The Outraged Mother Joanne Braxton - sfonline.barnard.edu

1 S&F Issue: & Scholar & Feminist XXX:Past Controversies, Present Challenges, Future FeminismsDocument ArchiveReprinted from:Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary LiteraryRenaissanceJoanne M. Braxton and Andre Nicola McLaughlin, EditorsNew Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990 The Outraged MotherBy: Joanne BraxtonIn an essay called Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation, novelist Toni Morrisonspeaks of her attempt to blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profoundrootedness in the real world.

2 With neither taking precedence over the other. InMorrison s view this artistic goal is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Blackpeople looked at the world. We are a very practical people, very down to earth, evenshrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could becalled superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blendthose two worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limiting. And some ofthose things were discredited knowledge that Black people had; discredited onlybecause Black people were discredited and therefore what they knew was discredited.

3 1 Other aspects which Morrison uses to define the literary tradition of Black Americansinclude the oral quality of that body of writing and the presence of an ancestor. Morrison views the inclusion of this figure as a deliberate effort, on the part of the artist,to get a visceral, emotional response as well as an intellectual response as he or shecommunicates with the audience in a literary pattern of call and response (341, 343).The ancestral figure most common in the work of contemporary Black women writers isan Outraged Mother .

4 She speaks in and through the narrator of the text to bear witness and to break down artificial barriers between the artist and the audience. Not only doesthis ancestor figure lend a benevolent, instructive, and protective presence to the text,she also lends her benign influence to the very act of creation, for the Black woman artistworks in the presence of this female ancestor, who passes on her feminine wisdom for thegood of the tribe, and the survival of all Black people, especially those in the Africandiaspora created by the Atlantic slave trade.

5 This essay examines the ancestral presenceof the Outraged Mother as a primary archetype in the narratives of contemporary BlackAmerican women writers. The Outraged Mother embodies the values of sacrifice,nurturance, and personal courage values necessary to an endangered group. Sheemploys reserves of spiritual strength, whether Christian or derived from African in all her actions and fueling her heroic ones is outrage at the abuse of her peopleand her person. She feels very keenly every wrong done her children, even to the furthestgenerations.

6 She exists in art because she exists in of the Outraged Mother abound in the oral lore and early autobiographicalnarratives of persons of African descent enslaved in the Americas. For example,Jamaican Maroon folklore attributes many supernatural powers to Grandy nanny , amythical ancestress from whom all present day Maroons (believe) they are descended. According to legend. nanny was both a magician and a military leader in Maroonresistance to the British. In one story nanny uses magic to neutralize a large Britishmilitary force. [S]he stooped down and tauntingly presented her rump toward their guns;as they fired on her, she proceeded to shock them by catching between her buttocks a fullround of lead shot, rendering them inactive.

7 Thus she both insults and overwhelms theenemy. British written history of Jamaica acknowledges the existence of an importantpersonage named nanny , and refers to her as a powerful obeah woman or sorceress. And when today s Mooretown Maroons refer to themselves as nanny s yo-yo. nanny sprogeny, they assert a connection with an Outraged Mother of an ancestral past,signifying both continuity and the slave narrative genre and even in the post-emancipation accounts offemale former slaves, the Outraged Mother remains an ancestral presence.

8 She is fullydeveloped in Harriet Linda Brent Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).Linda s conviction to save herself and her children moves her to act deliberately anddecisively in planning a secret escape. As in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Africandiaspora, maroonage or running away from slavery, proved a viable form of rebellion formany enslaved in the United States. Like Grandy nanny , Linda takes to the woods, andbecomes, for a brief period, an American Maroon, a rebel and a fugitive from the help of her maternal grandmother, Aunt Marthy, a free woman, and anotheroutraged Mother , Linda was disguised as a sailor and taken to the Snaky Swamp, alocation she found more hospitable than landed slave culture.

9 [E]ven those largevenomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in thatcommunity called civilized. 3 Such language and imagery set the tone for laterdevelopments in Afra-American narrative, with the protective and determined qualities ofthe Outraged Mother well established, and the autobiographical act performed in thepresence of Aunt Marthy, an Outraged female forebearer who dies during the course ofthe slave narrators like Linda Brent planted the seed of contemporary Blackfeminist autobiography and womanist fiction early in Black American literary fact, the slave narrator s Outraged grandmother, Aunt Marthy.

10 Foreshadows Zora NealeHurston s nanny in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). A spiritual sister of theMythical Grandy nanny , Zora Neale Hurston s fictional nanny shares many of themythic character s rebellious and protective attributes. She emerges in Eyes as anancestral American Maroon, Hurston s nanny flees the slave plantation to create a newand better way of life for herself and her child. nanny takes to the woods with her blondand gray-eyed newborn after the plantation mistress makes use of the master s absence toorder nanny whipped and the child sold.