SOURCE: “The Politics of Matrilineage: Mothers and Daughters in the Poetry of African American Women, 1965-1985,” in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20^th-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, University of Texas Press, 1996, pp. 117-131.

“The image of the mother,” according to critic Andrea Benton Rushing, “is the most prevalent image of black women” in African American poetry (“Afro-American,” 75). These images have been developed through a long and distinguished literary history, reaching back through the diaspora to ancient African cultures in which “the African woman is associated with core values” and is revered as “guardian of traditions, the strong Earth-Mother who stands for security and stability” (Rushing, “African,” 19). These values, passed down through an oral tradition in which women have played a major role, as well as through the medium of print, continue to define the ways black women are represented in African American literature and the ways they perceive themselves and their daughters and act upon these perceptions. Christine Renee Robinson argues that “self-reliance, independence, assertiveness, and strength are inherent characteristics of Black women which are passed on to Black girls at a very early age” (Nice, 68). And it has been widely noted that, contrary to the experience of most white women, black mothers and daughters prosper through relationships that are mutually loving and supportive (Nice, 197; Washington, 148). A recent landmark study by Vivian E. Nice not only points out the relevance of these literary images to sociological and psychological explorations of black motherhood, but also suggests the possibility of using these artistic representations of relationships between black mothers and daughters as models of the kind of supportive, interdependent relationships possible between mothers and daughters of any race once freed from the distorting influences of patriarchal culture.

The writings of African American women hold particular interest for Nice and other feminist theorists who seek to replace the Freudian model of female adolescent development (which emphasizes conflict) with a model based on interdependency and “growth through relationships” (Nice, 66), thus fostering stronger positive bonds between all mothers and daughters and between members of the larger community of women. Nice is aware, however, that ambivalence and conflict will be part of even the most loving relationships, and she applauds contemporary black women writers for revealing ambivalence “in all its glory.” In the works of the contemporary poets she cites, there exists “the connection between mothers and daughters and the legacy of strength between them without denying the anger, guilt, and difficulties in communication which can also exist and the fact that connection and anger can in fact co-exist” (187).

In African American poetry, however, there have been at least three forces working to limit the depth of characterization and fullness of description in representations of black mothers and daughters:

1. the symbolic nature of the mother in the African American tradition;

2. the dominant white culture's insistence on what it identifies as universality;

3. the necessity of promoting “positive images” of blacks in order to achieve social change.

With regard to the first of these forces, Rushing notes that “women often symbolize aspects of black life that are valued by the race”; she claims that “that usually unconscious thrust has been something of a straightjacket” (“Afro-American,” 74). She calls these symbolic images “epic,” “heroic,” or “archetypal” (“Afro-American,” 82). In another instance, she reflects that poetry may not be a suitable instrument for creating realistic characters (“African,” 24). Nan Bauer Maglin agrees that these depictions are often symbolic, but she emphasizes the legitimacy of symbolic representation:

In the literature of matrilineage often the strength of the women in our past is sentimentalized or is magnified so that our own strength appears to be negligible—especially in terms of the hard physical and social conditions of the past. Sometimes our genealogical and historical mothers become not persons but symbols (which we need) and lose their multidimensionality. (263)

Maglin cites Lucille Clifton's “My Mama Moved among the Days” as an example of such symbolization, but she argues that Clifton's depiction is “not simplistic” since the poem reveals the mother's fear as well as her strength (263).

Taking a different approach, Arnold Rampersad in his article “The Universal and the Particular in Afro-American Poetry” writes of the dominant white culture's insistence on universality and its equally vehement insistence that the particulars of black experience cannot be construed as universal. Such strictures led to the propagation of “raceless virtues” as black writers attempted to “elevate” their writing while effectively binding it in shackles. Rampersad says of this verse that it “is sometimes executed in glorious fashion, but in many instances it is much like the efforts of a man bound and gagged who is trying to get one's attention” (9). True universality is rooted in the specifics of everyday life; false universality (that prescribed by the dominant culture) “thrives on vagueness; it abhors the specific in any form that stresses concrete experience” (8). Rampersad identifies Amiri Baraka as the poet who, in the 1960s, initiated “a violent assault on the obsessively universal in Afro-American writing” (14).

Finally, the necessity of promoting “positive images” of blacks in general and of black women in particular may have contributed somewhat to the limiting range of characterization of mothers and daughters (for references to the need for positive images, see Ward, 189; Giovanni, 40; Parker, xxx). The projection of positive images, of course, is essential to the development of black pride and self-worth and is a key element in countering stereotypes such as “the Mammy” and “Sapphire.” However, this inherently good and useful prescription for change may have produced a somewhat paradoxical side effect: a positive stereotype. As Rushing observes, “in almost all the mother poems, mother is above criticism, the almost perfect symbol of black struggle, suffering, and endurance” (“Afro-American,” 76). Ward warns, though, of the problems inherent in judging the adequacy of these representations:

Whether visions of Black women in literature are positive or negative, true or distorted, good or bad, real or surreal, satisfying or inadequate is relative. Evaluation of the vision depends in part on some understanding of the cultural imperatives that governed its creation and in part on whether those imperatives (linguistic, social, psychological, etc.) are constant with our own. (188)

In the intensely autobiographical poems of contemporary African Americans, such as Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Rodgers, Audre Lorde, and Colleen McElroy, images of black mothers and daughters have achieved a fullness and depth of representation which indicate the individuality of black women and the diversity of their experience. Although the poems are at times more abstract and symbolic, at times more concrete and specific, taken together they provide the model of interdependency which Nice speaks of, with its welter of love, ambivalence, admiration, and anger.

An impressive example of the strong traditional mother appears in Alice Walker's sequence “In These Dissenting Times” (Adoff, 475-480). In carefully crafted, spare verses, Walker employs incremental description to build, piece by piece, an image of a woman of her mother's generation, a mighty gold-toothed woman who dragged her children to church. The third poem in the sequence is entitled “Women,” and it is here, primarily, that Walker consciously creates an iconography of traditional black motherhood. As is apparent from the poem's title, Walker has no intention of creating individualized, idiosyncratic portraits of these women. Here she continues the generalized, fragmentary descriptions begun in the prologue. She describes the women's voices as husky, their steps as stout, and their hands as fists. And she shows the women acting not in isolated, separate incidents, but in actions which have become mythologized, embedded in the cultural consciousness of African Americans because of their persuasiveness and the intense emotion—the pain, the humiliation, and the fortitude—which those actions symbolize. The persona notes that these “Headragged Generals” (477) demolished barriers and marched across mined fields to secure an education for their children. Yet when her purpose is individual representation, she does that equally well. In the fourth poem of the sequence, “Three Dollars Cash,” she particularizes a representation of her own mother by retelling the story of how her family paid the midwife who brought her into the world. Most of the poem is spoken by the mother, and the diction and cadences of the mother's speech further particularize the poem. The mother's language also creates a causal, informal atmosphere, as does Walker's use of the word “Mom” rather than “Mother.”

Whether Walker speaks symbolically or specifically, throughout the sequence she restricts herself to the idealized representation of black motherhood. According to Mary Burgher,

Values specifically attributed to Black mothers include the belief that there is a promised land beyond this life of bondage and oppression, that one has within oneself the natural wit and resourcefulness to find strength in apparent weakness, joy in sorrow, and hope in what seems to be despair, and that the love of a mother cannot always be determined by physical presence or material gifts. (116)

The faith and determination of these women is shown in their insistence that life will be better for their children, even if that involves physical hardship and sacrifice for themselves. Burgher emphasizes these qualities: “It is not she separately who is significant and it is not what she attains personally and immediately that matters; instead it is what the future brings from the ideas she expresses, the consciousness she reflects, the action she takes” (120).

In much of the poetry of these contemporary writers, the mother is a figure of such mythic proportions that her life haunts her daughters through the duration of their own lives. Lucille Clifton, whose mother died in midlife (at age forty-four), has written extensively upon this theme. In her poem “Breaklight,” she speaks of her own intellectual and spiritual growth, which culminates in a new understanding of her mother. She says that when her mother's fears approached her she listened as they explained themselves to her. The persona notes with certainty, “And I understand” (An Ordinary Woman, 85). These experiences of mystical enlightenment culminate in a very intense, personal understanding. It is useful, in considering this poem, to look at Clifton's “My Mama Moved among the Days” (Adoff, 308). Part of what Clifton finally “understood” in “Breaklight” may have been what she was unable to understand earlier: her mother was able to get them “almost through the high grass,” but seemingly turned around and ran back into the wilderness. The mother here is loved and yearned for, but is not idealized, even though the language is highly symbolic. She has not fully carried out her responsibilities to her daughter. These may be particular responsibilities which remain unnamed and which the mother left undone out of fear or they may simply be her obligation to live and to nurture her daughter, which she was unable to do. Both poems are dreamlike: Mama moves “like a dreamwalker in a field,” the disembodied fears knock at the door, trying to “explain themselves.” In coming to understand her mother's fears through these dreams, Clifton resolves the bewildering unfinished relationship (at least momentarily, to the extent that poetry can serve that therapeutic function) and assuages her pain.

In a poem commemorating the twenty-first year of her mother's absence (“february 13, 1980”), she speaks again of her grief and pain, naming her mother “the lost color in my eye” (two-headed woman, 15). Clifton, whose middle name is Thelma, after her mother, feels that her mother's name has continued to protect her despite her mother's physical absence. She says that she has worn her mother's name like a shield. Her complex feelings are apparent when she notes that the shield has both ripped her up and safeguarded her. And since her mother's absence has come of age, Clifton determines that she must now accept the responsibilities that go along with womanhood. But she assures her absent mother that although she has grown into a self-sufficient woman, she nonetheless remains spiritually close to her. Her mother, though dead, is a continuing presence in her life; lest she disappoint the lingering spirit, the daughter must reassure her that she is still loved and needed.

Approaching the age at which her mother died, Clifton ruminates more darkly upon her mother's death in two poems, “the thirty eighth year” and “poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young.” In the first one, the tone is resigned and melancholy, as Clifton reflects upon her life and finds herself merely “an ordinary woman.” Implicitly, she compares herself to her mother, finding herself inadequate. She says that she had expected to be more than she was. Instead she views herself as “plain as bread” (An Ordinary Woman, 93). In contrast, she remembers her mother as very wise and beautiful. Despite these perceived differences, she identifies strongly with her mother, saying that she has surrounded herself with memories of her mother so that her mother's dreams could be fulfilled through her. The persona clearly sees herself as a continuation or replication of the mother. The implication is that daughters cannot truly find voice until they validate their mother's voice or experiences. Having rescued her mother from death by living for her, she now faces the death which swallowed up her mother. She associates life with images of Africa and death, in contrast, with images of Europe. The prospect of death creates in her an intense loneliness which she had not anticipated; if she is coming to the end of her life, she asks that she be allowed to come to it without fear and loneliness. She says that before she dies, she wants to come “into [her] own” (95). Here she is not seeking to escape from her mother's life (and thus from death), but to emerge from her mother's life equipped with the emotional resources which will allow her to live her own life fully before it ends.

The image of “turning the final turn” derived from the footrace is used again in “poem on my fortieth birthday” (two-headed woman, 14). Here the tone is not at all melancholy; rather than growing more abject as the fateful date nears, Clifton (perhaps drawing upon the emotional resources she has inherited and cultivated) seems to rally as she approaches the homestretch. Defiant, strong, goal-oriented, she informs her mother that she intends to keep running. Yet she is not convinced of victory: “if I fall / I fall.” The vortex of her mother's death continues to pull her into its spiral.

A truly grueling example of this intense mother / daughter identification is Carolyn Rodgers's “The Children of Their Sin,” a double narrative in four parts (21-25). Three of the parts relate the daughter's decision to change seats on a public conveyance; one part tells of the mother's being mugged. As the mother's and daughter's experiences are interwoven, the daughter's changing seats becomes even more intense, violent, and emotionally wrenching than her mother's mugging.

In the first section of the poem, Rodgers explains that she decides to change seats on a bus (or possibly a train) because the man who sat down next to her seems unsavory. Because she has money in her pockets (and because she bears her mother's experience in mind, as is revealed later), she moves to a seat by a stylishly dressed white businessman. Yet as she does so, she “smother[s] faint memories and / shadows and things.” The dramatic and passionate narration of the mother's mugging (by a “mean nigger”) in section two is followed in section three by the riveting protest of the shadows which she had “smothered” in section one. While she fears that this poor, hungry black brother might mug her, she is reminded by a coliseum of black women ancestors of all the atrocities that white slaveholders heaped upon blacks. These ancestors scream to her to remember the whips, the bodies hanging from trees, the women who were raped and whose children were sold away. The poem moves toward a crescendo of anguish and guilt as Rodgers hears her mother's desperate screams juxtaposed against the agonies of the black race at the hands of white slaveholders. Identifying with her mother, she chooses white over black (she changes seats). Although at first she is only vaguely uncomfortable at this decision, ultimately she understands that her choice is a true act of treason against her race.

Produced at the heart of the Black Arts Movement and promoted by Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, Carolyn Rodgers's work is widely known and often discussed. Her poems “Jesus Was Crucified, or It Must Be Deep” and a companion piece, “It Is Deep,” in which Rodgers refers to her mother as “a sturdy Black bridge that I / crossed over, on,” are well known (8-12). Rodgers is especially skilled in the depiction of conflict, whether internal or interpersonal. In “Jesus Was Crucified,” the points of contention between mother and daughter are apparent: the mother does not approve of her daughter's rejection of religion or her association with revolutionaries (whom she accuses of being Communists); the daughter resents the mother's complacency and lack of political awareness. The daughter's tone throughout is sarcastic and sassy; the mother appears backward and ridiculous, and there is little in this poem to indicate that the daughter has any compassion for her. In the collection how i got ovah, however, this poem is followed by “It Is Deep,” which serves as a sort of retraction and reconciliation. This poem indicates a complete shift in the daughter's awareness; suddenly she understands that despite their differences they are united by their love and strengthened by the hardships they have come through together.

Discussions of these poems are included in studies by Maglin (265) and Nice (187). Both critics recognize that these poems show the ambivalence characteristic of any intense, enduring relationship, and both recognize the relationship depicted as a model of their ideal mutual support and interdependency. Maglin also notes that “It Is Deep” “articulates some of the themes of the literature of matrilineage: the distance between the mother and daughter; the sudden new sense the daughter has of the mother; the realization that she, her mother, is a strong woman; and that her voice reverberates with her mother's” (265).

Although Maglin and Nice focus on a pair of poems in which conflicts are neatly worked out, in a growing number of mother-daughter poems conflicts are not resolved so neatly, and some are not resolved at all. Despite the tendency for relationship between black mothers and their daughters to be supportive, there are individual exceptions, and some of them are poets. Audre Lorde appears to be one of these, though her struggle to understand her mother is evident in her poems. One of them, “Story Books on a Kitchen Table” (Coal, 27), opens, “Out of her womb of pain my mother spat me / into her ill-fitting harness of despair.”

Lorde's diction here is sharp and effective; the connotations of spat—disgust, disdain, and filthiness—in this context, the act of giving birth, are intended to shock and offend. The child is immediately harnessed—confined—in the mother's despairing world view. The mother undoubtedly fears that her child will shame her by not turning out properly, that she will reject her mother's views and values. Her mother leaves her, for reasons unstated, in the care of “iron maidens.” Needing the warmth and tenderness of a “perfect” mother, the child is left with emotionally distant old women. She is (mal)nourished on European witch tales rather than stories of her African-Caribbean heritage. The table is empty, the mother vanished. The poem suggests that there are mothers who seek to control and manipulate; when their daughters resist, the conflict intensifies. The child's loneliness and desperate needs are manifested as heartache—the ache of the ill-fitting harness, a despair like her mother's.

In the poem “Prologue” (From a Land, 43-46) Lorde says that in her mother's attempts to teach her survival strategies she tried to beat her whiter every day. She refers to her mother's “bleached ambition” as her motivation for teaching her children about her mother's errors. In her integrity and determination to speak the truth as she understands it, Lorde does not minimize the mother's error; yet the insertion of one word, survival, associated as it is with the fabric of oppression, clarifies the complexity of the situation. The mother is not infallibly good or innately evil. And as her mother tried to beat her into whiteness, Lorde recalls her “loving me into her blood's black bone.” Here the paradoxical identification of physical punishment with love and Lorde's recognition that she and her mother are bound the more strongly for it are evident. Lorde's attempts to understand her mother are also revealed in “Black Mother Woman,” where she imagistically represents the process of this understanding: she has peeled away her mother's anger “down to the core of love” (From a Land, 16).

Another contemporary black woman who has written exceptional poems on the theme of mother-daughter conflict is Colleen McElroy. The image she presents of the mother in the poem “Bone Mean” could not in any way be construed as positive. The persona notes that the mother has stacked the world against her daughter. Intentionally mean and vindictive, this mother serves mint-flavored ice cream at the child's birthday party, fully aware that the child dislikes it. As her daughters have matured, she has “pruned and pinched / them into bonsai symmetry” (Queen, 25). A harsh, domineering, cronelike woman, she seeks to control everything around her, until her daughters have no voices and no wills of their own.

Although such a poem is not politically useful in the interests of feminism or race struggle, it is nonetheless a valid and skillfully constructed work of art. If one insists that all art is political, then this poem might be construed as misogynist. If one holds, however, that a poem should be the artist's representation of the truth of her experience as she conceives it, then this poem is a work of integrity, and perhaps also of courage, for the view presented here has not been “politically correct” since the mid-sixties.

Intense, unresolved conflict is the theme again in McElroy's poem “Ruth” (Stetson, 287-288). The daughter has been haunted for twenty-seven years by her memory of her mother falling down a flight of stairs during one of their arguments. She remembers the terror she felt as she was unable to prevent her mother from falling. Immobilized, she felt like the famous statue of Venus (the Aphrodite of Melos) without arms to catch her mother. Here imagery reveals her complex feelings: on the one hand, the mother is “larger than life,” “a great vulture”; on the other, she is “fragile … plunging in wingless flight.” McElroy has been unable to write about this incident for twenty-seven years, all attempts thwarted by the memory of her mother's angry words. Nonetheless, her relationship with her mother has been an obsession, as is evident in the countless unfinished verses about her mother which she has stuffed away in closets. Writing the poem, she has finally recognized the cycle of pain and blood in which she and her mother (and all women) are trapped. She has been unable to see herself in her mother, to recognize the forces that unify them, including perhaps their shared oppression. And she understands that she will someday continue the cycle in her relationship with her own daughter. However, the ending of the poem does not indicate a complete reversal—anger and bitterness have not completely been replaced by love and understanding. Modifying the words of the biblical Ruth, McElroy says, “Wherever I go you have gone.” Not only does she see her mother as having prepared the way for her, but she cannot find a path that is uniquely hers—a path her mother has not taken before her—and she finds this frustrating. The persona is in search of a space to call her very own, perhaps, one in which she will be able to break the cycle of pain and begin a new legacy which includes joy.

As is apparent in quite a few of these poems, including this one, feelings are complex. They result from a lifetime of experience and, like thunderheads, are continuously roiling. The poems about mothers and daughters reflect the shifting configurations of feelings.

McElroy's poems do not exclusively present conflicts, though she does that with great skill. Perhaps the most beautiful poem she has written is “Mother,” a birth poem rich with the imagery of the African jungle (Music, 34-35). The poet imagines her mother, sedated while giving birth to her, dreaming of “emerald green forests,” “queleas and touracos.” The mother's dream of Africa symbolizes her role in the generational continuity of the black race. Her daughter, the poet, sits in an easy chair, happy and comfortable, trying to remember what it was like to be in her mother's womb. Continuity of lineage is emphasized as the daughter hums her mother's song while her own children watch her.

Two other notable birth poems are Audre Lorde's “Now That I Am Forever with Child” and Lucille Clifton's “light.” Lorde's poem deals with the birth of her daughter, including the experience of pregnancy, her thoughts about the baby's prenatal development, the birth itself, and (in a brief conclusion) the child's individuation. Clifton's poem is about her own birth, particularly her mother's choice of the name Lucille for her, and includes the story of her ancestor whose name she is given. All of these birth poems are romantic, magical representations.

According to Nice, “there is much less written by mothers than by daughters on the mother-daughter relationship” (70). Indeed, this is true with regard to poetry. Outstanding poems by mothers on daughters are rare, the strongest having been written by Audre Lorde. Several have also been produced by Alice Walker. These poems focus on misgivings and insecurities which the mother experiences as she attempts to raise her daughter.

In “What My Child Learns of the Sea,” Lorde ponders the intellectual growth of her daughter, who, despite what Lorde has passed on to her, will one day be a “strange girl … cutting my ropes” (Coal, 22). Yet Lorde herself will feel responsible for her daughter's view of the world, her optimism or pessimism. In “Progress Report” Lorde deals with her daughter's adolescence and, despite the apparent love between the two, the growing distance between them. When her daughter asks her about love, Lorde doesn't know whether to recommend “a dictionary / or myself” (From a Land, 13). She feels unsure whether she has taught her daughter enough about blackness and she knows that behind the closed door of her room her daughter is reading secret books. Lorde's respect for her maturing daughter, her acceptance of her as an individual, is obvious throughout the poem. She appreciates the child's strength of spirit, tenderness, and fearlessness, qualities she admires; and she remembers to knock before entering her daughter's room.

Alice Walker's poems about her daughter are very different from Lorde's—more direct and less evocative. Nonetheless, they reveal similar insecurities. Only a few lines of the poem “Mississippi Winter III” focus on her daughter, but what emerges clearly is Walker's anticipation of her daughter's adolescence, even though the child is only four. Walker is “alarmed” that her little daughter already “smells / of Love-Is-True perfume” (Horses, 38). This experience leads Walker to muse upon her own preference to avoid romance. “My Daughter Is Coming!” (Horses, 38-39) shows Walker frantic as she prepares a room for her daughter, who has been living far away in the custody of her father. Joyous, excited, and insecure, she worries that her daughter will only notice the torn curtains. Poems of this kind, in which mothers reveal their feelings about their daughters and illustrate the difficulties of motherhood, prove to be a valuable resource in understanding the mother's role.

Poems in which the poet deals with her role as both a mother and a daughter are especially rare. However, it is in these poems that the continuity of generations can be seen most clearly. Colleen McElroy's “In My Mother's Room” not only reveals the linkage of women from generation to generation within her own family, but also points to the connection of all women within a larger women's culture (Queen, 5-6). McElroy's images of her mother are not idealized, yet they achieve symbolic power. Her unflattering description of her mother's vulnerable naked body, with its childbearing scars, her mouth sagging open, suggests that this is a woman of flesh and blood and that McElroy is able to see beyond her role as mother to her physical existence as a woman. Though they are torn by conflict, she and her mother are “shadows of black into black,” and she expects to follow her mother in “age-old patterns.” Her connection with her mother and with all women is apparent in her assertion that she will follow the path of her foremothers in childbirth. Thus, here again as in “Ruth” is the “cycle of blood and pain” with its connection to fertility, childbirth, the continuation of one's genetic line, and the propagation of one's race. Though McElroy's daughter is innocent about what lies ahead for her, the poet understands that her continuation of this female role is inevitable.

Lucille Clifton also links three generations of women in her family in her poem “i was born with twelve fingers” (two-headed woman, 4). Using the extra fingers which she, her mother, and her daughter were born with as a symbol of magical power and generational continuity, she says that members of their community were afraid that they would learn to cast spells. Here Clifton alludes to the mythological woman of power, the African conjurer. Although the fingers were surgically removed, the power is not so easily excised. She speaks of the missing fingers as ghosts with powerful memories. This line of women remains powerful: “we take what we want / with invisible fingers.” And she closes the poem with a beautiful image of the three women—one dead, two living, linking those amazing hands across the boundaries of death.

Contemporary African American women poets, whose cultural traditions have primed them for this task, are speaking of these connections between women and in doing so are creating a poetics of matrilineage. The simple direct verses of Alice Walker, the terse, mystical writings of Lucille Clifton, the passionate lines of Carolyn Rodgers, the evocative encodings of Audre Lorde, and the richly imagistic poems of Colleen McElroy are diverse representations of black women as mothers and as daughters. These writers are “beginning to piece together the story of a viable female culture” (Washington, 147). A part of that culture will be a full understanding of what it means to be the mother of a daughter or the daughter of a mother. Additionally, these poets are finding ways to see beyond those relationships, to see their mothers and their daughters as unique, individual women within a larger community of women. The mother-daughter poems produced by these talented and wise black women suggest that both mothers and daughters grow spiritually when they recognize and valorize each other's experiences as women.

Works Cited

Adoff, Arnold, ed. The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Bell, Roseann P., Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1979.

Burgher, Mary. “Images of Self and Race in the Autobiographies of Black Women.” In Bell et al., 107-122.

Clifton, Lucille. An Ordinary Woman. New York: Random House, 1974.

———. two-headed woman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Giovanni, Nikki. Re:Creation. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970.

Lorde, Audre. Coal. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

———. From a Land Where Other People Live. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973, rpt. 1983.

Maglin, Nan Bauer. “Don't never forget the bridge that you crossed over on: The Literature of Matrilineage.” In The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, 257-267. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

McElroy, Colleen J. Music from Home: Selected Poems.. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976.

———. Queen of the Ebony Isles. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984.

Nice, Vivian E. Mothers and Daughters: The Distortion of a Relationship. New York: St. Martin's, 1992.

Parker, Bettye J. “Introduction.” In Bell et al., xxv-xxxi.

Rampersad, Arnold. “The Universal and the Particular in Afro-American Poetry.” CLA Journal 25, no. 1 (1981): 1-17.

Rodgers, Carolyn. how i got ovah: New and Selected Poems. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1975.

Rushing, Andrea Benton. “Images of Black Women in Afro-American Poetry.” In The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, ed. Sharon Hartley and Rosalyn Teborg-Penn, 74-84. Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications-Kennikat Press, 1978.

———. “Images of Black Women in Modern African Poetry: An Overview.” In Bell et al., 18-24.

Stetson, Erlene, ed. Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women 1746-1980. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Walker, Alice. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful. New York: Harcourt, 1984.

Ward, Jerry D. “Bridges and Deep Water.” In Bell et al., 184-190.

Washington, Mary Helen. “I Sign My Mother's Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall.” In Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley, 142-163. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.