Graduate Thesis
We are not a coming people, we are here: Confronting history, endless struggle, and new beginnings
Abstract
Two years ago my mother, a journalist, connected with Paula Whatley, a documentary filmmaker and former professor at Howard University. Paula was a descendant of a slave owned by my mother’s family, and this was shocking for both my mother and me. My mother learned this through a DNA test. At least one ancestor was a slaveholder and a rapist, and there were probably more like him in our family line. My mother always thought she was from a poor farming family, and I had never thought about my American roots because I am half Ukrainian and from New York. We are both deeply aware, however, of the necessity of learning from history to bring change and awareness to ourselves and others.
We Are Not a Coming People, We Are Here, which began as a personal exploration, has become a place for four women—Paula Whatley, her daughter Mashadi Matabane, my mother and me—to literally come to the table. We are creating together, storytelling, and discussing the violence that has marked our shared American history, in hopes of healing on both sides and of growing into a family through open discussion. We must discuss and challenge the amnesia that has erased so much of the memory of white America.
White woman, as well as black men and women, were very much entrapped by the patriarchal system of the 19th century; this is the subtext of We Are Not a Coming People, We Are Here. As a woman, I could have protested the fact that my husband owned slaves, but what real agency would I have had? Yet I must acknowledge that my ancestors (including women) were part of a white power structure that benefited from the subjugation of a people.
My paper takes a critical look at the photographs in our family archives. The writing of Barthes and Sontag influence how I analyze each photograph. I also assess my own paintings, which are based on stories and discussions. Finally, I look at the words of activists throughout history, including Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit, and their thoughts on how looking at the past can change the future.
Part 1: Creating a Self-Portrait
I woke up this morning and did two things: I read Darby English’s [2013] essay Emmett Till Ever After about Jason Lazarus’s iconic work, This is a Self Portrait of Jason Lazarus [2005], and I listened to a podcast, Democracy Now, about the slaying by the NYPD of a 34- year-old black man, Saheed Vassel.
Lazarus’ work was a photograph of Emmett Till’s gravesite after Till’s exhumation. The artist arrived too late to photograph the coffin, so he photographed the empty gravesite, calling it his self-portrait. Lazarus is a white artist and also my mentor; Till was a fourteen-year-old black boy who in 1955 was murdered in Mississippi for speaking to a pretty white woman working the cash register in a general store. Her husband and his stepbrother brutally murdered the young man. He was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River—a mutilated and swollen corpse. Sixty years later, the woman admitted that much of her accusation was false.
Saheed Vassell was a bipolar man slain just a few days ago in New York City. Vassell did things like helping the elderly in the neighborhood without seeking compensation. I am horrified by the number of black men like Saheed Vassell and Emmett Till who, for no reason other than their skin color, have been shot and killed by the police or brutally murdered by renegade groups of white males. These stories haunt me.
I cannot blame myself for these particular acts, but I can blame the white power structure of which I am part because of my skin color and my mother’s familial history. This is shameful and frightening to me and must be confronted. I imagine that I could have been that pretty white woman in the general store. I have trouble with this.
Returning to English’s essay on Lazarus’s project, I am struck by a question he posed: “What was he thinking?” This question is twofold. What was Lazarus thinking to present Emmett Till’s gravesite as his own self portrait, but also what was Emmett Till thinking at the time of his own death? English reminds us there is an uncomfortable gap between what we know about Emmett Till and what our cultural storytelling conventions have dictated. Lazarus’s photograph emphasized this “distance.” (Darby English, Emmett Till Ever After, Black is, Black Ain’t, pg. 85- 92)
Though I began this project before I started working with Lazarus, I was on the same route of discovery. We Are Not a Coming People, We Are Here is as much a self-portrait as a story about my white ancestors, my black relatives, and society in the past, present, and what I hope will be the future. Through each story I hear, and with each painting I create, I replay the turmoil of a fraught history. First, I hear a story. Then I pick one or two elements of the story and look at the photos. I analyze them intellectually. I see individuals I do not know, I fantasize about them, and I cry for them. I cry for myself. I feel anger towards myself, towards others, towards my mother’s family, and even towards my father’s Ukrainian family for being a part of the problem. I remember the ancestors. I can relate to the women in my pictures.
The ancestors are with me, I think. I come to peace with myself. I come to peace with the amnesia that hid this history from me. I come to peace with my own racism, which I may not have even recognized, but was there through generations of being white. I recognize it is now time for me to act, and through this work, I have begun. This work is my self-portrait. It is not only for black America; it is, for white America, an encouragement to remember.
Part 2: Beginnings
The story begins with my mother, Jacqueline Kochak, doing a DNA test and learning we are related to many African-American men and women. She decided to explore this and in the process connected with Paula Whatley, to whom she is distantly related. Paula was on the same search, looking for people from the white side of her family to fill in blank spots in her own story. The two women began a conversation, and later all four of us began to speak.
Paula is only a few years older than my mother, and her daughter Mashadi is just a few years older than me. Mashadi is an academic and a writer, and I am a contemporary artist. In the summer of 2016, we coalesced as a group to uncover this history that both our families cared so deeply about.
Now, we work to solve the mystery of our ancestors, and in doing so we learn about ourselves: all the good and the bad, all the uncomfortable and the sad and happy times that our families endured in an era of cruelty, violence, and unforgiving capitalism. We want to push forward to change our shared American future.
Before I worked with Paula and Mashadi, I did not understand the weight of African- American experience and how the exploitation of a people has divided our country. I thought I knew, because I have always been open to learning, always had friends from different ethnicities, and always wanted to hear their stories. Not until I threw myself into this two-year project did I understand that all those things I learned in school meant nothing.
Many things I have never thought about before have come up through conversations, especially with Paula. She is like a new mother to me, teaching me to see and to live and to act. In one instance, Paula and I sat at a diner in Atlanta. I mentioned that I never identified with being a “white American.” I always identified myself as Ukrainian, and everyone else in New York identified me this way since they sorted themselves by ethnicity.
Paula laughed and said, “I just saw you as white.” I thought about this. This is one way the disconnect between two groups happens. Simply the ability to identify myself as a nationality beyond or before “American” is white privilege. We white families all know or can learn where our families came from. Black American families didn’t have that privilege before the advent of DNA testing. Few records were kept about the enslaved, and unless you are lucky enough to be a master researcher like Paula, those records can be very difficult to find.
Until I undertook this project, these huge markers of differentiation between my privilege and my black friends’ privilege were not so apparent to me. I hope this project will encourage white Americans to accept that they have been privileged for no reason other than their skin color and to begin their own work. It takes all Americans to create and produce change. A bridge needs to be created to close the divide created by hundreds of years of exploitation.
Part 3: Storytelling as Activism
I am deeply affected by inequality. I believe everything and everyone is interconnected, and the greatest thing I can do as an activist, artist, and researcher is to make others aware of these interconnections. In doing this, I also am learning and growing.
Angela Davis defines this approach, this awareness of interconnections, as “intersectionality” in her 2016 book Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and The Foundations of a Movement. Davis suggests that the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, needs to be viewed within a global context, suggesting that one might have assumed the scene was troubled Gaza in the Mideast, not Ferguson in the United States, if only images of the police and not the demonstrators had been shown (Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Pg. 13).
Davis suggests that all these issues, racism, police militarization, and state violence, are rooted in the U.S. history of slavery. She also notes that George Zimmerman, a would-be police officer, was replicated the role of the slave patrol when he killed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Pg. 15-16). Were progressive organizations and movements all over the world to focus on a need for equality and justice in the U.S., what would happen? Would the white majority be shaken out of its complacency and acknowledge that there are indeedproblems that need to be addressed?
Addressing the current racial, political, social, and gender issues we face will take all of us working towards this goal, and that goal is for people of color and whites to create a better America. This might be a utopian idea, but all activism is utopian. Amnesia, or forgetting about the cause of problems, thwarts the impulse for change. Rebecca Solnit writes in her 2016 book, Hope in the Dark, that, “Controlling the past begins by knowing it; the stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do.” (Solnit, pg. xx). Solnit suggests that unpacking the past can ultimately change the future, and that knowing the truth about the past is the first step to engaging with the past. That first step can lead to activism and the change that is needed for the future, but a comfortable amnesia can shield us from the past’s harsh, painful truths—truths we would rather not know.
Solnit’s statement prompted me to begin my search. And when my mother told me her story about meeting Paula, I wanted to meet her, too. Slowly, the idea of this project came to me, and I proposed that the two families begin to get to know each other by starting a conversation.
In the process we could become a family—a family that had never been acknowledged. I proposed to use our family archives to make reimagined images for our family. These first took the form of collages and montages of our two families’ combined images. From the collages, I am creating large-scale paintings to synthesize these moments and write them into present history. I am also making an anti-autobiography in the form of a manipulated book and a video piece.
Paula, Mashadi, and my mother respond to everything I create, and I edit the artworks depending on their comments. We have continued conversations through Skype, email, and meetings in person—conversations that I record. I am collecting data to build a new archive. In doing this, we rotate agency. Each of us has a part in how a piece is made, when I create based on a story, my collaborators express their thoughts and I change accordingly. We are history making by chatting and acknowledging, collaborating and negotiating. Through a newfound unity, we are transcending a patriarchal society; the shame that both our families have dealt with is revised into a new beginning.
“I love Natalya’s vision. She is searching for a deeper identity that unites four individuals in the face of hundreds of years of exploitative systems and actions that were designed to eternally divide and obscure the relationship between us,” Paula said.
After I sent her the first draft of my artist statement for We Are Not a Coming People, We Are Here, Paula responded via email: “The message is clear, slavery was not a ‘black’ thing or a ‘white’ thing, it was a distorted and brutal relationship of racial and economic domination that brought blacks and whites into intimate contact with each other.
Our stories—the story of each woman—are germane to this project, and for that reason I will let each woman tell something about her past and how she came to this point:
Natalya’s Story
I was bullied terribly as a child from the age of six to thirteen. The bullying made a profound impact on me. I was deemed an outsider, never part of the group, and I could do nothing to try to better fit in. I’m not exactly sure why I was the butt of the other kids’ cruelty. There was a period when it was because my first name was Ukrainian. Then it was because I was Byzantine Catholic, and that made me weird. Then it was because I was dyslexic. My peers chanted songs about how stupid I was. Being deemed different was terrible.
In high school, we began moving because of my father’s job instability. We moved from New York to Kansas and then finally to Alabama for my senior year of high school. In Kansas, all seven of us lived in a two-bedroom condo. My two sisters and I shared a concrete basement. I found relief in doing drawings of my sisters as they slept. I felt outside of the world that was in front of me. As I moved, I drew all the people I saw and I paid attention to those around me.
Then we moved to Alabama. I knew what racism was and I knew what white and black were. I kind of knew what Hispanic was (which I called “Puerto Rican” up until then), but I did not understand what those terms really meant to the people in question, although I heard the Italian parents in New York murmur quiet, racist remarks under their breath. In Alabama, I was friends with everyone: black, white, Baptist, Catholic, Protestants and on and on. Then, one day, I was with a group of white kids and I heard one of the boys talk about lynching. I won’t repeat what he said. It horrified me. I yelled at him, and suddenly I thought I recognized what “whiteness” means and is. That incident has stayed with me to this day, but until I began this project, I don’t think I really understood.
Paula’s Story
Growing up in the South in the 1950s, there were only two types of people — blacks and whites. Jews were a special type of white person with all the rights and privileges, but they had caution and some compassion for blacks. Jews were white people who knew better and were more apt to do better by blacks some of the time. There were no Asians, Africans, or Latinos to speak of. They were anomalies just passing through mainly, for education purposes.
I was raised in Atlanta, where we lived in segregated communities, attended segregated schools, churches, parties, etc. We shopped in the West End and Downtown (mainly Rich’s when we needed higher quality), where I saw white people. West End was full of working class and poor whites. They were variously friendly, indifferent, or hostile. I recall an incident in a grocery store when I was about eight. A little white boy, about two, was in the shopping cart. He looked at me and smiled with the sweetest smile and clearly, cheerfully said, “Hello, nigger.” His mother looked terribly embarrassed.
So encountering white people in public spaces was my full experience with whites until 1957 or 1958, when my maternal uncle Paul Davis (I’m named for him) married a white woman (Doris) from California. He lived in Ghana, and she came home from Africa to pack her stuff to ship over there. On her way back across the country, she stopped in Georgia to meet his family. (Her family was deeply opposed to the marriage, even though Paul was a Harvard graduate and a member of the New York bar, etc., far outstripping their worldly achievements). Doris was the first white person I knew on a personal basis, and who knew my name.
It was not until I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and moved into Hill Hall, where I had white roommates as well as 15 other suitemates who were all white, that I began to know and be known by white people as a human being, by name, and to go out and do things together. It was also then that it became apparent that I felt socially inferior to whites and really didn’t feel comfortable interacting with them on a social basis.
I could hang academically or on the basketball court (I was on Penn’s women’s team), but it was much harder—almost impossible—for me to hang with a group of white people as the only black person. I could do one-on-one, but I was very uncomfortable and felt out-of-place as the only black in a group. My roommate and suitemates were nice to me and invited me to join in up to a certain point. They also saw my withdrawal from them, so it wasn’t just them being standoffish. It took years and more exposure for me to come to grips with that and to feel more at ease among white people socially.
Jacqueline’s Story
I never interacted with a black person as a child. Actually, it was more than never interacting—I never saw a black person as a child in western Kansas. I read voraciously—way above my age—so in some books I ran across references to "colored people.” I thought this was a reference to the few Mexicans who lived in our town, and asked my mother about it. That's when I learned about "Negroes."
In Dodge City's Wright Park, there was a big bathtub-style pool that had to be drained once a week, and the Mexicans were only allowed to swim in it the day before the vast pool was drained and refilled. And they were only allowed to sit in the balcony of the one movie theater in town, not downstairs. I remember my Dad shaking his head and saying, "I just can't believe it. We thought it was normal in those days."
In a way this "sheltered" upbringing was probably good, because I didn't grow up in a miasma of negative stereotypes or expectations. I wasn't taught anything at all about "races," other than to never use the "N-word," as only low-class people did that. To me, African- Americans were kind of another exotic people like Ukrainian-Americans (my husband) or Chinese. I was naive in a lot of ways.
Part 4: Analyzing Photography
The basis of my project is historical family photographs gathered from our two archives, because the power of photography in telling stories and influencing feelings has been known since the very beginning of the medium’s existence. In this section, I analyze photographs from 19th century America, the time of American slavery and the Civil War, and discuss how they are not simply historical artifacts but also relate to contemporary culture. In the following section, I will put my family photographs and artworks into conversation with the historical photos.
I wanted to start with a photo taken in 1862 by William D. McPherson and his partner, Mr. Oliver. This is a horrific depiction of the scars resulting from the severe whipping of a runaway enslaved man named Gordon. After fleeing his, Gordon made it to a Union camp and decided to enlist in the Union army. During Gordon’s medical examination, the doctor discovered his scars and asked the photographers to document them. They took this photo with the express purpose of exposing the horrors of slavery to a Northern audience during wartime. Before this, photography of slavery—in particular, photographs showing cruelty to enslaved individuals—was more or less hidden from to preserve the fiction of slavery as a benevolent institution. Once published, this photo incited many freed slaves to enlist in the army. (Gage, A Slave Named Gordon)
Abolitionists used this image for their own purposes, distributing copies widely. People in the North were not only enraged by the cruelty of slavery; by purchasing these images, they felt they were doing something to better the condition of people in bondage. Photographs such as this one deserveattention because they actually made a change in our history. This powerful yet painful photo became a tool to provoke Northerners to disavow slavery. It is a good example of what French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes says about photography:
I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives… And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead. (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9)
The image of Gordon demonstrates the three “intentions” Barthes discusses. The Operator took this photograph to specifically show the wounds; his intention was to create hysteria in the North. The Spectators were those who saw it and reacted, including us today. We still react emotionally to this photograph, because it reminds us that this was not that long ago and things are not that different. Then there is Gordon himself, the Spectrum of the photograph, the “spectacle.” As with my own family photographs, I can stare at these images and relate to them as people, but I will always be reminded that these are images of people who once lived and have now passed. The images do, however, always “feel” as if these ghosts are right here with us, haunting us.
Another important photograph of the time was taken by the biologist Louis Agassiz. He took a series of photographs in 1850 of a slave named Delia on a plantation in Columbia, South Carolina, as part of his study of race. Agassiz chose to pose his enslaved model topless to suggest that she is exotic and tribal, even though she was born into slavery.
I am looking at this photograph more than 150 years later, and I think I understand the look on her face. This photograph lays the subject bare both physically and socially. She must do what the photographer asks of her, because she has no choice as an enslaved woman. You can see this on her face, the sadness, the mistrust. As historian Brian Wallis wrote of these daguerreotypes: “…their attitudes are detached, unemotional, and workmanlike. In what seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage with the camera or its operator, they stare into the lens, their faces like masks, eyes glazed, jaws clenched” (Wallis, Black Bodies, White Science; Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes, 40)
When speaking on the subject of slavery in his [1988] book Camera Lucida, Barthes writes: “The essence of slavery is here laid bare: the mask is the meaning, insofar as it is absolutely pure (as it was in the ancient theater). This is why the great portrait photographers are great mythologists.” (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34) He goes on to say, “Society mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise which will make it less acute. Hence the photograph whose meaning is too impressive is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically.” (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 36)
Barthes is saying that, as human beings, we would rather talk about aesthetics than talk about [our?] contact with photographs that are challenging. This reminds me of conversations I have had with white artists since beginning this process. I have asked them why they don’t use their art to ask difficult questions, and the answer is often that they do not want to open that door. They do not want to put themselves into the middle of the debate.
Part 5: Paintings
In the next section I take a look at paintings I created from photos in my family archives.
At first, my mother and I weren’t sure where or when these photos were taken; we only knew they had been tucked into a family Bible passed down through a different branch of the family, not related to Paula. This fact brought home to me the fact that many of my ancestors owned slaves, not just one. The photographs appeared to have been taken in the 1800s, and at some point an ancestor of mine either knew or researched these people and took the time to record their names on the front side of the photographs. One photo has the word “slave” written on the front edge.
"What happened to that family relationship after freedom came?” Paula asked. “The existence of the photographs suggests there was some recognition of their humanity by your ancestors, perhaps some affection. I don’t know, but not every white family has such a photo. Your mother must find that story if she can.”
One photo has the names “Calvin and Addie Roberts,” scrawled across the face, with Calvin seated and playing a fiddle. Another shows a woman named Darthulia, looking as if her image was captured in mid-song—a remarkable picture to have been taken at a time when photographs usually were carefully posed. The enslaved often took the surname of their master, and we found these photos in the Roberts family Bible.
Pictures such as these would probably go unremarked at the time they were taken, but to today’s researcher, they are compelling. They stimulate discussion. They document a past that has disappeared: the culture of the enslaved in the antebellum South. Yet these are not beaten people with scars from lashes on their backs. They don’t look unhappy, and if these photos were taken after the Civil War, they must have stayed with my family. More importantly, these individuals apparently were important enough to my family to merit photographs to record their memory. These may have been complicated relationships that didn’t fit today’s popular narrative of unending cruelty and degradation.
“The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates,” Sontag notes in her [2003] book, On Photography (Sontag, On Photography, 64-65). These photographs of the Roberts seem to represent a purposely preserved moment in history; a remembrance of a time outside of anything we know today; and a memory that was preserved without coercion. By contrast, the photograph of the scars on Gordon’s back, and that of the enslaved, topless woman, were stolen or looted images. They were not freely given to the photographer, but taken.
Such were my initial thoughts as I began to create the paintings. One might say they are just photographs, but they are much more. They represent an internal battle between my thoughts, intellect, emotion, outer, and inner demons. In the first layer, I used black and white paint to respond unemotionally to the attributes of the photographs. After I created the first layer, I sent pictures to the other women to get their reactions. I was doing an artist residency in China at the time, and one night—several time zones away—I went to sleep, unaware Paula and my mother were still working. I awoke to find they had uncovered a great deal of history about the people in the photos.
Darthula (Darthulia), Calvin, and Ada (Addie) Roberts all lived next to each other in the 1930 Overton County, Tennessee, census, where my Roberts family lived before moving to Kansas in 1883. Darthula was born about 1853, Calvin was born about 1859, and Ada was born about 1868. They would all have been children at the time of emancipation, so clearly there was a continuing relationship; these photos were taken when all were adults, probably at the time my mother’s great-great Grandfather Roberts took his family and moved west.
“That, to me, is a pretty clear indication of real affection, which is certainly recognition of their humanity,” my mother said. “I never thought of having any kind of connection with these people who lived so long ago, but could their attitudes and beliefs have been passed on to me in a very subtle way?”
“Maybe that kind of relationship became a subtle influence on your mother to have the awareness that she has now,” Paula responded. “Part of her backdrop without many words spoken."
After waking to these stories and thoughts, I felt a sense of relief and a desire to add color to the imagery. For my second layer, I literally colored in the black and white images, as if to add life to the dead. Yet, it wasn’t enough. I looked at these photographs from the family album again, and I became acutely aware of a reality that I know nothing about. From my knowledge of history, I could deduce what had occurred and why these photos were taken, but nothing more. Yet I was looking at people who had once lived, people with lifetimes of stories and loves and hurts.
Again, I thought of Barthes, who compares photography to resurrecting someone from the dead. “The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been,” he said (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85). I returned to the painting to obscure details through layers of black and layers of washed away and smeared colors, completing a third layer. I was haunted by an ineffable sense of relationship to these long-dead people, and grieved their passing.
Part 6: A Unification Towards a Feminist Future
The painting called The Family Portrait, was conceived after my first meeting with Paula, when she told me an unforgettable story. The first iteration was a collage in which I mixed our two families together. I then made a large-scale painting. Paula wrote me this after seeing the painting: “When I looked at the one you just sent it startled me for a moment. I thought of my great-great-grandmother, Minerva, and the terrifying fear and pain she must have experienced being taken from her parents at age seven.”
Minerva was born about 1811 in Virginia, an enslaved child of Thomas Cleaton. Cleaton died in 1818 and in his will he “loaned” Minerva to his daughter, Catherine Cleaton Rainey. Catherine’s husband, Reuben, collected Minerva along with another child and some furniture, taking them home to Georgia. Minerva was a “loan,” not a “gift,” because Cleaton didn’t want Reuben to sell his wife’s property to pay his own debts. He wanted the human chattel, which represented wealth, to be passed on to Catherine’s children.
“On Christmas Day 1828, contrary to Cleaton’s will, Rainey sold Minerva for $262.50 to John M. Settle, who bought her as his concubine and had four children with her over the next 12 years, along with having six or seven children with his white wife,” Paula says. “My great- grandfather, Warren Settle, was one of those four. None of them were required to do hard labor and, even after freedom came, they had friendly relations with their still living white half- siblings.”
Reuben Rainey died about 1838, and Catherine had died about five years earlier. Their children were grown and expected an inheritance, but their father left nothing but debts. When they checked Grandfather Cleaton’s 1818 will, they discovered Minerva should not have been sold. She and her “increase” (Settle’s children), by law belonged to them. They went to court, and the Georgia Supreme Court eventually ruled for Settle, who was forced to again pay the Raineys $262.50 for Minerva.
“Minerva died in 1872. I’ve never seen a photo of her, though in the court filing some white people described her as ‘light’ and others as a ‘dark mulatto.’” Paula says. “All were clear that all of her children were ‘yellow,’ meaning half-white. I don’t even know where she’s buried.”
When we talked about this story at dinner one day, conversation turned to the patriarchy that created this system. Although the white wife enjoyed her “white privilege,” neither woman enjoyed any kind of autonomy. At the same time, the women were dependent upon each other, and Minerva’s position as nurse would have entailed her helping the white wife give birth. The white wife, as domestic head of the household, may have acted as midwife to birth Minerva’s children.
Shawn Michelle Smith writes in her book American Archives, Gender, Race, and Class [1999] that 19th-century middle-class women were anchored in a narrative of domesticity and the ideal of the True Woman, who was pure, pious, domestic, and submissive (Smith, American Archives, pg. 11-14). To be a True Woman, a white woman extolled submission. A black woman, by contrast, could not aspire to be a True Woman, because maintaining her “purity” was almost impossible.
“When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will...resistance is hopeless,” explained Harriet Ann Jacobs (Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, pg. 80).
I imagined myself as the white wife and wondered if I could have prevented this abuse. How could any of us know what we would have done? Jacobs also spoke of her master’s wife, describing her as terribly mean because of her jealousy for Harriet, the pretty young enslaved girl. Jacobs even felt sorry for the white wife. (Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, pg. 32-36)
The complicated layers that surround these “arrangements” are what I tried to emphasize in the painting I created for The Family Portrait. I wanted to make this piece about the women, emphasizing the black women and slightly de-emphasizing the white wife and her family. Although in the center, the man who was the father of all the children is no longer of importance.
As we have discussed these stories, I have become aware that this is a feminist project as well as being about race. None of us, we four women, would have had a voice. Now, in 2018, with a litany of flagrant indiscretions against women and people of color in the news, it becomes clear there is still work to be done. We women are taking the reins to defy this patriarchal history, and through the power of our storytelling—in many ways a woman’s craft—we are taking small steps toward changing the paradigm that defines our thoughts about our shared American past.
In her reaction to my artist statement, Paula said: “Natalya’s work defies the exploitation and abuse as well as the naysayers. But art shakes us up, shakes up calcified beliefs and pain. That is what I see this vision bringing forward. It merges divided families created through the abuse and exploitation of slavery and associated shame.”
Family blood lines may have been determined by the “masters,” the men who created the institution of slavery, but women bore the children and raised the children who shape society.
Patriarchy may still seek to divide and conquer, but we need not respond to that call. Now is the time for the women to raise their voices and call for change.
Bibliography
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Davis, Angela. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago, Ill., 2016: Haymarket Books.
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