You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [47]
But what does my class on God have to do with why I snubbed you at the ball? I can hear you wondering. And I will get on to the point.
Lucy, I wanted to teach my students what it felt like to be captured and enslaved. I wanted them to be unable, when they left my class, to think of enslaved women as exotic, picturesque, removed from themselves, deserving of enslavement. I wanted them to be able to repudiate all the racist stereotypes about black women who were enslaved: that they were content, that they somehow “chose” their servitude, that they did not resist.
And so we struggled through an entire semester, during each week of which a student was required to imagine herself a “slave,” a mistress or a master, and to come to terms, in imagination and feeling, with what that meant.
Some black women found it extremely difficult to write as captured and enslaved women. (I do not use the word “slaves” casually, because I see enslavement from the enslaved’s point of view: there is a world of difference between being a slave and being enslaved.) They chose to write as mistress or master. Some white women found it nearly impossible to write as mistress or master, and presumptuous to write as enslaved. Still, there were many fine papers written, Lucy, though there was also much hair tugging and gnashing of teeth.
Black and white and mixed women wrote of captivity, of rape, of forced breeding to restock the master’s slave pens. They wrote of attempts to escape, of the sale of their children, of dreams of Africa, of efforts at suicide. No one wrote of acquiescence or of happiness, though one or two, mindful of the religious spirit often infusing the narratives studied, described spiritual ecstasy and joy.
Does anyone want to be a slave? we pondered.
As a class, we thought not.
Imagine our surprise, therefore, when many of us watched a television special on sado-masochism that aired the night before our class ended, and the only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.
And this is why, though we have been friends for over a decade, Lucy, I snubbed you at the ball.
All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a “fantasy” that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts. And embarrassment and disgust, at least in the hearts of most of the white women in my class.
One white woman student, apparently with close ties to our local lesbian S&M group, said she could see nothing wrong with what we’d seen on TV. (Incidentally, there were several white men on this program who owned white women as “slaves,” and even claimed to hold legal documents to this effect. Indeed, one man paraded his slave around town with a horse’s bit between her teeth, and “lent” her out to other sado-masochists to be whipped.) It is all fantasy, she said. No harm done. Slavery, real slavery, is over, after all.
But it isn’t over, Lucy, and Kathleen Barry’s book on female sexual slavery and Linda Lovelace’s book on being such a slave are not the only recent indications that this is true. There are places in the world, Lucy, where human beings are still being bought and sold! And so, for that reason, when I saw you at the ball, all I could think was that you were insultingly