Betsey's Developing Sense of Identity
Betsey Brown has a loose plot, based on a series of episodes in the protagonist’s thirteenth year. Betsey faces various trials and tribulations—some large and some small—as she negotiates the dilemmas of being black, being female, and just simply being a teenager in 1959 St. Louis. Betsey Brown may seem to lack structure. However, one thing that gives shape to its plot is the series of domestic servants who come to work for the Brown family. Though each woman works for the Browns only briefly, each one is symbolically significant to Betsey’s moral and emotional development. Tracing Betsey’s interactions with and ideas about Bernice, Regina, and Carrie outlines some of the most important aspects of Betsey’s journey toward maturity and self-understanding.
One aspect of Betsey’s developing sense of identity that a focus on the servants serves to highlight is her middle-class status. Though she lives in an almost exclusively black neighborhood and, until school desegregation goes into effect, moves almost entirely within a black social milieu, Betsey is by no means typical of the African-American experience. Her father is a doctor in an era when there were few black professionals of any sort and her mother, descended from free blacks rather than slaves, enjoys a long legacy of education and privilege. This special status reflects that of Shange’s own upbringing. Until she wrote Betsey Brown Shange tended to focus on the hard-luck stories of emotionally and economically downtrodden characters. But in Betsey Brown, a semi-autobiograph- ical piece, she examines the particular tensions that arise out of being a privileged member of an doubly oppressed group, black women.
In her essay “Roots of Privilege,” which appeared in Ms. in 1985, Sherley Anne Williams offers the historical context that until the 1920s, middle- class, educated, and light-skinned blacks tended to populate the fiction written by African Americans. With the rise of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, there was a revaluation of indigenous African-American art forms associated with “the folk”—the supposedly simple, often uneducated black masses. For example, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes used dialect in their writing, celebrated the rich African-American oral culture of storytelling, and used motifs from the blues, a form of folk music.
In the mid-century, folk forms still dominated the black arts scene, and as the political radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement took hold, the situation of the common, working black person remained the most popular subject for black authors. “I was embarrassed to be a middle-class person at a time when the black proletariat was so active; the black people I was around were having bridge parties. Everybody in New York and Washington was burning down the city!,” Shange admits in a Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism interview with Serena Anderlini. Betsey Brown shows how Shange came to terms with that shame.
The Browns’ first servant, Bernice Calhoun, works for them less than one day and only appears in two short scenes, but her status in the novel is important to Betsey’s moral development and her self-consciousness about her privileged status. Significantly, Bernice is introduced through a blues song—Shange’s reference back to the Harlem Renaissance tradition of integrating African-American folk music into literary forms. Bernice’s song serves as an autobiography. Shange provides little information about Bernice’s background other than the lines of the soulful, improvised song, which begins, “well, my name is bernice & i come a long way / up from arkansas & i’m here to stay / i aint got no friends and i aint got no ma / but i’ma make st....
(This entire section contains 1961 words.)
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louis give me a fair draw.” Shange seeks to emphasize the cultural distance between Betsey and Bernice. Bernice embodies qualities associated with a common-folk definition of blackness that Betsey fails to understand or appreciate. Bernice “looks to [Betsey’s] mind like a woman in need of some new clothes and a suitcase. Who ever heard of carrying one’s belongings in two shopping bags while wearing a hat with five different colored flowers on it?” Betsey sees Bernice’s poverty, but she fails to appreciate the richness in the song that “moved as if it weren’t usedta having shoes on its feet.”
At this point, early in the novel, Betsey—a middle-class city girl—lacks the experience and insight to perceive Bernice’s “country honor.” Disgruntled by the fact that Bernice has revealed her oak-tree hideaway, Betsey plots revenge against Bernice, rallying her siblings to wreak havoc in the household and get Bernice fired. Never having had to worry about material security herself, she is simply naïve as to the repercussions of her actions on Bernice’s well-being. Then Betsey’s classmate Veejay reveals that her mother is the household servant for a white family, “tak[ing] care of nasty white chirren who act up like y’all acted up this morning.” Veejay, who Betsey is surprised to find she has angered, goes on to call Betsey “stupid” and to explain that her mother “don’t do it cause she likes it neither. She does it so I could have clothes and food and a place to live.” Betsey is suddenly filled with remorse. Veejay’s condemnation comes as a revelation to Betsey about her own lack of insight and empathy. She had been “so busy seeing to herself and the skies, she’s let a woman who coulda been Veejay’s mama look a fool and lose her job.” Betsey runs home, hoping to repair the situation, but it is too late—Bernice has hit the road, and she does not appear in the novel again. Betsey’s treatment of Bernice stands as a moral error and a lesson to Betsey about the power that she, even as a young black girl, wields over the lives of others.
The next servant the Browns hire is Regina Johnson. Regina also faces Betsey across a cultural divide—she is from a poor and troubled family. But this is mitigated by the fact that she is herself from St. Louis and, more significantly, that she is an attractive young woman just out of high school, “fresh, neat and slender, with a heavy curl across her forehead, the fashion of the day.” Furthermore, she is in love—a condition that Betsey is curious about and ambivalently aspires to. For these reasons, Regina is someone Betsey looks up to. With Bernice, all that Betsey perceives are her differences, ultimately failing to see her as fully human. With Regina, Betsey doesn’t comprehend the significance of her differences enough.
If Bernice is associated with “Mississippi muddy” blues, Regina is associated with the new black pop stars of Motown. Regina’s sexuality is part of the reason she initially fits in well at the Browns’. Charlie is obedient because he has a crush on her and the girls are fascinated with her. But her sexuality also leads to her downfall. Having few emotional or financial resources herself, she does what many women have done and puts all of her faith in her boyfriend Roscoe. A jealous Charlie reports one of Roscoe’s visits to Vida. Proud of her love, Regina leaves. Betsey looks to Regina and Roscoe as she tries to understand her own budding feelings for Eugene. While Betsey worries that “when you’re really in love, there’s never enough to go around,” Regina seems confident in both her love and her sexuality. “Regina took no mind of her body when she was with him. Her woman gave into his man and there was a hush, subduing her throbs and moans in the midst of the sepia rush that was Roscoe.” However, when she meets Regina again at Mrs. Maureen’s beauty parlor/bordello and learns that Regina is pregnant and living there, waiting for Roscoe’s dubious return, Betsey must reevaluate her idol.
Betsey has run away to the bad side of town, feeling alienated from her family and tired of the white folks at school. She tells Mrs. Maureen that she plans to work for her until she can elope. She complains to Regina about her mother not letting her listen to popular music and goes on, “She doesn’t want me to be like everybody else, Regina. She wants me to be special, like I lived in a glass cage or something.” While Betsey claims that she “feels so much better when I’m just like everybody else,” Regina explains to her that she is lonely because she is special—and different from women like her, whose options are limited. She helps Betsey see that she has broader resources to draw on than just her sexuality and warns her, “Don’t you grow up too soon.” Fortified by Regina’s advice, she marches through the streets of St. Louis with a new appreciation for her uniqueness and the power that she possesses, feeling like the “Queen of the Negro Veiled Prophet.”
Carrie, the third domestic servant, arrives at a crucial time in Betsey’s development—just after Jane has left the family. Carrie helps Betsey to integrate what she has learned about herself from the hard lessons of Bernice and Regina and to carry on with a new maturity. Like Bernice, Carrie’s appearance betrays her simple, rural background. She wears her hair unfashionably and ties her dresses with a rope. She also uses the latrine in the basement rather than any of the modern bathrooms in the house “cause that’s what her mama had in Arkansas.” This is an example of the “country honor” she shares with Bernice. By now, Betsey has learned enough to overlook appearances and appreciate the values that Carrie has to instill. Under Carrie’s guidance, the Brown children learn the value of taking pride in hard work. While Bernice sings the blues and Regina has the girls mouthing along with the pop tunes of Mary Washington, Carrie helps them to make up their own song to sing as they work, expressing pride in their house: “this is our house . . . / we keep it shinin / spanking clean / if some white folks ever see it / they’ll think they musta done it / but it’s us colored kids that run it / this is ours.” This responsible attitude is the exact inverse of what the children displayed on Bernice’s catastrophic first day of work.
Like Regina, Carrie has a gentleman caller, Mr. Jeff, who comes by the house and stirs up trouble with Vida, but the older and wiser Carrie handles the conflict with aplomb. Discerning Carrie’s womanly knowledge and warmth, Mr. Jeff is attracted to her despite the fact that she is overweight and odd-looking. Betsey watches her and learns how a woman can earn and enjoy a man’s attentions without sacrificing her independence or risking her future. While Jane and Vida censure Betsey’s sexuality and Regina gives her a glimpse into the consequences of thoughtless passion, Carrie teaches Betsey about moderating between caution and pleasure in matters of love: “Go on ahead and enjoy bein a girl, but be careful.”
When Jane fires Carrie for getting arrested, Betsey has the quiet confidence that her role model acted with justice and reason, an opinion she is also now wise enough to keep from her mother. In Carrie’s absence, “Betsey just took Carrie’s place in the house.” Betsey’s optimism at the novel’s close that she was “surely going to have her way” can be attributed in part to her newfound ability to appreciate and understand a strong woman from a background so different from her own.
Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
Popular Culture in the 1950s
The novel Betsey Brown, by Ntozake Shange, is set in St. Louis in the mid-1950s, during which the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. the Board of Education led to the desegregation of schools in the South. Betsey Brown, the main character, is an adolescent African-American girl, from an educated, middle-class family, who is “bused” to a mostly white high school in the wake of this ruling. Throughout the novel, Shange addresses themes of desegregation and its effect on African- American families, especially children. The novel is also a look at the early period of the Civil Rights Movement, as seen from the perspective of an African-American girl. Throughout the novel, Shange makes references to several popular novels, films, and plays, as well as a number of African-American celebrities during the 1950s. These references to American culture of the 1950s function to expand upon Shange’s theme of race relations in the United States and the historical and cultural roots of the Civil Rights Movement.
Betsey Brown makes reference to two classic titles, Gone with the Wind and Imitation of Life, both of which were originally novels by white women concerning racial issues, and both of which were adapted to film. Shange’s novel also makes reference to the stage play, later adapted to film, entitled The Green Pastures, which was written by a white man, but includes an all-black cast. These references to popular American culture expand upon Shange’s theme of racial desegregation and the early Civil Rights Movement. Written by white authors, but concerning characters and issues pertinent to African Americans, all three of these titles have met with a variety of interpretations as to their significance to race relations in the United States.
There are several references throughout Betsey Brown to the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind, di- rected by Victor Fleming, and based on the 1936 novel of the same title by Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949). Gone with the Wind is a romantic epic tale of the South before, during, and after the Civil War. It remains one of the most popular novels in American history; according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Within six months [of publication] 1,000,000 copies had been sold; 50,000 copies were sold in one day. It went on to sell more copies than any other novel in U.S. publishing history, with sales passing 12 million by 1965.” The novel also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The film version was equally popular, winning nine Academy Awards, and remaining the top-grossing film of all time for over fifty years after its initial release. Gone with the Wind stars Vivien Leigh as the Southern belle Scarlet O’Hara, and Clark Gable as romantic lead Rhett Butler, the source of one of the most famous movie lines in American cultural history: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
Although immensely popular, Gone with the Wind has come under fire for its racist stereotyping of African-American characters and its sympathetic portrayal of the pro-slavery South during the Civil War. The character played by Hattie Mc- Daniel, an African-American actress typecast as the “black mammy,” represents a slave who is faithful to her white “owners” throughout the Civil War, and remains with them even after the Emancipation Proclamation abolishes slavery in the United States. In Shange’s novel, reference to Gone with the Wind is used as ironic commentary on the story’s racist elements, from the perspective of a pre-adolescent African-American girl during the early Civil Rights era of the mid-1950s. In one passage, Betsey Brown associates her grandmother with Scarlet O’Hara. Hearing her grandmother’s “Carolinian drawl,” Betsey thinks, “There was a way about Vida that was so lilting yet direct that Betsey sometimes thought her grandma had a bloodline connection to Scarlett O’Hara.” The irony of this observation works at several levels. Whereas one might expect to observe a contrast between the fictional white Southern belle of a Southern slave plantation and an older African- American woman during the early Civil Rights era, Betsey finds in her grandmother a similarity between them. In stating that she thought her grandmother “had a bloodline connection” to the white character of Scarlett O’Hara, Betsey Brown, perhaps unwittingly, alludes to the fact that many African-American families are in fact descendants of white plantation owners. Because of the rampant rape of African-American slave women by white male plantation owners in the South, it is in fact not unlikely that Betsey’s grandmother could have a “bloodline connection” to a white Southern plantation- owning family. Through this allusion, Shange suggests that white and black Southerners share strong cultural, familial, and historical ties which are unfortunately obscured by the racism and segregation still practiced in the South during the 1950s.
In a second reference to Gone with the Wind, Betsey’s grandmother is compared to the white Southern character of “Miss Pittypat,” as well as, once again, to Scarlet O’Hara: “Vida hummed to herself, ‘Lord, I wanna be a Christian in my soul,’ and sat rocking on the pillared front porch. Miss Pittypat couldn’t of done better.” Again, Betsey Brown’s grandmother is compared to a white Southern woman during the slavery era; she sits in a rocking chair on the porch of a large Southern home, humming a Christian hymn to herself. As she does so, Vida thinks, “Jane had never had to say ‘I’ll never be hungry again,’ cause Vida’d seen to it that every one of her chirren ate. Every single one of em.” This refers to one of the most famous lines from Gone with the Wind; after the South has lost the Civil War, Scarlet O’Hara returns to her family’s plantation home, which has been devastated by the war. Formerly a pampered and spoiled Southern belle, accustomed to being waited on hand and foot, Scarlet O’Hara finds the inner strength to vow to herself that she will survive the devastation of her home, declaring dramatically, “I’ll never be hungry again!” Shange’s reference to this line from Gone with the Wind points out the irony of such a statement coming from a wealthy white Southern woman, when African-American women throughout American history have had to find the inner strength to struggle against great odds—such as slavery, poverty, and racist oppression— in order to see that their families will “never be hungry again.”
A third reference is made to Gone with the Wind when Betsey enters her school in the morning: “Not only were the floors of the Clark School shining like the halls of Tara, but Betsey’s brow was weeping with sweat, as were her panties and underarms. . . . She felt hot. And there was Mr. Wichiten with the razor strap at the head of the hallway, justa swinging and smiling.” Tara is the name of Scarlet O’Hara’s family plantation in Gone with the Wind. By comparing the hallway of her school to the halls of a Southern slave plantation, Betsey expresses her feeling of oppression upon entering school that morning. She is nervous and sweating because she is going to be reciting a poem in class and hopes to win a prize for the best elocution. But the white school official with the “razor strap” in his hands threatens her like a slave driver. Shange here is not at all implying that the school full of black children that is run by white teachers is anywhere near as oppressive as was a Southern slave plantation; however, she is expressing through hyperbole a young girl’s feelings of oppression at the hands of her white school teachers. Finally, although Betsey Brown’s white teacher treats her African-American students with the same interest and respect as she did her white students, Shange has chosen the name “Mrs. Mitchell” for this character; in conjunction with the nearby references to Gone with the Wind, it seems clear that Shange had in mind Margaret Mitchell, author of the original novel.
In addition to Gone with the Wind, Shange also makes reference to Imitation of Life, originally a novel by Fanny Hurst, adapted to film in 1959. This story is about two single mothers, one white and one black. The white woman (played by Lana Turner in the film), becomes a successful stage actress; the black woman (played by Juanita Moore) is hired as a maid who lives with her daughter in the white woman’s house. The central drama of the story concerns the daughter of the black woman, who is so light-skinned that she can easily “pass” for white; as a teenager, she runs away from home, shunning her own mother in order to enter society as a white woman. Imitation of Life has been interpreted by critics both as racist, or as critical of racism, depending on the interpretation. In Shange’s novel, Betsey’s first day in an integrated school—which is predominantly white—includes meeting Mrs. Leon, her white teacher who treats her with kindness and respect, thus making a positive example for Betsey’s white classmates to follow. Betsey is so impressed with Mrs. Leon’s understanding treatment of her that she thinks, “maybe Mrs. Leon wasn’t white at all, maybe she was passing, like in that book Imitation of Life. Or maybe she was what Jane called ‘well-meaning white people.’ At any rate Mrs. Leon broke the ice and the thrill of a new place and new faces came over Betsey as easily as the shadows had blackened her path.” By comparing her white teacher to a fictional character who is African-American but “passes” for white, Betsey expresses a feeling of camaraderie—she imagines that her teacher is really African-American, like herself, and this helps her to better cope with the anxiety of her first day at a mostly white school.
When Betsey runs away from home for an entire day, her mother and father take very different approaches to addressing the crisis. While Jane gathers the family around her to kneel down and pray for Betsey’s safety and return, Greer drives around St. Louis looking for her. Greer, Betsey’s father, understands why she may have run away, while her mother does not. Greer thinks that he cannot possibly explain Betsey’s desires to his wife, who remains “down there on her knees with Jesus.” Greer concludes, “His whole family looked like a bad scene from Green Pastures.” The Green Pastures was a play by Marc Connelly, first performed in 1930, which consists of a reenactment of the stories of the Old Testament, in which all of the characters are African-American. The play, written by a white man, is made up of dialogue in what sounds to the modern reader like a highly stereotypical rendition of black English. While the play was extremely popular in the 1930s, it eventually came to be considered by many to consist of gross stereotypes of rural, Southern African Americans as ignorant and childlike, especially in terms of their religious devotion. When Greer says that his entire family, while kneeling together in their living room praying for the return of their daughter, looks like “a bad scene from Green Pastures,” he is expressing a degree of disdain for such a passionate expression of religious devotion. This sentiment demonstrates an important set of differences in value between Betsey’s father and mother; Greer is much less traditional than his wife, and is disdainful of any behavior on the part of his children or family which suggests catering to white stereotypes of black people. Jane, on the other hand, resorts to prayer in a time of crisis, unconcerned with how her expression of faith might look to an outside observer.
Betsey Brown reads as a veritable Who’s Who of African-American celebrities during the 1950s and the years preceding the Civil Rights Movement. The narrative refers to prominent and distinguished African-American athletes, musicians, singers, actors and actresses, and political figures. Shange’s character of Betsey Brown fantasizes about marrying or emulating a wide range of African-American celebrities who were prominent during the 1950s. Through these many references, Shange celebrates African-American culture and history, as well as calling to mind the importance of such exceptional figures as important role models to a young African-American woman during the Civil Rights era.
Betsey’s internal monologue, expressed through the third-person narrator, often takes flights of fancy, in which she imagines a romantic and illustrious future for herself. At one point, Betsey hears music which makes her think of getting married—but only “after she’d run away and made a career of her own, like her mama had and Madame C. J. Walker. Oh yes, Betsey Calhoun would be coming to the altar with something of her own to offer.” In fantasizing that she will “make a career of her own,” Betsey compares herself to her mother, and to Madame C. J. Walker. Madame C. J. Walker (1867–1919), also known as Sarah Breedlove, was the first black female millionaire in the United States. As a fantasy of a successful African-American career woman, Walker represents the epitome of success in the world of business. In 1905, Walker created a product and process designed for hair styling among African-American women. This process became known as the “Walker System,” or “Walker Method,” and was marketed by the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, of which Walker herself was the president and sole owner. Walker’s products were sold by door-to-door sales representatives who targeted African-American neighborhoods. Walker also became known as a philanthropist, donating extensive funds to such African-American causes as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. Betsey’s choice of Walker as a role model is significant to the novel, in part because of its setting in St. Louis, Missouri, where Walker first developed her product. In addition, Walker’s concerns with issues later associated with the Civil Rights Movement indicates the historical efforts of African Americans which led up to the dramatic changes in race relations which took place during the 1950s, in which Shange’s novel is set.
References to famous black athletes in Betsey Brown include boxing champ “Sugar” Ray Robinson, tennis star Althea Gibson, and baseball player Jackie Robinson. In fantasizing about the kind of man she might marry, Betsey Brown thinks to herself, “I’m Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown, soon to be married to a Negro man of renown.” Betsey considers a wide array of African- American celebrities as potential husbands. Among them is “Sugar” Ray Robinson: “He’s so handsome,” Betsey thinks. “He’s so sharp. Mrs. Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown ‘Sugar’ Robinson. Sounds good to me.” “Sugar” Ray Robinson (1921–1989) was a widely admired professional boxer who held the world championship six times. Five of these championships were fought during the 1950s, when Shange’s novel takes place. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Robinson “is considered by many authorities to have been the best fighter in history.” In addition, “his outstanding ability and flamboyant personality made him a hero of boxing fans throughout the world.” Later in the novel, after Betsey has run away from home for a day, her father, Greer, drives around St. Louis looking for her. Having exposed his daughter to a wide array of African-American cultural heroes, Greer looks for Betsey in locations throughout the city which are associated with some of these historic figures. He looks “at the spot where ‘Sugar Ray’ liked the barbeque.” This reference is also significant to the novel’s setting in St. Louis—the African-American heroes Betsey fantasizes about are not just distant stars, but are, or have been, members of the African-American community in which she and her family live.
Later in the novel, Betsey discusses a white teacher who has put her down. Carrie suggests she “fight the teacher,” not physically, but verbally. In response to the mention of “fighting,” Betsey jumps up and down “like ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson or Althea Gibson,” thinking, “Betsey the champ. Humph. My, my, my.” Althea Gibson (born in 1927) was the first African-American tennis player to win the Wimbledon and U.S. singles championships. The height of Gibson’s career was during the 1950s, when Shange’s novel takes place. In this passage of the novel, Betsey associates “fighting” for her dignity and rights against a white teacher with the physical fighting of a championship boxer, or the competitive physical effort of a famous tennis player. Shange also makes reference to Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player in the U.S. major leagues. The effect of these references to successful black athletes is to paint a picture of America, particularly St. Louis in the 1950s, in which the early actions of the Civil Rights Movement went hand in hand with the success of a number of exceptional African Americans in such traditionally white domains as national and international athletic competitions. The sense of empowerment Betsey feels in calling to mind these successful African-American athletes is equivalent to the sense of empowerment among African Americans for which the Civil Rights Movement was striving.
In addition to athletes, Shange’s novel makes reference to several prominent African-American singers, dancers, and actors of the first half of the twentieth century, including Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge, and Eartha Kitt. When Betsey enters school hoping to win an elocution contest in her class, she fantasizes about what prize she might win, wondering if it would perhaps be a Paul Robeson record. Later, when she is fantasizing about what type of illustrious career she will have, she considers that of an actress, “like Dandridge or Eartha.” All three of these singers/actors met with a significant degree of success, followed by unfortunate circumstances which led to the decline of their careers. Paul Robeson (1898–1976) became well-known for his stage and screen roles during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Robeson was also celebrated for musical recordings, particularly in the singing of spirituals. His most famous role was as Joe in the stage and screen versions of the musical Showboat, in which his leading number was “Ol’ Man River.” Robeson was also a left-wing activist, and his American passport was taken away in 1950 after he refused to deny his membership in the Communist Party. This led to general public condemnation of his character during the era of the “Red Scare,” and a subsequent decline of his career prospects. Dorothy Dandridge (1923–1965) was known as the first black woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress— for her performance in the 1954 Carmen Jones. This notoriety would have occurred in the same year in which Shange’s novel takes place, and Betsey’s interest in her as a celebrity is historically accurate. However, Dandridge’s film career was limited by the few opportunities for black women in Hollywood during this time, and her early success eventually led to disappointment. Eartha Kitt was well-known for her nightclub performances as a singer and dancer, as well as several film roles. Like Robeson, Kitt was eventually ostracized and her career virtually destroyed for her left-wing political views, after she publicly declared at a White House luncheon her disapproval of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Through reference to these three figures, Shange reminds the reader of important African-American figures from American popular culture of the 1950s who expressed strong political sentiments, and whose careers were directly affected by the racism and the political climate of their time.
In addition to the many references to popular culture and African-American celebrities, Betsey Brown includes a number of references to prominent military and political figures such as Benjamin Oliver Davis, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Kwame Nkrumah. In fantasizing that she will one day marry any of a number of famous men, most of them African-American, Betsey muses: “I’m Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown, soon to be married to a Negro man of renown. There’s Cab Calloway. Machito. Mongo Santamaria. Tito Puente. Colonel Davis. Nasser. Nkrumah. James Brown.” While most of these figures are musicians, several were renowned for military and political accomplishments. Mention of Colonel Davis could include both Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. and Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. Davis Sr. (1877–1970) was the first African American to reach the rank of general in the U.S. army. His son, Davis Jr. (born in 1912), was distinguished as the first African American to reach the rank of general in the U.S. air force. In Shange’s novel, Betsey is most likely referring to Davis Jr., who was the organizer of the first air unit manned entirely by African Americans, which fought during World War II, after which he was promoted to the rank of colonel. Mention of Davis in Shange’s novel is significant to the theme of desegregation and the beginnings of racial integration, because Davis was instrumental in planning the official desegregation of the U.S. air force after the war. In 1954, around the time in which Shange’s novel is set, Davis Jr. was promoted to brigadier general (a one-star general). In 1959 he was made major general (a two-star general), and in 1965 he was promoted to lieutenant general (a three-star general). In 1998, after retiring, Davis Jr. was made a four-star general.
Shange also makes reference to an international diaspora of political leaders of African descent, as well as others not of European descent, through the mention of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), who was prime minister and then president of Egypt between 1954 and 1970, and Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the Ghanaian nationalist leader who led the drive for national independence from Britain and became the leader of Ghana from 1957 to 1966. In 1954, around the time in which Shange’s novel is set, Nasser had just emerged as the new prime minister of Egypt, and Nkrumah had been prime minister of the Gold Coast (the name of Ghana during the era of British rule) since 1952.
Shange’s many references to historically real texts and celebrities of American culture during the 1950s, in the context of her fictional novel, function to expand upon and enrich her central thematic concerns with desegregation and the early Civil Rights era.
Source: Liz Brent, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
An Interview with Ntozake Shange
One of the most articulate Black American artists to have emerged in the last few years, Ntozake Shange began the process of identifying and fulfilling her many talents in an academic milieu. An honors graduate of the American Studies program at Barnard in 1970, an NDEA Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she earned an M.A. degree in American Studies in 1973, Shange has lectured or taught at a number of colleges and universities, such as Brown, C.C.N.Y., Douglass, Howard, N.Y.U., Sonoma State, and Yale. Her book-length publications include for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975, 1977), sassafrass: a novella (1976), nappy edges (1978), and 8 pieces & ‘a photograph’(1979). Individual poems, essays, and short stories of hers have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Black Scholar, YardbirdMs., Essence, The Chicago Review, and Third World Women. Theatrical credits, reflecting her work as a writer and a performer, include for colored girls (1976), negress (1977), a photograph; a still life with shadows/a photograph: a study in cruelty (1977), where the mississippi meets the amazon (1977–78), from okra to greens: a different love story (1978), boogie woogie landscapes (1978–79), and magic spell #7 (1979). Her involvement in musical collaborations with David Murray, Oliver Lake, Jay Hoggard, Ramsey Ameen, and Cecil Taylor also reflects the range of her creativity, as does her role as a performing member of The Sounds of Motion Dance Company, directed by Diane McIntyre.
The following interview is a composite of conversations with Shange, recorded while she was visiting the University of Connecticut as a speaker. Shange supplied the answer to the last question by mail, and she has been kind enough to read and edit the typescript.
INT. You have indicated that you feel that Black writers from the East, West, South, and the Midwest represent separate groups, each with its own voice and perhaps a different aesthetic. Would you elaborate on that?
SHANGE. Sure. My craft was seriously nurtured in California and that probably has some influence on what my writing looks like. There’s not a California style, but there are certain feelings and a certain freeness that set those writers off from those in the Chicago-St. Louis-Detroit tripod group. They’re not the same. In the West we’re terribly free to do whatever we want. We’re free to associate with Asians and Latins at will, aesthetically as well as politically. And this is reflected in the kinds of things we do, so that the chauvinism that you might find that’s exclusionary, in that triangle, you don’t find too much in California. And if you do find it, it’s in young poets who’re just starting. Black, Asian, or Latin, they’re only very nationalistic until they realize that all Third World people are working toward the same thing, which for us is the explication of our reality. I sometimes get the feeling that the writers in Chicago are at war, and that they are defending our reality. In San Francisco, that defensive stance isn’t necessary, because the racism in California is so peculiar, they don’t really attack us immediately, so we’re able to do the particularly important job of simply exploring what our lives have been in the Western hemisphere, and making the exploration, not the defense, be the work of the poems. My kids and the people around me should know exactly who we are. And when someone speaks of Third World people’s reality, there’ll be no mistake about what that reality is. The poetry of the Black writer on the West Coast clarifies—migrations, our relationship to the soil, to ourselves in space. There is an enormous amount of space in the West, and you do not feel personally impinged upon every time you come out of your door, like you do in New York and in Chicago. So, there’s a different attitude about being alive. I’m really glad that David Henderson and Ishmael [Reed] live there. I used to live there. It gave us a chance to breathe, to get away from the immediacy of oppression in the East and those particular political events, which all of us experienced, and which we sometimes deal with as a corrective group in our poetry. Black writers on the West Coast got out from under the heavy pressure of those events, but that doesn’t mean that we forgot them. It just means that we could deal with them from another angle. The Midwest people: If you see a poem you know where it came from, if it came from Chicago. Their sense of rhythm is almost limited to whatever it is that came up off the Delta. They seldom stray from particular rhythm sequences that I would associate with the blues and with inner-city urban life. This is all right, but it can become a trap. I think there is a tendency to assume that all Black people know that particular rhythm sequence, that all Black people migrated up the Mississippi River, and that is not true. They talk about the cities, about gangs, welfare—as opposed to opening it up and talking about Black folks in other places. There ain’t no poems about nobody in the country in Indiana. Nobody knows what kind of life they live, because they are not a part of our scheme of what Black life is supposed to look like. And that means we’re leaving out portions of our population in order to formulate some ideology of what we are. This monolithic idea that everybody’s the same, that we all live the same lives. That the Black family, the Black man, the Black female are the same thing. A one image. A one something. It’s not true, but it’s very difficult to break through some of that. We ignore Black Catholics. They don’t exist in literature. Maybe in the Renaissance a couple of people admitted to being Catholic, but everybody nowadays has become somebody who was nurtured in the Baptist Church. I don’t know why we’re trying to become some solid unit of something. Part of our beauty is the fact that we’re so much.
INT. And New York?
SHANGE. I don’t think poets in New York have ever gotten over. Whereas in California readings are a source of joy, readings in New York are almost scenario, because the impact of theatre, dance, and other art forms (and the fact that you need money to produce anything) has made the playwright, the novelist, and the musician the carriers of good news, as opposed to the poet. New York poets almost have to be miserable and unhappy to get over. Some are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Some others are labeled poets, but I don’t count them, I don’t deal with them that way.
INT. Why not?
SHANGE. Because I don’t think they know what they are doing.
INT. What makes a poet from your point of view?
SHANGE. A very conscious effort to be concise and powerful and as illusory as possible, so that the language can, in fact, bring you to more conclusions than the one in the poem, but that that one conclusion can’t be avoided, even though there are thousands of others roaming around. And there should be wit and grace and a movement from one image to another, so that there’s no narrowness to the body of your work. That to me would suggest someone is a poet.
INT. You seem to have very definite ideas about what it takes to be a poet. Does that definiteness reflect your academic training?
SHANGE. No. Poetry is my life. And actually, when I went to graduate school, and was studying Afro-American art, I was made to feel like a traitor, because there’s a huge strain of anti-intellectualism not only in the new Black Arts movement, but in Black America in general. People think that you aren’t doing anything: Studying don’t mean nothing. I felt very bad, but I was determined that those people were going to hear from me. Just because I had studied didn’t mean that I had lost my voice. The anger about my situation as a student propelled me to make doubly sure that I fulfilled all my obligations. I always went to my readings, even if I had a test the next day. Or, if I had to teach the morning after a reading, I did it. I have always appreciated my academic background, though not just for the usual reasons that you would expect. I went to Women’s Studies, because in Women’s Studies, I was at least able to discuss the anger and the awkwardness. I wasn’t stifled or shut back.
INT. I can see from your experience why you would see not just richness but truth in our diversity. Do you think that Southern Black writers are shaped in distinctive ways by their experience in the South?
SHANGE. Yes. My sister and I were raised in the Midwest and the North, and we’d go to a lot of poetry readings together. At one reading, there were a lot of women who had formerly been raised in the South. And we were getting very upset by what, in our ignorance, we saw as their romanticization of Southern living. Instead of a streetcar, there would be hills and swamps and a porch and grandma and quilts and iron pots and Mr. So-and- So from down by the church. And I was saying to myself, if it was as wonderful as all that, why in the hell did you all come up here? It was really getting ridiculous. But I thought a little more, and I said, wait. If it’s that severe a sense of loss, then perhaps they’re not talking about what we are talking about. To children of migrations, leaving the South may have engendered a stunning sense of loss, and that’s something that should be respected and dealt with in its own right.
INT. So, were they merely romanticizing, or driving to the heart of a personal reality that you felt cut off from?
SHANGE. I think they were explaining. After a while, I wasn’t paying attention to the romantic images. I was trying to deal with the motivation for those images, and I was wondering, why are they telling me this? Why is this supposed to be important to me? And I decided that it was because they wanted us to know what they thought they had lost. And what they thought they lost is, in fact, as important as what really did go away, because that vacuum has first to be identified and then filled with something. And those acts of identification and repair are going to be, or should be, increasingly personal. But mostly now you get just one picture. A lot of times, Black poets are expected to reflect immediate political need, or current political fashion. I think that tendency is behind the fact that you can’t talk anymore about the South as a bad thing. It’s like Heaven; you don’t criticize it. Just as for a while, it was a terrifying and scary thing to write a poem which was not politically relevant, about yourself when you were a child. Nor could you speak critically of your mother and father; they worked so hard as Black people. So for a long time we didn’t have strong poems dealing with actual Black family life; you couldn’t do it. But, well, we’ve been here for as long as however we’ve been here—each of us, separately. And that is something that we’re beginning to explore as we try to understand ourselves as mature adults. And some women are sort of easing away to address the real bludgeoning effects that any family has. Coverups, romantic or otherwise, are not endemic to us, but that doesn’t matter. O.K., so I’m not from the South. I missed that big jolt that was a big thing in the fourth generation migratory Black person, who’s been up North since 1917, or something, so I don’t know nothing about that fund of experiences, and I just have to be quiet. So, I’m saying, all right, I’ll be quiet, but I would at least like to know why those women glorified their losses. Usually, when people make something important, it’s because it’s not working. It’s something that has to be dealt with. And they start addressing it however they can. I think critical explorations are beginning to happen, and in the next five years there will be some really marvelous work, like Black Nashvilles, like Black Black-fiction shows, and Black stories about the reality of our lives in the South, as opposed to our dream dimensions of that. It’s too crazy now. Everybody had a grandma who was wonderful, or an uncle who came by and did the family errands. Cotton was nice to be picked. That is crazy to me, because it’s the same thing that my grandma said she was tired of and the reason that she left. My experience poses not a simple difference but a contradiction to such depictions.
INT. Granting that differences are important to understanding our identity, are there similarities which it is crucial to examine? Are Black women writers, for example, connected by a common set of problems?
SHANGE. I worked exclusively with Black women in college, but since that time I’ve been working most in a Third World context, in terms of women, at any rate. I moved from New York in 1970 and went to California because at that time there was no space for an independent woman’s voice; women were expected to be quiet and have babies, no matter what kind of training they had had. Where I came from, women existed for the pleasure and support of men. I began to wonder, What are we doing? What are we supposed to do when our men are gone? I started writing because I had to have an answer, I had to hear a voice. I absolutely had to hear something. And nobody was going to give it to me. So, I gave it to myself.
I left New York because I could not fight with them. In fact, I thought what they were doing was right. But I just could not live inside those roles. Those same male-oriented roles and expectations were imposed in our literature. As a young woman, I was starving for Black literature. I didn’t care what they said, just so the writers gave me something. For years, I was able to tolerate being chastised and denigrated in American literature and any other kind of literature because that is where we were, and that’s how women were regarded. But as my consciousness as a woman developed, I said, hey, you all are doing the same thing to women that you say Faulkner did to you. What the hell is going on? But even then I didn’t take it as a personal affront, because that’s how all of us were trained. I do now, though. I mean, after ten years of women saying, hey, we’re people, we think, we feel—I don’t expect the same kinds of attitudes. You can’t blame somebody because salt wasn’t refined when it wasn’t refined. Now we know how to refine it, so let’s do it.
INT. Do you think this habit of diminishment and neglect in and out of literature has forced Black women to look at life in a special way, has forced them to devise a special aesthetic?
SHANGE. To an extent. The same rhetoric that is used to establish the Black Aesthetic, we must use to establish a women’s aesthetic, which is to say that those parts of reality that are ours, those things about our bodies, the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries in all castes and classes of our people, are to be dealt with now. When women reach puberty, they menstruate. What does that mean? Women have relationships with their mothers that are incredibly full of pain and love. A mother functions as part of a husband, not as another woman for the child. Women have relationships to the world that have to do with whether you can reach things. Can you put a pan away? Can you lift stuff? Are you afraid of a corner at night—and other things that men do not deal with? And our poetry deals with that, and we use images that have to do with that. Some men have weird notions about women. The title of a manuscript that I have, “Dreams as Real as Menses,” means to most women that their dreams are going to come true. Most men hearing that title either stumble over the word “menses” or go “ugh” because they can’t see or accept that reality. So it’s the same as the Black man’s struggle, in terms of liberating our reality from the pits, from Hades, and making things we see everyday tangible and speakable. One has to speak about things inherently female. And that is my persona. A women. And she is going to talk the way she understands. Why must I use metaphors because men understand them? That’s the same argument I have with Paul Laurence Dunbar. He knew that he could not be respected as a poet unless he wrote all those sonnets with the English corrected, and they are just awful. This is analogous to what women have been doing all along. Using male-identified symbols and myths to talk about ourselves. That’s ridiculous. There are enough females in the world to be joyful, to be knowledgeable, to be loved. We don’t have to go across the line. And if men don’t understand it, then I would suggest, as I suggest to white students who say they don’t understand Black literature, that they should get more serious about the subject. Learn something about women. I’m not going to change what I write to help a man understand it. They’ve been here as long as I’ve been here. They rule the damned world, they rule the household, if not the world, and they can certainly learn who their mother was, and who they sleep with at night.
INT. Does your position create friction with Black male writers?
SHANGE. Most of the Black men whose writing I respect, respect mine. And I have very good working relationships with them. I don’t have good working relationships with some so-called critics and socio-political poets. They don’t want idiom; they want ideology, and they can have it. They’re seeing Black poetry as some kind of mammoth creature with four legs and a nose. And my leg is going over there, or over here. It destroys their idea. They don’t want to deal with poetry, they want to talk politics. They want to make me run for office. Well, I’m not going to do that. Pablo Neruda did run for office, but he was a poet in the government. My politics, I think, are very correct. I do not have heroes who are not heroes.
INT. Who are some of your heroes?
SHANGE. Toussaint L’Ouverture. Denmark Vesey. Sojourner Truth. Nat Love. Albert Ayler. Jelly Roll Morton. Bessie Smith. Zora Neale Hurston . . .
INT. That’s an interesting list. What makes them heroes? Politicians . . .
SHANGE. Politicians don’t turn me on. When someone takes charge of your reality and does something to it that is satisfying for them, changing everything that comes after in some way or other, then that is, to me, being a successful and competent human being and a successful and competent Black person. When you take something you believe in and make it affect other people, you’re doing a politically significant act. These people did things that changed the way all the rest of us were treated or thought of in the world. I think you have to stop looking to something called “the politician.” They’re there. That’s their job, but it can’t just be on them. What are we, sheep? We don’t have no feet? No brains? We can’t do anything ourselves?
INT. Are you stressing self-reliance, or . . .
SHANGE. The most important thing I know is that anything you want to do, especially pertaining to your work, you can do yourself. You don’t have to wait on nobody. You don’t have to wait on the Black world; you don’t have to wait on Ishmael; you don’t have to wait on Percy Sutton. If you want to do a show, you go to your little local bar, and toll them that on—whatever their night off is—you want to use their space. And you go and use it to the best of your ability, and get paid $1.37, but get known in your community. Send out your own little press releases. Meet a printer. Have a printer do up just one page of your poems. Give them away, mail them to your friends. Give him fifty dollars and have him do a ten-page booklet. You don’t have to wait. Learn how to print your goddamn self. This sense that we have to follow all the patterns established by the country and by our own habit is really quite unnecessary. And if we are, in fact, closer to developing a new way of thinking and new skills, we have no choice but to do for ourselves. Which is not to go back to Booker T., but to take him to the ultimate point of what he said in the first place. You can do what you have to, what you must. You don’t have to be recognized by whites. Just go and do it. There’s the anecdote: “They don’t need to know we can build the Empire State Building, they just need to know we can clean floors?” I don’t even care what they know. All I need to know is that Black people are not going to sit around waiting for the powers that be in the white community or in our community to take care of us.
INT. Did you have a Black audience in mind when you wrote colored girls?
SHANGE. It was meant for a women’s audience, initially. In most of my work, I’m talking to women, because I’m talking to myself when I write. As for specifically Black audiences, I don’t think like that. I write poems, and I take them where I think they’ll work. I don’t bar much. If I tried to stop a poem, because I don’t have an audience for it, I’d be a fool. Poetry is like the only privacy in some areas that I have, so I can’t jam it up because Black people might not like it. I write the poem because it’s there, and I take it where I can take it. Maybe I can’t take it anywhere, maybe I just have to leave it in the house. Some of them I do that with. But I have a right to think and feel what I want, and I can’t stop feeling what I feel. Writing with me is a visceral thing. I have to get certain ideas out, or I will get sick, I will cry, I will become catatonic. I don’t have a choice.
INT. You’ve spoken on other occasions about influences. Who among contemporary Black writers has had the most influence on what and how you write?
SHANGE. Ishmael. Yellow Back Radio Broke- Down Mumbo Jumbo, “I Am A Cowboy in the Boat of Ra”—these have been terribly significant to me, because they said, look, you have the whole world to deal with. You do not have to deal with the block in New York City where there are no trees. And there’s Baraka. Everything. All the essays. Everything. He’s fabulous. I read the stuff out loud. The stories in Tales, in Dante’s Hell, are just some of the most beautiful uses of language and imagery I’ve seen anywhere at all.
INT. Looking back at your work from sassafrass through nappy edges are you aware of any changes in the way you see the world or in the way that you express what you see and feel? Are you more concerned with technique? With broadening the scope of your vision? With exhausting your material?
SHANGE. Only the way I have to proceed has changed. As a recognized writer I face problems I never dreamed of as an unknown: expectations. I find that in order to work at all now I must virtually obliterate the outside world. I have to construct what I call a “creative myopia” because the wolves are at the door. People say, “How could you say that?” or “So many people pay attention to your ideas, you are responsible for . . . ” All that sort of thing is burdensome and interrupts my relationship with myself. More and more I understand why Midwestern writers feel they are under siege. In certain parts of the country, the density of population and poverty surely exacerbate racism. This year the critics had a field day discussing whether or not Black and Latin actors could do Shakespeare! In such a world, one admittedly has to flex muscle not just lyricism. I have to do battle with myself to even present the fragile composites of a life—Black and fictional—before such barbarians. I sometimes doubt that I’d have been able to write sassafrass had I been aware of this situation. She’s too precious to me to endure the wear and tear of this place (the Eastern literary establishment, Black and white). I am more concerned with craft at this point. To protect my characters and landscapes from unwarranted attacks, I make them taut and as lean as I can. Some whimsy is lost but I doubt anyone in the midst of an urban winter would miss it. There’s little possibility of my exhausting my material. I’m still alive and feeling and seeing. I’ve started drawing and dancing again to make sure that I don’t lose touch with the roots of my poetic vision. These roots have so much to do with actuality and yet so very little. But that begins another story.
Source: Henry Blackwell, “An Interview with Ntozake Shange,” in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter 1979, pp. 134–8.