In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter five The Black Mother/Wife Negotiating Trauma In all conversations about lynching and citizenship, including those centered on the soldier and lawyer, black women were crucial. Because mobs so often negated black citizenship by targeting men, African American women routinely survived the physical attack and were left to face a forever-altered future. In Mine Eyes Have Seen, Aftermath, A Sunday Morning in the South, and For Unborn Children, the surviving black women are sisters and grandmothers. However, the plays written in the later 1920s by the genre’s most prolific author, Georgia Douglas Johnson, focus on black wives and mothers. Angelina Weld Grimké had inaugurated the genre by placing a spotlight on Mrs. Loving—a grieving wife and mother whose experiences lead her daughter to reject marriage and maternity. When Johnson revisits this figure, she uses the black mother/wife to illuminate the most tragic dimensions of the mob’s attack on black families. Because she so often survives to suffer in the home from which her husband or son is removed, the black mother/wife is the witness that those content with the racial status quo most want to silence. She bears witness to what it means to live with lynching. Through this figure, authors and readers access the conversation and conduct of those who lived with the “traumatizing shock of a commonly occurring violence” (Caruth 6).1 Though “mother/wife” is a bulky term, it highlights a figure that has not shaped the historical record to the degree that lynching drama suggests it should. Historians have typically relied on archives that bear the imprint of mainstream discourses and practices, which seldom prioritized depictions of African American mothers and wives in their own homes. Yet, as I have argued, it is the black home scene that oppressive forces sought to erase. As black women asserted themselves as citizens, they were portrayed as either asexual and unappealing or oversexed and unscrupulous.2 Harkening back to the “good old days” of slavery, mainstream discourse often cast black women as mammies; they were believed to love the white children in their care far more than their own offspring, and they were imagined to have no romantic ties to black men. For the black mother/wife, who was neither a single mother nor mammy figure, it would seem undeniable that she enjoyed a sense of belonging within her family, yet national rhetoric downplayed her homebuilding success by asserting that she was naturally promiscuous. At the turn of the century, mainstream discourse often “portrayed all black women as sexually available and subservient to all white men” (Rosen 8). Thus, the nation embraced mammy figures and images of unwed black mothers but rejected the idea that black women could sustain respectable marriages. Because lynching plays reflect and encourage community conversation, the emergence of the black mother/wife as a central figure registers the degree to which her experiences informed discussions of black identity and citizenship. Rather than portray a black woman in a white family’s house where she dotes on white children, the genre presents black women characters in ways that emphasize their love for their own children as well as for a romantic partner. In the process, African Americans participated in, and preserved evidence of, embodied practices of black belonging. As discussed, the genre showcases black belonging by virtue of the plays’ family-centered content as well as their one-act form, which made them conducive to practices of communal literacy. By engaging in and recording discourses and practices of black belonging, African Americans sustained themselves, even as they watched their homebuilding efforts negated in the mainstream. Reading their surroundings accurately, blacks understood that the nation encouraged the denial of African American familial ties by tolerating lynching and the circulation of photographs that cast mob victims as isolated brutes.At the same time, private violence worked to destroy all evidence that there had ever been bonds of love in the first place.3 In fact, while whites declared blacks to be homeless brutes and whores, vigilantes often attacked African Americans in distinctly domestic ways.As historian Hannah Rosen establishes, “Although schools and churches were occasional targets for arson . . ., the vast majority of violent encounters occurred in and around homes” (189). Whites could have terrorized blacks by shooting at them from afar, but they often preferred invading their victims’ households, and these intrusions “lasted at times for hours and involved prolonged interaction and dialogue between assailants and victims” (180). In other words...

Share