Salvation is the Issue

When we read the work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Zora Neale Hurston, we hold in our hands more than a book, but a dream of community: living evidence of a spiraling chain of black women intellectuals whose work has been the saving of our spiritual, intellectual, and cultural lives. Their work has made possible Oprah’s success and Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize. The work of these women has been the discovery and publication of lost works of other black women. It has been the founding of black studies programs at universities around the country. It has been the teaching and apprenticeship of the next generation. They have created, taught, and performed poetry, fiction, criticism, and theater art of startling liberatory power. Their work has been a means of healing for many of us. When we read these works we participate in a long process of writing, editing, publishing, critiquing, promoting, teaching, and reading in which the visionary voices of black women were recognized as such because of their value to other black women, who passed them on to the world: from hand to hand, to our hands.

But now those links are breaking, and voices of great power are dwindling into silence around us.

Death is becoming an occupational hazard of black female intellectual life. Black women intellectuals are sickening and dying at alarming rates. Most of us are alert to the sobering statistics that tell us that African Americans are generally among the least healthy people in this nation, with the fastest growing number of AIDS cases, and rates over 30% higher than the general population of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. We also know that though black women are slightly less likely to face breast, lung, and cervical cancers, we face them at much younger ages and in their more virulent strains, making us 67% more likely to die of them (NBWHP). We have the highest rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, and lupus among women, and higher rates of mental illness than most. But not many of us are aware of the violent assault these diseases have made against the lives of black women who are artists, teachers, activists, and scholars.

Barbara Christian, a professor of African American Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, had been ill for months, years really, experiencing a slow ebbing of physical vigor marked by chronic back dysfunction, unshakable fatigue, and later, undiagnosable chest pain. Before she became ill her impact as a writer, scholar, and activist had been deep and wide. She was instrumental in the creation of the “open admissions” policy that made the City College system of New York accessible to people of color. She had been central in creating the African American studies program at Berkeley, and had published “the bible” of black feminist criticism, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (Christian 1980). But when her life’s work began to crumble around her, she got tired. Hers was a progressive debilitation, a slow chipping away of power and energy that was a precise mirror of the slow destruction of progress she saw around her. Around the country, affirmative action programs were being dismantled and ridiculed. There were fewer and fewer students of color each term. Harvard notwithstanding, black studies departments were losing power, losing faculty, losing funding and institutional support in the midst of a renewed debate about the worth of those programs and the necessity of linking art and education with social and political concerns. In the publishing world, black editorships were down. The publication of black books was on the rise but was increasingly limited to commercially lucrative romances and thrillers, closing down avenues for other kinds of work and other kinds of voices. In the meantime, and in this context, her health continued to fail.²

When her cancer was still undiagnosed, she walked around with her hand pressed against her heart, where the pain seemed to originate. To friends and colleagues she spoke often about her disappointment with the direction black cultural work was taking, not knowing her own life would...