Gender in Black and White

Review of the book Writing Through Jane Crow Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature by Ayesha K. Hardison

Race has been something that has affected me only in terms of making my life quite easy in the main. I am an upper middle class white woman. The first black person I have any memory of encountering was a friendly carnival worker at a fair when I was about six. He lifted me out of a seat on a ride and said something like, “There you go, sweetheart…” It is hard to know what is an actual memory and what is a recollection that has been formed by reading about race and American society in the decades since that day around 1969 in small town Oregon. But as I recall, I thought something like, “What an interesting looking thing…sounds like a grownup but does not look like a grownup—anyway, not like any of the grownups I know. Had such interesting eyes…” I did not think of him as a man but as something like the other unusual things at the fair, like the ride I had just been on.

I am 50 now and have had limited experience with black people. I knew very few in all my years of public schooling and have worked with only a handful in various settings and have never had a close black friend. This has just been the way life has worked out. I have always enjoyed reading about American literary history and as I perused the websites of various university publishers some months ago I came across a description of the book Writing Through Jane Crow Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature by Ayesha K. Hardison, published by the University of Virginia Press.

I realized as I read about the book that I knew next to nothing about writing by African-American women and nothing whatever about what it is like to be an African-American woman. The book is eye-opening. All white Americans should consider reading it. Even if you have no background in or no particular interest in American literary history, reading the book will endow you with a far greater understanding of this large part of the population than you probably have now and will leave you with greater empathy for black women.

For example, here is a rather chilling example of the ramifications of race for black women that would never have occurred to me had I not read this book. I had never heard of the Ebony editor and journalist Era [Bell] Thompson (1905-1986). She lived most of her early life as one of the very few blacks in North Dakota and later wrote a memoir about her childhood and youth there and of her first few years after leaving North Dakota for college in Iowa and work in Chicago. The book, American Daughter, was published in 1946. In a footnote in her own book, Hardison writes of Thompson:

She had ordered a rubber profile of a man advertised in the Chicago Daily News as a safeguard for lone women drivers. “As I am a Negro,” she wrote, “send colored man only.” Finding only a profile of a white man in the store’s catalogue, Thompson followed up with a second letter to Neiman Marcus: “Unfortunately, I cannot use your inflatable man, as there are areas in which it would invite aggression rather than provide protection.”

This occurred in 1967, just a few years before I met the kindly man at the fair. What a different world I have lived in than Thompson did.

The Basics of the Book

The book covers the period of roughly 1945-1960 and discusses not only fairly well-known figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright but writers who are not as famous, such as Ann Petry (1908–1997) and the cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911–1985).

Hardison says of this era, “The cultural production of texts between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, amid World War II and the Brown decision, is a turning point in the African American literary tradition. In this epoch female-centered texts challenge the privileging of race over gender. They confront tensions between the expectations of middle-class respectability and the desire to express black female sexuality. These works grapple with the Jane Crow practices prescribing black women in the public sphere of work, citizenship, and an emergent popular and consumer culture.”

Hardison examines several works that explore the tensions between working class black women and those struggling to maintain a tenuous position in the middle class and between all black women and white society. I had never realized what an omnipresent threat of sexual harassment and sexual violence black women lived under as domestics in white households and of their struggles to fend off the assumption of whites of both genders that blacks are inherently promiscuous and a threat to the sanctity of white womanhood and propriety. I would say that the audience that really needs to read this book is not so much scholars already interested in African American literature but simply white people in general. We whites sometimes take the attitude that we live in a post-racial society and that blacks need to “get over” resentment. And whites are often simply baffled at the rage sometimes expressed by the portrayals of blacks of both genders in the media and by interactions with law enforcement. We whites think, “What are they mad about this time?” Hardison has provided me with a much better grasp of the daily grind of suspicion and distrust that black women even now live with and the burden of just trying to make a living in the face of intractable racism.

This book made me reexamine my own inadvertent microaggressions. For example, about ten years ago as I was getting off an Amtrak car in the little town near my own small Oregon city I said to a pleasant black lady, “I guess you will be continuing on, huh?” on the assumption that she was heading to a city like Oakland or Los Angeles. She said with great courtesy and dignity, “No, I am getting off here.” I learned later she and her family had lived in our city for years. Oops. Only the other day, I said to a nice young woman of mixed race as she headed out for the day, “It will do you good to get some pink in your cheeks.”

What Black Women Were “Supposed” to Write About

We learn from Hardison that white publishers pressed black female writers to write about what the white (mostly male) publishers deemed to be appropriately “black subjects.” That meant that blacks were supposed to write about black folklore or to portray the seamier side of black society and to portray lurid sex crimes and to pathologize black urban life a la Wright’s novel Native Son (1940). Hardison also stresses that it was not just white male publishers that expected black women writers to toe the line when it came to genre and subject matter. She tells us, “Hurston’s peers dismiss her because she does not take up the proletarian figure dominating Wright’s school of social realism, and later literary critics celebrate her only as the promoter of authentic black folk.”

And when the writers Hardison examines wanted to focus on gender rather than race, they faced criticism. She says of Thompson’s American Daughter, “It is telling, then, that Thompson addresses only gender in her title and critics consider only whether she solves or exacerbates the race problem. Of course, race figures prominently in American Daughter, but reviewers’ juxtapositions of Wright and Thompson limits the critical discussion of the latter’s text to race and devalues its Jane Crow discourse.”

Who Should Read This Book?

Anyone who teaches or writes about 20th Century American literature should read this book. Hardison discusses neglected books by much admired writers, such as Hurston’s 1948 novel Seraph on the Suwanee which featured a white woman as one of the main characters as well as an unpublished novel by Wright, Black Hope—his only novel that featured a black woman as protagonist. She also examines works by those far less famous than Hurston and Wright as in her discussion of Petry’s novels The Street (1946) and The Narrows (1953. With any luck, Hardison’s book will jog some rethinking among teachers of American literature about syllabi construction.

And those who are interested in post-WWII pop culture should read the epilogue to Hardison’s study in which she says of Ormes’s work, “As is the case for mid-twentieth-century black women writers and those who worked in popular culture mediums, Ormes’s illustrations remained relatively obscure because comics were dismissed generally as an inferior literature due to their discursive accessibility, and they were forgotten due to their material temporality .” As a little sister, I enjoyed reading about single-frame cartoon series Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger which ran for over a decade starting in the mid-1940s. Anyone who has been a sibling will enjoy some of those cartoons.

The book is well worth reading by anyone interested in race, literature and gender and American society in general. The matter of race is very much still with us and Hardison intelligently renders how hard it can be to retain dignity and achieve respectability when obtaining even a tiny income can be a struggle.