Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition

by Cheryl A. Wall

Overview

For blues musicians, "worrying the line" is the technique of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a shout, or repeating words in order to emphasize, clarify, or subvert a moment in a song. Cheryl A. Wall applies this term to fiction and nonfiction writing by African American women in the twentieth century, demonstrating how these writers bring about similar changes in African American and American literary traditions.

Examining the works of Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker, Wall highlights ways in which these authors construct family genealogies, filling in the gaps with dreams, rituals, music, or images that forge a connection to family lost through slavery. For the black woman author, Wall contends, this method of revising and extending canonical forms provides the opportunity to comment on the literary past while also calling attention to the lingering historical effects of slavery. For the reader, Wall shows, the images and words combine to create a new kind of text that extends meanings of the line, both as lineage and as literary tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807855867
Publisher:	University of North Carolina Press, The
Publication date:	02/28/2005
Series:	Gender and American Culture Series
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Cheryl A. Wall is professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Women of the Harlem Renaissance. She has edited five books, including Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women and, most recently, a critical casebook on Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Read an Excerpt

Worrying the Line

Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition

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By Cheryl A. Wall

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2005 Cheryl A. Wall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-2927-7

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Chapter One

Introduction

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. -Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

My great-grandmama told my grandmama the part she lived through that my grandmama didn't live through and my grandmama told my mama what they both lived through and my mama told me what they all lived through and we were suppose to pass it down like that from generation to generation so we'd never forget. -Gayl Jones, Corregidora

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. -W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

On the cusp of a new century, black women's writing has been preoccupied with the recuperation and representation of the past four hundred years of black peoples' lives in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. The impulse to represent the past by reconstructing family genealogies recurs in texts such as Lucille Clifton, Generations; Gayl Jones, Corregidora; Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow and Daughters; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon and Beloved; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; and Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Genealogies are woven together out of individual and collective memory, encoded in stories, songs, recipes, rituals, photographs, and writing. Black women writers' rereading of the African American and American literary traditions produces what Adrienne Rich called a quarter century ago "re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction." While not rejecting Du Bois's baleful prophecy, these writers also explore how gender and class differences within black America complicate the color line. As critics have frequently noted, black women's writing does not focus on the traumatic encounters of blacks and whites across the color line. The interracial conflicts that are at the heart of narratives by black male writers from Frederick Douglass to Ralph Ellison to Amiri Baraka do not take center stage. Contemporary black women writers focus instead on those intimate relationships in which the most painful consequences of racism are played out. Racism corrodes love between black men and women, fractures families, and destroys mothers' dreams for their children. The best defense against the destructiveness of racism, these writers assert, is the formation of a cultural identity derived from an understanding of history. For example, Marshall expresses indignation at the distorted version of history she was taught as a child, which denigrated black people at every turn. She explains that her preoccupation with history derives from the need "to set the record straight, if only for myself; to get at the whole story." Even if not a successful defense, historical knowledge ensures personal integrity. The cultural identity that the history of African Americans in the United States informs is necessarily multidimensional. Its complexities mitigate against the formation of a unitary identity. Moreover, a crucial tenet of black feminist theory is the multiple subjectivity of black women, a subjectivity that begins with the inextricability of the terms "black" and "woman." What Mae Henderson calls the awareness of "racial difference within gender identity" and "gender difference within racial identity" negates the possibility of a unitary self. She argues that "black women speak from a multiple and complex social, historical, and cultural positionality which, in effect, constitutes black female subjectivity."

As important as the understanding that race and gender are socially constructed is, Michele Wallace cautions correctly that individual desire is never fully determined or delineated by such constructions. The representation of individual desire worries the line of even the most heuristic fiction. Social positionality in these black women's texts is in large measure the consequence of history, but individuals have room to maneuver. Ironically, those who desire to "free" themselves of the bonds of history are least able to understand the forces that kept them in bondage. Upward social mobility weakens the will to know the past and consequently inhibits the formation of cultural identity; it leaves individuals vulnerable to psychic dislocation and despair.

A confluence of social and historical events enabled the creation of "the community of black women writing" that Hortense Spillers designated a "vivid new fact of national life." Chief among these were the civil rights movement and the women's movement. These movements gave rise both to a group of writers and to an audience for their work that was at first largely made up of African American women. This audience, better educated and more affluent than any that had existed for black writers in the past, also represented the first generation of black people for whom cultural assimilation was a possibility. To a great extent, the urgent preoccupation with history in the writings of black women in the 1970s and 1980s registered alarm at the potential loss of a history that had never been accurately recorded. Morrison asserted in a 1980 interview, titled "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," that these social and cultural transformations gave the novel an urgent function in African American life: "We don't live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don't sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago." For Morrison, the novel became the way to preserve the stories and to communicate "new information." For other writers, poetry, the essay, and the memoir served similar ends.

The title Worrying the Line is a blues trope, which seems apt in part because, as Wallace attests, "the black female blues singer as a paradigm of commercial, cultural, and historical potency pervades twentieth-century Afro-American literature by women." For many contemporary black women writers, the blueswoman is a symbol of female creativity and autonomy whose art informs and empowers their own. In her volume Some One Sweet Angel Chile, Sherley Anne Williams makes Bessie Smith the subject of a cycle of poems. Individual poems reimagine moments from Smith's biography, revise lyrics of her signature tunes, and represent the relationship between the singer and her audience. That relationship is reified in the intimate relation between Bessie and the speaker, a relation captured in the lines

Bessie singing

just behind the beat

that sweet sweet

voice throwing

its light on me. Not only can this speaker "see" Bessie's face, but she can improvise on her lines. Analogously, in Walker's The Color Purple, the protagonist Celie hears in Shug Avery's blues, as she sees in her life, the possibilities of her own renewal. Ursa, a blues singer and protagonist of Corregidora, finds in the blues a vocabulary, of emotion as well as of verbal expression, that allows her to confront and work through a family history of slavery, sexual subjugation, and survival that is accessible only through memory and oral lore. Even some fictions that do not depict blueswomen portray women, like Pilate in Song of Solomon, who sing the blues.

Stephen Henderson in Understanding the New Black Poetry defines "worrying the line" as "the folk expression for the device of altering the pitch of a note in a given passage or for other kinds of ornamentation often associated with melismatic singing in the Black tradition. A verbal parallel exists in which a word or phrase is broken up to allow for affective or didactic comment." In "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry," Sherley Anne Williams observes that "repetition in blues is seldom word for word and the definition of worrying the line includes changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues cries that often punctuate the performance of the songs." As a technique, worrying the line may be used for purposes of emphasis, clarification, or subversion. In appropriating the trope for critical purposes, I hope to show how black women's writing works similar changes on literary traditions.

Of the multiple meanings of "the line," the two that most interest me are the line as a metaphor for lineage and the line as a metaphor for the literary traditions in which these texts participate. Worrying the Line focuses on the points of intersection between these two meanings. What happens at those moments in literary texts when the genealogical search is frustrated by gaps in written history and knowledge? For example: What happens when, after friends of his father fill in the details of his life, Milkman Dead is left with a series of unanswered and apparently unanswerable questions about his father's father? How can Miranda Day, the titular protagonist of Mama Day, apprehend the history of her great-grandmother Sapphira when she has only legend and a ledger on which water damage has removed "the remainder of that line"? How does Avey Johnson, the widow for whom Paule Marshall writes a praisesong, learn to dance the "Carriacou Tramp, the shuffle designed to stay the course of history," when she does not know her nation? How does "Audre," Lorde's fictive double and the protagonist of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, bond with Dahomey goddesses?

Worrying the Line argues that it is at those moments when the quest for answers to the genealogical search is thwarted, when the only access to the past comes from what Morrison describes in "Rootedness" as "another way of knowing," that these texts are most likely to subvert the conventions of literary tradition so that the connection to the past can be forged nevertheless. Through memory, music, dreams, and ritual, it is. A frequent catalyst for the recollection of stories of lost kin is an image-sometimes a family photograph as in Generations and sometimes an intangible representation of family as in Beloved-that is inserted into the narrative. These texts require and enact "re-visions," that is, different ways of seeing as well as of writing. For the characters within the texts, the images provoke stories that close the gap between past and present. For the reader, the images and words combine to create a new kind of text that extends both meanings of the line.

Although the impulse to reconstruct family history in the texts in Worrying the Line is particularly urgent, it has antecedents in the African American literary tradition. One of the most eloquent articulations of the line as a genealogical metaphor comes at the resolution of James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues," where the narrator finally comprehends his brother's art:

And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us, and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that we would never be free until we did.... He had made it his: that long line, of which he knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. In a manner that many of the texts in this study adopt, Baldwin's metaphor of the line fuses music and memory. Music is at once the container and transmitter of memory. In the story's representation of communal performance, Sonny's solo is encouraged by an older jazzman, identified only as "Creole," an epithet that evokes New Orleans and the musical ancestors who constitute Sonny's artistic lineage. Creole on bass "initiates a dialogue with Sonny" and his piano. The pattern of call and response, characteristic of jazz and African American expressive culture more generally, shapes the climax of the story. A spiritual guide, Creole leads Sonny to the depths where he can "sound" his past. Sonny in turn earns his place on the bandstand by letting the long line of memory resound in his playing. Sonny's gesture is then reciprocated in his brother/auditor's recognition of their shared lineage. Although Baldwin does not exclude women from the family genealogy, he is most concerned with healing the fractured bonds between men, whether fathers and sons or sons and brothers. Black women writers focus more on the rifts between men and women, mothers and daughters. As Baldwin's fictions often do, "Sonny's Blues" figures the moment of reconciliation in metaphors borrowed from the Old Testament, a figuration that serves to reinscribe spirituality as a fundamental component of the blues.

Baldwin's Old Testament allusions notwithstanding, lineage for African Americans bears little resemblance to Genesis. As Frederick Douglass articulated with characteristic irony, "genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves." Extending Douglass's observation in her aptly titled "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Spillers argues that the beginning of the African American symbolic order is a rupture, "a radically different kind of cultural continuation." It is a radically worried line. Under the law children born to slaves followed the condition of the mother, and enslaved men and women were denied the right to marry. As a consequence, to quote Spillers: "'Family,' as we practice and understand it in the West'-the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of 'cold cash,' from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and female of his choice-becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community." Bereft of this "privilege," African American families historically assume configurations for which the dominant order has no category. In contrast to most public discourses however, in black women's writing these configurations, like Morrison's three-woman households, do not necessarily become a cause of despair but a site of possibility. Scholars have set forth competing theories of African American literary tradition, for which the line is a fitting metaphor. Whether one perceives texts as responding to their precursors or as signifying on them, tradition constitutes a theoretical line in which texts produce and are produced by other texts. These intertextual connections may be thematic or mythic, rhetorical or figurative.

Continues...

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Artfully examines the literary genealogy of a prominent and influential group. . . . Offers keen insights into these writers' formal and thematic uses of other less literary sources. . . . Impressive.—Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Brilliantly reworking notions of 'the cut' and 'the line,' both tropes from blues vocalization, in Worrying the Line Cheryl Wall explores not only the complex ways in which African American women writers treat ideas of lineage and the literary tradition, but also the deep interconnections between the two preoccupations. This impressive study will transform our understanding of black women's writing.—Valerie Smith, Princeton University

A lucid map of black women's late 20th century literary writing deftly rendered by Wall. . . . This is a work of literary criticism I would recommend to nonacademic readers—and reading groups—who want to know more about how our most gifted African American women narrative artists work their magic to enhance readers' appreciation of the miracle of African American families, our cultural wealth, and dramatic historical legacy. Wall weaves a vivid tapestry that allows readers to see clearly common themes and significant relationships among the represented texts and better comprehend the rich cultural sources upon which the writers draw.—Black Issues Book Review

Takes its place alongside other powerful essay collections on the subject. . . . Conveys in intelligent and potentially quite rich ways the process at work in summoning memories, eliciting stories, and recasting them for new contexts.—Feminist Teacher

With remarkable skill and sensitivity, Cheryl Wall explores a series of texts to find in what ways the authors assume attitudes towards earlier writers of varying ethnicities, adopt and adapt themselves to diverse cultural frameworks, and interrogate the idea of 'traditions'—both those that welcome them and those that have historically been closed to them. This is a book that will teach us a great deal about the importance of these debates and these authors.—Ashraf Rushdy, Wesleyan University

At once clearly articulated and engagingly written, Worrying the Line offers rich insights into the works of twentieth-century African American women writers, brilliantly uncovering their complex responses to earlier writers, both male and female, of various ethnicities. . . . These studies powerfully reveal the complex literary legacies of slavery and suggest new and fruitful ways of thinking about the work of some of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century.—American Literature

Wall's indisputably fine prose conveys valuable information, convincing interpretations, and models for more than academic essays . . . in twentieth-century black women's writing in the United States.—Journal of American History

Worrying the Line is an important study of contemporary women writers. . . . Wall has provided readers with an excellent study of how a variety of contemporary women writers have examined, altered, and extended the literary and cultural context for the work they do, and she has done it in an intelligent, clearly written, and entertaining fashion.—Studies in American Fiction

A valuable resource in the effort to define a critical epistemology of literary matrilineage in African American literature.—African American Review

[A] fascinating study. . . . Cheryl Wall has given us yet another way of looking at black women's texts through the prism of our multifaceted experiences.—Journal of African American History

Editorial Reviews

"A valuable resource in the effort to define a critical epistemology of literary matrilineage in African American literature."
— African American Review

"Artfully examines the literary genealogy of a prominent and influential group. . . . Offers keen insights into these writers' formal and thematic uses of other less literary sources. . . . Impressive."
— Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

"Takes its place alongside other powerful essay collections on the subject. . . . Conveys in intelligent and potentially quite rich ways the process at work in summoning memories, eliciting stories, and recasting them for new contexts."
— Feminist Teacher

From the Publisher