Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life

SCANDALIZE MY NAME

COMMONALITIES

Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17     5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For Grammy

CONTENTS

Introduction: Back to Living Again

1   On Anger

2   Getting Happy

3   The Way It Is

4   Baby Mama

5   In the Life

Afterword: We Gon’ Be Alright

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Back to Living Again

When we are not public, with all that the word connotes for black people then how do we live and who are we?

—ELIZABETH ALEXANDER, THE BLACK INTERIOR

The notion that black culture is some kind of backwater or tributary of an American mainstream is well established in much popular as well as standard social science literature. To the prudent black American masses, however, core black culture is the mainstream.

—JOHN LANGSTON GWALTNEY, DRYLONGSO

First, a story.

I was twenty-one years old, a senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, when, after three years of immersion into what passed as the college experience on that campus, I achieved the ultimate in adult-lite independence: I moved into my own apartment. It was the top unit of an old but well-maintained three-unit building on Eighty-First Street nestled between Ashland and Damen in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, which, as you might know, is the South Side of Chicago. And what you might also know, or at least suspect, is that this was not the South Side of the Obamas. We’re not talking about Hyde Park here. I was living on the South Side of the people whose reputation for violence has made any number of national headlines but where, despite said reputation, all manner of black folk freely roam, the residents routinely put trash cans and fold-out chairs in their parking spots to keep them from being taken, the streets and sidewalks transform into playgrounds and waterparks on sticky summer days, and there are as many storefront churches as there are liquor stores and chicken joints.

Though I do not come from the great state of Chicago, I do come from one of its suburbs. Actually, that’s not true. My hometown is not a suburb of Chicago and neither is Chicago a state, of course, but when you come from Peoria, a city with a total population of about 116,000 and a black population of approximately 30,000, you learn to think of it as such. You learn that the best way to explain to non-Illinoisans, as well as many Chicagoans, where Peoria is located is in reference to Chicago (Peoria is approximately 170 miles southwest) and that its significance is typically best understood in relationship to two of its most noteworthy successes: Caterpillar, the Fortune 500 heavy-machinery manufacturer that is headquartered there and has historically employed a significant number of its residents, and the late great social commentator Richard Pryor, who was born there in 1940 (and not necessarily in that order). Anyway, the point is, the South Side of Peoria, with its masses of black people cordoned off into the most underresourced area of the city, the place where I was born and raised, is not unlike the South Side of Chicago, which became the location of my first real foray into adulthood.

For five hundred dollars a month plus utilities I had a space that was all mine, where I could come and go as I pleased, where I didn’t have to check my guests in and out, where I didn’t have a curfew, where I didn’t have to pick up and search out a place to sleep when my roommate had company, where I could decorate without getting anyone else’s input, where I could be as clean or as messy as I wanted (though, as it turned out, I was much less inclined toward messiness when I was the one paying the bills). I was ecstatic. My parents, I later found out, were not. They were slightly terrified—particularly my dad, a self-proclaimed country boy who is currently a resident of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Delta town of Gunnison, Mississippi (population: 452), who never did approve of that big ole raggedy city anyway. But, alas, that little third-floor, one-bedroom apartment, complete with its secondhand furniture and rodent interlopers, was where I established my first self-made home.

Despite whatever fears my dads—my biological father and my stepfather—might have had about their young, single, relatively sheltered daughter living alone on the South Side of Chicago, they did what they have always done and rallied together with my mothers—my biological mother and stepmother—and grandmothers to support me in my big-girl endeavors. But I remember it being my Grammy, my mother’s mother, who, though she was never to see my apartment in person herself, seemed most excited for me. Soon after moving into my place I received a care package from her containing household provisions, including a recipe book made up of her own handed-down recipes and a document she’d typed up outlining remedies for various minor catastrophes like ink-stained clothing and stubborn grease stains. Not long after that I went to visit her, and as we were sitting in her kitchen catching up on things and talking about my adventures in homemaking, I told her about how I was rather liking keeping house. And I still remember very clearly her turning to me and saying, See, it’s not so bad taking care of your home and family, is it?

It was such a simple, unassuming, and, ultimately, rhetorical question, but for reasons I did not at all understand at the time, that moment stayed with me. It was not until after she died in August 2007, while I was a graduate student in the thick of studying for my PhD comprehensive exams, that I began to fully appreciate what Grammy had been saying to me all those years before. Because it was not until then that I really began to contemplate the meaning of my grandmother’s life and its impact not just on my life but also on the shaping of my life’s work.

My grandmother, whose full name was Bernice Lee Turner (née Collier), was born in 1931, the fourth of five children, and lived most of her life in Danville, Illinois, a city about 150 miles southeast of Peoria that is so small Peoria is a big ole raggedy city in comparison. She had three children, a son named Jacque and my mother, Kim, who were born to her first husband, whom she divorced in 1960, and another son, Brett, who was born to her second husband, who died unexpectedly of health complications in 1970. She married for the final time in 1987. She worked at several different companies throughout her life, including the Internal Revenue Service in Detroit, where she lived for several years with her first husband before returning to Danville, and the Danville Housing Authority. Her longest continuous period of employment was at the First Midwest Bank in Danville, where she held various positions, including manager of teller operations, before retiring in 1993 after more than twenty-five years of service.

Despite a seemingly rewarding career, the center of my grandmother’s joy was her family, and there was nothing she loved as much as gathering with her children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, and whoever else might happen to stop through, around a meal she had labored over for hours (years after my parents divorced, my father would still go into a near drool when talking about my Grammy’s macaroni and cheese, arguably the most famous of her famous dishes). And because I was her oldest and, for a number of years, only biological grandchild and her only daughter’s only daughter, I had an especially close relationship with her. Growing up, I spent countless hours standing by her side and, occasionally, helping as she cooked in her kitchen; laying in her living-room floor cutting paper dolls out of the Jet and Ebony magazines she would save for me; sitting underneath her arm at Union Missionary Baptist Church while the organist, my uncle, played what was to me at that time absolutely terrifying shouting music; watching movies with her that I’d convinced her to rent because they were R-rated and my mother never would; making sugary-sweet coffee under her watch (because, like R-rated movies, coffee was something my mother did not allow her adolescent daughter); and going on summer vacations with her and my grandfather and younger cousin to places like St. Louis and the Wisconsin Dells. And we would talk and talk. There was very little that was off-limits between my grandmother and me. I never felt from her the judgment that I felt in other places and with other people, and it was with her alone that I was my most vulnerable, most joyful, most complete self.

But for all our talking and all our sharing, there are particular things I do not remember about my grandmother. I do not, for instance, remember her talking much about money, at least, not about how to get more of it—although she never, at any point in her life, had a whole lot more than just enough to get by. Nor do I remember her ever spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to amass material things. Now, please believe, Aunt Becie (as my cousins called her) was quite the fashion plate, and she enjoyed the finer things in life when she could. But the material things she enjoyed were by-products of a life well lived and not, in and of themselves, her reason for living. Moreover, even before her retirement she never prioritized material or immaterial stuff so much that she did not have time to cook for her family or spend time in her garden or sing in the church choir or visit with her friends or tend to her children. Which is to say, her life was full of doing the things she loved to do.

And when it came to me, her beloved granddaughter, I never remember my grandmother telling me that I needed to go out and make a success of myself. Her stated goals for me never did include attending prestigious schools or earning a lot of money or having elite degrees or fancy titles or having a high-profile job. This is not to say that she was not extremely proud of me when I did do some of those things. I remember, for instance, near the end of her life when I was in law school and had published my first journal article. I had given my mother a reprint of the article to give to my grandmother when she went to visit her at the nursing home she was living in by then, and afterward my mother called me, laughter in her voice. She told me that when Grammy saw it she had broken into tears, saying she didn’t really know what in the world I was talking about but she was just happy because I was so smart. But the thing is this: Grammy did indeed know what I was talking about. Perhaps she did not understand all of the intricacies of tribal sovereignty and the like that I was attempting to work through in that elusive document that is the law review note (and, to be quite honest, neither did I), but she did understand the struggle for self-governance, the need to carve out a space of one’s own, to claim it and to hold onto it and to demand it. And in the relay between my Grammy’s tears and my Mama’s laugh was, and is, a whole realm of comprehension that I am only now able to lay even a modicum of claim to.

Though my grandmother was most certainly one of my biggest cheerleaders and supporters while she was living, what she wanted most for me was bound up in that long-ago statement she made to me affirming the value of homemaking. The point is not to be taken literally; she was not saying that I necessarily had to become a wife and mother as she did. Instead, what I eventually heard my grandmother telling me, via both our conversations and the example of her life, was that tending to her home, cooking, cleaning, and the like, were not burdens from which she hoped to escape but acts of love that helped to sustain her as much as they did her family. Further, she was telling me that her life was not circumscribed by the conditions of its possibility but was instead enriched and enlarged by her embrace of the mundane and the everyday. I believe that more than outward signifiers of success, what my grandmother ultimately wanted for me and all of her children and grandchildren was that we realize, in accordance with Ralph Ellison and a whole host of other black folks who came before and after her, "the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and which render it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable."¹

This desire of my grandmother’s resonates with the experience Rita Dove relates of making a dress for her daughter during a sabbatical she took not long after winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987. Despite the protests of her husband, who thought she was wasting her precious sabbatical time by making her daughter a lace princess dress for her fifth birthday that she was sure to destroy before her party’s end, Dove spent the time necessary to make it so that her daughter would ha[ve] the dress she wanted, referring to the making of it as fieldwork for a poem she was working on.² Though my grandmother was neither a poet nor a scholar in the traditional sense, her cooking functioned similarly to Dove’s dressmaking. She would spend hours shopping, prepping, cleaning, picking, cutting, dicing, chopping, baking, and frying in preparation for a meal that would often be devoured without much fanfare in a matter of minutes. But I imagine Grammy might have also thought about this as fieldwork, perhaps not for a poem, but for the making of a life worth living.

Telling this story of my grandmother is meant neither to glamorize her life nor to suggest that her life was wholly unique (though she was, of course, uniquely special to me). Indeed, as a black woman who came of age in the segregated North of the 1930s and 1940s, who did not have much in the way of a formal education beyond high school, who divorced one husband, buried another, and had a tumultuous relationship with the third, who experienced a seventeen-year stretch during which she was, in her words, looking for love, who was episodically a single mother of multiple children, and who was ravaged for years by Parkinson’s disease before her eventual death, there was much that was difficult and painful in her life.³ And it is, by most accounts, a story black women know well.

Yet the story of my grandmother is important to this project for a couple of reasons. For one, it helps to reveal the contours of a black feminist practice that need not be tethered to discussions of movements, organizations, or overt political activism. To my knowledge, my grandmother was never actively involved in any national or local social justice or political organizations—her organizational commitments were mostly limited to church groups like the choir and usher board—and I doubt that at any point in her life she would have identified herself as a feminist. The same is probably also true of my mother. But my mother and grandmother have both been instrumental in my own coming to feminism. Because although they may not be or have been feminists in the academic sense of the term, and despite certain ideological differences we may have or have had, they have taught me more about what it means to resist oppression, demand accountability, struggle for voice, and cherish all people than anyone or anything else.

I am not treading any particularly new ground here, for black feminist thinkers within the academy have often been concerned with grounding their work in the experiences of women working outside the academy, particularly those from poor and working-class backgrounds. In Black Feminist Thought, one of the seminal texts in the black feminist canon, Patricia Hill Collins discusses the tremendous influence black women who are not academics have had on the evolution of black feminist thought:

Developing Black feminist thought as critical social theory involves including the ideas of Black women not previously considered intellectuals—many of whom may be working-class women with jobs outside academia—as well as those emanating from more formal, legitimated scholarship. The ideas we share with one another as mothers in extended families, as othermothers in Black communities, as members of Black churches, and as teachers to the Black community’s children have formed one pivotal area where African-American women have hammered out multifaceted Black women’s standpoint.⁴

For Hill Collins black feminist practice is a distinct outgrowth of black feminist thought, which is to say it is an outcome of black feminism.⁵ Here I make a different sort of distinction. While I do not draw a dividing line between thought and practice, I do distinguish between black feminist practice and black feminism, which, in alignment with the Combahee River Collective and other black feminist thinkers, I define as a sustained sociopolitical commitment to centering the lives of black women and girls while actively struggling against racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and other intersecting modalities of oppression that affect even those who do not identify as either black or female.⁶ I define black feminist practice as a radical commitment to the significance of black female life and the humanity of all black peoples, regardless of whether the practitioner identifies with feminism as a formalized ideological commitment or holds some views that might ultimately be deemed antithetical to feminism itself. Under these terms, thought is not a separate endeavor but a constituent element of the critical engagement. Thus what it means to take up practice here is to turn our attention to the politics of the everyday,⁷ the places where the subject lives as theorist, consumer, grocery shopper, got-to-pick-up-the-mail-now, let’s go to the bank.⁸

My grandmother’s story is also important because it works to turn the aspirational posturing that often characterizes black racial uplift narratives on its head. By way of example, in an interview actor Kerry Washington gave to Oprah Winfrey in late 2012, she discussed the intersection of two of her most high-profile roles—Olivia Pope, the powerful D.C. fixer and onetime presidential mistress who headlines Scandal, the hit television series produced for ABC by Shonda Rhimes, and Broomhilda Von Shaft, the slave wife in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained. In the interview Washington stated that Olivia Pope is the answer to Broomhilda’s prayers about what might be possible someday and that Olivia Pope and Broomhilda Von Shaft are the same woman hundreds of years apart. To which Winfrey responded, That is so perfect I could weep.⁹

Washington’s proclamation on its face might be innocent enough and, aside from Pope’s stint as a mistress, one that perhaps many black women would agree with. To