"flowers on the distant frontier"

Beyonce reunited with her old cohort on Superbowl Sunday.  Years ago while walking the streets of Stockholm during a research trip, I was so happy to see Destiny's Child "brown" faces on this poster.

This past Monday, a day on which many of us found ourselves exhausted from Super Bowl-watching, I was impressed by the degree to which the students recognized how space, or location, has meaning for everyone, not just African Americans. The class, among other things, discussed the impressions many have of people from Alabama. Beyond that, the students also had a range of responses to “Daughters of the Dust,” the motion picture unveiling the anxieties felt by one family of African descent in 1902 as they prepared to leave their out island home for the “mainland.” In migrating, this family was leaving not only kinfolk, but old traditions. Lauria noted how one worldly relative named “Yellow Mary” demonstrated the ways in which skin complexion has had an impact on the status of people of African descent across time. Lighter-skinned African Americans, according to Lauria, are perceived as having more privileges, an idea that she also gathered from the Amrita Chakrabarti Myers’ reading. Alexis honed in on how Myers’ book and “Daughters” both demonstrate how the city is believed to be a place “where fortunes can be made.” To this point, Raven took note of the idea of migration and its role in how people look for a “new and better life.” Roosevelt saw how the family’s decision to move from their island home posed tensions with the desire of slaves who, too, desired to be “free.”  Tiffany noticed small, but important details in the movie, including “flowers on a distant frontier.” She also recognized the “deep [-] rooted community” depicted in the film, something she also sensed in Myers’ work. Finally, Shanece understood how migrating was not easy. She noted “the girl [who] wanted to stay with the guy she was seeing.” Shanece also grasped how the family was moving from the “periphery” (this idea appeared in a Ronald Lewis essay, the second assigned reading) to the mainland. We will continue learning about how space and place figures into the life of African Americans during the antebellum period next week when we turn to the cities of Cincinnati and Buffalo.

"who they out there?"

The story of African Americans in cities often begins outside of cities. John Boles' study of South Carolina reveals, among many things, people of African descent's ties to land including land in the South. “The South is the blacks’ land, too,” he writes, “and southerner is a biracial term." While presenting the unique features of the oppressive slave era, including slavery’s development in Africa, Boles also draws attention to the eighteenth century when “blacks learned to communicate with one another…began to create families and develop a sense of black community." But as this scene in Julie Dash's 1991 "Daughters of the Dust" depicts, some of the earliest families of African descent in the United States also understood the degree to which there was a world beyond the immediate land around them. This world was quite different from their distinctive culture. If it is true African Americans are composed of many ancestral parts, as the Gullah people in Dash's film reveal, how does culture persist when people move to new locales? How is it altered?