You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [18]
The wife has cunningly saved Tracey A. Gardner’s essay for just this moment. Because Tracey A. Gardner has thought about it all, not just presently, but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is cold—she is furious. The wife, given more to depression and self-abnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardner’s high-spirited anger. She begins to read:
Because from my point of view, racism is everywhere, including in the women’s movement, and the only time I really need to say anything about it is when I do not see it…and the first time that happens, I will tell you about it.
The husband, surprised, thinks this very funny, not to say pertinent. He slaps his knee and sits up. He is dying to make some sort of positive dyke comment, but nothing comes to mind.
American slavery relied on the denial of the humanity of Black folks, and the undermining of our sense of nationhood and family, on the stripping away of the Black man’s role as protector and provider, and on the structuring of Black women into the American system of white male domination.…
“In other words,” she says, “white men think they have to be on top. Other men have been known to savor life from other positions.”
The end of the Civil War brought the end of a certain “form” of slavery for Black folks. It also brought the end of any “job security” and the loss of the protection of their white enslaver. Blacks were now free game, and the terrorization and humiliation of Black people, especially Black men, began anew. Now the Black man could have his family and prove his worth, but he had no way to support or protect them, or himself.…
As she reads, he feels ashamed and senses his wife’s wounded embarrassment, for him and for herself. For their history together. But doggedly, she continues to read:
After the Civil War, popular justice, which meant there usually was no trial and no proof needed, began its reign in the form of the castration, burning at the stake, beheading, and lynching of Black men. As many as 5,000 white people would turn out to witness these events, as though going to a celebration. [She pauses, sighs: beheading?] Over 2,000 Black men were lynched in a 10 year period from 1889–99. There were also a number of Black women lynched. [She reads this sentence quickly and forgets it.] Over 50% of the lynched Black males were charged with rape or attempted rape.
He cannot imagine a woman being lynched. He has never even considered the possibility. Perhaps this is why the image of a black woman chained and bruised excites rather than horrifies him? It is the fact that the lynching of her body has never stopped that forces the wife, for the time being, to blot out the historical record. She is not prepared to connect her own husband with the continuation of that past. She reads:
If a Black man had sex with a consenting white woman, it was rape. [Why am I always reading about, thinking about, worrying about, my man having sex with white women? she thinks, despairingly, underneath the reading.] If he insulted a white woman by looking at her, it was attempted rape.
“Yes,” he says softly, as if in support of her dogged reading, “I’ve read Ida B.—what’s her last name?”
“By their lynchings, the white man was showing that he hated the Black man carnally, biologically; he hated his color, his features, his genitals. Thus he attacked the Black man’s body, and like a lover gone mad, maimed his flesh, violated him in the most