Introduction

In A Voice from the South, activist Anna Julia Cooper famously said:

Only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’

Cooper’s often cited quote asserts that black women play a necessary and crucial role in African American progress and that without them such progress cannot exist. In this special issue of Pleaides on African American women writers, we feature the work of four emerging women writers, four black women, four new writers and voices, whose fiction offers a fresh take on issues relevant to the African American literary tradition, whose stories trouble the water by exploring tropes of racial uplift, social progress, motherhood, and sexual agency.

“The Difference Between” is a lyrical story in which Glori, a woman suffering from “mother-hunger,” goes on a week-long getaway with the married man she’s been seeing, a man who has promised to be both her mother and her father. Taking a post-coital walk along the beach, she encounters an old white woman in a wheelchair, who is being tended by her two daughters. Despite their limited interaction, the woman haunts Glori, who indulges in imagining alternate scenarios which feed her “mother-hunger” and reveal the depth of her yearning.

In “Tongues,” Zeyah’s intellectual curiosity, fostered by her teacher’s word-of-the-day calendar, clashes against her family’s dogmatic approaches to religion, such that her tendency to question is read as deviancy and, eventually, harlotry. Zeyah’s mind hungry questioning elicits reprimands from both her parents and her pastor and sees her excluded from her church and isolated from her family. The elision between intellectual hunger and sexual hunger is deftly rendered as the story alludes to the patriarchal social practice of silencing and dismissing dissenting women and/or reading female agency as transgressive and disruptive. The story plays with the cliché of black woman as seductress to surprising ends.

In “Etymology,” women spend little time on the page. “Etymology” follows Eniola during the week after he receives a promotion. His prosperity is juxtaposed against both the economic disparity in the city, seen by the homeless man he daily encounters, and the city’s racial tensions evidenced by the murder of an innocent black man and the ensuing rally to protest the senseless death. Seemingly blind to the fraught racial tensions in his workplace and in the city, Eniola’s willful racial blindness is revealed to be a form of self-protective armor. Like the Armani suits he wears to work, meant to serve as a sort of uniform to signal his upper middle class status and his belonging in wealthy white spaces, his dogged racial blindness is meant to render him harmless in the eyes of white coworkers and citygoers, shielding him from both white fear and violence.

“Middling” follows a black woman in an interracial marriage who has an affair to distract herself from the deterioration of her marriage. She is forced to face the growing problems within her marriage when her white husband takes to participating in Civil War battle reenactments, developing a nostalgic fascination for all things confederate which threatens to ruin their marriage and disenfranchise his black wife.

Whether exploring motherhood, racial violence, sexual agency, or social uplift, these diverse stories are all, at heart, ultimately concerned with terminology, studying terms and their uses; they all place pressure on practices of identifying and naming and push past easy definitions, an act which has a long established history in African American cultural tradition, in which one being called out of one’s name is an ever present threat and concern. In the spaces between the sentences of these stories, one can hear Frederick Douglass muse upon the definitions of men, slaves, and brutes; one can hear Sojourner Truth ask “Ain’t I a Woman” and extemporize on the ways in which definitions of womanhood and femininity have been racially proscribed; one can hear Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Nanny telling Janie that black women are...