Appalachia in the Classroom: Teaching the Region

2. Listening to Black Appalachian Laundrywomen: Teaching with Photographs, Letters, Diaries, and Lost Voices

33 Two Listening to Black Appalachian Laundrywomen: Teaching with Photographs, Letters, Diaries, and Lost Voices elizabeth s. d. engelhardt I n 1 9 8 9 , s c h o l a r Da r l e n e C l a r k H i n e proposed the concept“culture of dissemblance” to discuss the challenges and ethical issues of recovering black US women’s lives. In her influential“Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Hine focused primarily on the legacy of rape and domestic violence African American women might try to hide when interviewed by scholars. Believing it might be better to say nothing than risk being exploited again, and believing it better to agree there was no story to tell than to lose the right to control what was told to whom, black women often deliberately kept their voices out of the public record. After lifetimes of alternatively misinterpreted and explicitly stolen knowledge, and the reality of exploitative US race, gender, and employment discrimination, women of color felt protective of their own stories. According to Hine, the combination of a culture of dissemblance by subjects and racism or ignorance among researchers severely hindered historians’ picture of US social history. Hine built on the work of fellow historian Deborah Gray White. Both scholars agreed that African American women themselves may have hesitated , resisted, and outright rebelled—for very logical reasons—at having family papers and memories put in archives. In a 1987 article titled “Mining the Forgotten: Manuscript Sources for Black Women’s History,” White 34 Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt argued that black women’s hesitation to donate papers stemmed from a “perennial concern with image, a justifiable concern born of centuries of vilification” (238). She also identified the“adversarial nature” of relations between many black women and public institutions, as well as the perception of “being undervalued and invisible” that led many women to believe their materials were not inherently collectible (238). In addition, though, White turned the focus more fully onto researchers and the archives upon which they base their work. White suggested that archives overlooked the lives and social histories of African American women by at best negligent and at worst racist collecting practices. Even when black women’s lives were located in archives , they rarely were cataloged under their own names, joining women of all races in being listed under a husband’s or father’s papers. The scrapbooks, cookbooks,and oral histories that women may have favored as autobiographical writing were frequently dismissed as ephemera by archives accustomed to formal definitions of genre or writing. Black women who were enslaved joined black men in antebellum collections, by often being listed only in tax or property lists of their owners. Neither Hine nor White mentioned African American women in Appalachia specifically; in addition, the articles are both twenty years old. One might ask whether they are relevant today in teaching about Appalachia. Certainly national collecting practices, often from the hard work of feminist and African Americanist archivists, have improved. As disciplines open up to scholars with more diverse interests,the politics of subject and researcher shift as well, helping to erode the culture of dissemblance. But I deliberately evoke Hine and White as touchstones for teaching about Appalachia. In the following paragraphs, I consider briefly details about the mountains, the canon of Appalachian Studies, and our classrooms. I do so to propose that Hine’s and White’s concerns were writ so large in Appalachia that we still have important work to do to answer them. One piece of the answer, though, involves going with our students to those archives and manuscripts, finding the obscured voices, and building such work into our syllabi.The body of this chapter is an example of such an assignment.Coming from my own research,I offer it more as a work in progress than as a finished model; the more such efforts we make, the more our classrooms expand,and the more our students expect our syllabi to incorporate all of the voices of Appalachia. Today I teach in Texas, at the University of Texas in Austin. My home location is the Department of American Studies, and I have a joint appointment in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. Most of my courses are 35 Listening to Black Appalachian Laundrywomen cross-listed between the two. While I do...