Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VIII

“Speak up, Ike, an ‘Spress Yo’se‘f”

Sentimental Romance Revisited in Ntozake Shange’s

Betsey Brown

A Feminist Leitmotif: “Coming of Age”

In many contemporary African American women’s works, the pattern of the nuclear family is destroyed. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple are suggestive examples of dissipated family lives, torn by racial and social conflicts. Swimming against this narrative stream, Shange creates in Betsey Brown a text radiating from the notion of the unified family. As the above epigraph reveals, the writer’s intention is to make us aware of the need to explore in depth the positive aspects of humanity—family being one of them.

Women’s self-assertion is crucial in Shange’s work that shapes racial protest though reconstructions of main itineraries of black female identity in connection with the private and public sphere. Her intense preoccupation with woman-centered issues relates gender to new perspectives on race and class, by means of “tools that are available to [her] as a feminist reconstructing history” (Shange, in Lester 1990, 727). In a black female tradition embroidered with silence, Shange insists on the piercing need of women’s spiritual development and on their ability to produce radical change in the literary discourse. Importantly, the power of naming functions as a leitmotif in her life and work. Born Paulette Williams, she adopts a Zulu name: Ntozake (“she who comes with her own things”) and Shange (“she who walks like a lion”). Her interest in subtle onomastic connotations is also reflected in her choice of titles for her works of fiction, all of them bearing significant names: Sassafrass: A Novella (1976), Melissa & Smith (1978), Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1983), Betsey Brown (1985), and Liliane (1994).

In an interview with Neal Lester, Shange expresses her wish to write something that fills a gap, something that she dearly wanted to read as a child coming of age in a segregated America. Just like Morrison and Walker, Shange’s creative impulse springs from her desire to write what she would have liked to read:

I’d like to be part of a collection of books by women that someone might give a female child. It simply didn’t exist when I was a child; the books weren’t there and that’s what I meant. I’m lucky that Alice Childress still writes; June Jordan still writes; Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Kitty Tsui… The mere presence of these women in print has to be of moral assistance to young women (1990, 721).

If we correlate Shange’s point with African American women’s literature written in the last two centuries, we notice that examples of female rites of passage are not few and can be easily found in works by Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and many others. However, Shange draws attention to the necessity of creating an anthology specially designed to focus on young women’s development, with a view on actual problems.

Shange’s Betsey Brown represents a fine example of a book intended to provide young women with moral assistance, being centered on a female child growing up in a nation marked by racial progress. The book offers an insight into the life of a middle class African American family whose inner peace is disturbed by the “changing values in the black community and the effects of legislated integration” (Blain, Grundy, and Clements 1990, 970). It is 1957, the year of school integration, when black children have to “take up for the whole damn race,” and “to do battle with the white man” (Shange 1985, 135).

Yoking the aesthetic and the political views, Shange’s novel remarkably parallels the personal story of Betsey’s attaining self-confidence with the social achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. In the black community of St. Louis, Betsey’s private drama becomes emblematic: at the age of thirteen, her life weaves together the bright threads of an incipient romance with the darker ones of racism and prejudice. In a distinctive female genealogy, the writer places Betsey’s story next to that of her mother and grandmother, thus making us conscious that “black women’s relation to history is first of all a relationship to mother and grandmother” (Willis 1987, 5). In a house in which three generations of women dovetail with each other, men’s stories are not forgotten, the father playing the multiple roles of a positive parental figure, a dedicated social activist, and a doctor for his community.

It is the aim of this chapter to demonstrate that Shange’s Betsey Brown can be read in an intertextual dialogue with two basic texts of the black female tradition: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929).¹ Like her precursors, Shange uses the specific tropes of the black female sentimental romance, such as the insistence on domestic setting and heroic quest for racial freedom. Moreover, Shange’s claim that she writes “feminist, not feminine” literature lies at the core of her transformative power that reconfigures the genre of sentimental romance (Shange, in Lester 1990, 727). The chapter further highlights how Shange subverts women’s stereotypical representations, creating a polytropic character whose coming of age in a moment of crisis initiates a flight from conventions.

The last section discusses how Shange reconsiders the passing-for-white plot, another common element with Harper’s and Fauset’s works. If in Iola Leroy and Plum Bun, the passing-for-white plot is dominant, in Betsey Brown, it becomes a subplot unveiled through the elders’ memory. Importantly, all three novelists suggest that race is not simply determined by biological factors, but mostly by cultural and social conditions. Even if the act of passing might bring privileges, it implies discarding a valuable racial inheritance and a strong communal belonging.

NOTES