term “slave” is dehumanizing and serves to categorize
people as property or objects. Enslaved, on the other hand, places the onus
of the actions on the enslaver, and focuses on the enslaved as people.
5. Kemet refers to ancient, Black Egypt.
17
Purpose of Study
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the
purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for
writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black
folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for
propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while
the other is stripped and silent.
(W.E.B. DuBois, Criteria of Negro Art, 1926)
From an Afrocentric perspective … knowledge can never be produced for
the sake of it, but always for the sake of our liberation.
(Ama Mazama, The Afrocentric Paradigm, 2003)
The purpose of this research project is to conduct an Africological study of the
ways Black women contemporarily code the word as resistance with the overall
aim of Black liberation, to observe how their expressions of resistance are
presented in the literature, and to expand the discipline of Africology by creating
and testing a theoretical framework and building a glossary of the Coded Word.
The research has been conducted with a research tool that I have developed and
named the Coded Word (which is defined and discussed in the Methodology
section). My goal in this research is to examine how Black women continue to
code the word in the contemporary struggle against oppression, and consider
how these expressions can be used for the benefit of Black people.
Molefi Kete Asante (1992) asserts, “In a white supremacist
22
environment,
you are either for white supremacy or against it. There is no middle ground for
22
Afrocentricity agrees that the idea of white supremacy is a myth. No one race is supreme (or any more
supreme) than another.
18
intellectuals in an oppressive society” (p. 21). Black people are existing within
racist, and oftentimes dangerous, environments. Byington, et al., in their 2018
report note,
Intolerance against black Americans has existed since they were
forced into slavery, targeted for racial lynchings and denied equal
rights. Despite the passage of hate crime legislation and civil rights
protections, black Americans disproportionately face acts of
intimidation, extremist rhetoric and life-threatening violence.
According to the latest U.S. census data (2017), Black people are 13.4% of the U.S.
population. However, Black people are also the largest group of victims of hate
crimes perpetrated by white nationalists who assume supremacy, and who
seemingly have been emboldened by the election of the current U.S. president.
Though hate crimes across the board have risen for 2017, “anti-black crimes were
among the most common in the nation’s 10 largest cities” (Byington et al., 2018).
Black churches remain under attack.
23
The NAACP (2014), reports that Black
people are incarcerated “at more than 5 times the rate of whites;” Black women
are twice as likely as white women to be imprisoned; Black children “represent
32% of children who are arrested, 42% of children who are detained, and 52% of
children whose cases are judicially waited to criminal court”; and though the rate
of drug use is similar to that of white people, Black people are jailed at almost 6
times the rate of white people” (NAACP).
23
Taryn Finley and Hilary Fung (2015) reported at least 100 attacks from 1956 to 2015. This count does
not include the numerous attacks and attempts on Black churches in 2016, 2017 and 2018, the latest being
the attempted attack on a Kentucky church on October 28, 2018.
19
Kristen Bialik (2018) of the Pew Research Center reports Black households
in the U.S. have one-tenth of the wealth of white households, and that racism,
from the perspective and experience of Black people, has been steadily
increasing. Arenge, Perry and Clark (2018), in an NBC News poll show that 64%
of Americans agree that racism is (and remains) a main problem in America. The
National Urban League’s annual State of Black America report for 2018 shows an
equality index for Black Americans at 72.5%; “That means that rather than
having a whole pie (100%), which would mean full equality with whites in 2018,
African Americans are missing about 28% of the pie” (National Urban League
2018). In the report, Valarie Rawlston Wilson (2018) notes,
While a lot has changed for African Americans and other people of
color in this country since 1968, many things have not. Even after
the historic two-term election of the first African-American
president of the United States, full racial equality remains a distant
goal. Further, progress toward this goal must currently be pursued
under the national leadership of a president whose rhetoric and
actions have done more to fan the flames of racism and divisiveness
rather than inspire greater equality (p. 9).
These daily battles have residual negative impacts on the health and psyche of
Black people, however, they also demonstrate the determined nature of a people
with a unified victorious consciousness in the act of resisting oppression. Vernon
Andrews and Richard Majors (2004), in their examination of unique forms of
Black expression, note that the evolution of nonverbal communicative styles in
Black expression is the result of “invisibility and frustration resulting from racism
and discrimination” (p. 316). Navigating within this system, and additionally
burdened, Black women and girls are the victims of daily “state-sanctioned
20
terror" (Fox, 2017; p. 143), which creates a need for communication that protects,
resists and liberates.
Dereic Angelo Dorman (2017) asserts, “A major thrust of the Africological
enterprise is to develop approaches, models and theories to combat racism in all
its forms” (p. 1). As an Africologist, my research aims to contribute to the
discipline of Africology and the liberation of Black people by creating a
theoretical framework that provides an additional approach to resisting and
combating racism, while on the centuries-long “journey to regain our freedom”
(Asante, 2003, p. 146). Until Black people are in a truly liberated space, A luta
continua.
24
24
Portuguese: “The struggle continues.”
21
Research Questions
The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business.
All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play
with and handle. He can read my writing, but he sho’ can’t read my mind.
(Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935)
And when outside observers, especially whites, were present, they rarely
understood what they were seeing.
(Katrina Hazzard-Donald. Mojo Workin’, 2012)
Zora Neale Hurston was unsuccessful in her first attempt at collecting Black
folklore in the South. She realized that it was “not because I had no talents for
research, but because I did not have the right approach. The glamor of Barnard
College was still upon me” (Hurston 1942, p. 144). The alien rhetoric and
methodology of “the white man" were off-putting for the towns’ residents, who
were distrustful of Hurston when she presented herself as an outsider. They were
resistant to her efforts and often directed her toward the next town or county.
Hurston was collecting folklore in places where the people were polite, but
were also “particularly evasive [and] when approached by outsiders [would] smile
and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so
little about us, he doesn’t know what he’s missing” (Hurston 1942, p. 2). These
were Hurston's people, and she knew them well. When she returned as a
daughter of the community, one centered on the culture and using the language
of the community, she was welcomed home and was successful in her collection.
Franz Boaz, known as the father of American Anthropology, recognized Hurston's
ability to (re)enter this closed world, writing,
22
The great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the
homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully
accepted as such by the companions of her childhood. Thus she has
been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the
Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in
his true inner life (1995; p. 3).
Hurston was often criticized for both her use of Black language and her softer
subject matter,
Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and
work and music and life's unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that
these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and
she was judged superficial. By implications, merely feminine
(Pierpont 1997).
A more political and angry, Richard Wright compared Hurston to Phillis
Wheatley and accused her of writing for the entertainment (and laughter) of
white people.
25
It appears, however, that Zora Neale Hurston also wrote for (and
for the benefit of) Black people.
Barracoon: The Last Black “Cargo”
U.S. Congress abolished the intercontinental trade in Black bodies on
March 2, 1807. The law was ratified on January 1, 1808. In 1820, the U.S. deemed
the continued illegal trafficking to be punishable by death. Despite this threat,
there is historical evidence of the persistent illegitimate trade (e.g., the Antelope
in 1825 and the Amistad in 1839). On May 15, 1859, the Clotilda set sail (more
than fifty years after the passing of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of
1807). William Foster, under the direction of his boss, the enslaver, Timothy
25
See Pierpont, Claudia Roth. “A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian.” The New
Yorker. February 9, 1997.
23
Meaher (who was rumored to have initiated the illegal expedition with a bet), set
sail to the West coast of Africa. The cargo ship arrived in Whydah, Dahomey in
May, 1860, and Captain Foster stuffed the cargo ship with 116 kidnapped and
unlawfully sold human beings. These African men and women were immediately
renamed “cargo,” in an attempt to hide the illegal activity. This naming and
defining, demonstrates the ability of language to both distance and dehumanize.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston began conducting a series of interviews with
Oluale Kossula
26
, the last known survivor (the last “Black Cargo") of the Clotilda.
American publishers showed a voyeuristic interest in Hurston’s documentation of
Kossula’s painful and historic journey,
27
but they pushed for an easier-to-accept
Eurocentric tongue and not the African reality that was demonstrated in the
language. To accept Kossula’s language, the readers would have to acknowledge
the circumstances leading to the need for the creation of this “new” language. In
addition, Hurston, as an anthropologist and folklorist, recognized the importance
of language and its connection to culture, and thus, refused to change the way
Kossula recounted his. So the book sat, unpublished, for 85 years. Hurston’s
victory is in (re)humanizing Oluale Kossula through the use of language (his
language) in Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” which was finally
published in May, 2018.
26
Also spelled Kossola.
27
See, Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo." New York: Amistad, 2018.
24
Cheikh Anta Diop, in Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a
Federated State (1974), cautioned against a hegemonic view of language and
culture, asserting “European languages must not be considered diamonds
displayed under a glass bell, dazzling us with their brilliance” (p. 12). English is
not Kossula’s first language, it is a language forced upon him and reflects a severe
history, one that anguishes M. Nourbese Philip (1989) and that Harriet Tubman
considers next to hell (Drew, 2008).
For readers and publishers to accept Kossula’s new language, they would
have to first face and acknowledge the conditions that created the need for his
new language. They would have to concede that his new reality and foreign
tongue were forced on him. They would have to experience a bit of his
uncomfortable reality as they struggled with his language in order to empathize.
They would have to shift their perspective and enter his world to fully hear, see
and understand him as a human. In his own words (and way with words), Oluale
Kossula’s grief was raw and his “muted mournful” pauses (Hurston, 2018; p. 87)
and faraway looks reflect as much of a visceral pain as his unedited language,
Excuse me I cain help it I cry. I lonesome for my boy. Cudjo know
dey doan do in de Americky soil lak dey do cross de water, but I cain
help dat. My boy gone. He ain’ in de house and he ain’ on de hill wid
his mama. We both missee him. I doan know. Maybe dey kill my
boy. It a hidden mystery. So many de folks dey hate my boy ’cause
he lak his brothers. Dey doan let nobody ’buse dem lak dey dogs.
Maybe he in de Afficky soil lak somebody say. Po Cudjo lonesome
for him (Hurston, 2018; pp.87-88).
The language of Black America, asserts Deborah Plant (2018),
speaks to a certain history and that history is one of violence. That
history is one of deracination. That history is one of a power that
25
believes itself, superior and supreme, that has the right to repress
the tongue of others … To repress a person’s language is, in essence
an attempt to annihilate an individual … Is to erase them in so
many words … Is to deny their humanity.
Because Hurston insisted on keeping his expressive language, the reader is able
to see and hear Kossula in sound and sight, and his wish is granted; “I want to
look lak I in Affica, ‘cause dat where I want to be” (Hurston, 2018; p. 30).
Hurston essentially (re)humanizes Kossula, against the wishes of publishers who
were supported by (and loyal to) the whims of a white audience. In a 2015
interview, Toni Morrison, who was largely influenced by Zora Neale Hurston,
made the declaration,
I’m writing for black people … in the same way that Tolstoy was not
writing for me … I don’t have to apologise [sp] or consider myself
limited because I don’t [write about white people] – which is not
absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The
point is not have the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it
(Hoby 2015).
When Black women write for Black people, and use the language of Black people,
based on the history of Black women's leadership and participation in resistance
and liberation movements, a nuanced study of the literature must be undertaken
to explore the literary phenomenon of word coding. What messages might these
women be coding into the literature that we might miss or (mistranslate) by not
using our own perspectives and approaches?
In this contemporary manifestation of racial oppression and growing
tension, how can we unify and use these liberatory directives? My main research
question, “How do Black women code the word in the contemporary struggle for
liberation?” will explore the ways Black women inspire and undergird resistance
26
efforts leading to liberation using the very things that marginalize them to their
advantage; sound (voice) and sight (vision).
27
Statement of Problem
The inability to “see” from several angles is perhaps the one common
weakness in provincial scholarship.
(Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, 1998)
A problem exists whenever there is a gap between a present condition and
a better condition.
(Serie McDougall III, Research Methods in Africana Studies, 2017)
Though the practice of word coding remains an active part of Black
culture, centuries of colonial decentering have resulted in the dislocation of Black
people
28
(Asante 2003, 2007; Mazama, 2003) who, even when instinctively
coding it, are no longer decoding the word in the same way. For example, hair, for
Black women, is more than a covering or an adornment for the head. As Black
girls, we are taught early that our hair is our crowning glory, and admonished
against letting everyone play in it. There is an art to Black hair care, and it is
expensive. Black people, approximately 14% of the population, spend $54.4
million per year on hair and beauty products, representing 85.65% of the market
(Nielson 2018). From an Afrocentric perspective, hair as art, (and any art form,
for that matter) should have a function.
Maude Southwell Wahlman (1999) notes that, “Arts preserve cultural
traditions even when the social context of traditions changes, yet the codes are
neither simple nor easy to decipher. Sometimes forms endure while the meanings
28
See Asante. Molefi Kete. “African American Studies: The Future of the Discipline.” The Afrocentric
Paradigm. 2003, pp. 97-108: “Dislocation, location, and relocation are the principal calling cards of the
Afrocentric theoretical position” (p. 98).
28
once associated with them shift; in other instances, meanings persist and the
shapes evolve” (p. 8). Afro-Colombian women code the word by braiding
messages into their hair. One particular design, Departes, is an upbraided style
that enslaved African women wore when they were ready to depart (escape).
Other braided styles communicated social status, recreated maps and provided
hiding places for seeds, rice and gold to help the women and their traveling
companions along the way. DeNeen Brown (2001) reports that the practice
comes from pre-colonial and pre-enslavement West Africa.
In fact, hair braiding has much older African roots. Sonja Peterson-Lewis
(1993) notes, “Primary among cosmetic practices among West African peoples
was the enhancement of the hair. According to Mullen, hair care practices such as
braiding and ‘corn rowing’ are a part of the Egyptian pre-dynastic era” (p. 103).
Camille Yarbrough (1992) also provides evidence of hair braiding as an ancient
African practice,
Developing from the simplest of styles, hair braiding also became
an art form in Africa. Approximately five thousand years ago in the
Sahara, on the stone walls of the Tassili plateau, about 900 miles
southeast of Algiers, a stone age artist drew a picture of a woman
sitting and breastfeeding a child. The woman is wearing the braided
hairstyle that African Americans call “Cornrows,” a classic style for
the texture of African hair. Over a period of thousands of years the
simple braided hairstyles became more elaborate and symbolic of
social status (p. 90).
Today, Departes, cornrows and other braided styles are worn throughout the
African Diaspora, however the original intent is no longer practiced, and is
29
oftentimes, unknown.
29
The question of why we should continue the work of
healing ourselves and reclaiming our African and original culture is clear. Yet
questions and concerns remain; How do we make the unknown, known and the
forgotten, remembered when there is a “prevalence of relatively restrictive
interpretations of African American resistance”?
30
Exploring the literature could offer some insight, but default
methodologies are often limiting. Contemporary Black women writers create in
the same custom as the ancestors and have maintained ancestral connections.
Black women are uniquely visual in their forms of expression. In fact, Black
women’s identity is closely related to issues of visuality
31
(Brown, 2011; Clarke,
2001; Gates, 1990; Lorde, 1984). This element is “surprisingly” left unexamined
in the study of Black women’s literature (Clarke 2001).
Literature reflects both society and the common values within that society
(Albrecht 1956). Unfortunately, in the study of Black literature, the most common
research customs place Eurocentric values, practices, terms and literary elements
over Afrocentric principles (Asante, 1980, 1990, 2004, 2007; Mazama, 2003;
Morrison, 1993; Porterfield, 2013). This action creates a “transubstantive error”
in “racial/cultural reasoning.” Nobles (2006), as qtd in McDougal (2017), asserts:
29
See, Brown, DeNeen. “Afro-Colombian Women Braid Messages of Freedom into Hairstyles.”
Washington Post. (July 8, 2011).
30
See Fox (2017, p. 3).
31
The Encyclopedia of Identity defines visuality as the “intersection of text and image, or more precisely,
the relationship between the verbal and the visual within a social and ideological context” (Jackson, 2010).
30
[T]ransubstantive error occurs when a researcher uses the cultural
substance of one ethnic group to define, explain, and interpret the
cultural substance of another group (p. 16).
This is problematic because, as Michael Tillotson and Serie McDougal (2013)
assert, “Different racial or cultural groups have their own combination of needs
and concerns” (p. 106). As a group within a racial and cultural group with unique
needs, how do Black women naturally respond to multiple, intersecting and
ongoing oppressions? How do they manage to thrive in spaces meant to suppress
them? Contemporarily, how do they, in the custom of the ancestors, “speak”
when they are silenced?
Black liberation, asserts Ama Mazama (2003), “rests upon our ability to
systematically displace European ways of thinking, being, feeling, etc., and
consciously replace them with ways that are germane to our own African cultural
experience” (p. 5). Because there remains a failure to fully “see” Black women, by
extension, there remain unanswered questions and unexplored areas in Black
women’s literature that could prove be useful to liberation efforts. This is a
cyclical problem. Black women’s literature reflects a society that continues to be
deaf and blind to their concerns and communications, and society, even when
“reading” Black women, continues to ignore their messages.
31
Rationale
Attempts to understand African American orature have failed because they
misconstrue the nature and character of African American discourse,
written or spoken.
(Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, 2003)
A primary reason for pursuing this study is my primary responsibility, as
an Africologist, to present and discuss Black reality from an Afrocentric
perspective. Power is not always found in the literal voice, and by creatively
coding the word, Black women resist oppression and victoriously lead liberation
efforts using their marginalized status to an unlikely advantage.
32
Those centuries between when Djehuty (Lord of the Words of God/Lord of
Knowledge), Seshat (the Goddess of Writing) and Nebetseshau (Lady of
Writing)
33
co-created the written word, and when laws prohibiting reading and
writing by enslaved Black people were enacted,
34
included a period of brutality
and a practice of censorship that was so extreme, even literature written by free
Black people was banned.
35
The colonial practices were designed to break the
connection in communication and culture between Black people, and to create a
32
This may have been one of the reasons Harriet Tubman was able to move silently and invisibly (even
with a deep scar on her left cheek and her small, five feet two-inch frame). Tubman received the scar as a
child when an enslaver, in an attempt to punish an enslaved man, threw a heavy iron weight and hit
Tubman instead. She suffered from seizures, headaches and visions for the rest of her life as a direct result
of the severe injury.
33
See, Nehusi, Kimani. (2010) The System of Education in Kemet (Ancient Egypt): An Overview.
34
In 1740, shortly after the Stono Rebellion (beginning September 9, 1739), South Carolina passed the first
laws prohibiting the education of enslaved Black people. Other enslaver-states soon followed this model.
35
See, Walker, David. (1829) Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.
32
European-dominant world view.
36
What they did instead, was create a need for
agency-centric Black people to refine and implement instinctive, original African
ways of communicating.
Unfortunately, the lasting legacy of colonialism also reveals a
disconnection in cultural practices and purposes. If the current status and
struggles of Black people are indicators (especially with the ongoing, and
increasing acts of racism and oppression), it appears as if the liberatory function
of word coding is not being utilized as it was previously. This research aims to
provide tools and explanations that will facilitate a reconnection to the original
practices and functions of word coding, as a liberatory practice.
My secondary rationale for undergoing this study is centered on the
creation and testing of the theory of the Coded Word. This type of research has
not yet been undertaken using contemporary Black women's literature.
36
See, Asante, Molefi, Kete. The Afrocentric Idea, 1998. “The last five hundred years of world history
have been devastating for the acquisition of knowledge about other than European cultures” (p. 27).
33
CHAPTER 2: METHODS: BLACK WOMEN’S LITERATURE
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to
malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”
(Chimamanga Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” 2016)
My primary method of data analysis in this exploratory, qualitative study is
literary synthesis. Primary sources (in the form of novels) are:
1. Zora Neale Hurston – Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
I chose this novel because it is Hurston’s last published and least examined work
of fiction. It is unique from her other novels in that she centers the story around a
poor, white, Southern family of “Florida crackers”. I am curious to see how, or if,
she employs the Coded Word when writing white characters, and if so, in which
ways? Hurston is considered one of the greatest writers of our time. Her inclusion
in the literary canon is relatively new, therefore providing opportunities for
limitless academic study.
2. Toni Morrison – God Help the Child (2015)
I chose Morrison’s most recently published novel because it is centered on a
contemporary Black woman navigating extremely oppressive spaces.
Additionally, I chose this novel because, during an interview discussing the book,
Morrison again made the announcement, “I’m writing for Black people” (Hoby
2015). I am curious to see what culturally specific language, themes and/or
symbols she may use in this novel, and if they can be read and utilized as
(resistance and liberatory-aimed) Coded Word.
34
3. Toni Cade Bambara – Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999)
I chose this novel because it is Bambara’s last published novel, called her
masterpiece by Toni Morrison, who is credited with being Bambara's literary
godmother and, who also edited the novel. I am curious to see how Bambara’s
protagonist navigates a society (pre Black Lives Matter) that is indifferent to the
lives of Black children and the Black families who are affected by their
kidnappings and murders. I am also interesting in investigating the ways the
community unifies and organizes in an attempt to save itself.
I chose this group of writers as my method of data collection because of their
literary, thematic connections and because of the history of Black women’s
involvement in resistance movements in America. In addition, the narrators and
protagonists of the three novels represent the feminine voices of resistance. Using
an inductive approach, this study explores the novels and incorporates secondary
sources in the analysis, including scholarly articles, studies, short stories, poems
and interviews.
35
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY: THE CODED WORD
In scientific research, several epistemological tools such as concepts,
theories, and paradigms moderate the relationship between the knowing
subject and its object. For oppressed people and their descendants, it is
important that the intellectual tools guiding the relationship between them
and who or what they study is culturally relevant and emancipatory.
(Serie McDougal, Research Methods in Africana Studies, 2017)
The ultimate objective of Afrocentricity is African development.
(Danjuma Sinue Modupe, 2003)
There can be as many Afrocentric theories as scholars seek to create.
(Molefi Kete Asante, African Pyramids of Knowledge, 2015)
I developed an Afrocentric literary theory, the Coded Word as a way to approach
and interpret Black women’s literature as a form of resistance. The theory of the
Coded Word asserts that Black women’s literature can be used in the same way as
Black women’s quilts or songs during enslavement; to share liberatory messages.
As one of the theories located within the Afrocentric paradigm, the Coded Word
proposes a shift in the explication of Black women’s literature, especially for
authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, whose
works include those written specifically for and about Black people. The theory of
the Coded Word places the foundation (and translation) of literary symbols and
sounds in Africa, focusing on ancient Kemet as its source because of the vast
amount of information on history and cultural practices that has survived
36
throughout the millennia, and has supported the existence of an original Black
civilization, from which all other civilizations spring.
37
Molefi Kete Asante (2009) defines the Afrocentric paradigm as,
A revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural
adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of
agency. The Afrocentrist asks the question, “What would African
people do if there were no white people?” In other words, what
natural responses would occur in the relationships, attitudes toward
the environment, kinship patterns, preferences for colors, type of
religion, and historical referent points for African people if there
had not been any intervention of colonialism or enslavement?
Afrocentricity answers this question by asserting the central role of
the African subject within the context of African history, thereby
removing Europe from the center of the African reality. In this way,
Afrocentricity becomes a revolutionary idea because it studies
ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic
processes from a standpoint of black people as subjects and not as
objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of
location (Asante, 2009).
Additionally, Asante (as quoted in Reviere, 2006) provides Afrocentric principles
for researchers, including the directives that they must,
(a) hold themselves responsible for uncovering hidden, subtle,
racist theories that may be embedded in current methodologies; (b)
work to legitimize the centrality of their own ideals and values as a
valid frame of reference for acquiring and examining data; and (c)
maintain inquiry rooted in a strict interpretation of place (p. 263).
Further, Asante (1999) defines “the basic tenants or characteristics of the
Afrocentric idea” as,
an intense interest in psychological location as determined by
symbols, motif, rituals, and signs,
37
See Diop, Cheikh Anta (1989), The African Origin of Civilization: Myth Or Reality.
37
a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any
social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with
implications for questions of sex, gender, and class,
a defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the
context of art, music, and literature and a defense of a pan-
African cultural connection based on broad responses to
conditions, environments, and situations over time,
a celebration of "centeredness " and agency and a commitment
to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives, including
sexual and gender pejoratives, about Africans or other people,
and
a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the
collective text of African people as one in constant and
consistent search for liberation and Maat (p. 4).
The Theory of the Coded Word
“There’s a secret language shared among black girls who are destined to climb
mountains and cross rivers in a world that tells us to belong to the valleys that
surround us. You learn it very young, and although it has no words, you hear it
clearly. You sense it when you walk into rooms with your hair in full bloom, each
coil glorious, your sway swift and your stance proud. You feel it like a rhythm you
can’t shake if you even dared to quiet the sounds around you."
(Solange Knowles, 2016).
The Coded Word is a closed form of cultural communication between
Black people that relies on instinctive cultural expressions that are signs of
African retentions (also known as Africanisms and African cultural carryovers).
38
Though both Black men and women practice word coding, Black women are
unique in their coding because they create forms of communication that are both
38
Joseph E. Holloway (1990) defines Africanisms as “those elements of culture found in the New World
that are traceable to an African origin” (p. ix). West Africanisms are more specific to a region and refer to
the elements that can be traced to West African origin (Nicholas 2015).
38
characteristically Black and distinctively feminine, which allows for shared
cultural communication, and uses the Black woman’s marginalized (invisible and
muted) status as an advantage and a way to share the Coded Word.
E. Franklin Frazier asserts that Black people in America were disconnected
from their African heritage during enslavement.
39
According to Holloway (1990),
“In short, Frazier argued that [enslavement] was so devastating in America that it
destroyed all African elements among black Americans” (p. ix). Holloway notes
however, that Frazier is “incorrect in arguing that North American [enslaved
Black people] suffered a complete loss of African culture” (p. x.). In addition,
though both Holloway and Melville Herskovitz agree with, and underscore the
idea of continuity and carryover of African culture in contemporary Black culture,
Herskovitz too, seems to be limited in his scope,
[A]s more historical and ethnographic data on the African cultural
background became available, the limitation of the Herskovitz
model became evident. Although Herskovitz spoke of Africanisms
in the United States in a global sense, he looked for evidence to
prove his theory almost exclusively in the Caribbean and South
America (Holloway, 1990; p. x).
African Retentions in the Coded Word
Pass it. Pass it along, Pass me. Pass me along.
(Edwidge Danticat, Breath Eyes Memory, 1994)
These African ancestors, no longer in the earthly world … passed along their
songs, sayings, basket-weaving techniques, and aesthetic learnings to their
descendants.
(Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture, 1990)
39
Frazier uses the term “lost” (Holloway; 1990; p, ix).
39
There is a new breed of women story-tellers today. They are powerful and
energetic women and the messages of their stories come to us in the printed
form. These women writers, like those who could not write … tell a story about
the world they live in. The one that denies women a complete voice in spite of
women’s contribution to the building of the societies in which they live.
(Valentine Udoh James, “The Keys to the Contribution of
Black Women Writers: A Synopsis,” 2000)
In a practice similar to steganography, with its principle of displayed, yet
covert communication, Black women, who have often been rendered mute and
invisible by a patriarchal and sexist society, have the ability to code the word in
plain view. A myth persists in Eurocentric scholarship, that steganography is of
Greek origin (Al-Shatnawi, 2012; Dunbar, 2002; Johnson & Jahoda, 1998; Kahn,
1996; Rakesh & Kuppusamy, 2018; Trithemius, 1499). David Kahn (1996) makes
an interesting point when he asserts, “The root metaphor -- as some philosophers
would say -- of steganography is a hiding place. Messages can be communicated
not only through space but also through time. For example, turtles will bury eggs
-- that's kind of a secret message through time. People will bury treasure” (p. 1).
Kahn however, like many other Eurocentric scholars, is a bit off the mark when
he goes only as “far back in history” to Herodotus, who he hails as “the father of
history” (p. 1). He does not travel back far enough. First, as Asante (2007) notes,
“Egypt was anterior to Greece in human knowledge [and] deeply influenced
[Greek] science, astronomy, geometry, literature, medicine, mathematics,
religion, politics, law, music, and philosophy” (pp. 146-147). Second, the Greek
40
historian, Herodotus, born in around 484 BC, was a student of the ancient
teachers (priests) of Kemet. Asante (2007) notes,
While the first contact between the Egyptians and Greeks came
when the Greeks studied and traveled in Egypt, it would be the age
of European imperialism that would seek to change the relationship
of Greece to Egypt as a hierarchical one with Greece occupying the
central place … Under the radical criticism of Afrocentricity the
Greek miracle has been shown to be non-existent inasmuch as the
Greek achievements had to be seen as parts of the African project
along the banks of the Nile. Egypt rises around 3400 B.C. and
Greece around 1000 B.C. Not only was Egypt prior to Greece in
chronology it was the teacher of the earliest Greek philosophers”
(Asante, 2002: pp. 3-4).
Third, Herodotus possesses “a likely Eurocentric bias … A necessary question that
accompanies the use of Herodotus’ work is therefore whether he could view
Kemet on Kemet’s own terms, or only through the distorting eye of Europe”
(Nehusi, 2016; p. xxv). Herodotus also has recognized inconsistencies in his
writing. Timothy Joseph (2015) notes,
Herodotus often refers to his own visit to Egypt –- but even more
often he gets things wrong. Of the famous pyramids of Giza he
writes, with bravado, “I myself measured them!” The image of the
historian, measuring stick in hand, scaling the pyramids is one that
grabs the reader, but much of what he writes about the pyramids’
appearance and construction does not hold up. The inconsistencies
in this and other passages have led scholars to question whether
Herodotus went to Egypt at all.
Notwithstanding, Herodotus offers some value to Africological study. Molefi Kete
Asante (1990) asserts, “Herodotus was the most comprehensive of the early
European recorders of the customs, traditions, and civilization of North Africa …
[significantly] Herodotus considered Africa as the land of the blacks” (p. 121).
41
Steganography has its foundations in ancient Kemet. Even scholars who
are not Afrocentric acknowledge the African origin of the practice (Davern &
Scott, 1995; Desoky, 2016; Kipper, 2004; Singh, 2000). Abdelrahman Desoky
(2016) notes,
The ancient Egyptians communicated covertly using the
hieroglyphic language, a series of symbols representing a message.
The message simply looks as if it is a drawing, although it may
contain a hidden message. Hieroglyphs contained hidden
information that only a legitimate person who knew what to look
for could detect. After [emphasis added] the Egyptians, the Greeks
used “hidden writing,” which is the derivative of steganography”
(pp. 1).
The Coded Word expands on the practice of steganography by incorporating
more than written symbols to code messages. As an Afrocentric theory, the
function of this methodology is to, “separate our thought from European thought,
so as to visualize a future that is not dominated by Europe” (Ani, 1994). Kalamu
ya Salaam (2008), in his interview with Toni Cade Bambara notes,
Peter Nazareth, an Ugandan of East Indian ancestry, in an essay
entitled “Afterword: Toward Third World Literature,” wrote, “In
order to survive, Black people in the United States had to use every
resource at their disposal, preserving their African folk traditions
underground and having to ‘mask’ their intentions, having to use
the language in a way ‘The Man’ would not understand.” Toni
believes that this language that Nazareth describes is the African
American mother tongue. However, the problem is how to
transform what is predominantly an oral language into a written
language. This has been a major, although often unacknowledged,
preoccupation of nationalist oriented, African American writers (p.
66).
Though there are differences in “complexities, experiences, struggles, and
circumstances” among Black women writers throughout the Diaspora, there are
also some “striking similarities [that] connect these writers” (Udoh, 2000; p. 3).
42
Biman Basu (1996) notes these similarities in what she terms a “centrality of
conflict” in Black literature; a “dialogics of difference/dialectics of identity,
simultaneity of oppression/discourse, immersion and ascent, roots and routes,
anchorage and voyage, etc.;” a conflict she asserts, which is present in “practically
all African-American writing” (p. 88).
In Black women’s fiction in particular, Basu argues that there is both an
ability to “manipulate” the point of view of the reader, and the presence of a
significant and observable “continuum” (p. 89). These Africanisms are passed
down (or “passed along”) often on an unconscious level, meaning they have not
been taught, yet they are practiced. For example, Africanisms are shown in
popular hair braiding styles, and can be found in the continued practice of
libation with the contemporary custom of pouring out a drink in honor of
departed loved ones. Africanisms are also found in the current Los Angeles,
California Krump dancing with its early West African roots.
40
Numerous scholars have researched Africanisms, including Carter G.
Woodson, who included “technical skill, arts, folklore, spirituality, attitudes
toward authority, a tradition of generosity – and called attention to African
influences in religion, music, dance, drama, poetry, and oratory;” W.E.B. Du Bois,
(1939) who produced comparable results in Black Folk. Then and Now; Guy
Johnson, who produced the first examination of African retentions that used oral
history as a methodology; Lorenzo Dow Turner, who documented Africanisms in
40
See Laura Sinagra (2005; p. 34).
43
Black speech, and was “the first investigator to draw a direct link between Africa
and America by examining linguistic retentions;” Norman Whitten; John Szwed;
Sidney M. Mintz; Richard Price; Lawrence W. Levine; John W. Blassingame;
Winifred Vass; Robert Farris Thompson; Roger Abrahams; Charles Joyner;
Sterling Stuckey; Margaret Washington Creel; and Molefi Kete Asante (Holloway,
1990; pp. xi-xxiv),
According to Asante, African-Americans have retained a linguistic
facet of their Africanness, and this African style generally persists
even as Anglicization occurs. For example, almost every language
spoken in Africa south of the Sahara is tonal, using pitch distinction
to differentiate words in much of the same way the European
languages use stress (Holloway, 1990; p. xiv).
The question remains not of the existence of African retentions, but of how to
recover and reconnect to the knowledge of and liberatory use of these retentions.
The theory of the Coded Word attempts to interrogate the possibility.
Tenets of the Coded Word
The Coded Word is characteristically Black. Toni Morrison (1989)
questions, “What makes a work ‘black’? The most valuable point of entry into the
question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language -
its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive,
masked and unmasking language” (p. 136).
Sherry Brennon (2003) also examines the “Black sound” which she
describes as a form of non-linguistic expression distinguished by sound and
rhythm that is present in Black music and literature. In her analysis of Amiri
44
Baraka’s poem “Black Art,” Brennon questions; “What sound does a body make
of language? How is a black sound made? Can English make a black sound?” (p.
299). Brennon analyzes the “revolutionary” sound in Baraka’s poem and in Black
sound in general, defining it as “a social body … an active body, a living justice, or
the sound of justice carried under and through the language, which animates that
language and speaks it as black as a black sound, as a black social body" (p. 299).
Brennon uses the sound of water as a metaphor of Black sound, asserting:
Water flows and laps and pools, and in the flowing it makes a
sound--the sound of water. The sound--. Music. The sound of music
is without language or the sense of language, yet it is not without
sense. In this way, there is also a form of language that is without
linguistic sense--a form of language without sense that is not
nonsense and thus carries sense--the sense of music, or the sound
of water or of the songs of birds or the wind in tree tops. Or the
sense of the sound of traffic, of the duration and staccato of human
voices in the street, of the sound of hammering or of heavy
machines (p. 299).
The Black sound, according to Brennon, is created as a response to phenomena,
just as the sound of water is created in response to contact with the shore, or with
itself. The Black sound, I argue, predates the struggle or the phenomena that
Brennon discusses. However, it can be refined (or re-tuned) as a response to
oppression.
The Coded Word is uniquely feminine. The feminine sound is
primarily visual because visuality is a part of women’s identity. Women
characteristically make you “see” phenomena. This could be due to the fact that
women are often silenced. As the unfortunate recipients of the bitter fruits of
both patriarchy and racism, Black women “everywhere experience problems set
45
forth by patriarchal societies” (James, 2000; p. 4), and at multiple intersections.
Scholars across the disciplines and within various paradigms and centers note the
marginal focus on, and silencing of, Black women.
Diann Jordan (2006) argues that “for too long, the lives of Black women
scientists have been virtually invisible and often neglected in the larger American
society and even in their own culture (p. x). She considers the “continuing
struggle to become visible in a white, male-dominated world" (p. 1). Robin
Wilson (2007) notes that there are very few Black women working within the
field of Philosophy, considered to be the oldest discipline of the academy, and an
overwhelmingly male and white field. The few Black women that are in the
discipline, asserts Wilson, “go against the grain” by attempting to incorporate
investigations of race into their practice (p. 3). In Psychology, Carr, Szymanski, et
al. (2013) assert that Black women “frequently deal with multiple intersecting
sources of oppression including sexual objectification, racist events, and
gendered racism” (p. 233). Dawn M. Szymanski and D. Stewart (2010) argue that
Black women throughout the Diaspora, “often deal with at least two sources of
oppression … based on race/ethnicity and gender” (p. 226).
Deborah King (1988) shares the strength and determination of Black
women, noting that the “systematic discriminations of racism and sexism remain
pervasive, and, for many, class inequality compounds those oppressions. Yet, for
as long as black women have known our numerous discriminations, we have also
resisted those" (p. 43). Two decades later, Black women continue to resist
oppression, and work to create a just society, in spite of the many hurdles. For
46
example, in recent politics, Black women became “firsts”
41
on local, state,
national and federal levels.
Though not a resistance theory, the Coded Word is employed
by Black women as an act of resistance to oppression. The aim of the
Coded Word is the liberation of Black people (physically, mentally and
spiritually). In this way, the Coded Word focuses not on the oppression, but
provides tools to resist the oppression. Afrocentric scholars, including Na’im
Akbar, Linda James Myers, Norman Harris and Molefi Kete Asante, all agree that
the “essence of life, and therefore human beings, is spiritual” (Mazama 2003),
therefore this must be an element of the aim of the Coded Word.
The Coded Word is an evolving and shifting form of
communication. Diverse patterns and colors were used to communicate
different messages according to the Quilt Code theory. As well, evolving versions
of Black coded talk regularly become part of the language of the larger society,
which creates the need for further coding as Black talk becomes common
knowledge.
42
In that same tradition, various literature written by Black women
can be used to communicate messages, specifically those of resistance and
41
Though there are “firsts” in recent history, Black women have held positions of power throughout
African history. I argue that Black women (and Black people as a whole) are still on the journey to recover
what was lost. In essence, we are catching up to our ancient selves. For example, as Asante (2007) notes,
“If one looks at the African rulers of antiquity, it is difficult to find any society where women have not held
high positions. For example, the queens who ruled in Kemet, Punt, and Nubia (and there were more than
forty who ruled in Nubia) represent the earliest known examples of women ruling nations” (p. 48).
42
Neologisms, new words or new uses of existing words, often stem from the Black community, and are
regularly added to the dictionary. For example, both Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries recently
added a commonly used term in the Black community, “woke” (as in “stay woke”). Oxford defines it as,
“alert to injustice in society, especially racism” (2019).
47
liberation. The theory of the Coded Word uses perceivable (auditory or visual) yet
inexplicable (for some) elements. In this way, it is connected to the early concept
of word power, and, just as was the practice of hieroglyphic coding in ancient
Kemet, the recipient of the message must know what to look (or listen) for,
otherwise it is just art (Desoky 2016), which does not exist on its own in African
culture, as art also has function.
The Coded Word is created by Black people and is primarily for the use of
Black people, though others may see, hear or even attempt to appropriate it. The
uniqueness of the Coded Word is its focus on freedom.
43
The Coded Word examines two specific characteristics in a
literary text, sound and sight.
Sound
This analyzes the types of sounds presented in the literature that could possibly
be identified (or used) as Coded Word. This includes tone or tone of voice
44
as
well as forms and styles of music. The exploration of sound also includes nature
sounds. For example, it examines how the characters in the literature respond to,
or communicate with nature. This is based on the resistance and liberatory
practices of American maroons. For example, Sylvaine Diouf (2014) writes of
Louis, a man from Guinea and a member of an Alabama maroon community who
43
Norman Harris (2003) defines freedom as “the ability to conceptualize the world in ways continuous with
one’s history. Literacy is the application of historical knowledge as the confluence between personality and
situation dictates.” He further asserts, “Freedom is an idealized conception derived from historical
knowledge” (p. 112).
44
Mari Evans (1970), Sherley Anne Williams (1990) and Toni Morrison (1997) all utilize the power of
tone, specifically the “hum," in various genres (poem, short story and novel).
48
speaks “the forest’s language,” and asserts “can’t nobody come along without de
birds telling me. Dey pays no min’ to a horse or a dog, but when dey spies a man
dey speaks” (Diouf 102).
49
Sight
This analyzes the types of non-verbal, visual cues and symbols presented in the
literature, and examines how the writers, characters and/or narrators use the
voice visually. I define using the voice visually as using statements that “show;"
for example, “This is how…” statements. In Jamaica Kincaids's “Girl” (1978), the
mother uses the voice visually to teach her daughter how to become a “proper”
woman by repeating these types of statements throughout the writing. Kincaid
incorporates implied “this is how” statements like, “always eat your food in such
a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach [and] on Sundays try to walk
like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” (p, 320) [emphasis
mine]. These statements indicate that the daughter has seen (or is seeing) the
proper ways to eat and walk. Kincaid also includes direct “this is how”
statements, which show the mother teaching the daughter by showing her,
This is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button–hole
for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress
when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from
looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is
how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a
crease; this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they
don't have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house,
because okra tree harbors red ants … this is how you sweep a
corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep
a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much;
this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how
you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a
table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you
set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a
table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how
to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and
this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned
you against becoming … this is how to make a bread pudding; this is
how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how
50
to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good
medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this
is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don't like,
and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a
man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if
this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't
feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you
feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on
you; this is how to make ends meet” (Kincaid, 2003; pp. 320-321).
Deborah Clarke (2001) asserts that, what we see expands or amplifies
what we know. She argues that the visual can be reclaimed “as a means of
black expression and black power” (p. 600).
The theory of the Coded Word attempts to reclaim expressions of Black
sound and sight as tools of Black power. In essence the theory attempts to align
with the components of Afrocentric Theory, acknowledging that within the
Afrocentric paradigm, theories are consistently expanding.
Seven Components of Afrocentric Theory
Danjuma Modupe (2003) asserts that there are seven components of
Afrocentric theory, including,
1. The Afrocentric Objective: (African development), which incorporates
the Communal Cognitive Will; “the continuous spiritual and intellectual
thrust toward psychic and cultural liberation” (p. 56).
45
45
Molefi Kete Asante, cited in Modupe (2003), defines the communal cognitive will as the, “overwhelming
power of group of people thinking in the same direction. It is not unity in the traditional sense of a group of
people coming together to achieve a single purpose, it is a full spiritual and intellectual commitment to a
vision which constitutes the cognitive imperative” (p. 53).
51
2. The Consciousness Matrix: The “binding substance for liberation” out
of which “originates, develops,” and is “contained” a conceptualization of
consciousness for cultural reclamation” (p. 57). This matrix
“motivates the person of African descent by making clear the need for
psychic liberation and African cultural reclamation” and “allows for the
ultimate expression of a victorious consciousness” (p. 57).
3. The Formal Academic Framework: This component is “generated
and informed by the knowledge, experience, history, and culture of people
of African descent,” and has three basic “pyramidal elements (grounding,
orientation, and perspective)” all of equal importance, working together to
inspire an Afrocentric “rise to consciousness” (pp. 62-63, 71).
4. The Condition Complex: Modupe refers to this as
Cause/Effect/Alleviation. This component “promotes an African holism”
by focusing on the cause, effect and alleviation of a problem or condition
(p. 64)
5. Theoretical Constructs: These are defined as “accumulations of
knowledge and understanding resulting from the effective engagement of
the Afrocentric framework with a problematic African condition” (p. 64)
Within those constructs includes conceptualizations of agency, (Black
people as subjects), centeredness, (knowledge and understanding of,
and connection to African historical origins), and situatedness,
(intellectual and psychic space; “a place to stand”) (p. 65).
52
6. The Structural Gluon: Defined as “the material and non-material
reality in which Afrocentric theory exists [and is] governed by Afrocentric
epistemological, axiological, and ontological/cosmological principles” (p.
68). The language environment of the structural gluon exists as Black
language; “Ebonics, African American Standard Ebonics and Afrocentric
Standard Ebonics” (p. 69).
7. Victorious Consciousness: Defined as “an attitude based upon the
understanding of the relationship between African history, derived of
African culture, and African consciousness, which is in turn governed by
the Afrocentric’s understanding of the subjective and objective nature of
reality” (p. 71).
Though the Coded Word examines how Black women resist oppression, it is not a
theory of resistance
46
, though it can act as a “rhetoric of resistance” (Asante
1998). Resistance theory is grounded in “Marxism,
47
poststructuralism,
postmodernism,
48
and feminism
49
(Ainsworth, 2013; Giroux, 1983; Hargreaves,
46
See Modupe (2003): “As a theory of development, as opposed to a theory of unity or a theory of
resistance to oppression, Afrocentricity postulates a two-pronged conceptualization of liberation: and the
conceptualization of liberation itself is grounded by the African American conceptualization of freedom. In
such a development as opposed to resistance theory, psychic liberation would necessarily comprise, first
and foremost, the freedom to develop” (p. 58).
47
“Marxism’s Eurocentric foundation makes it antagonistic to our world view; its confrontational nature
does not provide the spiritual satisfaction we have found in our history or harmony” (Asante, 1998; p. 8)
48
A conflict “frequently exists between the postmodernist and the Afrocentrist … Afrocentricity cannot
abandon the structuralism of modernism without betraying the achievements of culture” (Asante 1998; p.
9).
49
Feminism, like Marxism, asserts Asante (1998), is “not helpful in developing Afrocentric concepts and
methods because it, too is a product of a Eurocentric consciousness that excludes the historical and cultural
perspectives of Africa” (p. 5).
53
1982; Sleman, 1990), all Eurocentric enterprises. In addition, where resistance
theory focuses on acts of resistance against oppressive political or religious
systems or institutions, the theory of the Coded Word is used to examine a form
of resistance that communicates liberatory messages not to, or for the systems or
institutions, but to and for other Black people. Black women code the word in
resistance to the racist demand to exist within limited and oppressive spaces.
Resistance is an element of the Coded Word because Black people have not
yet achieved the “freedom from” (oppression, racism, attacks, etc.) in order to
have the “freedom to” develop, psychically and culturally (Modupe 2003; pp. 57-
58). Molefi Kete Asante (1998) notes, “I am aware of the varieties of oppression
in our contemporary situation, and, like other Afrocentrists, I believe that it is
necessary to confront all forms of discrimination, persecution and oppression
simultaneously (p. 9). The Coded Word focuses on the freedom to develop, not
the “freedom to resist oppression” (Modupe 2003, p. 58) because as an agency-
centric theory, it is inspired by a victorious consciousness.
54
Limitations
My research focuses on a specific population, and is limited in its scope by not
including Black men, who also may create and code the word. In addition, while
there are countless literary works by Black women throughout the Diaspora, in
order to provide a close reading I have selected three primary texts only, and
limited secondary texts for this study. Further, this qualitative project is limited
in methods because it does not include a quantitative element.
55
CHAPTER 4: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Black women, the Coded Word, resistance, and liberation, are inextricably
connected. Resistance is a natural response when anything (or anyone) is faced
with, or forced to exist in, an unnatural state. Though acceptance of unnatural
states can and does occur (as in cases of apathy and nihilism), the instinct for
most beings leans toward self-preservation and liberation. Within the Afrocentric
paradigm, resistance is not enough. The ultimate aim of Africological
50
study,
theory and praxis, should be Black liberation.
51
How do Black women resist the
unnatural states produced by patriarchy and racism? How do they succeed in
their liberatory efforts? In acts of resistance to multiple and intersecting
oppressions, and with the collective aim of liberation, Black women code the
word by creating and employing unique forms of expression that are both
characteristically Black and uniquely feminine.
Resistance is most often categorized as a masculine trait. In her
examination of “the liberal problematic,"
52
Reis M. Fox (2017) reimagines Black
women’s resistance through seemingly passive forms that are considered more
“bourgeois or accomodationist …elitist, inauthentic or otherwise
50
Molefi Kete Asante (2003), defines Africology as “the Afrocentric study of phenomena, events, ideas,
and personalities related to Africa” (in Mazama, 2003; p. 24).
51
See, Mazama, Ama (2003), “From an Afrocentric perspective, where knowledge can never be produced
for the sake of it, but always for the sake of our liberation, a paradigm must activate our consciousness to
be of any use to us” (p. 8).
52
See, Fox, Regis M. (2017), Fox defines “the liberal problematic” as Black writers’ “critical engagement
with the fundamental disjunction between democratic promise and dispossession in the American nation-
state” (p. 1).
56
inconsequential” (pp. 1, 3). Fox argues that Black women who do not follow
predefined forms of resistance, are often overlooked, “minimized,” and accused
of following the path of “indifference or elitism, passivity or acquiescence, vis-á-
vis existing regimes of power" (p. 2). Fox asserts,
A strictly gendered and classed construct, ‘resistance’ pivoted upon
radicalized connotations of representativeness and narrowly
quantifiable standards of credibility. Yet … meaningful Black refusal
can be imbricated in contexts of combat and insurrection as
intricate matrices of hierarchy, submission, and theory” (p. 3).
Most people speak multiple languages. They have ways of speaking in private
(usually between family and friends), that are different than those used in mixed
company. There are also regional differences in speech. Code-switching, the
practice of moving between two or more languages (or forms of languages), is
most commonly noted as a practice employed by people who do not fit into the
defined Western standard.
People of diverse colors and cultures engage in code-switching in an
attempt to assimilate into a hegemonic culture by mimicking the language of the
dominant group. This is a one-sided form of Communication Accommodation
Theory (CAT), where participants (or groups of participants) recognize
differences (in social class, education levels, cultures, etc.) and adjust their
communication styles to lessen those differences. In this case, only one group
adjusts. Code-switching, as practiced by marginalized groups, has additional
aims not found in CAT. This type of expression is most often applied in an
attempt to provide a sense of familiarity, avoid a xenophobic response and/or
curry favor from the dominant group. Koch, et al. (2001) assert,
57
Language is one cue that seems to provide a basis for interpersonal
judgements … Thus, in the absence of other information, another
person’s speech patterns may be used as data in evaluating the
similarity or dissimilarity of his or her attitudes with one’s own. If a
person is speaking the language of the positively viewed in-group,
then the person will likely be viewed as possessing positive
attributes (pp. 30).
Black women, the most marginalized group in society, commonly practice
a form of code-switching described by Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-
Gooden (2004) as “shifting,”
African American women change the way they think of things or
expectations they have for themselves. Or they alter their outer
appearance. They modify their speech. They shift in one direction at
work each morning, then in another at home each night. They
adjust the way they act in one context after another. They try to
cover up their intelligence with one group of friends and do
everything possible to prove it to another (pp. 62).
Language is defined as a form or system of communication which includes
spoken, written, and nonverbal expression. Scholars agree that Black people
characteristically modify and recreate language in all of these forms. Zora Neale
Hurston (1934) notes that Black people have “done wonders to the English
language” (p. 831). Molefi Kete Asante (1998) notes the “genius of the Africans
who created [a] unique linguistic response to their environment,”
Yoruba, Asante, Ibo, Hausa, Mandingo, Serere, and Wolof had to
combine elements of their language in order to communicate with
each other and their oppressors. Ebonics was a creative enterprise,
born out of the materials of interrelationships and energies of the
African ancestral past (p. 69).
Asante further asserts,
With an African heritage steeped in orature and the acceptance of
transforming vocal communication, the African American
developed a consummate skill in using language to produce
58
communication patterns alternative to those employed in the Euro-
American situation (p. 97).
In addition, though the existence of a distinct Black language is finally
acknowledged in academia, its use is still considered a problem. Geneva
Smitherman (2017) asserts,
Despite the racial upheaval of the ‘60’s, American educational
institutions are, unfortunately, continuing their role as passive
reflectors of a racist society … Suddenly after more than three
centuries on this continent, the educational and societal consensus
is that Blacks have a ‘language problem.’ Yet viewed from another
perspective, the current controversy about Black speech is not
sudden or new. For one observation of Blacks about white America
is a fixed constant: The Man don’t never change … Nonetheless,
present reality must not be obscured by historical fact. There is a
Black Idiom; it bees that way (p. 499).
It is a dogged practice for oppressive systems to dismiss, demonize and/or reduce
all things African, including Black language and forms of expression. Ama
Mazama (2003) asserts,
“Animality and puerility are the two major metaphors around which
the reductive discourse on the colonized is organized. Conversely,
the colonizer, who is supposed to have reached a higher level in the
evolutionary ladder, is made to symbolize the perfection that
maturity and wisdom bring” (p. 4).
Martin Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (1997) use terms like “savage and barbarism,”
“radical,” “extreme,” “controversial” and “segregated … regional ghettos” when
writing about Africa, Afrocentricity, the African origins of civilization and cultural
studies (p. 105, 106, 110, 111), but when writing of Georg Hegel, they use rhetoric
like “philosophical respectability” and “tremendously influential” (p. 106, 107),
and praise the racist Hegel, whose flawed notion of the movement of civilization
59
completely ignores Africa, the first civilization (p. 106). Lewis and Wigen also
accuse Africa of being “bereft of history” (p. 109) when, in fact, the oldest
literature in the world is found in the Nile Valley and is at least 5,000 years old.
53
Ralph Ellison (1953) notes this phenomenon in the common (and
continued) Eurocentric rhetoric regarding Black people,
Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of
segregation is that of the word. And by this I mean the word and all
its complex formulations … The word has the potency to revive and
make us free, it has the power to blind, imprison and destroy ... The
essence of the word is its ambivalence, and in fiction it is never so
effective and revealing as when it mirrors both good and bad, as
when it blows both hot and cold in the same breath. Thus it is
unfortunate for the Negro that the most powerful formulations of
modern American fictional words have been slanted against him;
that when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an
image drained of humanity (81).
Black men and women, though complementary, are unique from each other.
Clenora Hudson-Weems (2001) argues that even though they are explicitly
connected, Black women are neither the opposite of, nor the exact same as Black
men, and can be considered the “flip side” of the same coin. According to
Hudson-Weems, the Black woman is “the co-partner in the struggle for her
people, one who, unlike the white woman, has received no special privileges in
American society” (p. 157).
Houston (2000), Hecht, Ribeau and Alberts (1989), Collins (2000), Davis
(1981), and hooks (1981; 1984) all assert that Black women’s experiences are
53
See Nehusi, Kimani. (2001). “From Medew Netjer to Ebonics.” Ebonics and Language Education of
African Ancestry Students (p. 10-11).
60
incomparable with (and have provided them with unique perspectives from)
white women and other women of color. Marsha Houston (2000) asserts,
Black women experience womanhood in the context of blackness;
they do not experience their gender and ethnic identities as
separate ‘parts’ of who they are (Collins, 1990; Davis, 1981; hooks,
1981; 1984) … black women’s experiences of womanhood may
overlap with those of both white women and other women of color,
but will also differ from them in important ways; and their
experience of blackness may overlap with those of African American
men, but will significantly differ from them as well” (p. 11).
These scholars all agree that although Black men and Black women (and Black
women and women of color) may see some of the same things and speak some of
the same tongues, they often see and therefore, express the phenomena in
different ways. The Ubang of Nigeria provide an example of the different
communication styles used by men and women. It is interesting that the first
language learned is the language of the mother, the mother-tongue, which sets
the foundation for future communication. Though the men begin speaking the
men's language after a certain age, they retain the ability to understand the
women’s language. Such a practice is conducive to the translation of Black
women's word coding.
54
James (2000) notes that although there are differences in “complexities,
experiences, struggles, and circumstances” among Black women writers
throughout the Diaspora, there are also some “striking similarities [that] connect
54
See “Ubang: Community Where Men and Women Speak Different Languages.” Africa News Service.
November 11, 2003 - The Ubang women speak a different language than the Ubang men. Though all of
them speak and understand the mother tongue, the boys must learn and speak the masculine language after
a certain age in order to be considered men.
61
these writers” (p. 3). Holloway (1992) emphasizes the importance of research
focused on this phenomenon,
There is, however, a compelling historical reason to explore the
potential for commonalities among these writers. The cultural
history that links black writers in America also calls for an
acknowledgment of the West African sources of that history. It is
this perspective that allows for an exploration of the intertextual,
shared images and patterns among writers with a common cultural
history to emerge in the midst of the acknowledged differences
between them. The result is an activity that explores how particular
manipulations of words and specific ways of arranging meaning can
call attention to gender in culture (pp. 20-21).
In addition, to the ability manipulate words and shift perspectives, Audre Lorde
(1984) notes that Black women also possess the perseverance needed to continue
liberation efforts,
Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if
unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand
always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been
rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even
within the women's movement, we have had to fight, and still do,
for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our
Blackness … And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is
that which also is the source of our greatest strength (p. 42).
The literature of Black women incorporates both modified voice (sound,
characteristic of Black expression) and vision (sight, characteristic of women’s
expression). When these two elements are coded into the literature they
demonstrate the ability of Black women to lead and liberate.
62
CHAPTER 5: THE AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS
Zora Neale Hurston – Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)
The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.
(Zora Neale Hurston)
Literary foremother and influential cultural icon, Zora Neale Hurston was an
author, activist, essayist, folklorist, anthropologist, ethnographer, playwright and
journalist. A central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston published four
novels, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937),
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); her
seminal autoethnographical collection, Mules and Men (1935); and more than 50
short stories, plays, essays and articles. There have also been numerous
posthumous publications of her many works.
55
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, AL to John
and Lucy Potts Hurston. She was the fifth born of seven children, and the second
girl.
56
The family moved to Eatonville, FL when she was three years old.
57
John
Hurston was three-time mayor of Eatonville, the first all-Black, incorporated
township in America
58
, and was the minister of Eatonville’s largest church,
55
Zora Neale Hurston transitioned on January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, FL.
56
In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston recounts the story of her father, who upon
hearing the news of another girl, “threaten[ed] to cut his throat … Plenty more sons, but not more girl
babies to wear out shoes and bring in nothing” (p. 577).
57
Zora Neale Hurston always considered Eatonville her home and Eatonville readily adopted Hurston,
regularly holding the ZORA! Festival, an annual celebration of Eatonville’s Daughter.
58
Eatonville, FL was incorporated on August 18, 1887, by twenty-seven, formerly enslaved Black men.
Pictured at the signing of the town charter are thirty-one Black men; J.E. Clark, Simon Bevin, A.J. Bird,
63
Macedonia Missionary Baptist. Lucy Potts Hurston was a schoolteacher who
“exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun’”
59
.
When Hurston was thirteen years old, her mother passed away. Her father
remarried soon after (amid scandal concerning both the timing and age of the
new bride). He pulled Hurston out of school, and after years of being bounced
around to (and from) numerous family members’ homes,
60
she went to live with
her brother in Nashville, TN and began caring for his children. She eventually ran
away and found work as a maid for a singer in Gilbert & Sullivan’s traveling
theater. Hurston soon made the decision to return to school. She earned her high
school diploma at Morgan Academy in Baltimore, MD in 1917, at the age of 26
(she shaved 10 years off of her age by listing her birth year as 1901). In 1924, she
earned an associate’s degree at Howard Prep School, and in 1928, she earned her
B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College
61
. She undertook graduate study at
Columbia University with prominent anthropologist Franz Boas and began
conducting fieldwork in Florida and Haiti. Hurston was granted an honorary
doctorate from Morgan State College in 1939.
C.H. Boger, Louis Brazell, Matthew Brazell, J.B. Brazell, Richard Butler, Smart Bynum, F. Carraway,
Thomas Clemmon, David Yelder, E.L. Horn, J.R. Johnson, Anderson Lawson, Joseph Lindsey, T.J.
Pender, George Oats, L. Sewell, E.J. Shines, C.S. Sizemore, Elloy Smith, Nero Smith, John Suman, J.T.
Taylor, W.T. Thomas, Joseph Walker, J.N. Watson, Ishmal Williams, John Calhoun, and Columbus
Crooms.
59
Hurston, Zora. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942, p. 13).
60
Not much information is available about this time period in Hurston’s life (1904-1914) that she refers to
as her “haunted years” (Hurston, 1942; p. 99).
61
Zora Neale Hurston was the first Black student at Barnard.
64
Hurston’s first short story was published in Howard University’s literary
journal, The Stylus. She was encouraged to move to New York City by the editor
of Opportunity, and arrived in 1925 where she connected with Wallace Thurman,
Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Lorenzo Dow Turner.
62
Her most celebrated
novel, and the one considered her masterwork, is Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937). Her most disparaged novel, according to many critics, remains Seraph on
the Suwanee (1948).
Zora Neale Hurston was “creative, unorthodox, defiant, clever, persistent,
contradictory, and stubborn to boot.” She was also “ahead of her time”
(McClaurin, 2012; p. 50). She has been considered by many, to be an enigma.
63
Hurston seemingly catered to white audiences at times, most notably, the
“Negrotarians”
64
;
Most contemporary readers, of any race, would find Zora's self-
degrading racial references odd, offensive, and unnecessarily
obsequious. Yet Meyer
65
, a product of her time, seemed to respond
differently. One could argue that Zora was consciously playing
Meyer, to use a vernacular term, for her own benefit. That is, she
was perhaps playing up to any notions of racial superiority Meyer
62
Turner and Hurston first met at Howard University where he was head of the English department and she
was a student.
63
See, McClaurin (2012); “If ever there was a person to embody the meaning of words like ‘enigma” and
“heterodox,’ Zora Neale Hurston is it. The dictionary defines enigma as ‘a person of puzzling or
contradictory character’... while heterodox is defined as being ‘contrary to or different from an
acknowledged standard, a traditional form, or an established religion’… Certainly, Zora was all of these:
puzzling, contradictory, and more often than not finding herself in opposition to convention and standards.
These descriptors are as central an ingredient to understanding Hurston’s character as sugar is essential to
the making of Alabama sweet tea” (p. 49).
64
Negrotarians are “influential whites who supported the New Negro movement and who took an interest
in black life itself. Because their philanthropic interests had a distinct racial angle, they were not merely
humanitarians, in Zora's view. Instead, she called them ‘Negrotarians’" (Boyd, 2002; p. 100).
65
Annie Nathan Meyer was an American author and the founder of Barnard College. Meyer found
scholarships and other forms of financial support for Hurston while she completed her studies at Barnard.
Hurston dedicated Mules and Men (1935) to Meyer.
65
might have held in order to make the older woman feel good about
her continued support of a helpless young "pickaninny" … Yet, from
another perspective, it seems that Zora had a rather sophisticated
understanding of "white psychology." She had to, in order to get as
much help from white people as she got, suggested her
contemporary, John Henrik Clarke. Zora knew that "if she showed
certain scars," Clarke asserted, "she'd get paid for them." In other
words, she understood that engaging in a certain kind of racial role-
play could be profitable, and she did so with a bittersweet humor
(Boyd, 2002; p. 102).
Notwithstanding, it is clear that, throughout her later decades, Hurston
increasingly wrote for Black people,
And during that period, in the '40s and '50s, she was hoping to
write without having to bother about white audiences. She began a
novel called The Golden Bench of God, and imagine if we had this
now; it was a novel about black hairdressing entrepreneur and art
patron Madame C. J. Walker. Imagine that novel . . . which is lost …
She wrote to her literary agent: "Imagine that no white audience is
present to hear what is said." Her publisher rejected it. Waterbury
was unable to place it and the novel is missing (Kaplan, 2005; p.
6).
66
We do, however, have Hurston’s under-examined last novel, Seraph on the
Suwanee (1948),
67
written during this transformative period and therefore, quite
possibly, written for Black people.
Much of the scrutiny surrounding Seraph on the Suwanee may stem from
the inability to neatly categorize Hurston as a writer (or feminist, Black feminist,
radical feminist or Afrocentricist), or it could be due to her audacity
68
as a Black
66
After Hurston’s transition in 1960, many of her papers were burned as her last home was being cleaned
out. A friend, who happened to be passing by, was able to put out the fire and collect her remaining (and
invaluable) works. Copies of the singed papers are included in the Zora Neale Hurston Papers, housed at
the University of Florida Smathers Libraries – Special and Area Studies Collections.
67
Seraphs may have their origin in Kemet, with a connection to Uraeus.
68
See Kaplan (2005, p. 4).
66
woman, to write about white people in such a manner. Some critics accused
Hurston of presenting Black characters in white face, (Jordan, 1996; p. 359),
however, peering through a different lens, it seems as if Hurston presents two
different women in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee.
Janie, a Black woman, is a symbol of positive self-growth and agency; “Ah done
lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means to live mine” (Hurston, 1937, p. 114); and
Arvay, a white Cracker woman, is a symbol stuck in patriarchy; “Yes, she was
doing what the big light had told her to do. She was serving and meant to serve”
(Hurston, 1948; p. 352).
The novel, asserts John C. Charles (2009), “has tended to baffle and
disturb even Hurston’s most devoted readers,”
Critic Mary Helen Washington, for example, dismisses Seraph as
"an awkward and contrived novel, as vacuous as a soap opera"
[and] Bernard Bell expels it from his influential study on the
African American novel because "[it] is neither comic, nor
folkloristic, nor about blacks" … Seraph's most damning critique,
however, comes from Hurston's first great champion, Alice Walker,
who describes Hurston's later work as "reactionary, static,
shockingly misguided and timid" and adds that this is "especially
true of Seraph on the Suwanee, which is not even about black
people, which is no crime, but is about white people for whom it is
impossible to care, which is” (p. 19).
Mary Helen Washington (qtd. in Dubek 1996) explains Hurston’s “strange book,”
revealing, as Dubek asserts, “an attitude shared by many readers and critics of
African American literature, “It was as though in abandoning the source of her
unique esthetic—the black cultural tradition—she also submerged her power and
creativity” (p. 344). However, as Dubek also points out, it is the perspective (or
67
centering) of the reader (or critic) that is imperative to the analysis and
understanding of the messages in the book,
Indeed, if we read Seraph in the context of either 1940s black
protest fiction or a black feminist literary tradition that requires the
woman writer to break the silences surrounding her black sister’s
lives, the novel will seem seriously flawed. Its focus on white
characters and psychology ostensibly places it outside the black
(feminist) tradition, an expulsion that leads Ann duCille to question
the very notions of that tradition (p. 344).
In Seraph, Hurston presents a less-than-perfect image of whiteness and the
American standard of beauty.
69
,
70
While Arvay, with her blond hair and blue
eyes, is not the preferred variety of Florida Cracker, Jim Meserve, with his “thick
head of curly black hair,” has a certain “flavor” about him; “Meserve was very
handsome too, and had stirred the hearts of practically every single girl in town …
He was obviously Black Irish in his ancestry somewhere” (pp. 6-7). The novel
moves from Hurston’s standard writings on Black people and Black culture, and
is her only work centered on white characters, specifically, “Florida white
Crackers.” Like “Redneck,” “Cracker” is a pejorative. It was originally used to
69
Arvay, the protagonist, is blond, with “Gulf-blue eyes,” and “her shape was not exactly in style in those
parts … no heavy-hipped girl below that extremely small waist, and her legs were long and slim-made
instead of the much-admired ‘whiskey-keg’ look to her legs that was common (p. 4). She was “nothing like
her sister ‘Raine at all, who was robust, not to say a trifle lusty, and pretty in the ways that the rural
community favored” (p. 6).
70
Arvay and Jim’s firstborn, Earl, has the same blue eyes and blond hair as his mother; “It would be a
blond. That was disappointing but not serious. What else she saw made Arvay cry out in horror, ‘Dessie!
Dessie! What is the matter with my child’s hands?’” (p. 67). In addition to his tiny hands with their “string-
like fingers” (p. 69), Earl’s head was severely deformed; “there was practically no forehead nor back head
on her child [it was] narrowed like an egg on top” (p. 68). In addition to his physical challenges, Earl is
mentally challenged and prone to violence. He “yelps and growls,” (p. 727), snarling at and attacking
Arvay after his vicious and bloody assault of a village girl. He is killed within the hour by a posse.
68
signify poor, white settlers who arrived in Florida in the mid to late 1760s. A
letter to the Earl of Dartmouth explains the term,
I should explain to your Lordship what is mean by Crackers; a name
they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of
rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, who often change their places of abode (Burrison, 2002,
2019).
In another usage, “Cracker” signifies the white foremen of enslavers, based on
their habit of “cracking the whip” on the backs of enslaved Black people.
According to Thornton (1912), “The whips used by some of these people are
called ‘crackers’ … Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus
named” (1912).
71
Arvay Meserve, the protagonist in Seraph on the Suwanee, is a poor white
Cracker living in the impoverished Florida community of Sawley, a sawmill town
located near the Suwanee River. Arvay is considered “queer, if not a little
‘tetched’” and “highstrung.” The community “old heads” say she takes after her
mother Maria, who eventually grew out of the seizures (pp. 4, 6). Arvay’s issues
are due, in part, to her religious fervor. Yet there is something much more carnal
in her actions. When her sister ‘Raine is chosen by the new Reverend Carl
Middleton, sixteen year old Arvay, slighted and hurt, commits herself to living a
71
Also, “Cracker,” in its contemporary use, has been used by some white people in a similar fashion as the
n-slur is used by some Black people, as a term of endearment (Olmsted 1856, Darwin 1859). President Bill
Clinton used the term in 2008 in reference to white voters; “You know, they think that because of who I am
and where my politic base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton
Chiles used to call the ‘cracker vote’ there” (qtd in Smith 2008).
69
life of missionary work and going “off somewhere to take the Word to the
heathens” (p. 4).
Arvay also fantasizes that her brother-in-law, Carl, will run off and join her
in her efforts to save the “heathens of China, India and Africa” (p. 5). Arvay has a
secret and unrequited love of her brother-in-law.
72
She harbors guilt over her six-
year long secret fantasy of taking him from her sister ‘Raine.
73
Arvay, over the
course of three years, has also developed seizures; “hysterical seizures, classified
in the local language as ‘having fits’” (p. 6). The fits occur whenever a young man
takes an interest in Arvay. Her Sawley community believes that marriage will
eventually “straighten her out” (p. 6), and her straightening comes in the form of
Jim Meserve, who courts Arvay “in spite of all she could do and say” (p. 7).
Meserve, in fact, cures Arvay’s strange hysteria permanently by “accidently”
dropping one of the standard three drops of “teppentime” into her eye as she is
having a fit,
He was very deliberate … There were seconds, it seemed to Maria
between each drop. Two of the drops were finally deposited on the
sugar on the spoon … [Arvay’s] mother looked anxiously, tracing
the course of each drop. Jim looked from the bottle to the spoon, to
Arvay’s face and back again to the poised bottle and the spoon. Now
for that last drop. Suddenly his hand gave a nervous twitch, and the
third, or maybe third and fourth drop together, missed the spoon
entirely, and landed in the outside corner of Arvay’s right eye …
Then a hurricane struck the over-crowded parlor” (p. 32).
72
“She fell in love, and began to live a sweet and secret life inside herself” (p. 11).
73
“Not a soul in Sawley suspected this secret life of Arvay’s” (p. 12).
70
Though Jim is sure he wants to marry Arvay, she is unwilling to allow herself to
get close to him.
74
Her anxiety, paranoia and guilt (which he reads as aloofness),
75
make him unsure of her willingness to marry him. So he rapes her, within
minutes after asking her to marry him. His aim is to leave her no choice (in his
and her eyes) but to follow through and they head to the justice of the peace that
same afternoon to get married,
So after what went on under the mulberry tree, Jim figgers that I
ain’t fitten no more to tote the Word, Arvay thought … ‘All I know is
that I been raped.’ ‘You sure was, and the job was done up brown …
Sure you was raped, and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on
getting raped … No more missionarying around for you. You done
caught your heathen baby” (pp. 56-57).
More so than the switch in center from Black to Cracker communities,
critics have a problem with the way Hurston chose to portray Arvay’s
acceptance of her rape. Carla Kaplan (2003) states that "it is hard to
understand why Hurston would have written it,"
Why, for example, would she go from depicting the black
community she knew so well, portrayed so lovingly, and criticized
so handily to a story about southern crackers and their difficult rise
to financial success? Why would she go from using rape as a central
metaphor for exploitation in Their Eyes to a story in which rape is
merely misunderstanding: a "pain remorseless sweet" and a
"memory inexpressibly sweet"?
Ann duCille offers a “provocative interpretation” of Seraph. She posits that,
Hurston could make such a severe and intimate critique of the
“coupling convention” in Seraph precisely because her characters
were white: By placing sexual violence within a white marriage,
74
Jim’s love is steeped in patriarchy and ideas of ownership. He has a low opinion of women; “Women
folks don’t have no mind to make up now how. They weren’t made for that” (Hurston, 1948; p. 621).
75
“You act like, I, that is, somebody been just waiting around for you to ask ‘em that. Supposing that I
don’t live you, or no other man, enough to marry ‘em” (p. 25).
71
Hurston could explore marital rape “without subjecting herself and
her fiction to charges of pandering to white stereotypes of black
sexuality.” duCille’s insight is an important one, but it leaves
unexplored
76
the ways in which race (defined here as “whiteness”)
determines the social positions out of which that sexual violence
comes (qtd. in Dubeck, 1996; p. 344).
The novel’s protagonist, Arvay has “extremely limited vision … Hurston
highlights domestic forces in the novel as the absolute farthest Arvay is
able to see—and even this is a stretch” (p. 343). In addition to the issues
with her white main characters and the rape, Hurston received criticism
for the way she presents her secondary Black characters,
Why does she paint a positive and comic image of the very "pet
negro system"--"every Southern white man has his pet Negro"--
which she decried elsewhere as a "residue of feudalism"? (Kaplan,
2003; p. 443).
77
As if they have no life or work of their own, her minor characters (who are Black),
faithful Joe Kelsey and his wife Dessie, are essentially summoned (versus invited)
to Citrabelle to work for Arvay and Jim; Dessie as a maid and Joe, Jim’s friend,
advisor and “Pet Negro,”
78
taking all the risk and running Jim’s successful
bootlegging business (Dubek, 1996; p. 345). Joe represents the working class and
is employed to do manual labor, “colored men did all of the manual work, they
76
The novel itself, remains largely unexplored.
77
“Every Southern white man has his pet Negro. His Negro is always fine, honest, faithful to him unto
death, and most remarkable, indeed, no other Negro on earth is fitten to hold him alight, and few white
people. He never lies, and in fact can do no wrong. If he happens to do what other people might consider
wrong, it is never his Negro‘s fault. He was pushed and shoved into it by some unworthy varmint. If he
kills somebody else, the dead varmint took and run into the pet‘s knife or bullet and practically committed
suicide just to put the pet in wrong, the low-life-ted scoundrel-beast! If the white patron has his way, the pet
will never serve a day in the jail for it. The utmost of his influence will be invoked to balk the law. Turn go
his Negro from the jail!” (Hurston, 1948; pp. 653-654).
78
See, Hurston, Zora Neale. Seraph on the Suwanee, pp. 60-61.
72
were the ones who actually new how things were done” (Hurston, 1948; p. 666).
The bulk of the profit from the work, however was reserved for white males.
Sawley is a segregated town
79
, as is the town of Citrabelle
80
where
Jim and Arvay move after the birth of Earl. Once in Citrabelle, Jim starts a
fruit plantation business and, to bring in more money, becomes involved
in bootlegging.
81
Arvay, who cannot believe that her husband would do
such a thing, casts Joe Kelsey as Jim’s “Pet Negro,” a villain who is
“leading her husband astray,”
[Arvay] neither knows nor expresses any interest in the fact that
Jim’s gradual rise is largely due to his close ties with the laborers of
Citrabelle’s Colored Town, black men whose adeptness at fruit-
picking earns Jim a promotion. Significantly, it is Jim’s black work
crew that clears the land for the white couple’s first house and black
carpenters who furnish the materials and erect the structure in
which Arvay will spend almost all of the next twenty years (Dubek,
1996; p. 345).
Zora Neale Hurston was not always fond of Arvay and what she represented. In
her discussion with a Scribner editor of the character she created, Hurston said,
I shall bring Arvay along her road to find herself a great deal faster.
I get sick of her at times myself. Have you ever been tied in close
contact with a person who had a strong sense of inferiority? I have
and it is hell. They carry it like a sore on the end of the index finger.
You go along thinking well of them and doing what you can to make
them happy and suddenly you are brought up short with an
accusation of looking down on them, taking them for a fool, etc., but
they mean to let you know and so on and so forth. It colors
everything ... It is a very common ailment. That is why I decided to
write about it. The sufferers do not seem to realize that all that is
79
“The Negroes were about their own doings in their own part of town, and white Sawley was either in
church or on the way” (Hurston, 1948; p. 3).
80
The town of Citrabelle is described as beautiful with nice homes.
81
Illegal manufacturing, distributing and selling alcohol.
73
needed is a change of point of view from fear into self-confidence
and then there is no problem (qtd in Hemenway, 1997; 312-313).
The novel ends with Arvay reconciling with Jim (and her station in life as a wife
and mother) after a brief separation,
As Jim rests on Arvay‘s bosom like a child returning “to the comfort
of his mother,” the boat carrying them is similarly cradled by the
maternal and eternal sea: the Arvay Henson rode gently on the
bosom of the Atlantic. It lifted and bowed in harmony with the wind
and the sea. It was acting in submission to the in finite and Arvay
felt its peace (p. 123).
Arvay had found her purpose, “She made the sun welcome to come on in, then
snuggled down again beside her husband” (Hurston, 1948; p. 352).
Most critics argue that Arvay was only able to define her identity through
her existence as a wife and mother. But what if the story relays a different
message? What if the novel, instead of being compared unfavorably to Hurston’s
earlier works (or judged based on what critics preferred her to write), takes into
consideration her audience, Black people? What messages might Hurston be
revealing to Black people in the novel? It is not unconceivable that she would do
such a thing. Carla Kaplan (2003), in presenting Hurston’s Life in Letters, notes,
But what's even more amazing to me, is that this book is the first of
its kind, which is to say—we have no other volumes of an African
American woman artist's or writer's letters. Now, that's particularly
extraordinary, if you think of the larger context of the African
American tradition … We are talking, after all, about a literary
tradition especially marked by coded, masked, double-voiced
discourses designed to contend with the problem of double or triple
or quadruple and divided audiences (p. 3).
Could it be possible that Hurston, a literary foremother, writing in the Black
literary tradition, is using “coded, masked, double-voiced discourse” (Kaplan,
74
2003; p. 3) in Seraph on the Suwanee to send a message to Black people? Could
she have left an egg (that she mentions in the epigraph above) for her future
readers? Is the novel a buried treasure that Kahn describes?
82
And what of her
influence on contemporary Black women writers?
83
How has this impacted the
ways in which they present (or code) messages for their Black readers?
82
See Kahn, David (1996), “Messages can be communicated not only through space, but also through time.
People will bury treasure” (p. 1).
83
Hurston has influenced many writers, including Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara.
75
Toni Morrison - God Help the Child (2015)
What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
Toni Morrison
One of the most celebrated, living American writers, and Nobel laureate,
Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winning author and professor, Toni
Morrison, became the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in
1993. Among her numerous honors and awards is the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama in 2012. Morrison has been
described as “a uniquely prolific novelist, literary critic, [and] editor,” “a literary
figure of prominence,” “a significant literary voice”(Iyasere & Iyasere, 2010); “a
phenomenon, in the classic sense of a once-in-a-lifetime rarity, the literary
equivalent of Paul Robeson, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Chris Evert, or
Martina Navratilova,” “one of America’s greatest writers,” and a woman of
“extraordinary genius” (Harris, 2010; pp. 23-24). Morrison’s major works include
The Bluest Eye (1970),
84
Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977),
85
Tar Baby
(1981),
86
Beloved (1987),
87
Jazz (1992),
88
Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy
84
Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye during her painful marriage; “The instinct to write was shaped by a need
to read something with which she could identify” (Dawes, 2010; p. 9).
85
Song of Solomon (1977), won numerous literary awards and “established Morrison’s reputation as a
writer” (Dawes, 2010; p. 10)
86
In Tar Baby (1981), Morrison includes “some examination of the traditions of black rebellions, as
demonstrated in the Maroon lifestyle of Caribbean blacks during slavery” (Dawes, 2010; pp, 10-11).
87
In 1988, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. The novel is “regarded as a literary masterpiece,
Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a film adaptation that was released in 1998” (Iyasere & Iyasere,
2010; p. 3).
88
According to Dawes (2010), “The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Morrison largely on the
strength of this, her sixth novel.
76
(2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015), and countless other works,
including children’s fiction with her son Slade Morrison
89
, short fiction, plays,
non-fiction, essays and articles.
Chloe Ardelia (“Toni”)
90
Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, in
Lorain, OH to George and Ramah Wofford. She was the second born of four
children. When she was two years old, the Morrison family home was set on fire
(while they were inside), “an incident that only confirmed her father’s attitude
towards whites. ‘He simply felt that he was better, superior to all white people,’
Morrison has said. Her father wouldn’t even allow white people inside their
house”
91
(Bowers, 2010; p. 46).
As a child, Morrison was an avid reader with “eclectic literary tastes” that
included works by Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jane
Austen (Dawes, 2010; p. 7). She was the only student in her class who could read
before the first grade (Bowers, 2010; p. 46). Morrison recognized early on, the
“disparity that existed between the largely white worlds of these works and her
own black female experience [which] demonstrated that her own culture, values,
89
Author Slade Morrison collaborated with his mother on five children’s books, The Big Box (1999), The
Book of Mean People (2002), Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper?, The Lion or the Mouse?,
Poppy or the Snake? (2007), Peeny Butter Fudge (2009), and Please Louise (2014). Slade Morrison
transitioned on December 22, 2010, at the age of 45, of pancreatic cancer.
90
The name “Toni” is a shortened version of the Catholic “Saint Anthony,” the name Morrison adopted as
a child when she joined the Catholic Church.
91
When George Wofford was around 15 years old, and living in Cartersvills, GA, two Black businessmen
who lived on his street were lynched by white people; “He never told us that he’d seen bodies. But he had
seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him” (Morrison, qtd. in Ghansah, 2015).
77
dreams and feelings were not being represented in the literature she was reading”
(Dawes, 2010; p. 7).
Morrison earned a B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953, and a
M.A. in English from Cornell University in 1955. She received an honorary
doctorate from Harvard University in 1989. She has held professorships at Texas
Southern University, State University of New York (Albany and Purchase
campuses), Howard University, Yale, Bard, and Princeton (where she retired in
2006) (Dawes, 2010; p 8). While teaching at Howard University, she met and
married Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. They had two
sons, Harold, Jr., born in 1961, and Slade, born in 1964. That same year,
following her divorce from Harold, Sr., Morrison moved to New York City and
accepted a position as an editor with Random House. She began writing when she
was in her late thirties “because, as she has said, she was too busy working and
raising two children on her own” (Weiss, 2010; p. 16). Her first novel, The Bluest
Eye, was published in 1970, when Morrison was thirty-nine years old.
In the tradition of her literary foremother, Zora Neale Hurston,
particularly with Hurston’s declared focus and intent in her later works (Kaplan,
2005; p. 6), Toni Morrison writes for Black people,
Most writers claim to abhor labels but Morrison has always
welcomed the term “black writer”. “I’m writing for black people,”
she says, “in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-
year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise
or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white
people] – which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people
in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your
shoulder and approve it” – she refers to the writer James Baldwin
talking about “a little white man deep inside of all of us”. Did she
78
exorcise hers? “Well I never really had it. I just never did” (Hoby
2015).
Kwame Dawes (2010) notes this preeminent feature of her works, asserting,
“Morrison demonstrates a desire to speak to her own community or from that
community. Morrison bluntly states that she writes for a black audience because
she is writing for the village” (p. 11). Bowers (2010) also acknowledges this
unifying element in Morrison’s work,
Morrison’s most revolutionary—and most defining—act has been to
write for black readers about black people. By this act alone, she has
challenged white hegemony, but most important, she has credited
the complexity and originality of African American life by working
within its intricate and rich system of meaning, language, and art”
(p. 40).
Morrison, herself solidifies her stance while reflecting on The Bluest Eye (1970),
“No African-American writer had ever done what I did—none of the
writers I knew, even the ones I admired—which was to write
without the White Gaze. My writing wasn’t about them. Ralph
Ellison: Invisible Man. Invisible to whom? Not me. No one else was
going to write only like a jazz or a blues musician, just for the
people. And I knew the people were going to be very demanding,
honest, sophisticated, unwilling to be flimflammed” (qtd in Bowers,
2010; p. 40).
God Help the Child (2015)
92
,
93
was unquestionably written for Black people.
Iyasere & Iyasere (2010) note that Morrison, by writing “within the African
American vernacular tradition and creating literature about and for African
92
Toni Morrison did not like the title of her new novel. She prefered the original title, The Wrath of
Children; “It provided more clarity about a key theme of the novel: that what you do to children matters”
(Chen, 2016).
93
God Help the Child is Morrison’s eleventh novel. She started it prior to A Mercy (2008), but “didn’t
know how to elevate the ‘very modern, very convenient, kind of stupid’ language she wanted to use … into
something literary” She returned to the novel after “she had absorbed enough television and articles and
magazines to develop and ear for using that style of speech in a way that wasn’t shallow” (Chen, 2016).
79
Americans … gifts us with works (novels, essays, a play) that speak to and for all
humankind, earning her a global audience as well as international accolades,
awards, and ever-expanding critical study” (p. vii). In addition, she has “a
commitment to the black experience” (Dawes, 2010; p. 10). Further, she “is
committed to writing about the experiences of African Americans, about their
unique values, culture, and dreams, and about the historical and existential
problems that shape their lives” (Iyasere & Iyasere 2010, p.4). This commitment
is weaved throughout God Help the Child, as Morrison focuses on themes of child
abuse, childhood trauma, and colorism steeped in racism,
It is a story of lost love and reconciliation, trauma and healing,
abjection and redemption. It is above all, the story of a mother
whose reluctance to accept her daughter’s “blue-black” colour and
provide her with support and love, leads her to commit an abject
crime. An innocent woman spends fifteen years in prison because of
a false testimony of a little Black girl yearning for mother love and
acceptance (Fatoumata, 2018; p. 44).
God Help the Child (2015), is centered on Lula Ann Bridewell (Bride), a strikingly
beautiful, cosmetics designer with a successful and lucrative career.
94
She reaches
her turning point after her boyfriend Booker leaves her. In response, her body
literally reverts back to pre-puberty,
95
symbolically forcing a Sankofic return to
94
Fatoumata (2018) asserts that, “In endowing blackness with positive values, Morrison abates the stigma
of abjection, enabling, a form of poetic catharsis, which in her narrative, is also a kind of poetic justice” (p.
52). Hurston, by contrast, in Seraph on the Suwanee, endows whiteness with negative values.
95
At one point, Bride loses all of her pubic hair; “Every bit of my pubic hair was gone. Not gone as in
shaved or waxed, but gone as in erased, as in never having been there in the first place” (p. 12). Her
previously pierced ears close and her breasts disappear; “I must be sick, dying, she thought. She plastered
the wet towel above the place where her breasts had once upon a time announced themselves and risen to
the lips of moaning lovers” (Morrison, 2015; p. 93).
80
her past
96
, in order to confront and heal her childhood trauma.
97
As Bride asserts,
“Memory is the worst thing about healing” (p. 29).
Bride is born too Black, according to her parents and society. She is
“Midnight black, Sudanese black … Tar is the closest I can think of,” and her color
scares and embarrasses her mother “from the very beginning” (p. 3). Bride grows
up without affection. Her mother creates distance between them; “I told her to
call me ‘Sweetness’ instead of ‘Mother’ or ‘Mama.’ It was safer. Being that black
and having what I think are too-thick lips calling me ‘Mama’ would confuse
people” (p. 3),
My husband, Louis, is a porter and when he got back off the rails,
he looked at me like I was really crazy and looked at her like she
was from the planet Jupiter. He wasn’t a cussing man so when he
said, “Goddamn! What the hell is this?” I knew we were in trouble.
That’s what did it—what caused the fights between me and him. It
broke our marriage to pieces. We had three good years together but
when she was born, he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she
was a stranger—more than that, an enemy. He never touched her
(Morrison, 2015; p. 5).
Louis abandons his wife and his daughter soon after, though, likely motivated by
guilt, he pays child support in the form of monthly “fifty-dollar money orders” (p.
7). His distance is spotlighted in the fact that he is mentioned by name only two
96
Morrison achieves this by incorporating flashbacks to Bride’s childhood throughout the novel.
97
Part of this healing requires Bride to come to terms with a lie she told as a child. She accused a teacher of
pedophilia, “I lied! I lied! I lied! She was innocent. I helped convict her but she didn’t do any of that.”
“You lied? What the hell for?” “So that my mother would hold my hand! … And look at me with proud
eyes, for once” (Morrison, 2015; p. 153).
81
times in the novel (pp.5, 7). Notwithstanding her parents’ actions, Lula Ann
manages to survive her childhood, and begins her new life as Bride.
98
Bride’s friend Jeri (a “total person designer”) insists that Bride “should
always wear white … Only white and all white all the time … Not only because of
your name … but because of what it does to your licorice” (pp. 31). Bride
represents the new Black
99
according to Jeri, “And black is the new black. Know
what I mean?” (p. 32). Jeri tells Bride as she advances in her career, “See … ‘Black
sells. It’s the hottest commodity in the civilized world” (p. 36). Jaleel Akhtar
(2009) notes,
Bride, as the new black, is Morrison’s answer to the feminist calls to
foreground black women’s “pleasure, exploration and agency” …
She is independent and socially mobile. She disregards the
conservative rules of sexual conduct and respectability, which could
distract her from achieving agency, social mobility and greater
financial success (pp. 1-2).
Akhtar (2009) asserts that “the black is beautiful sensibility of the black
aesthetics anticipates the new black just as the new negro and the Harlem
Renaissance anticipated the Black Arts Movement … Bride achieves her agency
and individuality by capitalizing upon and wielding her blackness to her
advantage” (p. 3).
98
See Hudson-Weems, 2001. “Self-namer and self-definer” are “descriptors” of Africana Womanism, as
defined by Clenora Hudson-Weems. Other descriptors include strong, in concert with male in struggle,
whole, authentic, flexible, role player, respected, recognized, spiritual, male compatible, respectful of
elders, adaptable, ambitious, and mother and nurturing.
99
See Akhtar (2009); “The new black defines his/her subject position in terms of his/her material
achievements. It reaffirms upward mobility and success, which is the promise of the American Dream” (p.
2).
82
As the new black, Bride’s identity is shattered when Booker tells her that
she is not the woman he wants; “I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I
feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started.
It began after he said, ‘You not the woman I want.’ ‘Neither am I’ (p. 8). His
statement resonates with Bride, “How he hit me harder than a fist with six words:
You not the woman I want. How they rattle me so I agreed with them. So stupid”
(p. 10); “we fought about it the night he said ‘You not the woman …” (pp. 12);
Maybe he is right. I am not the woman” (p. 32); “and then out of nowhere, ‘You
not the woman …” (p. 38); “You not the woman is the last thing I expected to
hear” (p. 62); “what did he mean by ‘not the woman’? Who? This here woman?”
(p. 80). Booker’s statement seems to have shaken Bride to her core, because for
the first time in years, her carefully crafted outside appearance can no longer
protect her from her inner demons.
In a 1993 interview in The Paris Review, Morrison explains how she often
gives away the climax of her novels on the first page, a technique she compares to
the creation of jazz. Weiss (2010) asserts that the “worlds in [Morrison’s] novels
are constructed like musical improvisations, combining the recognizable with the
surprising,”
The delight and satisfaction is not so much in the melody itself but
in recognizing it when it surfaces and when it is hidden, and when it
goes away completely, what is put in its place. I wanted the delight
to be found in moving away from the story and coming back to it,
looking around it, and through it, as though it was a prism,
constantly turning (Morrison, qtd in Weiss, 2010; p. 16).
The novel begins with Sweetness declaring her innocence,
83
It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no
idea how it happened … I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we
call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my
family anywhere near that color … You might think she’s a
throwback, but throwback to what? You should’ve seen my
grandmother; she passed for white and never said another word to
any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my
aunts she sent right back, unopened (p. 3).
It ends with Sweetness, sixty-three years old, and living in a nursing home after
developing “some creeping bone disease” (p. 176). Sweetness has received a note
(with no return address) from Bride, who now addresses her as “S,” that she is
going to be a grandmother, “I’m too too thrilled and hope you are too,” Bride
writes (p. 177). Sweetness immediately wonders if the baby’s father (Booker, who
she has never met, and who Bride has never mentioned),
is as black as she is. If so, she needn’t worry like I did. Things have
changed a mite from when I was young. Blue blacks are all over TV,
in fashion magazines, commercials, even starring in movies …
There is not return address on the envelope. So I guess I’m still the
bad parent being punished forever till the day I die for doing the
well-intended and, in fact, necessary way, I brought her up (p. 177).
Bride’s only relationship with her mother is a little more than her relationship
was with her father when she was a child. Sweetness reflects, “Still, our
relationship is down to her sending me money … I know the money she sends is a
way to stay away and quiet down the little bit of conscience she’s got left … If I
sound irritable, ungrateful, part of it is because underneath is regret” (p. 177). Old
systems and practices, however, are slow to change. Sweetness, the climax and
conclusion of the novel, speaks as if Bride is there with her, “You are about to find
out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you
are a parent … Good luck and God help the child” (p. 178).
84
God Help The Child received mixed reviews on release; from celebratory
praise for Morrison’s “loving attention to the textures and sounds of words”
(Walker 2015), to severe criticism, with some critics comparing the novel
unfavorably to The Bluest Eye. Ron Charles (2015), in his Washington Post book
review, claims,
She leaves these people no interior life, a problem that grows more
pronounced as the novel rolls along from trauma to trauma,
throwing off wisdom like Mardi Gras bling. While attempting to
create a kind of fable about the lingering effects of material neglect
and racial self-hatred, Morrison ends up instead with characters
who keep phasing between skimpy realism an overwrought fantasy
... parts of the novel serve only as chatty filler.
In contrast to the negative reviews, Dephine Gras (2016) offers another
perspective,
“What has struck some reviewers of God Help the Child as an
incoherent narrative lacking character development or depth is
instead a provocative indictment against the illusion of post-
raciality. It is no coincidence that the very character that seems to
belong to a post-racial generation gets shot just because of her skin
color. With overlapping narratives connecting traumatized
characters across time and place, Morrison forces her readers to
acknowledge the pervasive mental and physical damages racism
and sexism still cause to this day, particularly for Black girls and
women” (p. 3).
In fact, Morrison rejects the term “post-racial” “precisely because it seems to
imply ‘that we have erased racism’” (Gras, 2016; p. 2).
Cultural appropriation is a form of racism. The controversial practice of
one culture copying elements of another culture, is often considered by many of
its critics to be a disrespectful theft and, when practiced by the dominant culture,
a demonstration of the further colonialization of oppressed people. The cultural
85
norms and values attached to the practices are often unknown and/or overlooked
by the appropriators, and the rituals are transformed into a performance empty
of the original “racially encoded meanings” (Rodriguez 2006).
Bride’s “friend[?]”
100
Brooklyn “invented” herself (p. 139). She is a symbol
of cultural appropriation. Brooklyn is “chalk white with blond dreadlocks” (p,
131) which, according to Bride, “add an allure she wouldn’t otherwise have. At
least the black guys she dates think so” (p. 44). Brooklyn states that she is the
daughter of an alcoholic mother, and that she ran away from home at the age of
14. She claims that her uncle made sexual advances at her when she was a child,
then proclaims that she has the ability to read people, (that she can always sense
what they are thinking). She says, “It is a gift I’ve had since I was a little kid” (p.
139). Brooklyn also admits that her uncle didn’t actually know “himself what he
was planning to do,” and it is not clear what the uncle was actually thinking,
because Brooklyn’s “reads” aren’t always correct. For example, she certainly
misreads Bride’s love, Booker, claiming, “Only once did I misread—with Bride’s
loverman” (p. 139). Brookyn initially considered Booker a “predator” (p. 58), a
common, Eurocentric stereotypical (re)imaging and (re)naming of a Black man.
When Brooklyn sees Booker, “with a bunch of raggedy losers at the subway
entrance. Panhandling, for Christ’s sake” (p. 58)
101
she doesn’t tell Bride,
100
Though she instinctively knows to keep some secrets from her, Bride initially considers Brooklyn a
“friend,” “a true friend,” “a good friend,” her “closest friend” and “her only true friend” (pp. 10, 29, 44, 45,
66, 69, 98). Booker, however, knows that Brooklyn is Bride’s “obnoxious pseudo-friend” (p. 134).
101
In fact, Booker is a trumpeter who sometimes plays with guitarists at the train station (p. 131). He also
lives off of an inheritance
86
And once I’m pretty sure I saw him sprawled on the steps of the
library, pretending he was reading a book … Another time I saw him
sitting at a coffee shop table writing in a notebook, trying to look
serious, like he had something important to do. It was surely him I
saw walking aimlessly in neighborhoods far from Bride’s
apartment. What was he doing there? Seeing another woman?
Bride never mentioned what he did, what, if any, job he had (p. 58).
This, however does not stop Brooklyn from trying to have sex with him in Bride’s
home,
One day just for fun I flirted with him, tried to seduce him. In her
own bedroom, mind you … He watched me closely while I stripped
but didn’t say a word so I knew he wanted me to stay ... I simply
stood there naked as a newborn. He just stared, but only at my face
and so hard I blinked.
“Don’t you want another flower in your garden?”
He said, “Are you sure you know what makes a garden grow?”
“Sure do, I said. “Tenderness.”
“And dung,” he answered (p. 59).
Shortly thereafter, Brooklyn correctly “reads” Booker. She also returns to
negatively locating him, referring to him as a “conman” (p. 139). Booker has more
depth to him than Brooklyn is able to see or appreciate because she has
prejudged him, and predefined who he is as a Black man. Further, in addition to
breaking the Girl Code
102
with her “best friend,” Brooklyn uses Bride’s misfortune
as another excuse to spew racist stereotypes. She describes Bride’s face after Sofia
102
The Girl Code includes friendship and loyalty guidelines that women follow, including rules like, when
groups of girlfriends go out together, they all leave together, queens fix other queens’ crowns, and never go
after another friend’s boyfriend or ex.
87
Huxley’s violent attack, using a reference to the Ubangi people,
103
when she says
Bride has “lips so Ubangi” (p. 25), which in itself is not derogatory. However, she
continues with a persistent and insulting stereotype, to describe Bride’s nose
when she exclaims, “Worse than anything is her nose—nostrils wide as an
orangutan’s” (p. 25). In addition, Brooklyn admits that she is wrong, but she sees
(and then later uses) Bride’s difficult situation as an opportunity for herself,
noting, “I shouldn’t be thinking this. But her position at Sylvia, Inc., might be up
for grabs” (p. 26). Using Brooklyn as a tool, Morrison comments critically on
whiteness aligning itself with Blackness, not in solidarity, but in its attempt to
appropriate.
Some critics have called Morrison’s novel “flawed (Charles 2015), however,
I wonder if some of the criticism stems from the sting of Morrison’s interweaving
of this perspective of European culture into the multi-layered novel (reminiscent
of Zora Neale Hurston’s presentation of white, Florida Crackers in Seraph on the
Suwanee, and the resulting criticism she received). It is possible that some of the
criticism is a form of deflection. Though the characters are fictional, the issues of
child abuse, racism, colorism, cultural appropriation, dangerous (and sometimes
deadly) prejudging and predefining of Black men, and false alignment with Black
women (as echoed from Black women’s experiences with the feminist
movement), are not fantasy. Morrison is able to effectively speak directly to Black
103
Many Ubangi women, of Chad and other areas in west central Africa, wear lip plates that extend the
bottom lip significantly. In addition, in Nigeria, Ubangi men and women speak their own unique languages.
See “Ubang: Community Where Men and Women Speak Different Languages.” Africa News Service.
November 11, 2003. Bride and Brooklyn also speak different languages.
88
people in the literature because of the shared histories and experiences. Morrison
teaches the Black reader and critic to look within the story for the story, a practice
similar to that of the ancient African storyteller, Aesop.
104
104
Though commonly referred to as Greek, Aesop, was in fact, an enslaved African living in southern
Greece (which is bordered by northern Africa). His name is derived from the Greek, “Aethiops” (Ethiopia).
89
Toni Cade Bambara - Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999)
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
(Toni Cade Bambara, 1982)
Like a griot
105
, who preserves the history of his or her people by reciting it,
Bambara perpetuates the struggle of her people by literally recording it in their
own voices.
(Ruth Elizabeth Burks, 1984)
Her writing is woven, aware of its music, the overlapping waves of scenic action,
so clearly on its way—like a magnet collecting details in its wake, each of which is
essential to the final effect.
(Toni Morrison, 1996)
Writer, professor, film-maker, community activist, organizer and “cultural
worker,”
106
Toni Cade Bambara, had a revolutionary spirit
107
that was
considerably influenced by the tone and tempo of the Black Arts Movement of the
1960s.
108
Bambara, an award winning author,
109
was one of the founding
members of the Southern Collective of African American Writers, and an
inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. She received the John Golden
105
For Africologists, the terms djeli (for boys and men) and djelimuso (for girls and women) are of West
African origin and provide more centered denotations for Black storytellers and poets. “Griot” is a word of
French origin.
106
Bambara’s “favorite way of describing herself was as a ‘cultural worker’” (Holmes & Wall, 2008; p. 4).
107
See, Lewis, Thabiti. A Retrospective of the Revolutionary Spirit of Toni Cade Bambara. Palmimpsest: A
Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International. (2012) 1.1; 107-115.
108
See Holmes & Wall (2008); “She helped shape and was shaped by the Black Liberation Movement, the
Women’s Movement, and the struggle against the war in Vietnam” (p. 3).
109
See, May, Charles E. Critical Survey of Short Fiction (2012); “Her other honors include the Peter
Pauper Press Award (1958), the John Golden Award for Fiction from Queens College (1959), a Rutgers
University research fellowship (1972), a Black Child Development Institute service award (1973), a Black
Rose Award from Encore Magazine (1973), a Black Community Award from Livingston College, Rutgers
University (1974), an award from the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s
Club League, a George Washington Carver Distinguished African American Lecturer Award from Simpson
College, Ebony Magazine’s Achievement in the Arts Award, a Black Arts Award from the University of
Missouri (1981), a Documentary Award from the National Black Programming Consortium (1986), and a
nomination for the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award (1997)” (p. 83)..
90
Award in fiction for her first short story, “Sweet Town” in 1959. In
1970, Bambara’s The Black Woman
110
became the first major anthology to be
written by, and centered on, Black women. Bambara’s numerous publications
include Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971), Gorilla, My Love (1972), The
Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories (1977), The Salt Eaters (1980), which
won numerous literary awards including the 1981 American Book Award and the
Langston Hughes Society Award, Raymond’s Run: Stories for Young Adults
(1989), and two posthumous publications, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions:
Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996) and Those Bones Are Not My
Child (in 1999). Bambara also has several film and screen credits, including
Seven Songs of Malcolm X (1993), W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices
(1995), and the Academy Award-winning documentary, The Bombing of Osage
Avenue (1986).
111
She was “a woman whose voice and vision played a vital role in
shaping African American culture in the last quarter of the twentieth century,”
and is celebrated as “a citizen of the world” (Holmes & Wall, 2008; p. 5).
110
Though Bambara’s focus was on “Blackhood,” the anthology is considered “one of the founding texts of
that decade’s [the 1970s] emerging Black feminist movement” (Benjamin 2001; p. 338).
111
See, Toni Cade Bambara (1986). The Bombing of Osage Avenue, Philadelphia: Scribe Video Center.
MOVE was founded in 1972 by John Africa (formerly Vincent Leaphart). All of the members of the Black
activist and liberation organization, took the name Africa as a surname, wore locs (dreadlocks), lived a
natural and communal lifestyle, opposed modern medicine and advocated for human and animal rights.
MOVE members also practiced their first amendment rights by carrying weapons. The day after Mother’s
Day, on Monday, May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police, after ongoing conflicts with the group, at the direction
of Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor and the leadership of Mayor Wilson Goode, dropped two bombs
on the home and headquarters of MOVE, located at 6221 Osage Avenue. The bombs hit a gas-powered
generator on the roof of the home, which was located on a residential, West Philadelphia block filled with
row houses. The explosion created a fire that quickly spread and firefighters were given orders to let the
buildings burn. Sixty one homes were lost and 127 structures were damaged within minutes. Eleven men,
women and children of MOVE were killed in the bombing. Only two members survived the attack,
Ramona Africa and Michael Moses Ward (Birdie Africa) who transitioned on September 20, 2013, at the
age of 41.
91
Miltona “Toni” Mirkin Cade was born on March 25, 1939 in Harlem, NY to
Walter and Helen Brent Henderson Cade. Helen Cade was a school teacher.
Walter Cade II worked as a performer and stand-up comedian.
Frequent trips with her father and brother to the Peace Barber
Shop, part of Harlem’s Father Divine business community,
nurtured Toni’s storytelling abilities. Walter told me that he
believes his sister’s wit and love for humor can be partly attributed
to their father, a master of improvisation and informal stand-up
comedy” (Holmes & Wall, 2008; p. 9).
As a child, Bambara’s family moved frequently; “Jersey City, Brooklyn, and
Queens. Harlem addresses included apartments at 92 Morningside Avenue, 555
West 151st Street, and the Dunbar Gardens, co-op apartments financed by John
D. Rockefeller in 1926” (Holmes & Wall, 2008; p. 9). Harlem was where she felt
most at home and where she spent her first ten years. In a 1994 interview with
Louis Massiah, Bambara recalls her early childhood,
I spent the first ten years of my life in Harlem. I had skates and got
around a lot and met a lot of wonderful people. I met this one
woman who had a tremendous influence on my writing. Dorothy
McNorton lived across the street from us when we lived on
Morningside. She taught me critical theory (Massiah, 1994).
She shortened her first name to “Toni” when she was around five or six years
old
112
and had her last name legally changed to Bambara in 1970 after she saw it
written in a sketchbook that belonged to her great-grandmother. Both were acts
112
See Massiah, Louis. “Interview of Toni Cade Bambara by Louis Massiah.” New York: Hatch Billops
Collection, 1995: “At some point, around kindergarten age, I accosted my mother, who was trying to take a
bath. I was leaning against the hamper, and I announced to mother that my name was Toni, and it was not
short for Miltona, it was Toni, period. She was very indulgent and said, Yes, sure, Honey."
92
of agency, which demonstrated her ability, even as a child, to self-name and self-
define.
113
In a 1995 interview, Bambara recalls the day she chose her new name,
[T]he minute I said it I immediately inhabited it, felt very at home
in the world. This was my name. It is not so unusual for an artist, a
writer to name themselves; they are forever constructing
themselves, are forever inventing themselves. That's the nature of
that spiritual practice. Maya Angelou changed her name. Toni
Morrison definitely changed her name — Chloe Wofford?!! Audre
Lorde changed the spelling of her first and last names. It's not all
that peculiar. So that's where my name comes from (Bambara, qtd.
in Massiah, 1995; p. 61).
Bambara earned a B.A. in English and theatre arts from Queens College in 1959,
and studied theatre in Europe (both Italy and France) in 1961. She earned her
M.A. in 1964 at City College of New York. In 1965, Bambara wrote and published
numerous short stories
114
and worked in film while teaching (as one of the first
faculty members) in City University’s Search for Education, Elevation, Knowledge
(SEEK) program. In 1969, she was an Associate Professor at Livingston College
(at Rutgers University), followed by teaching positions at Atlanta University and
the Atlanta Neighborhood Arts Center. After leaving Livingston in 1974, she
taught in Philadelphia, PA, at Scribe Video Center, before moving with her
daughter, Karma Bene to Atlanta, GA and co-founding the Southern Collective of
African American Writers. Bambara married once, to filmmaker Tony Batten,
who she met in high school. The marriage lasted less than one year.
Toni Cade Bambara is often categorized as a feminist, but like her literary
foremother, Zora Neale Hurston, she is not easily classified. In fact, she is “too
113
Clenora Hudson-Weems (2004) asserts that Black people have “long been denied not only the authority
of naming self, but moreover of defining self [and] it is now of utmost importance that we take control over
both these determining interconnected factors in our lives if we hope to avoid degradation, isolation, and
annihilation in a world of greed, violence and pandemonium” (p. 18).
114
In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, Bambara admits that, “Of all the writing forms, I’ve always been
partial to the short story” (p. 43).
93
dynamic a woman and artist to be constrained by categories. The boundaries are
blurred here, as they were in her life” (Holmes & Wall, 2018; p. 5). Bambara
herself, was resistant to the labels used to categorize and divide marginalized
people, as demonstrated in her 2008 essay, “On the Issue of Roles,” when she
writes, “Perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and
concentrate on Blackhood” (p. 101).
Bambara had a vested interest in Black liberation and, like Zora Neale
Hurston and Toni Morrison, she wrote for Black people. Her approach to art was
as an activist. In fact, asserts May (2012), Bambara’s “writing (like her work as a
teacher, social worker, and filmmaker) was always informed by her sense of
social activism and social justice in the broadest sense” (p. 84). In a 1982
interview with Kay Bonetti, Bambara states,
As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is
to make revolution irresistible. One of the ways I attempt to do that
is by celebrating those victories within the black community. And I
think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for
celebration. Also, my job is to critique the reactionary behavior
within the community and to keep certain kinds of calls out there:
the children, our responsibility of children, our responsibility to
maintain some kind of continuity from the past. But I think for any
artist your job is determined by the community you’re identifying
with … But in this country (US) we’re not encourage and equipped
at any particular time to view things that way. And so the artwork or
the art practice that sells a capitalist ideology is considered art and
anything that deviates from that is considered political
propagandist, polemical or didactic, strange, weird, subversive, or
ugly (p. 35).
Bambara’s posthumous novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999),
115
is based
on the infamous Atlanta, GA child murders.
116
She began collecting data for Those
115
The novel was originally titled, If Blessings Come.
116
Over a period of two years, between 1979 and 1981, a series of murders were committed against both
Black adults and children in Atlanta, GA. Of the forty people murdered, most were Black boys under the
age of 15. Wayne Williams, a young Black man, was arrested and convicted for two of the adult murders.
94
Bones in 1979, while living in Atlanta. In the novel, she begins her
Acknowledgements with Miss Adelaide’s mother, an elder who calls the former’s
excuses for not “marching herself over, shy or no shy, [to] write down the
mothers’ stories, “Chicken shit,”
[M]y forte was fiction and my fictional impulse tended to override
my documentary one. “Chicken shit.” Miss Adelaide’s mother said
… In 1979 and 1980, while I was still in the throes of The Salt
Eaters, a number of friends nudged me into the realization that the
sketches, narrative essays, and stories I’d been drafting about
events which would later be called the Atlanta Missing and
Murdered Children’s Case were really portions of the book (p. 671).
The book spans almost seven years, from July 20, 1980 to July 8, 1987, and is set
in two states, Atlanta, Georgia and Epps, Alabama. Bambara worked on Those
Bones intermittently, over a twelve year period, before succumbing to colon
cancer on December 9, 1995 in Philadelphia, PA. Toni Cade Bambara amassed a
large amount of information on the case even before she decided to write the
novel. When her longtime friend, Toni Morrison, edited Those Bones for
publication in 1999, there was so much data that she had to cut close to 1,200
pages from the manuscript (which she names Bambara’s magnum opus).
117
Morrison asserts that Bambara’s work is “absolutely critical to twentieth century
literature” (Holmes & Wall 2008; p. 3).
118
Williams, who maintains his innocence, has never been charged, but neither tried nor convicted for the
child murders. The police have closed all of the cases, though some of the child murders not attributed to
Williams, remain unresolved.
117
The novel is 689 pages.
118
Toni Morrison published two of Bambara’s works posthumously. In addition to Those Bones, Morrison
published Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions in 1995.
95
On June 21, 1981, Wayne Williams was arrested, and on February 27,
1982, he was convicted by a majority Black jury, of the murders of two adults,
Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Williams was given a life sentence. He
has neither been tried nor convicted of the multiple child murders. Many
members of the Black community, including James Baldwin, criticized and
questioned the findings. They viewed Williams as a scapegoat. Though he may
have been connected to the murders of the adults, “What happened to the
children remains one of the late 20th Century's saddest and most-shameful
riddles” (Kenan, 1999),
The verdict is being appealed and it is expected that information
about the multiple series of murders that have taken place
throughout the three-year period, particularly those that occurred
while Williams was in jail, will come up in the defense case. Before,
during and after the trial, a number of community forums focused
on the stark discrepancy between 'official' and 'actual' versions …
What the community records demonstrate is that the killings did
not cease with the arrest and imprisonment of Wayne Williams -
they are even now going on (Bambara, 1982; p. 111).
Bambara’s novel reminds the reader that the struggle for Black liberation and
safety, is ongoing, and that “it continues to be a fierce battle against powerful
forces that are determined to destroy the progress made so far” (Grigsby, 2009).
Gutiérrez-Jones notes that the novel, “is a call for a new investigation, but it is
also a relentless critique of those institutional forces that have worked to
undercut community agency” (p. 173).
On Thursday, March 21, 2019, officials in Atlanta, GA announced an action
to reexamine some of the evidence in the Atlanta child murders, using new
96
technology. According to Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms
119
, “A lot has changed in
Atlanta since 1979.” Mayor Bottom’s aim is “to make sure the victims’ memories
are not forgotten [and] to make sure, in the truest sense of the word, to let the
world know that black lives do matter” (Richards, Gutierrez & Kesslen, 2019). I
am confident Bambara is pleased.
In this fictionalized, historical account, Those Bones Are Not My
Child (1999) centers on the Spencer family, an estranged Black couple, Nathaniel
(Spence) Spencer and Marzala (Zala) Rawls Spencer, and their three children,
Sundiata (Sonny), Kenti and Kofi. The Spencers’ eldest son, twelve-year old
Sonny, has disappeared after failing to return from a camping trip. When the
novel opens, Sonny has been missing for one year,
The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they
repeat every day. There've been no new cases of kidnap and murder
since the arrest back in June. You've good reason to know that the
official line is a lie. But you sweep the walk briskly all the way to the
hedge, as though in clearing the leaves you can clear from your
mind all that you know. You'd truly like to know less. You want to
believe. It's 3:23 on your Mother's Day watch. And your child is
nowhere in sight (p. 3).
Bambara, with the line, “You’ve good reason to know that the official line is a lie,”
reflects the frustration and fear that Black parents experience every day. Spence
and Zala, along with other community members, must organize. They form their
own organization, the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (STOP), in order to
stop the kidnappings and murders of their children. They begin an independent
investigation because they know that the Task Force (police, city and federal
119
Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Black woman, is the first woman to be elected mayor of Atlanta, GA.
97
officials) are not interested in Black lives. Along with mismanagement and
outright refusals to investigate many cases, the officials blame the parents,
Monstrous parents, street-hustling young hoodlums, and the gentle
killer became the police/media version of things. In the
newspapers, STOP's campaign -- to mount an independent
investigation, to launch a national children's rights movement, to
establish a Black commission of inquiry into hate crimes -- would
be reported, invariably, on the same page as stories about parental
neglect, gang warfare, and drug-related crimes committed by
minors, most often drawn from the files of cities outside of Atlanta.
And frequently, photos of Atlanta's grief-stricken mothers would
appear above news stories that featured "the gentle killer" -- a man
or woman who'd washed some of the victims, laid them out in clean
clothes, and once slipped a rock under a murdered boy's head "like
a pillow," a reporter said. Like a pillow … In '81, as thousands were
scheduled to board the buses for STOP's May 25 rally in
Washington, D.C., an FBI agent told a civic group down in Macon,
Georgia, that several of the cases were already solved, that the
parents had killed their children because "they were such little
nuisances." (pp. 5, 61).
The inactivity and inefficiency of the officials, (Zala, at one point questions,
“Doesn’t someone proof-read the copy before sending it out?” (p. 16)), along with
their in-fighting, demonstrate that the officials (including the new Black mayor
and the two police forces, one new Black and one existing white) are more
interested in placating potential city funders and spreading a positive image,
which will in turn, increase business, development and tourism dollars, than they
are in solving the crimes or saving the lives of Black children.
Mothers of several murdered children happened to meet that spring
at a community gathering and they compared notes. Weeks later, a
group of them staged a sit-in. Organized as the Committee to Stop
Children's Murders, they camped out in media and law-
enforcement offices, demanding a special investigation of "the
epidemic of child murders." During their press conference, they
charged that the authorities were dragging their feet because of
race; because of class; because the city, the country's third-busiest
convention center, was trying to protect its image and was trying to
98
mask a crisis that might threaten Atlanta's convention trade dollars
(p. 16).
120
When the family is finally reunited with Sonny, he is unrecognizable, and
extremely malnourished,
“That is not my boy,” [Zala] had told them. She’d rehearsed the line
months ago in the Quonset hut in Atlanta. “Those bones are not my
child.” Brushing Spence’s words away from her ear, she told them it
was fruitless to try and palm the damaged boy off as their son. But
Spence kept saying things to bring her around, to take a good look,
to concentrate (p. 517).
He is also so mentally and physically abused, that he cannot speak initially. Even
as he heals, he remains mostly silent. Zala also wants to avoid what she know will
be waiting for them in Atlanta,
When she thought of Atlanta, it was the media mob that she
pictured. Sonny strapped in a chair, the wire from the clip-on mike
snaking around his throat and down his back. Her son a memorial
object, a hope symbol, a boy come back from the dead, with the
malignancy still plaguing the city and the authorities still hoaxing
them all (pp. 551-552).
In the end,
Bambara’s message is that the only solution to this dilemma is to
wake up to the reality of racial oppression and fight against it as
Marzala and Spence do. They may not win the larger battle of
discovering the real murderers of forty or more children, but they
win the small battle of saving their son, and Bambara’s message is
that through small successes, great victories are eventually won
(Grigsby, 2009).
Much of the critique of the novel has been favorable, and any issues are often
connected to critics’ assertions that Bambara fails to provide a sense of closure
120
Though the novel is based on the Atlanta child murders forty years ago, the context is strikingly relevant
today. For example, in the United States, there are approximately 640,000 Black girls and women missing.
See, Brown (2019), “Missing Black Girls and the Individuals and Organizations Trying to Help.
99
for the reader (even though she does reunite Sonny with his family). The
conclusion of the novel, argues Benjamin (2004), “compels strong readerly
responses yet provides no resolution” (p. 339). This lack of resolution, I posit,
could be due to Bambara’s untimely passing before she was able to complete the
novel. Grigsby (2009) however further disagrees with Bambara’s position on
Wayne Williams as a scapegoat, asserting that it is, “somewhat problematic.”
Grigsby does not seem to be open to the possibility that Williams, indeed could be
a scapegoat, especially considering that the child murders continued even after
Williams was convicted and jailed. Grigsby, however, does agree that the novel is
an important work.
Other critics, like Benjamin (2001) have an issue with “the sheer number of
secondary characters in the novel” (p. 339). Those Bones is “admittedly not an
easy read – especially for those who still remember faces of the more than 40
victims flashed upon television screens. Weighty, powerful intense and
hunting. Those Bones Are Not My Child is a literary monument – a loving tribute
to children who died but weren’t forgotten” (Greenlee, 2000; p. 49)
Holmes & Wall (2008) consider this “epic novel” to be “one of the most
precisely drawn portraits of contemporary urban American life we have” (p. 4). In
this portrait Bambara manages to make the collective voice of Black mothers (and
the communities alongside them) heard, using more than words. Bambara
recognized that the English language imposed on Black people is insufficient,
I think there have been a lot of things going on in the Black
experience for which there are no terms, certainly not in English, at
this moment. There are a lot of aspects of consciousness for which
there is no vocabulary, no structure in the English language which
100
would allow people to validate the experience through language. I’m
trying to find a way to do that … I do know that the English
language that grew from the European languages has been
systematically stripped of the kinds of structures and the kinds of
vocabularies that allow people to plug into other kinds of
intelligences. That’s no secret. That’s part of their whole history,
wherein people cannot be a higher sovereign than the state. At the
time when wise folk were put to the rack was also a time when
books were burned, temples razed to the ground, and certain types
of language “mysteries” for lack of a better word—were suppressed.
That’s the legacy of the West” (qt. in Salaam, 2008; p. 58).
Though the literary arts may not always be considered as important as the on-
the-ground struggle, Black literary arts, remains a standard force in Black
liberation and cultural efforts,
I never thought … well, writing seemed like a frivolous way to
participate in struggle. It wasn’t really until I went to Cuba—
although I certainly had been writing for years and publishing for
years, and taking some things rather seriously, and being
embarrassed about the amount of time I used to spend trying to
learn how to write—but in Cuba everything was confirmed. People
made me look at what I already knew about the power of the word,
which is something I certainly knew … I think it was in 1973 when I
really began to realize that this was a perfectly legitimate way to
participate in struggle. I don’t have to be out there running in the
streets or in the barricades. This counts too (qtd. in Salaam, 2008;
pp. 63-64).
Bambara demonstrates the importance of the literary arts to the struggle for
liberation. Because her art was creates for a purpose, and because she understood
the power of the word, Bambara’s work could prove to be a useful tool and a new
Coded Word.
101
Indicators of the Coded Word
Each of the three novels introduces the concept of hidden communication
through word coding, which raises the possibility that the authors may be further
coding the word in the literature.
In Seraph on the Suwanee, the incorporation of the Coded Word is not
surprising because Hurston comes from a literary tradition, as Kaplan (2003)
asserts, that is “especially marked by coded, masked, double-voiced discourses”
(p. 3). The novel, on the surface appears to be about a family of poor, white
Florida Crackers, focusing on a man and his neurotic wife, who rise above poverty
to affluence. However, beneath the surface, Hurston presents a negative and
“profoundly diseased” version of whiteness (Meisenhelder, 1995). The ability to
read the double-voiced discourse comes from direct experience with the Black
community, who have learned to look beyond the surface of communication, and
focus on its intent.
In God Help the Child, Booker’s reading lists point to hidden (or coded)
messages. He is an avid reader with a duffle bag “stuffed with more books, one in
German, two books of poetry, one by somebody named Haas and some
paperback books by more writers I’ve never heard of” (p. 61). He is a graduate
student. Bride notes, “I know he has degrees from some university. He owns T-
shirts that say so” (p. 61). Booker is a renaissance man, a scholar, a poet and a
musician. One of the books is significant, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
(1980), a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in 1327. One of
the hidden rooms in the novel, the central room and the most heavily guarded, is
102
the finis Africae
121
that can only be accessed through a secret door. The finis
Africae is connected to the Leones room, which contains books by African
authors. The idea of mystery, as well as hidden rooms and guarded writings
indicate the Coded Word.
In Those Bones Are Not My Child, there is a direct reference to the
Underground Railroad, which indicates the presence of the Coded Word by
default,
Runaway. How heroic it had sounded in her daddy’s mouth, in
Spences’ bedtime stories. The folks of old fleeing captivity and
setting up bases in the woods, the swamps, the hills, and in the
camps of the Seminoles. Runaway. The word figured too in Mama
Lovey’s family tales, in Grandaddy Wesley’s chronicles of the
Spncers. Uncle That, M’Dear Selestine, and the stalwart patriarch
Spence had been named after, run off from slavery, from migrant
camps, tramping along on foot with the North Star by night and the
moss growing on the north side of the trees by day (p. 103).
121
“The end of Africa” – Latin.
103
Coded Sound
“In my mother’s house, no matter what has happened to us, we have to sing.”
(Juno Lewis, 1965)
The poet, Juno Lewis writes of a melody that he and his father sing during a
ceremony for his departed mother. The poem, “Juno Se Mama” was taught to
him by his father.
122
He describes it as “a ritual dedicated to [his] mother” and,
A prayer for all those who have suffered the aftereffects of slavery …
It is also a spiritual for the sick and poor, light for the blind, comfort
to the young and old, cradle song for babies, wind for birds in trees,
the sound of thunder and lightning that burst out over the earth. It
is a rhythm of virtue. When you are all alone … The ritual, Juno Se
Mama, begins in a mighty cloud burst, and the rippling of the water
drum begins beating against the air cups of the world. Moon
children, ready to be born. Signs of sky, earth, water. One is born
called Juno. His father's house is the bird. You can hear him
teaching his son how to fly. Fly, till you reach the sky. Float. Fly.
Float till you make a boat … I'm going to show you your Mama’s
home. She lives in the sea. There is birth in the water. In my
mother's house. No matter what has happened to us, we have to
sing. There is always land ahead. Earth is where it is happening. It
is where we go from here. We have to sound the cry of the conch
shell. Blow the shell. Blow. Blow till you see … And Juno blowed
and blowed till he grooved and grooved (Lewis, 1966).
The refrain of the powerful prayer repeats, “So we sang this melody” throughout
the eighteen minute recording (Lewis, 1966). As a metaphor, Mama is Africa,
Juno represents her Diaspora (her lost or separated children), the bird represents
Sankofa and the melody represents the importance of tone in Black
communication. The many languages forced upon Black people have not been
able to separate this aspect of the mother-tongue. Therefore, sound, in the form
122
Juno Lewis was the only poet to be recorded by John Coltrane.
104
of music and tone, can be used to code messages by appealing to emotions and
creating images (or imaginings).
There are numerous scientific studies on the effects of sounds and
rhythms on the human body and psyche. Li, Juan, et al. (2011) conducted a study
to see if what they termed, “sustained subliminal auditory stimulus (SAS)” could
affect human perception and emotion. They found that sound does in fact, affect
human emotion (p. 381). Black women, who are known worldwide for their hums
and humphs, seem to have an innate ability to communicate, and manipulate
effectively through the use of tone. Mari Evans, in her 1970 poem, “I am a Black
Woman,” writes of the Black woman’s hum as inseparable from her identity,
I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night (p. 11)
Sherley Anne Williams (1980), in the short story, “Meditations on History,”
writes of a Black woman’s ability to sing resistance and aid liberatory efforts
while simultaneously, and literally soothing a savage beast with her hums,
Sometimes she closed her eyes or looked out into space. At these
times she would hum, an absurd, monotonous little tune in a minor
key, the melody of which she repeated over and over again … My
drowsiness was compounded, I finally realized, by the monotonous
melody which she hummed” p. 265).
Music is a nuanced form of sound which uses tone and rhythm to communicate
various moods. It is so interwoven into Black culture that often, it is the absence
105
of music that is most notable. In the three novels chosen for this study, music
plays a significant role and can be used as Coded Word.
For example, in Seraph on the Suwanee, Jim is looking for Joe in the
turpentine camp when he hears him singing, “Hands full of nothing, mouth full of
‘much obliged.’”Jim does not realize that the song Joe switches to is, in actuality,
Coded Word; “Now Joe had switched to that teppentime song: ‘Oh, don’t you see
dat rider coming?’” (p. 43). Jim may not see Joe, but Joe somehow sees Jim, or is
informed of his arrival. Joe, in fact, is warning the other Black workers that Jim
(the “rider”) is near.
Hurston’s incorporation of music also reveals how it can be used to affect
the psyche. On Jim and Arvay’s wedding night,
Less than ten minutes after the lamp had been blown out, there was
a gentle rustling outside the bedroom window, and then the full
tones of guitar broke out, playing in the way that only Negroes play
that instrument” (p. 58) … [Arvay] stood in her bare feet and
wedding nightgown and lived through the serenade. Instrumental
pieces, blues sung by men and some by women; spirituals, not sad
and forlorn, but sung with a drummy rhythm to them; work songs
and ballads” (pp. 58-59) … The music outside did something
strange and new to Arvay. The strains induced pictures before her
eyes. They conjured up odors and tastes (p. 59).
One of the songs that Jim hires Joe and his friends to sing on his wedding night
should be considered; “The song was an old, old ballad and it haunted you. Sweet
and bitter mixed up in just the right amounts” (p. 59). Arvay is referring to
Careless Love, an African American folk song, and blues and jazz standard. It has
been recorded by numerous Black artists, including Bessie Smith, George Lewis,
106
Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Big Joe Turner, Eartha Kitt and Ray Charles.
This song makes reference to a lover who threatens to kill a wayward lover.
In the second novel, God Help the Child, Bride listens as Sweetness hums
“some blues song while washing panty hose in the sink” (p. 87). As a child, Bride
does not know the words or the name of the song, but she knows the feeling. As a
woman, Bride repeats the practice as she and Booker tend to Queen, “Neither one
spoke during those ablutions and, except for Bride’s occasional humming, the
quiet served as the balm they both needed” (p. 166-167).
There is humming throughout the third novel, Those Bones Are Not My
Child, beginning with Spence being distracted by the hum of a kite string as he
stood in the middle of some sort of prayer or ritual circle as a child (p. 135).
People hum-talk in the novel; the people who come to see the mayor are “hum-
talking about the evil of the world” (p. 294), Spence regularly hums into Zala’s
hair (pp. 252, 294), Paulette sings and hums the gospel song, “I’m on the
Battlefield for My Lord,” (p. 498), even the children (p. 588), and “folks in the
choir would hum [Zala] along” as she overcame her fear of speaking up (p. 661).
There are 120 references to listen (or listening) in the novel. These can be read as
a form of summoning (of attention and/or action). This seems to be supported by
the fact that Bambara also includes a significant amount of drumming in the
novel, a key form of communication in Black culture. The drum has been used in
times of celebration, of mourning, in resistance efforts, and in war.
In addition, Spence brings up the idea of echolocation as an indicator that
the reader should listen,
107
The smell of spruce and pine seems awfully strong for this time of
year,” he said, the rumbling of the Cat drowning out the tumbling of
the lock. “Echolocation,” he said. “Remember? The bats?” He took
his hands from the wheel and shook them. “Smells can tell time and
sounds can see space.” “What?” “Echolocation. At the zoo,” he said.
“How bats locate themselves because they can’t see. They send out a
high-frequency pitch, then listen to sounds reverberating from their
surroundings. Remember? … Don’t you remember? How could you
not remember? It’s called echolocation. We were all at the zoo (p.
210).
Coded Sight
Karla Holloway (1992) asserts that “the area of [Black women’s] distinction
lies between the spoken test and the expressive text – between voice and vision”
(p. 6). In texts written by Black women, one of the first indicators of using the
voice visually is the incorporation of “this is how,” and/or show-tell statements.
This phenomenon is shared by both men and women characters created by Black
women.
In Seraph on the Suwanee, Arvay worries about how Jim will react when
she shows him their firstborn, Earl. Even before she knows “In what words could
she explain? She handed the bundle off to one side, so as to be sure not to overlay
it, and turned away and cried” (p. 68). Arvay’s way of telling Jim is to show him,
both the malformed baby and her shame. In addition, in another example of
show-tell, Arvay and Jim’s other son, Kenny, teaches Joe and Dessie’s daughter,
Belinda how to stand on her head by showing her, indicating a “this is how”
visual type of communication with, “Ain’t she wonderful? Nobody can’t stand on
their head that good. Nobody but Belinda. I showed her how myself” (p. 109).
Unfortunately,
108
Belinda was innocent of underwear. She was there on her head,
with her short percale skirt hanging over her face, with her shining
little black behind glinting in the sun. Kenny was innocent, and
besides he had seen it so often as he put his pupil through her paces
that he paid no attention (p. 110).
In addition, Jim, in an effort to connect with his wife, tries to make Arvay
understand by showing and telling her. Frustrated, he finally snaps at her, “I keep
on trying to tell you and show you” (p. 125).
In God Help the Child, there is a focus on Bride’s “funny-colored eyes,
crow-black with a blue tint, something witchy about them too” (p. 6). Brooklyn
notes after Bride’s violent beating at the hands of Sofia Huxley, that,
Somebody ruined one of those eyes, the ones that spooked
everybody with their strangeness—large, slanted, slightly hooded
and funny-colored, considering how black her skin is. Alien eyes, I
call them, but guys think they’re gorgeous, of course (p. 23)
Jeri refers to them as “wolverine eyes” (p. 34). Booker calls them “mesmerizing”
and “so deeply expressive they said much more than mere language could.
Speaking eyes, he thought, accompanied by the music of her voice … he could
always see starlight in her eyes” (p. 133).
Bride is also able to “read” eyes. For example, she notes that the eyes of
Huxley, the innocent teacher that she helped to put away, “are now more like a
rabbit’s than a snake’s” (p. 16). The fact that Bride’s eyes are “speaking eyes,”
indicates the visual aspect of Black women’s communication, and the “music of
her voice,” exhibits a characteristic of Black, tonal communication. Both of these
forms of communication have been used to code the word, and in the novel,
indicate the presence of the Coded Word.
109
In Those Bones Are Not My Child, in a clear demonstration of the Coded
Word, Teo’s wife walks into the community relations bureau and flashes Zala a
signal (p. 360). Bambara also includes the idea of the Coded Word. With her
“Pass the Dutchie”
123
reference, she leaves open the possibility that she too, may
be coding the word,
“Hey.” You still not caught up, or rather too much so, won’t relent.
You escort them to check out the adults, your convoy sailing under
the flag of what again did “Pass the Dutchie on the left-hand side”
mean? It’s still ’83 on your hit parade, if not ’79 (p. 665).
She also notes, “This is how we spent the first part of our anniversary” (p. 397),
which indicates that she has just described the events visually.
The visual is key to nuanced communication, even when that
communication is verbal. There is a noted difference in how expressions are
presented and interpreted in different cultures. For example, Ray Birdwhistell
(1970) documented the variation in his research among the Kutenai nation who,
when speaking English, move their bodies and gesture differently than they do
when speaking their native language. He asserts that there is “a systematic
relationship between audible and visible communicative behavior [and] these are
coercive and interdependent language systems” (p. 28). In “Speech Sounds,”
Octavia Butler (2005) creates a world where spoken language is almost non-
existent. To communicate, the people use gestures, grunts and symbols.
However, because of diverse people translating from their various centers, there
123
“Pass the Dutchie” is a 1982 song produced by Toney Owens and recorded by Musical Youth, a UK-
based British Jamaican teen group. “Dutchie” is used in the song as a replacement for the commonly used
“Kutchie” (marijuana).
110
is always the threat of some form of conflict. This further and significantly
demonstrates the importance of cultural centering in interpreting visual
expression.
111
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION
Because the Coded Word exists as evidenced in the literature, it can be
used as a tool of liberation for Black people. In the tradition of Diop’s aim for a
unified, African language, the Coded Word has the ability to unify Black resistant
and liberatory expression. A (re)reading of Black women’s literature can assist in
building a glossary, one that act as a resource to serve intracultural interests.
Unity is a key concept of the moving forward for Black people. In order to
reconnect the unconscious practices of sound and sight communication to their
original meanings and aims, one of the first steps is for Black people to once
again gather in closed spaces and share critical information. Closed spaces,
however, should be redefined, as they can happen in quick conversations between
Black people, even within larger (and more public spaces), and can then be
spread throughout the Black community using oral and visual communication.
This act accomplishes two things, it confronts, challenges and changes
propagandistic and divisive, Western-founded beliefs and practices that delay the
progression of Black movement toward liberty; and it adds to the creation,
collection and sharing of a unified Coded Word.
112
CHAPTER 7: GLOSSARY OF THE CODED WORD
Using sound and sight, the three novels can be effectively used as tools in
resistance and liberation movements by incorporating the readings into every-
day activities. For example, they can be included as regular readings (in changing
order as needed) in book clubs, or spotlighted books strategically placed in
bookstores and neighborhood libraries. They can be silently left behind on
random park benches and restaurant tables. They can also be brought up as
interesting topics in casual conversations, or mentioned in passing.
Seraph on the Suwanee can be read as Coded Word for
organizing Black business and political networks, and building the
Black community. The novel, though centered on Florida Crackers,
incorporates the Nguzo Saba; Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-Determination),
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics),
Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity) and Imani (Faith)
124
with its representation
of the Black community. The Crackers in the novel are not immediately
dangerous, in fact they seem to be more of a danger to themselves, as symbolized
by Arvay and Jim’s violent son (who was created out of a violent act). Therefore,
the Black residents of Sawley are able to safely build a self-sufficient Black
community and financial support system, not as an act of boycotting the white
124
The Nguzo Saba are the seven core principles of Kwanzaa. See Karenga, Maulana (1996).
113
community, but in the act of building the Black economic base and preserving
Black culture.
While white Sawley does their thing, “The Negroes [are] about their own
doings in their own part of town,” (p. 3), and when white Sawley needs help, it
goes to the Black community. Though, as Arvay notes, “every Southern white
man has his pet Negro,” (pp. 60-61), it is Jim who seeks Joe’s help, not the other
way around (though it seems to be a mutually beneficial “friendship”). Jim notes,
“Maybe Joe might know something that could help me just in here” (p. 43). Joe
also helps Jim “in other ways. It seem to be a sort of underground system in
Colored Town that the whites did not know about … They had, it seemed,
connections with a big lumber company” (p. 82). Though there are clear class,
cultural and color divisions, “Colored Town,” the Black community of Sawley
seems to be the place to go to make money, legitimate or otherwise (pp. 82, 89,
117).
Hurston, in presenting two separate sides of town, highlights her support
of segregated communities. The argument against integration is symbolized by
Joe’s move from “Colored Town,” to a more prosperous (and integrated) side of
town. The breakup of his marriage to Dessie and Joe’s unfinished house,
demonstrate Hurston’s negative view of the practice.
An element of risk and the likelihood of violence exists in the separation of
the two communities. American history has demonstrated how dangerous it is for
Black people to build independent lives and self-sustaining communities.
Therefore, this Coded Word must take into consideration, the lessons to be
114
learned from past Black communities that were destroyed by angry and jealous
white mobs during numerous race riots and massacres; including New York City,
NY (1863), Atlanta, GA (1906); St. Louis, MO (1917), Knoxville, TN and
Washington, DC (both in 1919); Tulsa, OK (1921), and Rosewood, FL (1923).
Hurston reminds the reader to be wary of whiteness through her use of
symbolism. For example, in the tradition of using hair as “word,” Hurston
associates blond hair with negative aspects of whiteness. Arvay Henson has “long
light yellow hair with a low wave to it with Gulf-blue eyes” (p. 4). She is thin and
“queer, if not a bit ‘tetched’ and ‘high strung’” (p. 6). Arvay and Jim’s son, Earl is
also blond, and with him also, “Something must be wrong. She could tell from
Dessie’s kind eyes trying to lie to her and look enthusiastic … Arvay looked at her
baby, and then she understood. It was nothing like Jim at all. The hair and
eyelashes were perfectly white. It would be blond. That was disappointing but not
serious” (p. 67).
God Help the Child can be read as Coded Word for Sankofa, a
directive to revisit the past in order to heal and move forward. In the
novel, Morrison reminds the reader of the effects of an unhealed past. Sweetness,
can be read as a parent as well as a system, while Bride can be read as an abused
child as well as an abused people, Black people. Sweetness finally realizes
something that, as she herself admits, she “should have known all along. What
you do to children matters. And they might never forget” (p. 42).
Morrison ends the novel where she begins it, with Sweetness. This full
circle demonstrates the impossibility of growth without healing. Sweetness,
115
though older, has not demonstrated either. She still has issues with colorism.
Even as she notes that things “have changed a mite … all over TV, in fashion
magazines, commercials, even … in movies” (p. 176), she has not internalized the
acceptance. Sweetness remains highly critical of Bride and because of this, also
remains separated from her only daughter and soon-to-be-born grandchild. The
past (Sweetness) is disconnected from the present (Bride) and the future (Bride’s
unborn child).
Those Bones Are Not My Child can be read as Coded Word for
uprising; a call to arms. The last novel is literally code for the last resort.
Even Dr. Martin Luther King, who supported nonviolent peaceful protest,
understood the time and place for war,
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn
riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at
the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions
that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause
individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage
in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a
riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has
failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor
has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years (King 1968).
In Those Bones, I explored both sound and sight. Because there were so many
references to listen in the novel, I first investigated the sounds. Drums are
significant in the novel, appearing early on as a “funeral drum” (p. 13), a message
directly related to the murdered children. Some roll “big drum cases, (p. 166)”
others carry “huge” drums (p. 620). These references can be read as a call to
attention/call to arms.
116
Sight is also significant in the novel. Because of America’s deafness to the
plight of Black people, sight must be employed. In other words, sometimes
people must be shown in order to comprehend. Sight as Coded Word produced
some interesting and novel ideas that supported the idea of Sound as Coded
Word. In comparing Sonny’s behavior after his return to that of South African
political prisoners, the Spencer’s friend, Gerry, a woman from South Africa
maintains, “there is no way to talk about torture and hatred, because they aren’t
images, they’re un-images (p. 560). An “un-image,” asserts Avilez (2012),
intimates the concept of a negative space … In addition, because an
image is a representation of an idea or a person, it is a device for the
conveyance of meaning. An “un-image,” then, would be that which
is non-communicative or that which fails to communicate meaning
(p. 21).
It is significant that Bambara (through her Black woman character, Gerry)
stresses the importance of sight in communication in order to avoid leaving one
“waiting for understanding” (Avilez, 2002; p. 22). In spite of the un-images, there
are elements of the novel that can be clearly seen.
Much of the background in Those Bones shows the reader the idea of
organizing and presents images of preparation, seemingly for war. There are
overhead blasts of cherry bombs and fireworks (p. 103). There is a military
presence with storm troopers entering the city (p. 220). Teo wonders, “Is
someone going to clue me in about the boots and the warriors?” (p. 231). The
seven marching boys of Ashby Street, who break rank then join again (pp. 259-
260), and, most significantly, the boot-shaped route of the murders (p. 258), all
indicate a movement towards war. Spence directly calls for action,
117
“Great,” Spence muttered, worrying the gum. “A city full of Nazis.”
And with nothing in place, he was thinking. The Black community
becoming a killing ground, fascists from all corners of the globe
marching in, and nothing was in place. “When the hell are you guys
going to take responsibility for civilizing your community?” Spence
snapped. “How come you’re sitting around with this bastard talking
about Julian Bond instead of taking some action?” (p. 220).
Zala, also urges preparation for resistance,
You remember what your grandaddy use to say about the Ku Klux
Klan, when they’d announce they were going to parade and
everybody better get off the streets? They’d turn the power off in the
Black community, remember? Just to show they could do it, just to
have people shaking in the dark, afraid to defend themselves. And
what did people do? Did they hide under the bed? Did they get
paralyzed with fear? That’s what the newspapers said. But what did
Grandaddy tell you?” “Said they pulled ropes across the roads if
they were coming on horses. Said they dug up the roads and made
ruts if they were coming in trucks. They put bottles in the trees and
stakes in the ground and nails and tacks and stuff like that. Sent the
dogs out to get ’em when they climbed out of the trucks. Got them
some rakes and pickaxes if they tried to set things on fire. Said they
drove ’em off.” “In other words, they didn’t panic. They got together
and made plans (pp. 304-305).
118
REFERENCES
Akbar, Na’im. “Africentric Social Sciences for Human Liberation.” The
Afrocentric Paradigm. Ed. Ama Mazama. Trenton: Africa World Press.
2003.
Akhtar, Jaleel. Toni Morrison and the New Black: Reading God Help the Child.
New York: Routledge. 2019
Albrecht, Milton C. “Does Literature Reflect Common Values?” American
Sociological Review. 21.6 (1956): 722-729.
Andrews, Vernon L. and Richard G. Majors. “African American Nonverbal
Culture.” Black Psychology. 4th edition. Reginald L. Jones (ed). Hampton:
Cobb & Henry, 2004. (331-351).
Ani, Marimba. Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural
Thought and Behavior. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1994.
Arenge, Andrew, Stephanie Perry and Dartunorro Clark. “Poll: 64 Percent of
Americans Say Racism Remains a Major Problem.” NBC News. (May 29,
2018).
Asante, Molefi Kete. Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Trenton: Africa
World Press, 1992.
---. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
---. The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics.
Trenton: Africa world Press, 1999
---. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Chicago: African American
Images. 2003.
119
---. “The Quest for a Method.” The Afrocentric Paradigm. Ed. Ama Mazama.
Trenton: Africa World Press. (2003): 145-150.
---. "Locating a Text: Implications of Afrocentric Theory." The Afrocentric
Paradigm. Ed. Ama Mazama. Trenton: Africa World Press. (2003): 235-
234.
---. Race, Rhetoric, and Identity: The Architecton of Soul. Amherst: Humanity,
2005.
---. An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance. Cambridge:
Polity, 2007.
---. Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation. New York: Prometheus
Books, 2009.
---. “Afrocentricity.” Asante.net (April 13, 2009).
Avilez, Gershun. “The Aesthetics of Terror: Constructing ‘Felt Threat’ in Those
Bones Are Not My Child and Leaving Atlanta.” Obsidian, 13.2 (2012), pp.
13–28.
Bambara, Toni Cade. “What’s Happening in Atlanta?” Race & Class. 24.2
(October 1982), pp. 111-124.
---. The Bombing of Osage Avenue, Philadelphia: Scribe Video Center. (1986).
---. Those Bones Are Not My Child. New York: Vintage, 1999.
---. The Black Woman: An Anthology. Ed. Toni Cade Bambara. New York:
Washington Square Press, 2005.
120
---. “On the Issue of Roles.” Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade
Bambara. Eds. Linda Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2008, pp. 101-110.
Basu, Biman. "The Black Voice and the Language of the Text: Toni Morrison's
"Sula"." College Literature 23.3 (1996): 88-103.
Beem, Jane A. “Secrets, Codes and Signals.” Appleseeds. March 2004. p. 18
Benberry, Cuesta. “The Heritage of an Oral Tradition: The Transmission of
Secrets in African American Culture.” Hidden in Plain View: A Secret
Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Eds. Tobin, Jacqueline L.
and Raymond G. Dobard. New York: Anchors Books, 1999
Benjamin, Shanna. Greene. “Reviewed Work: Those Bones Are Not My Child by
Toni Cade Bambara. African American Review. 35.2 (Summer 2001), pp.
338-340.
Berry, Kenyatta D. “Singing in Slavery: Songs of Survival, Songs of Freedom.”
Mercy Street Revealed. WHYY. January 25, 2017.
Bialik, Kristen. “5 Facts about Black in the U.S.” FACTANK: News in the
Numbers, Pew Research Center, February 22, 2018.
Birdwhistell, Ray L. Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion
Communication. Project Muse, and Ebrary Academic Complete
Subscription Collection. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1970.
Boaz, Franz. “Foreward.” Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and other
Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995.
121
Bohde, Stephanie. The Underground Railroad Quilt Code: A History of African
American Quilting from Ancient Practices to the Civil War Times. 2004.
Bowers, Paul. “Mother Emanuel Shooting Was a Loss for the Gullah/Geechee.”
Charleston City Paper. June 22, 2015.
Bowers, Susan R. “A Context for Understanding Morrison’s Work.” Critical
Insights: Toni Morrison. Eds. Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere.
Pasadena: Salem Press. 2010.
Boyd, Valarie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New
York: Scribner, 2002.
--- . “‘She Was Just Outrageously Brilliant’: Toni Morrison Remembers Toni Cade
Bambara.” Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Eds.
Linda Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2008, pp. 88-99.
Brennon, Sherry. “On the Sound of Water: Amiri Baraka’s ‘Black Art’.” African
American Review. 37.2-3 (2003): 299.
Brown, DeNeen. (2011) “Afro-Colombian Women Braid Messages of Freedom in
Hairstyles.” Washington Post.
Brown, Stacy M. “Missing Black Girls and the Individuals and Organizations
Trying to Help.” NNPA Black Press/NNPA Newswire. March 16, 2019.
Burks, Ruth Elizabeth. “From Baptism to Resurrection: Toni Cade Bambara and
the Incongruity of Language.” Black Women Writers 1950-1980: A
Critical Evaluation. Ed. Evans, Mari. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
122
Burrison, John A. “Cracker.” New Georgia Encyclopedia. Atlanta: Georgia
Humanities and University of Georgia Press, 2019.
Butler, Octavia. “Speech Sounds.” Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York:
Seven Stories, 2005.
Byington, Lillianna, Brittany Brown and Andrew Capps. “Black Americans Are
Still Victims of Hate Crimes More Than Any Other Group.” The Texas
Tribune. August 16, 2018.
Charles, John C. "Talk about the South: unspeakable things unspoken in Zora
Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee." The Mississippi Quarterly, vol.
62.1-2.
Charles, Ron. “Morrison Returns to Old Themes: Violence, Race.” The
Washington Post. April 15, 2015
Chen, Angela, “Toni Morrison on her novels: ‘I think goodness is more
interesting.” The Guardian, February 4, 2016.
Clarke, Deborah. “The Porch Couldn’t Talk For Looking: Voice and Vision in
Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Africana Review 35.4 (2001): 599-613.
Coleman, Floyd. “The Importance of the Decorative Arts in African American
History,” Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the
Underground Railroad. Eds. Tobin, Jacqueline L. and Raymond G.
Dobard. New York: Anchors Books, 1999.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the
politics of empowerment. Rev. Ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Danticat, Edwidge, Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, 1994.
123
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: Down, Bromley, Kent. 1859.
Dawes, Kwame S.N. “Biography of Toni Morrison.” Critical Insights: Toni
Morrison. Eds. Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere. Pasadena:
Salem Press. 2010.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
Desoky, Abdelrahman. Noiseless Steganography: The Key to Covert
Communications. West Papua: Auerbach Publications, 2016.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis. 1974
Diouf, Sylvaine A. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New
York: New York University Press, 2014.
Dittmar, Linda. "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" The Politics of Form in" The
Bluest Eye." Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Vol. 23. No. 2. Duke University
Press, 1990.
Dorman, Dereic Angelo. (2018). An Afrocentric Critique of Race Dialogues: An
Application of Theory and Practice in Africology. Dissertation. Proquest.
Drew, Benjamin. The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada.
Ontario: Dundurn Press Ltd., 2008.
Dubeck, Laura. "The Social Geography of Race in Hurston's Seraph on the
Suwanee." African American Review. 30.3, pp. 341-346.
Du Bois, W. E. B., and Alexander Street Press. Criteria of Negro Art. 1st
Electronic Ed.] ed. New York, NY: Crisis, 1926. Crisis (Online). v. 32
No. 6:290, 292, 294, 296-297. Web.
124
Dunbar, Bret. "A Detailed Look at Steganographic Techniques and Their Use in
an Open-Systems Environment." Sans Institute 1 (2002).
Edwards, Brent Hayes. "Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat." Critical
Inquiry. 28 (3) (2001): 618–649.
Ellison, Ralph. "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity"
(1953). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated. Ed.
John Callahan (2003). 81-99.
Evans, Mari. “I am a Black Woman.” I Am a Black Woman. New York: Morrow,
1970.
---. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans.
New York: Doubleday, 1984
Fatoumata, Keita. “Conjuring Aesthetic Blackness: Abjection and Trauma in Toni
Morrison's God Help the Child.” Africology: The Journal of Pan African
Studies, 11.3 (Feb 2018), pp.43-55
Finley, Taryn and Hilary Fung. “There Have Been At Least 100 Attacks on Black
Churches Since 1956.” Huffington Post. October 15, 2015.
Fox, Regis M. “Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as
Survival. 2017.
Gates, Henry Louis. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text.” Their Eyes
Were Watching God: A Casebook. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New York: Oxford
University Press (2000): 59-116.
Ghansah, Rachel Kaadzi. “The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison.” The New York
Times. (April 8, 2015).
125
Gras, Delphine. “Post What? Disarticulating Post-Discourses in Toni Morrison’s
God Help the Child. Humanities. September 27, 2016, 5.4.
Greenlaw, Lynn. “Pathways and Journeys: A McDaniel Avenue Landscape is
Transformed by Layers of History and Interest.” Greenville Journal (June
20, 2016).
Greenlee, Gale. “Those Bones Are Not My Child.” Black Issues Book Review.
Fairfax. 2.1 (Jan/Feb 2000), p. 49.
Grigsby, John L. “Those Bones Are Not My Child.” Masterplots II. Ed. Williams,
Tyrone. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2009.
Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. “Paranoid Designs: Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are
Not My Child.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. 33.2.
(September 2007): pp. 149-175.
Harris, Norman. “A Philosophical Basis for an Afrocentric Orientation.” The
Afrocentric Paradigm. Ed. Ama Mazama. Trenton: Africa World Press,
2003.
Harris, Trudier. “Toni Morrison: Solo Flight Through Literature into History.”
Critical Insights: Toni Morrison. Eds. Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W.
Iyasere. Pasadena: Salem Press. 2010
Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. Mojo Workin'. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2012.
Hecht, M., Ribeau, S., & Alberts, J.K. “An Afro-American Perspective on
Interethnic Communication.” Communication Monographs. 56. (1994).
385-410.
126
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1977
Hoby, Hermione. “Toni Morrison: ‘I’m Writing for Black People … I Don’t Have
to Apologise’.” The Guardian. April 25, 2015.
Holloway, Joseph E. Africanisms in American Culture. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1990.
Holloway, Karla F. C., and EBSCO Publishing. Moorings & Metaphors Figures of
Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 1992.
Holmes, Linda J, and Cheryl A. Wall. “Savoring the Salt: An Introduction.”
Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Eds. Linda Holmes
and Cheryl A. Wall. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a woman? : Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End
Press, 1981.
--- . Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press,
1984.
Houston, Marsha. “Multiple Perspectives: African American Women Conceive
Their Talk.” Women and Language. 23.1 (2000). pp. 11-17,
Hudson-Weems, Clenora. “Africana Womanism and the Critical Need for
Africana Theory and Thought.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 21.2
(1997): 79-84.
---. "Africana Womanism: The Flip Side of a Coin." The Western Journal of Black
127
Studies 25.3 (2001): 137-45.
---. “Africana Womanism.” The Afrocentric Paradigm. Ama Mazama, ed.
Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003.
---. Africana Womanist Literary Theory. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” (1934) Reprinted in
Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New
York: Literary Classics (1995): 830-846.
---. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York:
Harper and Row, 1937.
---. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1942.
---. Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Harper Collins, 1948.
---. “The Sanctified Church.” The Sanctified Church. New York: Marlowe &
Company, 1981.
---. Mules and Men (1935). Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other
Writings. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New York: Penguin, 1984.
---. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Worlds of Difference: Inequality in the
Aging Experience. Ed. Eleanor Palo Stoller and Rose Campbell Gibson.
Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 1994.
---. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” African American Literary Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Winston Napier. New York: University Press (2000): 54-61.
128
---. “Zora Neale Hurston on Zora Neale Hurston.” Their Eyes Were Watching
God: A Casebook. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New York: Oxford University Press
(2000): 17-18.
Imbotep, Asar Sa Ra. “Societies of Secrets” Encyclopedia of African Religion.
Eds. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama. Thousand Oaks: SAGE
Publications, 2009, pp. 620-621.
Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere. “On Toni Morrison.” Critical
Insights: Toni Morrison. Eds. Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere.
Pasadena: Salem Press. 2010
Jackson, Ronald, & Michael Hogg. Encyclopedia of Identity. Thousand Oaks:
SAGE Publications. 2010.
James, Valentine Udoh. “The Keys to the Contribution of Black Women Writers:
A Synopsis.” Black Women Writers across Cultures: An Analysis of Their
Contributions. Editors. James, Valentine Udoh, James S. Etim, Melanie
Marshall James, Ambe J. Njoh. New York: International Scholars. 2000.
Jordan, Diann. Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists
about Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science. West Lafayette:
Purdue University Press. 2006.
Jordan, Jennifer. “Review” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 15.2 (Autumn
1996), 358-360.
Kahn D. “The History of Steganography.” Information Hiding: IH. Ed. Anderson
R. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 1174. Springer, Berlin,
Heidelberg. 1996.
129
Kaplan, Carla. “Editing an Icon.” Jumpin’ at the Sun: Reassessing the Life and
Work of Zora Neale Hurston. S&F Online. Vol 3.2, (Winter 2005).
Transcripts from October 2003 Lecture.
Karenga, Maulana. "The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and
Message." African Intellectual Heritage (1996): 543-554.
Kenan, Randall. “World of the Atlanta Child Murder.” Chicago Tribune. October
17, 1999.
Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.” The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short
Fiction. 6th edition. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a
Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs. 14.1 (1988), pp. 42–72.
King, Martin Luther. “The Other America.” Speech at Grosse Point High School –
March 14, 1968. Retrieved from www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/
Knowles, Solange. “How Our February Cover Star Amandla Stenberg Learned to
Love Her Blackness.” Teen Vogue. January 7, 2016.
Lewis, Juno. “Juno Se Mama.” on Kulu Se Mama by John Coltrane. Track Los
Angeles: Impulse, 1965.
Lewis, Martin and Kären E. Wigen. “Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism.” The Myth
of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. California: University of
California Press. 1997.
Lewis, Thabiti. A Retrospective of the Revolutionary Spirit of Toni Cade
Bambara. Palmimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender and the Black
International. (2012) 1.1; 107-115.
130
---. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara: Kay Bonetti.” Conversations with
Toni Cade Bambara. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Li, Ning, Liu, Juan, Xin, Wang, Xiang-Hong, Sun. “Effect of Sustained Auditory
Stimulus on Human Emotion.” International Conference on Information
Science and Technology. (March, 2001), pp. 381-384.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing
Press. 1984.
Massiah, Louis. “Interview of Toni Cade Bambara by Louis Massiah.” New York,
NY: Hatch Billops Collection, 1995
May, Charles E. “Toni Cade Bambara.” Critical Survey of Short Fiction (Vol. 4th
ed). Ipswich: Salem Press, 2012
Mazama, Ama. “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions.” Journal of
Black Studies. 31.4 (March 2001); pp. 387-405.
---. The Afrocentric Paradigm. Ama Mazama, ed. Trenton: Africa World Press,
2003.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?: Reflections on
the Role of Black Women’s Studies in the Academy. Feminist Teacher 8.3
(October 1, 1994): 105-111.
McClaurin, Irma. “Zora Neale Hurston: Enigma, Heterodox, and Progenitor of
Black Studies.” Fire!!!, Vol. 1.1, 2012, pp. 49–67.
McDougal, Serie III. Research Methods in Africana Studies. Revised Edition.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 2017.
131
Meisenhelder, Susan. “Gender, Race & Class in Zora Neale Hurston’s Politics.”
Solidarity: A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization. (March-April,
1995).
Millhoan, Kimberly. The Bluest Eye Blues: Standing up for Toni Morrison.”
ACLU Ohio. September 17, 2013. Retrieved from www.acluohio.org.
Modupe, Danjuma Sinue. “The Afrocentric Philosophical Perspective.” The
Afrocentric Paradigm. Ama Mazama, ed. Trenton: Africa World Press,
2003: 72
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992.
---. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Black Women Writers
(1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City:
Anchor-Doubleday, 339-45.
---. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review. (1989): 1-34.
---. God Help the Child. New York: Penguin, 2015.
Murray, Madeline D. “Bambara, Toni-Cade.” The Continuum Encyclopedia of
American Literature. Eds. Steven R. Serafin and Alfred Bendixen. New
York: Continuum. 2003.
NAACP. “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” NAACP. www.naacp.org, 2014.
National Urban League. “State of Black America.” 2018.
http://soba.iamempowered.com/
Nehusi, Kimani. “From Medew Netjer to Ebonics.” Ebonics and Language
132
Education of African Ancestry Students. New York: Sankofa World
Publishers, 2001.
---. Libation: An African Ritual of Heritage in the Circle of Life. Lanhm:
University Press. 2016.
Ngũgĩ, Mukoma wa. "The Black Man's Nod." Callaloo 36.1 (2013): 86-88.
Nicholas, Alice L. “West Africanisms.” Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage
in North America. Eds. Shujaa, Mwalimu J. and Kenya J. Shujaa. New
Orleans: Sage, 2015.
Nwosu, Maik. “In the Name of the Sign: The Nsibidi Script as the Language and
Literature of the Crossroads.” Semiotica 182.1-4, pp. 285-303.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti. New York: Tom Doherty. 2015.
Olmstead, Frederick Law. Our Slave States. Dix & Edwards. 1856.
Peterson-Lewis, Sonja. “Aesthetic Practices among African American Women.”
African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Ed. Welsh-Asante, Kariamu.
Trenton: Africa World Press.
Philip, M. Nourbese and Evie Schockley. “Discourse on the Logic of Language.”
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Middletown:
Wesleyan, 1989.
Pierpont, Claudia Roth. “A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American
Contrarian.” The New Yorker. February 9, 1997.
Piexoto, Nathalia. “Voice Controlled Wheelchairs: Fine Control by Humming.”
Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine. 112.1 (October 2013):
156-165.
133
Petry, Ann. Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. New
York: Harper Collins, 1955.
Reese, Renford. “Canada: The Promised Land for U.S. Slaves.” The Western
Journal of Black Studies. 35.3 (Fall 2011): p. 208
Reviere, Ruth. "The Canons of Afrocentric Research." Handbook of Black
Studies. Molefi K. Asante and Maulana Karenga. Thousand Oaks: SAGE
Publications, Inc., 2006. pp. 261-274.
Richards, Dona. “The Nyama of the Blacksmith: The Metaphysical Significance of
Metallurgy in Africa.” Journal of Black Studies, 12.2 (1981), pp. 218–238.
Richards, Janelle, Gutierrez, Gabe and Ben Kesslen. “Atlanta Officials Announce
Fresh Investigation Into Decades-Old Child Murder Cases.” NBC News.
(March 21, 2019). Retrieved from:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/atlanta-officials-announce-
fresh-investigation-decades-old-child-murder-cases-n985896
Rodriquez, Jason. “Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-
Hop.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. (December 2006), 35.6,
pp. 645-668.
RoseGreen-Williams, Claudette. “Re-Writing the History of the Afro-Cuban
Woman: Nancy Morjn’s “Mujer Negra.” Afro-Hispanic Review. 21.1-2
(Spring-Fall 2002): 154-160
Salaam, Kalamu ya. “Searching for the Mother Tongue: An Interview with Toni
Cade Bambara.” Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara.
134
Eds. Linda Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2008.
Sinagra, Laura. "Brighter Summer Days: Blow Up: David LaChapelle Plays His
Krump Card with a South Central Dance Doc." The Village Voice 50.24
(2005): 34.
Skalland, Andrea. "Quilts Hid Coded Messages of the Underground Railroad."
Capper's. 124.12 (June 11, 2002): p. 10.
Smith, Dinitia. “Challenging the History of a Slave Conspiracy.” The New York
Times. (Feb. 23, 2002): p. 11.
Smitherman, Geneva. “Black Idiom.” African American Review. 50.4 (2017):
p. 499-505.
Spelman, Elizabeth. “Theories of Race & Gender/The Erasure of Black Women.”
Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 5.4 (January 1, 1982): p. 36-47.
Szymanski, D. M., & Stewart, D. N. (2010). Racism and sexism as correlates of
African American women’s psychological distress. Sex Roles: A Journal of
Research, 63(3-4), 226-238.
Thornton, Richard H. An American Glossary: Being an Attempt to Illustrate
Certain Americanisms upon Historical Principles. Philadelphia: JB
Lippincott, 1912.
Tobin, Jacqueline and Raymond Dobard, Jr. Hidden in Plain View: A Secret
Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday,
1990.
Turner, Lorenzo. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: University of
135
Chicago Press, 1949.
“Ubang: Community Where Men and Women Speak Different Languages.” Africa
News Service. November 11, 2003
Wahlman, Maude Southwell. “Secret African Signs Encoded in African American
Quilts.” Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the
Underground Railroad. Eds. Tobin, Jacqueline L. and Raymond G.
Dobard. New York: Anchors Books, 1999
Wainwright, G.A. “Seshat and the Pharoah.” The Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology. 26 (1941), 30-40.
Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” In
Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt,
1983.
Walker, Kara. “Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.” New York Times. April 19,
2015.
Wall, Cheryl. Zora Neale Hurston Folklore Memoirs and Other Writings. Ed.
Cheryl Wall. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Weiss, Sasha. “The Paris Review Perspective.” Critical Insights: Toni Morrison.
Eds. Iyasere, Solomon O. and Marla W. Iyasere. Pasadena: Salem Press.
2010
Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Ed. Welsh-
Asante, Kariamu. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990.
---. The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions. Westport: Greenwood Press,
1993
136
Williams, F. Leonard. Richard Allen and Mother Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church. Philadelphia: Historical Commission of Mother Bethel
A.M.E. Church, 1972.
Williams, Sherley Anne. “Encountering Zora Neale Hurston.” Their Eyes Were
Watching God: A Casebook. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New York: Oxford University
Press (2000): 59-116.
---. “Meditations on History.” Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by
Contemporary Black Women Writers. New York: Anchor, 1990.
Wilson, Robin. "Black Women Seek a Role in Philosophy." The Chronicle of
Higher Education. (54.5) 28 Sept. 2007.
“Woke.” Oxford Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2019,
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/woke
137
APPENDIX 1
Figure 1. M. Nourbese Philip Poem Excerpt
From “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” (1989)
138
APPENDIX 2
Figure 1. Common Quilt Codes
From Tobin and Dobard (1999), Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story
of Quilts and the Underground Railroad.
