"She made up her mind while standing on the street of Dayton."

Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench.

I returned the students' midterms yesterday and was happy to see how well some of them engaged ideas like "identity" and "resistance" in their short writings (they had a choice between writing a poem or an essay in addition to answering multiple choice questions). The issue of identity certainly figured into our look at the ways in which "blackness" is appropriated via music  as seen in the movie The Commitments. This motion picture concerns a group of Dubliners who form a band that plays hits made famous by African American artists during the 1950s and 1960s. After the movie, we saw the beginnings of a heated discussion on whether we are persuaded that the Irish, as the movie suggests, are the "blacks" of Europe. 

One of the more provocative observations came from a student who commented that Mexicans seem to be the "blacks" of Latin America. That comment and others stated in class or via written reflections that I read later pushed my own thinking about race as a social construction. Moreover, like some of the students who indicated as much via their written reflections, I remain quite interested in how the urban space expands the possibilities of understanding how race appears (and disappears) whenever other issues like ethnicity, poverty and labor are before us. 

To be clear, Dublin is very much a city and while watching the movie yesterday, the grime and poverty we tend to see in America's inner cities, which are heavily-populated by people of African descent, it was hard to not see what message Alan Parker, the filmmaker was trying to send. Whether we are persuaded by his story or not, it was a good discussion that sets us up to return to the idea of race and space next week. We will look at excerpts from Yael Sternhell's study of how southern people - black and white, enslaved and not - were forced to make sense of the world around them simply because they had to move through space amid the upheaval surrounding the Civil War. Their experiences pose unique tensions with an excerpt from Wench, a work of fiction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. In an excerpt from that novel, we will learn about four enslaved women who traveled to a city away from the direct oversight of their masters. How does the urban space inform their impressions of their oppression? How does the opportunity to simply be mobile make them aware of the possibility of freedom? We will try to think about possible answers to these questions while keeping race and gender squarely before us.

"forms of dislocation"

Yael Sternhell's study of Southern movement during the Civil War.

I get it. I know that you can only take comparisons so far. So, for this week’s in-class written reflection, I had mixed feelings about asking the students to think about Hurricane Katrina and the idea of movement in the years leading to and during the Civil War as described by Yael Sternhell in an academic study, and Dolen Perkins-Valdez in her best-selling novel, Wench. After all, the 2005 hurricane was a natural disaster though one involving human decisions on multiple levels. But human decisions also factor into man-made disasters like wars.  I went ahead with the in-class assignment with the hope of pushing the students' critique of African American life in a particular time and across time. I asked them to juxtapose the Sternhell and Perkins-Valdez readings against an excerpt from the Spike Lee HBO documentary “When the Levees Broke." These three works -  one of them historical fiction, describe, however differently, dislocation and racial conflict. For example, in Wench, the students read about the experiences of four enslaved women, all mistresses to white Southern men. The women traveled unaccompanied by their masters to an Ohio city and learned what it was like to order a meal in a tavern and go shopping to purchase anything they wanted for the first time. In literally moving not just from the South, but from their white masters’ presence, there was a psychological opening in how they perceived their oppression. Still, Lizzie, one of the women, could not bear the idea of escaping to “freedom,” something the others successfully contemplated. Demonstrating how the ability of bondswomen to move was different from bondsmen, she worried about her children who were still in slave territory. She also believed her master truly cared for her. Other tensions stemming from the idea of leaving were presented in the assigned Sternhell chapter. In it, the students read about how the Civil War disrupted the social order in the South, causing many to flee regardless of race or gender. Some rural slaves, suddenly free to move, fled to cities like Richmond. Sternhell pondered how emancipation, or the idea of freedom, could be considered against “other forms of dislocation” and “with other problems of social control in a theatre of war.” I wondered if the racially charged dislocation of many during Katrina, a storm that took place nearly 150 years after the Civil War, and one involving heated exchanges between local and national public leaders as well as blacks and whites alike could be mapped onto Sternhell’s (and Perkins-Valdez') work. I told the students if they were not persuaded that it could, it was totally okay. I was impressed by the range of positions  they took. Roosevelt wrote, “I don’t see [the connection]. Katrina affected only the people in New Orleans; the Civil War [involved people from the entire South].” Shanece saw a connection, writing, the [woman] in Wench was unable to escape because [she] did not know how [she] would survive... This is [sort of] similar to the Hurricane Katrina disaster [in that] lots of citizens [had similar concerns. They] did not have the finances or means of transportation to relocate.” Alexis observed a connection, observing how during the Civil War, Southern whites and blacks migrated toward [military sites] “for protection and safety] though some Katrina victims stayed for “[economic] reasons; [others simply] did not want to abandon their homes.” Taking a similar position, Christin saw a connection between one’s ability to physically move in New Orleans during Katrina and in the South during the Civil War. As she writes,  in both instances “race determined how successful the move could be and if it [was going] to be permanent.” To this point Tiffany, who also saw a connection, wrote, “Your wealth and status determin[ed] your ability to make decisions.”  Lauria also saw a connection between the two events though rightly with caution, writing, “I think it was by coincidence that the areas that were hit the hardest [during Katrina] were areas with a large African American [population].” She noted how some people did not have the means to rebuild their homes and like many living in the bellum and postbellum periods, discovered it was “easier to start new lives elsewhere.” Aaron saw a connection between the two events, observing the ways in which Katrina “completely dismantled the social order of New Orleans” because everyone “shared in the hardship.” But he acknowledged that in both instances, “it was much easier for whites to move.” I challenged the students to remember how they responded to this prompt and earlier in-class writing prompts as we continue learning about how certain bodies become associated with city life after the Civil War.

on being taken only to return

Dolen Perkins-Valdez' discussing her best-selling book, Wench.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez' best-selling novel, Wench, is the first literary work used in this course. The students will read an excerpt from this book in which four slave women enter Dayton, OH, for the first time unaccompanied by their white owners. This section was assigned along with a chapter in Yael Sternhell's study of how movement helps explain the ways in which the Civil War changes the course of U.S. history. Using both readings, we will also ponder what new things can be learned when we focus on the movements of nineteenth century Southerners including African American women in and away from the countryside.