PHL240: Love, Hatred, and Resentment

Text © 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com www.tenspeed.com

Crossing Press and the Crossing Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lorde, Audre. Sister outsider. (The Crossing Press feminist series) I. Title. II. Series. PS3562.ʼ75S5 1984 814ʼ.54 84–1844

eISBN: 978-0-307-80904-9

v3.1

Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*

Where does the pain go when it goes away?**

EVERY BLACK WOMAN in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers. My Black womanʼs anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I set the essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life. Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger. I know this, no matter what the particular situation may be between me and another Black woman at the moment. Then why does that anger unleash itself most tellingly against another Black woman at the least excuse? Why do I judge her in a more critical light than any other, becoming enraged when she does not measure up? And if behind the object of my attack should lie the face of my own self, unaccepted, then what could possibly quench a fire fueled by such reciprocating passions?

When I started to write about the intensity of the angers between Black women, I found I had only begun to touch one tip of a three-pronged iceberg, the deepest understructure of which was Hatred, that societal deathwish directed against us from the moment we were born Black and female in America. From that moment on we have been steeped in hatred — for our color, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to live. As children we absorbed that hatred, passed it through ourselves, and for the most part, we still live our lives outside of the recognition of what that hatred really is and how it functions. Echoes of it return as cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other. For each of us bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned to be at home with cruelty because we have survived so much of it within our own lives. Before I can write about Black womenʼs anger, I must write about the poisonous seepage of hatred that fuels that anger, and of the cruelty that is spawned when they meet. I have found this out by scrutinizing my own expectations of other Black women, by following the threads of my own rage at Blackwomanness back into the hatred and despisal that embroidered my life with fire long before I knew where that hatred came from, or why it was being heaped upon me. Children know only themselves as reasons for the happenings in their lives. So of course as a child I decided there must be something terribly wrong with me that inspired such contempt. The bus driver didnʼt look at other people like that. All the things my mother had warned me not to do and be that I had gone right ahead and done and been must be to blame. To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemiesʼ arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemiesʼ arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I

discover you in myself. Americaʼs measurement of me has lain like a barrier across the realization of my own

powers. It was a barrier which I had to examine and dismantle, piece by painful piece, in order to use my energies fully and creatively. It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another. But what is the nature of that reluctance to connect with each other on any but the most

superficial levels? What is the source of that mistrust and distance maintained between Black women?

I donʼt like to talk about hate. I donʼt like to remember the cancellation and hatred, heavy as my wished-for death, seen in the eyes of so many white people from the time I could see. It was echoed in newspapers and movies and holy pictures and comic books and Amos ʼn Andy radio programs. I had no tools to dissect it, no language to name it. The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch my motherʼs sleeve, her arms full of shopping

bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the trainʼs lurching. My mother spots an almost seat, pushes my little snowsuited body down. On one side of me a man reading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches as she stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it. Her leather-gloved hand plucks at the line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She jerks her coat closer to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seat between us — probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. It must be something very bad from the way sheʼs looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me away from it, too. When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesnʼt want her coat to touch. The fur brushes past my face as she stands with a shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child, I quickly slide over to make room for my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. Iʼm afraid to say anything to my mother because I donʼt know what Iʼve done. I look at the sides of my snowpants, secretly. Is there something on them? Somethingʼs going on here I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate. My three-year-old eyes ache from the machinery used to test them. My forehead is sore. I

have been poked and prodded in the eyes and stared into all morning. I huddle into the tall metal and leather chair, frightened and miserable and wanting my mother. On the other side of the eye clinicʼs examining room, a group of young white men in white coats discuss my peculiar eyes. Only one voice remains in my memory. “From the looks of her sheʼs probably simple, too.” They all laugh. One of them comes over to me, enunciating slowly and carefully, “OK, girlie, go wait outside now.” He pats me on the cheek. I am grateful for the absence of harshness. The Story Hour librarian reading Little Black Sambo. Her white fingers hold up the little

book about a shoebutton-faced little boy with big red lips and many pigtails and a hatful of butter. I remember the pictures hurting me and my thinking again there must be something wrong with me because everybody else is laughing and besides the library downtown has given this little book a special prize, the library lady tells us. SO WHATʼS WRONG WITH YOU, ANYWAY? DONʼT BE SO SENSITIVE! Sixth grade in a new catholic school and I am the first Black student. The white girls laugh

at my braided hair. The nun sends a note home to my mother saying that “pigtails are not appropriate attire for school,” and that I should learn to comb my hair in “a more becoming style.”

Lexie Goldman and I on Lexington Avenue, our adolescent faces flushed from springtime and our dash out of high school. We stop at a luncheonette, ask for water. The woman behind the counter smiles at Lexie. Gives us water. Lexieʼs in a glass. Mine in a paper cup. Afterward we joke about mine being portable. Too loudly. My first interview for a part-time job after school. An optical company on Nassau Street

has called my school and asked for one of its students. The man behind the counter reads my application and then looks up at me, surprised by my Black face. His eyes remind me of the woman on the train when I was five. Then something else is added, as he looks me up and down, pausing at my breasts.

My light-skinned mother kept me alive within an environment where my life was not a high priority. She used whatever methods she had at hand, few as they were. She never talked about color. My mother was a very brave woman, born in the West Indies, unprepared for america. And she disarmed me with her silences. Somewhere I knew it was a lie that nobody else noticed color. Me, darker than my two sisters. My father, darkest of all. I was always jealous of my sisters because my mother thought they were such good girls, whereas I was bad, always in trouble. “Full of the devil,” she used to say. They were neat, I was untidy. They were quiet, I was noisy. They were well-behaved, I was rowdy. They took piano lessons and won prizes in deportment. I stole money from my fatherʼs pockets and broke my ankle sledding downhill. They were good-looking, I was dark. Bad, mischievous, a born troublemaker if ever there was one. Did bad mean Black? The endless scrubbing with lemon juice in the cracks and crevices of

my ripening, darkening, body. And oh, the sins of my dark elbows and knees, my gums and nipples, the folds of my neck and the cave of my armpits! The hands that grab at me from behind the stairwell are Black hands. Boysʼ hands,

punching, rubbing, pinching, pulling at my dress. I hurl the garbage bag Iʼm carrying into the ashcan and jerk away, fleeing back upstairs. Hoots follow me. “Thatʼs right, you better run, you ugly yaller bitch, just wait!” Obviously, color was relative. My mother taught me to survive from a very early age by her own example. Her silences

also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, self-rejection, and sadness. My survival lay in learning how to use the weapons she gave me, also, to fight against those things within myself, unnamed. And survival is the greatest gift of love. Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the only gift

possible, and tenderness gets lost. My mother bore me into life as if etching an angry message into marble. Yet I survived the hatred around me because my mother made me know, by oblique reference, that no matter what went on at home, outside shouldnʼt oughta be the way it was. But since it was that way outside, I moved in a fen of unexplained anger that encircled me and spilled out against whomever was closest that shared those hated selves. Of course I did not realize it at the time. That anger lay like a pool of acid deep inside me, and whenever I felt deeply, I felt it, attaching itself in the strangest places. Upon those as powerless as I. My first friend asking, “Why do you go around hitting all the time? Is that the only way you know how to be friends?

What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going?

It is shortly after the Civil War. In a grey stone hospital on 110th Street in New York City a woman is screaming. She is Black, and healthy, and has been brought here from the South. I do not know her name. Her baby is ready to be born. But her legs have been tied together

out of a curiosity masquerading as science. Her baby births itself to death against her bone. Where are you seven-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of Little Rock, Arkansas? It is a bright Monday morning and you are on your way to your first day of school, draped in spittle, white hatred running down your pink sweater and a white motherʼs twisted mouth working — savage, inhuman — wide over your jaunty braids held high by their pink ribbons. Numvulo has walked five days from the bleak place where the lorry deposited her. She stands in the Capetown, South Africa rain, her bare feet in the bulldozer tracks where her house once was. She picks up a piece of soaked cardboard that once covered her table and holds it over the head of her baby strapped to her back. Soon she will be arrested and taken back to the reserve, where she does not even speak the language. She will never get permission to live near her husband. The bicentennial, in Washington, D.C. Two ample Black women stand guard over household belonging piled haphazardly onto a sidewalk in front of a house. Furniture, toys, bundles of clothes. One woman absently rocks a toy horse with the toe of her shoe, back and forth. Across the street on the side of a building opposite is a sign painted in story-high black letters, GOD HATES YOU. Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair. Four little Black girls, none more than ten years of age, singing their last autumn song in a Sunday church school in Birmingham, Alabama. After the explosion clears it is not possible to tell which patent leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found leg.

What other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still functions?

Black women have a history of the use and sharing of power, from the Amazon legions of Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen Yaa Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, to the economically powerful market-women guilds of present West Africa. We have a tradition of closeness and mutual care and support, from the all-woman courts of the Queen Mothers of Benin to the present-day Sisterhood of the Good Death, a community of old women in Brazil who, as escaped slaves, provided escape and refuge for other enslaved women, and who now care for each other.* We are Black women born into a society of entrenched loathing and contempt for whatever is Black and female. We are strong and enduring. We are also deeply scarred. As African women together, we once made the earth fertile with our fingers. We can make the earth bear as well as mount the first line of fire in defense of the King. And having killed, in his name and in our own (Harrietʼs rifle speaks, shouldered in the grim marsh), we still know that the power to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending rather than the beginning of something new. Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred — an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does. Racism and sexism are grown-up words. Black children in america cannot avoid these distortions in their living and, too often, do not have the words for naming them. But both are correctly perceived as hatred. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the hatred of oneʼs enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel. And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and

undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it — hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else. To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and cruelty. We are African women and we know, in our bloodʼs telling, the tenderness with which our foremothers held each other. It is that connection which we are seeking. We have the stories of Black women who healed each otherʼs wounds, raised each otherʼs children, fought each otherʼs battles, tilled each otherʼs earth, and eased each otherʼs passages into life and into death. We know the possibilities of support and connection for which we all yearn, and about which we dream so often. We have a growing Black womenʼs literature which is richly evocative of these possibilities and connections. But connections between Black women are not automatic by virtue of our similarities, and the possibilities of genuine communication between us are not easily achieved. Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, nor fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. And to acknowledge our dreams is to sometimes acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present situation. Acknowledged, our dreams can shape the realities of our future, if we arm them with the hard work and scrutiny of now. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels because we fear each otherʼs angers, nor continue to believe that respect means never looking directly nor with openness into another Black womanʼs eyes. I was not meant to be alone and without you who understand.*

I.

I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt. Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other. As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences. Why doesnʼt this

commonality bring us closer together instead of setting us at each otherʼs throats with weapons well-honed by familiarity? The anger with which I meet another Black womanʼs slightest deviation from my

immediate need or desire or concept of a proper response is a deep and hurtful anger, chosen only in the sense of a choice of desperation — reckless through despair. That anger which masks my pain that we are so separate who should most be together — my pain — that she could perhaps not need me as much as I need her, or see me through the blunted eye of the haters, that eye I know so well from my own distorted images of her. Erase or be erased! I stand in the Public Library waiting to be recognized by the Black woman library clerk

seated a few feet behind the desk. She seems engrossed in a book, beautiful in her youth and self-assuredness. I straighten my glasses, giving a tiny shake to my bangles in the process just in case she has not seen me, but I somehow know she has. Otherwise motionless, she slowly turns her head and looks up. Her eyes cross mine with a look of such incidental hostility that I feel pilloried to the wall. Two male patrons enter behind me. At that, she rises and moves toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no inflection at all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. Iʼve never seen this young woman before in my life. I think to myself, “now thatʼs what you call an attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of me. The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girlʼs face as she cuts her elegant sidelong glance at

me. What makes her eyes slide off of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sisterʼs face? My daughterʼs mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil for you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together?

Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in dirty type all the views fit to kill, me and you, me or you. And whose future image have we destroyed — your face or mine — without either how shall I look again at both — lacking either is lacking myself. And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed our brown flesh to from fear, self-preservation,

or to what brothered altar all innocent of loving that has no place to go and so becomes another face of terror or of hate? A dumb beast endlessly recording inside the poisonous attacks of silence — meat gone wrong —

what could ever grow in that dim lair and how does the child convert from sacrifice to liar?

My blood sister, across her living room from me. Sitting back in her chair while I talk earnestly, trying to reach her, trying to alter the perceptions of me that cause her so much pain. Slowly, carefully, and coldly, so I will not miss one single scathing word, she says, “I am not interested in understanding whatever youʼre trying to say — I donʼt care to hear it.” I have never gotten over the anger that you did not want me as a sister, nor an ally, nor

even a diversion one cut above the cat. You have never gotten over the anger that I appeared at all. And that I am different, but not different enough. One woman has eyes like my sister

who never forgave me for appearing before she had a chance to win her motherʼs love, as if anybody ever could. Another woman wears the high cheekbones of my other sister who wanted to lead but had only been taught to obey, so now she is dedicated to ruling by obedience, a passive vision. Who did we expect the other to be who is not yet at peace with our own selves? I cannot

shut you out the way I shut the others out so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you? We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each

otherʼs face our own face, the face we never stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we try to obliterate it. Why donʼt we meet each otherʼs eyes? Do we expect betrayal in each otherʼs gaze, or

recognition? If just once we were to feel the pain of all Black womenʼs blood flooding up to drown us! I

stayed afloat buoyed by an anger so deep at my loneliness that I could only move toward further survival. When one cannot influence a situation it is an act of wisdom to withdraw.* Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of hatred, where even in the

candy store cases of our childhood, little brown niggerbaby candies testified against us. We survived the wind-driven spittle on our childʼs shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of the superʼs boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but Iʼd have hated to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the catabolic process throws off waste products of fury even when we love.

I see hatred I am bathed in it, drowning in it since almost the beginning of my life it has been the air I breathe the food I eat, the content of my perceptions; the single most constant fact of my existence is their hatred … I am too young for my history**

It is not that Black women shed each otherʼs psychic blood so easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If I have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest — starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she- wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind — if I must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast and I weep for your going, oh my sister, I grieve for our gone. When an error of oversight allows one of us to escape without the full protective dose of

fury and air of contemptuous disdain, when she approaches us without a measure of distrust and reserve flowing from her pores, or without her eyes coloring each appraisal of us with that unrelenting sharpness and suspicion reserved only for each other, when she approaches without sufficient caution, then she is cursed by the first accusation of derision — naive —

meaning not programmed for defensive attack before inquiry. Even more than confused, naive is the ultimate wipeout between us. Black women eating our own hearts out for nourishment in an empty house empty

compound empty city in an empty season, and for each of us one year the spring will not return — we learned to savor the taste of our own flesh before any other because that was all that was allowed us. And we have become to each other unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous. I am writing about an anger so huge and implacable, so corrosive, it must destroy what it most needs for its own solution, dissolution, resolution. Here we are attempting to address each othersʼ eyes directly. Even if our words taste sharp as the edge of a lost womanʼs voice, we are speaking.

II

A Black woman, working her years, committed to life as she lives it, the children fed and clothed and loved as she can into some strength that does not allow them to encyst like horse chestnuts, knowing all the time from the start that she must either kill them or eventually send them into the deathlands, the white labyrinth. I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table listening to my daughter talk about the university and

the horrors of determined invisibility. Over the years I have recorded her dreams of death at their hands, sometimes glorious, sometimes cheap. She tells me of the teachers who refuse to understand simple questions, who look at her as if she were a benign — meaning powerless — but unsightly tumor. She weeps. I hold her. I tell her to remember the university doesnʼt own her, that she has a home. But I have let her go into that jungle of ghosts, having taught her only how to be fleet of foot, how to whistle, how to love, and how not to run. Unless she has to. It is never enough. Black women give our children forth into a hatred that seared our own young days with

bewilderment, hoping we have taught them something they can use to fashion their own new and less costly pathways to survival. Knowing I did not slit their throats at birth tear out the tiny beating heart with my own despairing teeth the way some sisters did in the slaveships chained to corpses and therefore was I committed to this very moment. The price of increasing power is increasing opposition.* I sat listening to my girl talk about the bent world she was determined to reenter in spite

of all she was saying, because she views a knowledge of that world as part of an arsenal which she can use to change it all. I listened, hiding my pained need to snatch her back into the web of my smaller protections. I sat watching while she worked it out bit by hurtful bit — what she really wanted — feeling her rage wax and wane, feeling her anger building against me because I could not help her do it nor do it for her, nor would she allow that. All mothers see their daughters leaving. Black mothers see it happening as a sacrifice

through the veil of hatred hung like sheets of lava in the pathway before their daughters. All daughters see their mothers leaving. Black girls see it happening through a veil of threatened isolation no fire of trusting pierces. Last month I held another Black woman in my arms as she sobbed out the grief and

deprivation of her motherʼs death. Her inconsolable loss — the emptiness of the emotional landscape she was seeing in front of her — spoke out of her mouth from a place of untouchable aloneness that could never admit another Black woman close enough again to matter. “The world is divided into two kinds of people,” she said, “those who have mothers and those who donʼt. And I donʼt have a mother anymore.” What I heard her saying was that no other Black woman would ever see who she was, ever trust or be trusted by her again. I heard in her cry of loneliness the source of the romance between Black women and our mommas. Little Black girls, tutored by hate into wanting to become anything else. We cut our eyes at

sister because she can only reflect what everybody else except momma seemed to know — that we were hateful, or ugly, or worthless, but certainly unblessed. We were not boys and we were not white, so we counted for less than nothing, except to our mommas. If we can learn to give ourselves the recognition and acceptance that we have come to

expect only from our mommas, Black women will be able to see each other much more clearly and deal with each other much more directly.

I think about the harshness that exists so often within the least encounter between Black women, the judgment and the sizing up, that cruel refusal to connect. I know sometimes I

feel like it is worth my life to disagree with another Black woman. Better to ignore her, withdraw from her, go around her, just donʼt deal with her. Not just because she irritates me, but because she might destroy me with the cruel force of her response to what must feel like an affront, namely me. Or I might destroy her with the force of mine, for the very same reason. The fears are equal. Once I can absorb the particulars of my life as a Black woman, and multiply them by my

two children and all the days of our collective Black lives, and I do not falter beneath the weight — what Black woman is not a celebration, like water, like sunlight, like rock — is it any wonder that my voice is harsh? Now to require of myself the effort of awareness, so that harshness will not function in the places it is least deserved — toward my sisters. Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury and disappointment for each other?

Who is it we must destroy when we attack each other with that tone of predetermined and correct annihilation? We reduce one another to our own lowest common denominator, and then we proceed to try and obliterate what we most desire to love and touch, the problematic self, unclaimed but fiercely guarded from the other. This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were

inoculated from the time we were born by those who intended it to be an injection of death. But we adapted, learned to take it in and use it, unscrutinized. Yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest. How do I alter course so each Black womanʼs face I meet is not the face of my mother or

my killer?

I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked to you for hours in my sleep sitting under a silk-cotton tree our arms around each other or braiding each otherʼs hair or oiling each otherʼs backs, and every time I run into you on the street or at the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I want to wring your neck.

There are so many occasions in each of our lives for righteous fury, multiplied and dividing. • Black women being told that we can be somehow better, and are worse, but never equal.

To Black men. To other women. To human beings. • The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This Bridge Called My Back*

exists, because now it gives her a chance to deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black women. So get away with your dirty ugly mean faces, all screwed up all the time! • The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I had handled so patiently and well. I didnʼt

blow up his damned machine. I explained how his racial blindness made me feel and how his film could be altered to have some meaning. He probably learned something about showing Black images. Then I came home and almost tore up my house and my lover because some invitations happened to be misprinted. Not seeing where the charge of rage was born. • A convicted Black man, a torturer of women and children, army-trained to be a killer,

writes in his journal in his death cell: “I am the type of person you are most likely to find driving a Mercedes and sitting in the executive offices of 100 big corporations.” And heʼs right. Except heʼs Black. How do we keep from releasing our angers at them upon ourselves and each other? How

do I free myself from this poison I was force-fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger at the least scent of anything nourishing, oh my sister the belligerent lift of your shoulder the breath of your hair.… We each learned the craft of destruction. It is all they knew to allow us,

yet look how our words are finding each other again. It is difficult to construct a wholesomeness model when we are surrounded with synonyms for filth. But not impossible. We have, after all, survived for a reason. (How do I define my impact upon this earth?) I begin by searching for the right questions.

Dear Leora, For two Black women to enter an analytic or therapeutic relationship means

beginning an essentially uncharted and insecure journey. There are no prototypes, no models, no objectively accessible body of experience other than ourselves by which to examine the specific dynamics of our interactions as Black women. Yet this interaction can affect all the other psychic matter attended profoundly. It is to scrutinize that very interaction that I sought you out professionally, and I have come to see that it means picking my way through our similarities and our differences, as well as through our histories of calculated mistrust and desire. Because it has not been done before or at least not been noted, this particular

scrutiny is painful and fraught with the vulnerability of all psychic scrutinies plus all of the pitfalls created by our being Black women in a white male world, and Black women who have survived. This is a scrutiny often sidestepped or considered unimportant or beside the point. EXAMPLE: I canʼt tell you how many good white psychwomen have said to me, “Why should it matter if I am Black or white?” who would never think of saying, “Why does it matter if I am female or male?” EXAMPLE: I donʼt know who you are in supervision with, but I can bet itʼs not with another Black woman. So this territory between us feels new and frightening as well as urgent, rigged

with detonating pieces of our own individual racial histories which neither of us chose but which each of us bears the scars from. And those are particular to each of us. But there is a history which we share because we are Black women in a racist sexist cauldron, and that means some part of this journey is yours, also. I have many troubled areas of self that will be neither new nor problematic to you

as a trained and capable psychperson. I think you are a brave woman and I respect that, yet I doubt that your training can have prepared you to explore the tangle of need, fear, distrust, despair, and hope which operates between us, and certainly not to the depth necessary. Because neither of us is male nor white, we belong to a group of human beings that has not been thought worthy of that kind of study. So we have only who we are, with or without the courage to use those selves for further exploration and clarification of how what lies between us as Black women affects us and the work we do together. Yet if we do not do it here between us, each one of us will have to do it somewhere

else, sometime. I know these things: I do not yet know what to do about them. But I do want to

make them fit together to serve my life and my work, and I donʼt mean merely in a way that feels safe. I donʼt know how they can further and illuminate your life and work, but I know they can. It is sometimes both the curse and the blessing of the poet to perceive without yet being able to order those perceptions, and that is another name for Chaos. But of course it is out of Chaos that new worlds are born. I look forward to our meeting eye to eye.

Audre

III

There has been so much death and loss around me recently, without metaphor or redeeming symbol, that sometimes I feel trapped into one idiom only — that one of suffering and its codicil, to bear. The same problem exists with anger. I have processed too much of it recently, or else the machinery is slowing down or becoming less efficient, and it creeps into my most crucial interchanges. Perhaps this is why it is often easier for Black women to interact with white women, even

though those interactions are often a dead end emotionally. For with white women there is a middle depth of interaction possible and sustainable, an emotional limit to relationships of self upon self acknowledged. Now why is this not so with Frances, who is white, and whom I meet at a depth beyond

anyone? When I speak of Frances and me I am talking about a relationship not only of great depth but one of great breadth also, a totaling of differences without merging. I am also speaking of a love shaped by our mutual commitment to hard work and confrontation over many years, each of us refusing to settle for what was easy, or simple, or acceptably convenient. That middle depth of relationship more usually possible between Black and white women,

however, is less threatening than the tangle of unexplored needs and furies that face any two Black women who seek to engage each other directly, emotionally, no matter what the context of their relationship may be. This holds true for office workers and political activists as well as lovers. But it is through threading this tangle that new visions of self and possibility between Black women emerge. Again, I am speaking here of social relationships, for it is crucial that we examine dynamics between women who are not lovers as well as between women who are. I ask myself, do I ever use my war against racism to avoid other even more unanswerable

pain? And if so, doesnʼt that make the energy behind my battles against racism sometimes more tenuous, or less clearheaded, or subject to unexpected stresses and disappointments? White people can never truly validate us. For example: At this point in time, were racism to be totally eradicated from those middle range relationships between Black women and white women, those relationships might become deeper, but they would still never satisfy our particular Black womanʼs need for one another, given our shared knowledge and traditions and history. There are two very different struggles involved here. One is the war against racism in white people, and the other is the need for Black women to confront and wade through the racist constructs underlying our deprivation of each other. And these battles are not at all the same. But sometimes it feels like better a righteous fury than the dull ache of loss, loss, loss. My

daughter leaving her time of daughterhood. Friends going away in one way or another. … as those seemingly alike mature, nature emphasizes their uniqueness and the differences

become more obvious.* How often have I demanded from another Black woman what I had not dared to give

myself — acceptance, faith, enough space to consider change? How often have I asked her to leap across difference, suspicion, distrust, old pain? How many times have I expected her to jump the hideous gaps of our learned despisals alone, like an animal trained through blindness to ignore the precipice? How many times have I forgotten to ask this question? Am I not reaching out for you in the only language I know? Are you reaching for me in

your only salvaged tongue? If I try to hear yours across our differences does/will that mean you can hear mine? Do we explore these questions or do we settle for that secret isolation which is the learned

tolerance of deprivation of each other — that longing for each otherʼs laughter, dark ease, sharing, and permission to be ourselves that we do not admit to feeling, usually, because then we would have to admit the lack; and the pain of that lacking, persistent as a low-grade fever and as debilitating? Do we reenact these crucifixions upon each other, the avoidance, the cruelty, the judgments, because we have not been allowed Black goddesses, Black heroines; because we have not been allowed to see our mothers and our selves in their/our own magnificence until that magnificence became part of our blood and bone? One of the functions of hatred is certainly to mask and distort the beauty which is power in ourselves. I am hungry for Black women who will not turn from me in anger and contempt even before they know me or hear what I have to say. I am hungry for Black women who will not turn away from me even if they do not agree with what I say. We are, after all, talking about different combinations of the same borrowed sounds. Sometimes exploring our differences feels like marching out to war. I hurl myself with trepidation into the orbit of every Black woman I want to reach, advancing with the best of what I have to offer held out at arms length before me — myself. Does it feel different to her? At the same time as I am terrified, expecting betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of laughter, is she feeling judged by me? Most of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that Iʼm too public about it. Iʼve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one thatʼs paid most easily and most often. I fight nightmare images inside my own self, see them, own them, know they did not destroy me before and will not destroy me now if I speak them out, admit how they have scarred me, that my mother taught me to survive at the same time as she taught me to fear my own Blackness. “Donʼt trust white people because they mean us no good and donʼt trust anyone darker than you because their hearts are as Black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?) It is painful even now to write it down. How many messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many different voices, how many different ways? And how can we expunge these messages from our consciousness without first recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they were?

IV

What does it take to be tough? Learned cruelty? Now there is bound to be a voice saying that Black women have always helped one

another, havenʼt we? And that is the paradox of our inner conflict. We have a strong and ancient tradition of bonding and mutual support, and the memorized threads of that tradition exist within each of us, in opposition to the anger and suspicion engendered by self-hate. When the world moved against me with a disapproving frown / It was sister put the ground back

under my feet.* Hearing those words sung has always provoked the most profound and poignant sense of

loss within me for something I wanted to feel and could not because it had never happened for me. There are some Black women for whom it has. For others of us, that sense of being able to depend upon rock bottom support from our sisters is something we dream about and work toward, knowing it is possible, but also very problematic across the realities of fear and suspicion lying between us. Our anger, tempered over survival fires, shuttered behind downcast eyelids, or else blazing

out of our eyes at the oddest times. Looking up from between the legs of a lover, over a notebook in the middle of a lecture and I almost lost my train of thought, ringing up groceries in the supermarket, filling out the form behind the unemployment office window, stepping out of a, cab in the middle of Broadway on the arm of a businessman from Lagos, sweeping ahead of me into a shop as I open the door, looking into each others eyes for a split second only — furious, cutting, sisters. My daughter asking me all the time when she was a little girl, “Are you angry about something, Mommy?” As Black women, we have wasted our angers too often, buried them, called them someone

elseʼs, cast them wildly into oceans of racism and sexism from which no vibration resounded, hurled them into each otherʼs teeth and then ducked to avoid the impact. But by and large, we avoid open expression of them, or cordon them off in a rigid and unapproachable politeness. The rage that feels illicit or unjustified is kept secret, unnamed, and preserved forever. We are stuffed with furies, against ourselves, against each other, terrified to examine them lest we find ourselves in bold print fingered and named what we have always felt and even sometimes preferred ourselves to be — alone. And certainly, there are enough occasions in all our lives where we can use our anger righteously, enough for many lifetimes. We can avoid confrontation with each other very readily. It is so much easier to examine our anger within situations that are (relatively) clearcut and emotionally unloaded. It is so much easier to express our anger in those middle depth relationships that do not threaten genuine self- exposure. And yet always that hunger for the substance known, a hunger for the real shared, for the sister who shares. It is hard to stand up in the teeth of white dismissal and aggression, of gender hatred and

attack. It is so much harder to tackle face-on the rejection of Black women who may be seeing in my face some face they have not discarded in their own mirror, who see in my eyes the shape they have come to fear may be their own. So often this fear is stoked between Black women by the feared loss of a male companion, present or sought after. For we have also been taught that a man acquired was the sole measure of success, and yet they almost never stay.

One Black woman sits and silently judges another, how she looks, how she acts, how she impresses others. The first womanʼs scales are weighted against herself. She is measuring the impossible. She is measuring the self she does not fully want to be. She does not want to accept the contradictions, nor the beauty. She wishes the other woman would go away. She

wishes the other woman would become someone else, anyone other than another Black woman. She has enough trouble dealing with being herself. “Why donʼt you learn to fly straight,” she says to the other woman. “Donʼt you understand what your poor showing says about us all? If I could fly Iʼd certainly do a better job than that. Canʼt you put on a more together show? The white girls do it. Maybe we could get one to show you how.” The other woman cannot speak. She is too busy keeping herself from crashing upon the ground. She will not cry the tears which are hardening into little sharp stones that spit from her eyes and implant themselves in the first womanʼs heart, who quickly heals over them and identifies them as the source of her pain.

V

There are myths of self-protection that hold us separate from each other and breed harshness and cruelty where we most need softness and understanding. 1. That courtesy or politeness require our not noticing each other directly, only with the

most covert of evaluating glances. At all costs, we must avoid the image of our fear. “How beautiful your mouth is” might well be heard as “Look at those big lips.” We maintain a discreet distance between each other also because that distance between us makes me less you, makes you less me. When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them

closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us. 2. That because we sometimes rise to each otherʼs defense against outsiders, we do not

need to look at devaluation and dismissal among ourselves. Support against outsiders is very different from cherishing each other. Often it is a case of “like needs like.” It doesnʼt mean we have to appreciate that like or our need of it, even when that like is the only thin line between dying and living. For if I take the white worldʼs estimation of me as Black-woman-synonymous-with-garbage

to heart, then deep down inside myself I will always believe that I am truly good for nothing. But it is very hard to look absorbed hatred in the face. It is easier to see you as good for nothing because you are like me. So when you support me because you are like me, that merely confirms that you are nothing too, just like me. Itʼs a no-win position, a case of nothing supporting nothing and someoneʼs gonna have to pay for that one, and it sure ainʼt gonna be me! When I can recognize my worth, I can recognize yours. 3. That perfection is possible, a correct expectation from ourselves and each other, and the

only terms of acceptance, humanness. (Note how very useful that makes us to the external institutions!) If you are like me, then you will have to be a lot better than I am in order to even be good enough. And you canʼt be because no matter how good you are youʼre still a Black woman, just like me. (Who does she think she is?) So any act or idea that I could accept or at least examine from anyone else is not even tolerable if it comes from you, my mirror image. If you are not THEIR image of perfection, and you canʼt ever be because you are a Black woman, then you are a reflection upon me. We are never good enough for each other. All your faults become magnified reflections of my own threatening inadequacies. I must attack you first before our enemies confuse us with each other. But they will anyway. Oh mother, why were we armed to fight with cloud-wreathed swords and javelins of dust? “Just

who do you think you are, anyway?” Who I am most afraid of (never) meeting.

VI

The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other. Too pretty — too ugly. Too Black — too white. Wrong. I already know that. Who says so. Youʼre too questionable for me to hear you. You speak THEIR language. You donʼt speak THEIR language. Who do you think you are? You think youʼre better than anybody else? Get out of my face. We refuse to give up the artificial distances between us, or to examine our real differences for creative exchange. Iʼm too different for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not-you. And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each otherʼs judgment. We have not been allowed to experience each other freely as Black women in america; we come to each other coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside, definitions not our own. “You are my reference group, but I have never worked with you.” How are you judging me? As Black as you? Blacker than you? Not Black enough? Whichever, I am going to be found wanting in some way … We are Black women, defined as never-good-enough. I must overcome that by becoming better than you. If I expect enough from myself, then maybe I can become different from what they say we are, different from you. If I become different enough, then maybe I wonʼt be a “nigger bitch” anymore. If I make you different enough from me, then I wonʼt need you so much. I will become strong, the best, excel in everything, become the very best because I donʼt dare to be anything else. It is my only chance to become good enough to become human. If I am myself, then you cannot accept me. But if you can accept me, that means I am what you would like to be, and then Iʼm not “the real thing.” But then neither are you. WILL THE REAL BLACK WOMAN PLEASE STAND UP? We cherish our guilty secret, buried under exquisite clothing and expensive makeup and bleaching creams (yes, still!) and hair straighteners masquerading as permanent waves. The killer instinct toward any one of us who deviates from the proscribed cover is precise and deadly. Acting like an insider and feeling like the outsider, preserving our self-rejection as Black women at the same time as weʼre getting over — we think. And political work will not save our souls, no matter how correct and necessary that work is. Yet it is true that without political work we cannot hope to survive long enough to effect any change. And self- empowerment is the most deeply political work there is, and the most difficult. When we do not attempt to name the confusion of feelings which exist between sisters, we act them out in hundreds of hurtful and unproductive ways. Never speaking from the old pain, to beyond. As if we have made a secret pact between ourselves not to speak, for the expression of that unexamined pain might be accompanied by other ancient and unexpressed hurtings embedded in the stored-up anger we have not expressed. And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of too-early battles for survival. “You canʼt take it, huh!” The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name-calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering. A piece of the price we paid for learning survival was our childhood. We were never allowed to be children. It is the right of children to be able to play at living for a little while, but for a Black child, every act can have deadly serious consequences, and for a Black girl child, even more so. Ask the ghosts of the four little Black girls blown up in Birmingham. Ask Angel Lenair, or Latonya Wilson, or Cynthia Montgomery, the three girl victims in the infamous Atlanta murders, none of whose deaths have ever been solved.

Sometimes it feels as if I were to experience all the collective hatred that I have had directed at me as a Black woman, admit its implications into my consciousness, I might die of the bleak and horrible weight. Is that why a sister once said to me, “white people feel, Black people do”? It is true that in america white people, by and large, have more time and space to afford

the luxury of scrutinizing their emotions. Black people in this country have always had to attend closely to the hard and continuous work of survival in the most material and immediate planes. But it is a temptation to move from this fact to the belief that Black people do not need to examine our feelings; or that they are unimportant, since they have so often been used to stereotype and infantalize us; or that these feelings are not vital to our survival; or, worse, that there is some acquired virtue in not feeling them deeply. That is carrying a timebomb wired to our emotions. There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain

is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action. Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized

pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle. And true, experiencing old pain sometimes feels like hurling myself full force against a

concrete wall. But I remind myself that I HAVE LIVED THROUGH IT ALL ALREADY, AND SURVIVED. Sometimes the anger that lies between Black women is not examined because we spend so

much of our substance having to examine others constantly in the name of self-protection and survival, and we cannot reserve enough energy to scrutinize ourselves. Sometimes we donʼt do it because the angerʼs been there so long we donʼt know what it is, or we think itʼs natural to suffer rather than to experience pain. Sometimes, because we are afraid of what we will find. Sometimes, because we donʼt think we deserve it. The revulsion on the womanʼs face in the subway as she moves her coat away and I think

she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred in her eyes because she wants me to see the hatred in her eyes, because she wants me to know in only the way a child can know that I donʼt belong alive in her world. If Iʼd been grown, Iʼd probably have laughed or snarled or been hurt, seen it for what it was. But I am five years old. I see it, I record it, I do not name it, so the experience is incomplete. It is not pain; it becomes suffering. And how can I tell you I donʼt like the way you cut your eyes at me if I know that I am

going to release all the unnamed angers within you spawned by the hatred you have suffered and never felt? So we are drawn to each other but wary, demanding the instant perfection we would never

expect from our enemies. But it is possible to break through this inherited agony, to refuse acquiescence in this bitter charade of isolation and anger and pain. I read this question many times in the letters of Black women, “Why do I feel myself to be

such an anathema, so isolated?” I hear it spoken over and over again, in endless covert ways. But we can change that scenario. We can learn to mother ourselves. What does that mean for Black women? It means we must establish authority over our own

definition, provide an attentive concern and expectation of growth which is the beginning of that acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers. It means that I affirm my own

worth by committing myself to my own survival, in my own self and in the self of other Black women. On the other hand, it means that as I learn my worth and genuine possibility, I refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the possible in myself, at the same time making a distinction between what is possible and what the outside world drives me to do in order to prove I am human. It means being able to recognize my successes, and to be tender with myself, even when I fail. We will begin to see each other as we dare to begin to see ourselves; we will begin to see ourselves as we begin to see each other, without aggrandizement or dismissal or recriminations, but with patience and understanding for when we do not quite make it, and recognition and appreciation for when we do. Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not misnaming either. When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have to cover emptyness with pretense.* We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each otherʼs eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged — without despisal — the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference. I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the Queen Mother of Benin, entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female.

VIII

Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighborʼs silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human. Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black

is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial. Certainly it is no more empowering. And it is empowerment — our strengthening in the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our work and future — that will be the result of this pursuit. I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to

learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with “I donʼt want you” or “it doesnʼt matter” or “white folks feel, Black folks DO.” And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an environment that consistently encourages nonlove and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable. Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of

the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile in passing, just because she IS; an understanding of each otherʼs shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment. Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving toward some livable future. It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy and difficult. It is suicidal

to believe it is not possible. As we arm ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible — or what has always seemed like the impossible — to one another. The first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.

* An abbreviated version of this essay was published in Essence, vol. 14, no. 6 (October 1983). I wish to thank the following women without whose insights and support I could not have completed this paper: Andrea Canaan, Frances

Clayton, Michelle Cliff, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Clare Coss, Yvonne Flowers, Gloria Joseph, Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Sheedy, Judy Simmons and Barbara Smith. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sheila Blackwell Pinckney, 1953–1983.

** From a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph.

*Unpublished paper by Samella Lewis.

* From “Letters from Black Feminists, 1972–1978” by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith in Conditions: Four (1979).

* From The I Ching.

** From “Nigger” by Judy Dothard Simmons in Decent Intentions (Blind Beggar Press, P.O. Box 437, Williamsbridge Station, Bronx, New York 10467, 1983).

* From The I Ching.

* This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984).

* From The I Ching.

* From “Every Woman Ever Loved A Woman” by Bernice Johnson Reagon, song performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

* From The I Ching.