This is my drafty narrative. You will notice redundecies. I wrote several drafts — all combined here.
“Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops Late 1ST S.C. Volunteers” by Susan King Taylor (1902)
Do You Know this Story? You should.
In its forward, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Former Colonel 1st S.C. Volunteers afterwards 33rd U.S. Colored Infantry, Nov. 8, 1902, Cambridge, Mass writes: “Actual military life is rarely described by a woman, and this is especially true of a woman whose place was in the ranks, as the wife of a soldier and herself a regimental laundress. No such description has ever been given, I am sure, by one thus connected with a colored regiment; so that the nearly 200,000 black soldiers (178, 975) of our Civil War have never before been delineated from a woman’s point of view.”
And so opens Susan King Taylor’s story (p. 49) in the anthology “Collected Black Women Narrative.” There are five narratives spanning the copyright years 1850-1902. Hers is the third. In her story: “Reminiscences” Mrs. Susan King Taylor’s reflections she shares stories of her maternal ancestors, specifically her great-great-grandmother who lived to be 120. King-Taylor grew up in Savannah at the time of slavery. Her grandmother lost $3,000.00 when the Freedmen’s Savings Bank crashed. Instability in lending institutions is nothing new, nor are the losses unrecovered or unrecoverable.
The Civil War veteran writes of battles and skirmishes, many at sea and the treatment of the Black soldiers who were worked for free and then the Union under duress offered Black soldiers only half the pay of the white soldiers. The men refused the pay, and had no money to send to their families, so their wives worked so that their children and husbands would have money for food and other expenses.
At the end of the war, King-Taylor is not paid. She worked as a nurse and survived many battles which she shares in the very succinct, yet comprehensive volume.
She writes about the different commanders, their wives and other visitors she meets at the camps. She tells us about the company’s pet pig on Cole Island. She almost drowns a several times when ships capsize. At the end of the war she returns to Savannah and opens a school house. However, free education closes her doors and she eventually returned to Boston where she continued to support the veterans via The Women’s Relief Corps (1886-1898).
Her “Thoughts on Present Conditions” could have been written today. She asks: “Living here in Boston where the [B]lack man is given equal justice, I must say a word on the general treatment of my race, both in the North and South, in this twentieth century. I wonder if our white fellow men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood? For two hundred years we have toiled for them; the war of 1861 came and was ended, and we thought our race was forever freed from bondage, and that the two races could live in unity with each other, but when we read almost every day of what is being done to my race by some whites in the South, I sometimes ask, ‘Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless?’
“’In this ‘Land of the free’ we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of this Negro-hating white man. There is no redress from a government which promised to protect all under its flag. It seems a mystery to me. They say, ‘One flag, one nation, one country indivisible.’ . . . No, we cannot sing, ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty’! It is hollow mockery. . . ‘” (61-62).
New Opera Honoring the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (free streaming) Nov. 11-Dec. 12
SHAWN E. OKPEBHOLO, COMPOSER
MARCUS AMAKER, POET
The film streams free of charge Nov. 11-Dec. 11, 2021
19th Century Black Women Writers, con’t.
These 19th century Black wom(b)en writers really struggled to control a narrative that sexualized their persons. They were not seen as victims and the white men and white women who constructed this system of chattel entrapment where one could not own oneself even in freedom. Agency was a whim easily dismissed by whiteness. It didn’t matter what the house looked like. Female or male.
The idea that a drop of African blood made a wom(b)an susceptible to abuse shows how arbitrary race, sex and violence is. Not much is changed today. The state still decides who is worthy of protection, e.g., California’s CDCR eugenics cases—We Charge Genocide AGAIN! Black wom(b)en are not at the top of any list.
Most of these 19th Century Black Wom(b)en Writers in this remarkable survey decided to write books to support themselves. Like Sojourner Truth who used her photos as calling cards, there were not many safe ways for a Black woman to earn a living.
What I find fascinating are these stories . . . published and then forgotten, not perhaps as long as Hannah Craft’s remarkable autobiography—found almost 133 years later, but still, why are these names not readily known as their male counterparts whom they also knew and knew them as well?
Patriarchal monopoly? These women, many scholars, are not well known like their white counterparts. Their likenesses are not on our stamps or currency, even special runs, when they should be. Contemporaries of WEB DuBois and supporters these Black women remain silenced.
I find their lives fascinating and the way they shaped characters in their novels to reflect a sentiment — Black is evil and white is pure, to not just sell books but to be in agreement with literary peers of the time, is equally instructive. Introductions by scholars such as the late Barbara Christian, Ph.D., help the reader understand the multiple contexts.
Women who were married had more freedom of a sort, at least they had protection. When one thinks about Anna Julia Cooper, Ph.D., “Voices from the South,” and her work as a teacher and mentor and how she was not supported and had to sacrifice scholarship strictly because she was not supported by the institutions she served.
Women couldn’t hold positions outside the home or elected offices unless they were widows.
I think I have enjoyed reading the introductions to these re-released books by some of my favorite scholars such as the aforementioned: Barbara Christine, Mary Helen Washington and of course the erudite Henry Louis Gates, Jr. whose forward “In Her Own Write,” prefaces all the books in the Schomburg Library Series, Oxford University Press (1988).
These women were not all well-educated and upper and middle class, especially the women recently freed from slavery or escaped and on the run or in the case of Harriett E. Wilson released from indentured servitude at 18. The poor child almost worked to death. And then there is Hannah Craft’s true story lost for 144 years and then found and authenticated. Her story sounds like Harper’s fictional one yet she was never under any illusions about her ancestry. Yet we learn of enslaved Africans in households where education helped them serve their owners as tutors, scribes. Her escape is pretty remarkable.
Harriet Jacobs’s (“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (1861) decision to hide out in a crawl space for 7 years like and unlike Ann Frank, in Germany in years to come (761 days or about 2 years), is a story that privileges a woman’s right to choose and Jacob’s decision to reclaim her person for herself at great sacrifice.
Slavery as an institution and the people who participated and the government that sanctioned its legality is guilty and there is no statute of limitations on the damage it continues to foster.
“Six Women’s Slave Narratives,” The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers with an introduction by William L. Andrews
Slavery was terrible. A story I read last night was of a woman whose mother was born free then kidnapped. However, Lucy A. Delaney writes in “From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom,” (1891), that her mom, Polly Crocket, never forgot she was not born a slave. Despite the promise of freedom when her owners died, Lucy’s mother never felt safe. She knew she was property and when they sold her husband, Major Berry, who was loyal, “South” or “down the river”, and parceled out her older daughter like an old mule, she told Nancy to run as soon as she could. Nancy ran as soon as she could to a safe house and then on to Canada.
Polly, too young to really understand the impact of what it would mean when her mother was sold away too. Her mother stayed close and later escaped herself in the same city as her younger child, Lucy. The mother sued the government for her freedom and won.
Later when threatened with sale, Lucy ran to her mother’s house who found an attorney to represent her daughter. Lucy had to spend almost two years in jail while the trial commenced, but the family won. The owner’s husband spoke of his disdain for slavery yet he spared no expense to keep this free child enslaved. The emotional impact is clearly outlined. As the trial ended the mother could not attend, she was so overwrought with anxiety and Lucy trembled so much, she couldn’t dress herself.
Mrs. Delaney’s story is not one widely known, which is why this volume, “Six Women’s Slave Narratives” with an introduction by William L. Andrews is such an important addition to The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (1988), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I remember another suit leveled at captors in Elmina in Ghana who took the liberty of an African girl child who sued and won her freedom back.
When I think about the enslavement of my ancestors I feel sorrow and anger. The conditions have still not been addressed that allow such to happen. The conditioning of a people led to believe they deserved such treatment or that such treatment was natural is a wrong that remains unaddressed.
October is MAAFA Awareness Month in the state of California, the 9th Congressional District and the City of Oakland and County of Alameda. This year due to health concerns, I was not able to organize the ritual ceremony as in year’s past. I arrived at the beach where I saw Brother Anyika and Min. Alicia and her family.
Masked, one has learned over the past year how to recognize one another through movement or eyes or body shape. Later I spoke to Iya Ebun Akanke who is on the MAAFA SF Bay Area board and saw Sunrise whom I’d seen the evening before purchasing white roses. Iya Ebun, Min. Alicia, Baba Tacuma and his drummers, Brother Desmond, Min. Imhotep, Wo’se Elders, Min. Mxoxilisi, Bamidele Agbasegbe-Demerson, Brother Clint and others made the 26th Annual MAAFA Commemoration a success.
Everyone was given a cowrie shell that morning. I’d left before this happened.
When I arrived I greeted those persons I saw and walked straight to the ocean. The last time I’d been here was on African American Freedom Day, June 18. We’d welcomed and celebrated the 350 Ancestors, Dana King’s Monumental Reckoning at Golden Gate Park and came by the ocean to feed the ancestors. It was at sunset.
The next time I was there was on my birthday. Both days were cold. Ava and I had just left the Stern Grove concert featuring Ledisi.
I asked some of those present this year to write reflections on the Maafa Commemoration. Min. Alicia sent hers to me first. I hope others come. If you would like to share your MAAFA Experience with us, you can send them to mail@maafasfbayarea.com Please include a short bio (50-100 words and a photo). Deadline is Dec. 20.
The MAAFA@25 art exhibit is still up and those people who want to honor an African American or African Diaspora ancestor at our virtual altar you still can.
It will not go away.
I used to collect slave narrative stories: “Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember—An Oral History; the Library of Congress Series of narratives: I Was Born into Slavery edited by Andrew Waters. I pulled “Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives,” edited by Norman R. Yetman off the shelf in October. I looked for, but couldn’t find my copy of “Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies” (1977), by John W. Blassingam. However, the collection of stories narrated or written by Black women were ones I didn’t know. I also started rereading the “Narrative of Sojourner Truth,” (1850) edited with an Introduction by Margaret Washington (1993).
19th Century Black Women literature is rich. Our ancestors created this western narrative tradition. Wrapped in respectability, Black women could not work outside the home unless she was a widow. The work around this, many women published book about their lives and women clergy published their sermons. There was a lot of poverty and child deaths due to poverty. Women had to leave their children with neighbors or relatives or indenture them to others who might harm them. These women turned to their spiritual traditions not all Christian given the church’s support for their enslavement or the enslavement of their people.
It is a bit insane to think that to prove our worthiness as a people, “many eighteenth and nineteenth-century Black writers [saw literary] as [the] most important of Western technologies [to] humanize them in the eyes of white bourgeois society” (Washington). Literacy is also linked to freedom. Free people are literate. However, this concept is not African. To know a thing through words on a page is not “to know” anything, really. To know is to do a thing. To have mastery is a tangible skill. This is African technology, so Isabella who changed her name to Sojourner Truth knew God not from the pages she memorized but from the night sky and the stories her mother told her about God’s house, a place bigger than the temporal landscape they might be trapped in presently. “Books did not speak to Sojourner Truth. As she said on more than one occasion, ‘”You read books, I talk to God” (xxviii Washington).
In another volume from the series: “Spiritual Narratives” with an introduction by Susan Houchins” we meet Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835), Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849); Ms. Julia A.J. Foote (1886); and Ms. Virginia W. Broughton (1907). Another writer is Ms. Harriet E. Wilson, whose “Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,” (1859) is perhaps the earliest known publication of a novel by a woman. However, since Hannah Crafts’ “The Bondwoman’s Tale,” was found it might be the first, having been written between 1853-1861 according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who edited Crafts’ and Wilson’s books. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, another narrative classic, was published in 1861.
I have been reading and rereading these stories throughout September, October into November– All Saints Day. We have to remember our stories as told by those who lived and survived. We will remember as long as we call the names of our ancestors. Given the nature of our arrival in this western diaspora (North America specifically) though there are similarities, our ancestor tales have specificity. There is no stock tale. Each enslaved African person has unique DNA which deserves recognition, so here in the Bay we at MAAFA SF Bay Area do what we can to enlighten and inspire Black people to never forget and others who are not Black people to never forget the debt owed.
There is no such thing as a BIPOC legacy. This country is born of exploitation of African people. The wealth is born of African people, a people 500 years later who have no tangible wealth collectively. Terrorized legally and robbed of what was gained by a few, yet somehow some Black families held onto their land and many people in the American Diaspora are returning to their sacred ground.
My family lost its legacy to NASA. My family here has nothing collectively. There is no family property. We all work to eat. We have nothing tangible to leave the next generation so like others we keep having to reinvent ourselves. It is so labor intensive to have nothing tangible to show for one’s sojourn in this nation, one your people built.
Yep
I am angry.
Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church didn’t allow women to preach—when Jarena Lee was called to the ministry, she was turned away. She was not welcomed until 7-8 years later. Not deterred she preached the word to all who asked and invited her. It seems that these Black women were poor yet driven to preach. The word viands for the soul. 19th Century America—during the Civil War and afterward was a hard time for Black women—the space they occupied unstable and precarious– newly freed or even born unshackled, these women were not safe. Respectability was something the dominate culture reserved for white women. Even married Black women were not safe. The married woman was a bit safer but not free. The system of slavery created or birthed a different kind of woman. She was free thinking, brave and a survivor. These women were also independent and fierce. They had faith which is illustrated repeatedly in their dogged self-sacrifice.
One of these women, Anna Julia Cooper, Ph.D. a contemporary of W.E. B. Dubois struggled unnecessarily. A womanist before Alice Walker coined the term, Cooper wrote about her dismissal and absence from the intellectual canon which is male.
In her seminal (and only book length) work, “A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South,” (1892) also a selection in the 19th Century Black Women’s Writers series, she states: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say, ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing ot special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” Would that she were a man, she would have been able to pursue her writing, rather than having to fight to keep her job as head of a school district, while a single parent to several adopted children.
Harriet Wilson and others write of how economic challenges made it so hard for them to maintain their health and provide for their children which often resulted in family dissolution and death. These mothers buried many children. Abandoned by husbands they often took to the evangelist road bearing witness for those without hope a message of salvation.
These women preachers and passionate educators Cooper were the coal in an engine about to derail. Racism the track. . . both literal and spiritual. There were class differences—Cooper was not impoverished and her relationship with women who were barely making ends meet and still reeling from slavery’s impact was more intellectual than actual to a certain degree initially. Let’s just say, they took BART and while the other folks road coach. Remember Hugh Masekela’s “Stimela” (Coal Train).
I love these stories. I also find it interesting how alcohol became the freed man’s medicine of choice. The early 19th century is not very different from now. . . so many people are overdosing and self-medicating.
Free Soberfest Summit, Nov. 13, 12 noon to 5 p.m. ET online
Book Talk
Watch the interview/book launch at Othering and Belonging, Nov. 2, 2021
Watch the interview/book launch at Othering and Belonging, Nov. 2, 2021
At a time when LGBTQ rights are advancing, why are attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color increasing? Join us Tuesday, Nov. 2 at 5pm PT / 8 pm ET to hear from a panel of artists, organizers, and academics who will discuss this question and others posed by Eric A. Stanley’s new book Atmospheres of Violence.
African Ancestry Virtual Programming
African Ancestry YouTube Programming features Sister Eurica Axum on Building Altars, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2021, 7 p.m. ET https://www.youtube.com/c/AfricanAncestryDNA
Musical Performance
Listen to Destiny Muhammad talk about her Digital Residency on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show
Theatre
Listen to a recent interview with the director and dramaturg on Wanda’s Picks Radio show.
Theatre
Listen to an interview with Michael Gene Sullivan, playwright, on Wanda’s Picks Radio, Oct. 20, 2021
Theatre
Listen to an interview with the playwright, director and cast, on Wanda’s Picks Radio Live, Wed., Nov. 4, 9:30 AM PT
Mental Health Community Forum with Hon. Pamela Price, Esq.
California Coalition for Women Prisoners Anniversary Event, Nov. 12
Soulskin Dance@ Dance Mission Nov. 5-6
Listen to an interview on Wanda’s Picks Radio with Adrianna Thompson &
SF Doc Stories Nov. 4-7 opens with Stanley Nelson’s Attica
The director will be present at the screening.
James Baldwin International Symposium, Nov. 5-6, 2021
Kim McMillon @Global Arts, Media and Writing Series at Merced Library
Theatre
Listen to an interview with actors: Sam Jackson & William Thomas Hodgson on Wanda’s Picks, Wed., Nov. 10, 2021
Activism — Free All Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War (PP/POW)
Listen to an interview with El-Hajj Mauri [pronounced Moor-e] Saalakhan on Wanda’s Picks Radio, Nov. 10, 2021. He is a Metro-Washington, DC, based writer, poet, and human rights advocate, who currently serves as director of operations for The Aafia Foundation, a Muslim led human rights organization. He joins us to talk about Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s little known case and Imam Jalil Al Amin and the rally Nov. 13, in Washington, DC for political prisoners: www.aafia.org
