Not Pleasant but Necessary Reading
by Cesi Davidson
I was observing a junior high school class when the teacher posed this question, “Should Black people forget about slavery?” One student without hesitation replied, “No, because it could happen again.”
Reading about the enslavement of Africans in the Americas (1526-1867) isn’t pleasant, but it’s necessary. We have to know where we’ve been to know where we are, and to know where we’re going. We have a problem. Despite the efforts of diversity, equity, and inclusion trending America we remain on a long journey to truth and reconciliation. It begins with our children and the glossing over of teaching of pre-civil war America to make the information palatable. This intentional filtering, results in a presentation of history that neglects the naming of slavery for what it was: a horrific, brutal institution that entrapped victims and perpetrators. Names, dates, and historical records can be disseminated like water running from a faucet. Turn it on. Turn it off. We need to read history with our mind, heart, and body. There isn’t a chronological age restricting when human beings can feel compassion.
Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery, ed. Patrick Minges is a collection of women’s stories about their experiences during slavery as retold by interviewers. It’s one book in the series Real Voices, Real History. In these stories you’ll read about resistance, love, defiance, courage, assault, deprivation, and the struggles of Black women in nineteenth-century America.
Perhaps the most well known of the “slave narratives” are those Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs. Sojourner Truth, a gifted orator, was unable to read and write. She dictated her story to Olive Gilbert who penned “The Narrative of Sojourner Truth” in 1850. Harriet Jacobs was the first known African woman in the English speaking Americas to author her own narrative, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Black and White interviewers under the Federal Writer’s Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collected first-person histories from 1936 to 1938. This was part of a series of programs to employ writers by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ s New Deal. It was one response to the massive unemployment resulting from the Great Depression.
The slave narratives collected weren’t without flaws. The dynamics of former enslaved women interviewed most often by White interviewers cannot be estimated. How might an oppressed Black woman of that period adjust her comments to be acceptable by the listener? She may have been concerned that her comments could alter her fate. How much did the interviewer’s interest in transcribing “Negro dialect” result in linguistic fiction? Mingus made selections from the WPA collections that he personally found compelling for his book and that he could theme together in a modern day form. They represent a fraction of the stories of the millions of African women captured and imprisoned during the four hundred years of America’s shame.
This collection assembled by
Minges has limitations but still has value. We can never read a woman’s story
so deeply that we fully experience her pain of sexual assault, daily fear, loss
of children, malnutrition, or hopelessness. We can never read a woman’s story
and completely feel her unrelenting drive to free herself and family from
bondage. Dispel the myth of the slave woman. They were not generic human
beings. They were individuals.
The junior high school student mentioned acknowledged the threat of slavery. We can force ourselves to recognize contemporary female bondage in all forms. We can call out all forms of modern day female enslavement. Atrocities against Black women historical and present day should not be denied.
Cesi (Cecelia) Davidson holds a doctorate degree in Speech Language Hearing Sciences from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She’s provided therapeutic services for children with communication and learning challenges for over forty years. Since beginning playwriting in 2009, she’s written hundreds of plays and works of non-fiction. Critics praise her demonstrated broad range, fearless creativity, and cultural responsiveness. She’s founder and curator of Short Plays to Nourish the Mind & Soul, free public theatre in New York City. Dr. Davidson is the author of three anthologies of plays published by Aqueduct Press: Articulation, Fricatives, and Bilabials.www.cesiwrites.com; cesidavidson@gmail.com
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