On how black mothers define motherhood as freedom

Toni Morrison was recently interviewed in Interview Magazine by Christopher Bollen and it’s a wonderful exchange with lots of humour. She is so damn interesting. Also, you can learn a LOT about feminist motherhood from Morrison.

BOLLEN: How did you find that article about Margaret Garner [the escaped slave who killed her daughter in Cincinnati to avoid her daughter’s reenslavement upon capture], which became the basis for the story of Beloved?

MORRISON: I was doing The Black Book [1974 nonfiction book by Middleton A. Harris and Morrison], and these guys were bringing me all this stuff because I was going to make a whole-earth catalog about black history—the good and the bad. I got old newspapers from a guy who collected them, and I found an article about Margaret Garner. What was interesting to me was that the reporter was really quite shocked that Margaret Garner was not crazy. He kept saying, “She’s so calm . . . and she says she’d do it again.” So I decided to look into this. It was not uncommon for slave women to do that, but I thought, Suppose she was rational and there was a reason. This was also at a time when feminists were very serious and aggressive about not being told that they had to have children. Part of liberation was not being forced into motherhood. Freedom was not having children, and I thought that, for this woman, it was just the opposite. Freedom for her was having children and being able to control them in some way—that they weren’t cubs that somebody could just buy. So, again, it was just the opposite of what was the contemporary theme at the moment. Those differences were not just about slavery or black and white—although there was some of that—but in the early days, I used to complain bitterly because white feminists were always having very important meetings, but they were leaving their maids behind! [laughs]

BOLLEN: Did you feel a real split between white and black feminists?

MORRISON: Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed. As a matter of fact, this was an interesting thing for me. When I went into the publishing industry, many women talked about the difficulty they had in persuading their families to let them go to college. They educated the boys, and the girls had to struggle. It was just the opposite in the African-American communities, where you educated the girls and not the boys, because the girls could always go into nurturing professions—teachers, nurses . . . But if you educated your men, they would go into jobs where they would have to be confronted or held down. They could never flourish so easily. Now that has changed in any number of ways, but it was like an organism protecting itself.

Even though my mothering, as a white mother, is not about preservation the way a black mother’s is there is something, still, that strikes a chord with me about the expression of motherhood as freedom. Black mothers and their feminist/womanist definitions of motherhood tap into a joy and liberation in the experience that white definitions frequently (but not always) miss. When American black mothers define motherhood they also tend to be more comfortable identifying the sense of ownership that can be fused with mothering. This is something white feminist mothers generally find difficult to acknowledge.