Black Women’s Freedom

 Black Women’s Freedom

Dr Manisha Patil 

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva’s physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel’s accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula’s resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation. Hannah’s claims are acceptable in her neighborhood because they are non-financial and non-threatening; she does not disturb or deplete family resources. Because her dependence is on another woman, Eva, who has both money and authority, she is not competitive. But Sula although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard. (xiii)

Suffering from the ‘geometric’ oppression of sex, race and class, black women in America are perhaps the last group with any chance of being really free. Theoretically, everybody is born free and equal, but practically, black women’s freedom and equality are curtailed at every step. They are made ‘the mule of the world’ with all the responsibilities and no rights. White feminists can afford to break their incompatible marriages and live independently. They can also choose to be single parents because they have the required economic resources and can hire domestic helps. Thus, single parenthood becomes an expression of power for them. In The Bluest Eye, Polly’s white mistress gives her the advice to leave her husband but Polly refuses to do so. In Sula, Eva’s husband Boyboy, leaves her and forces her to be a single parent. For Eva, this freedom is not an expression of power but of powerlessness. Commenting on the difference between white feminists and black women, Morrison says, ‘It’s not just the question of color but of the color of experience’13 and the experience tells us that black men can leave black women but not vice versa because economically and psychologically, black women remain dependent on black men. Its main reason is the lack of fair economic opportunities for black women. A single black woman without economic security can easily be reduced to prostitution. So marriage is considered to be a social and economic guarantee. Wives trade sex for security. e.g. Helene, Nel’s mother, herself a daughter of a Creole whore hurriedly got married to Wiley Wright, a sea-man with constant income. However, Eva’s case shows that marriage is not a life-time guarantee. The pressure to become a prostitute is even more on Eva because she has the added responsibility of three children. Yet she evades this fate by physical sacrifice. Her daughter Hannah becomes widow but she gets economic security through Eva. So Hannah can freely gratify her sexual desire without being resorting to prostitution. However, Hannah’s suicide poses questions about sufficiency of economic security and sexual gratification to fulfill female desire for freedom.

This illusive quest for freedom continues in the next generation also. At an early age, Nel and Sula discover that ‘they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them’ (52) but they respond to this fact in different ways. Like her mother Helene, Nel again compromises her freedom for social and economic security of marriage. However, like Eva Nel too is abandoned by her husband to feed three children. Unlike Eva Nel’s sacrifice is psychological rather than physical. She amputates her ‘self’. She works hard to be economically secure but curbs her sexuality. “O Jesus, I could be a mule or plow the furrows with my hands if need be if I knew that somewhere in this world in the pocket of some night, I could open my legs to some cowboy lean hips but you are trying to tell me no and O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that?” (111) Thus, Nel forces herself to fit into the stereotypes of ideal daughter, wife and mother at the cost of herself.

Sula takes another turn. She becomes different from Nel and all other women because she asserts herself in the most unlikely situations. Morrison says, ‘She is new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness responding inventively to found things. Improvisational, daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable and dangerously female.’14 Sula asserts her absolute autonomy.

The critical difference between Eva and Sula is that the older woman had her power thrust on her by bitter circumstances and she bore both a deep pride and a bitter circumstances and she bore both a deep pride and a bitter grudge for bearing that burden. Sula on the other hand, wants to find and exert the power of her own life, a choice the older generation of women did not have. It is also a choice the Bottom as a collective does not have. For Sula, putting her grandmother away in an old age home becomes an act of self-preservation encouraged by Eva’s domineering behavior; to the community it is a scandal.15 

Sula does not resort to physical or psychological sacrifice for economic freedom. She neither represses her sexuality nor becomes a prostitute. She picks up and drops men just like men pick up and drop a woman. Her life’s project is to make her ‘self’. She tells Eva, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”. (92). But social conditions are not conductive to such project. Sula refuses to fuse herself into a man’s self to make him complete (as Nel had done for Jude). Instead she is looking for someone who will complete her. After trying on many men, she realizes than no man can complement her as Nel had done in her childhood. But Sula and Jude’s affair has already turned Nel into an enemy. Ajax, a free and complete man, provides Sula a hope to complete herself. Their affair is based on mutual respect. Yet the difference in their gender makes their lives different. ‘A disfranchised black man outside the white man’s economy and the law Ajax cannot fulfill his desire to fly airplanes, yet he is at home in the community of the Bottom, which nurses his wounds. Women fight each other for him, his mother nurtures him without demands, he does not have to answer to anything but his own whims and certainly nobody castigates him for the relationships he does or does not have. This however is not the case with Sula. Though she has ventured outside her community and become worldly wise, inside the community, she steps into the sheltered space of her mother’s house; outside it, there is no place for her. Because of the sexual liberties she takes her status in the community is liminal. From his makeshift, male-centered world, Ajax cannot relate to her lonesome predicament. Sula’s invitation to him to lean on her signals to him her need to claim him. Sensing in her a proclivity for ‘the nest’, Ajax leaves Sula. While his rejection of Sula signifies his rejection of the structural imperatives of being a man (which he recognizes as an impossibility), his departure also signifies his inability to identify with Sula’s own rejection of the structural imperatives of gender roles in her life.’16 Ajax is complete in himself but he is not interested in making Sula complete. Curious, fearless and adventurous, Ajax is least interested in making a life-time attachment. When Sula shows interest in fusing their two selves and expects fidelity from and offers it to Ajax, he leaves. From his driving license, Sula comes to know that his name is ‘A. Jacks’ and not ‘Ajax’. So she realizes that even an unconventional man like Ajax cannot understand her urge for being free and attached simultaneously (as Ajax is). Worse still, it makes her confront the bitter truth for one last time – there is no chance for a black woman to be really free and happy in this country, at this particular time – which makes her sick and culminates in her premature death. 

Sula is a new world woman who exercises choice out of choicelessness. While other woman like Eva and Nel are forced to be alone, Sula cultivates aloneness. Sula tells Nel, “My lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondary lonely”. (143) (Maggie Gale house says, ‘...the town’s judgment is very specific: it is all right if Sula ends up alone, but it is not all right for Sula to cultivate aloneness’)17 Similarly, while other woman die a slow death, Sula accelerates her death. She thinks to herself, “There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are”, (137) and then proceeds further to experience the one last experience of life – death. On her deathbed she again tells Nel, “I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is, they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those red-woods. I sure did live in this world”. (143) Unlike Nel, Sula never falls prey to self-pity. Through her willingness to die she even conquers death. Following the well-known proverb ‘Life is an ice-cream, eat it before it melts’, Sula tastes all the flavors of life, sweet as well as bitter, with equal interest while Nel and others let their lives melt. While Sula lives even posthumously, others experience death in life. The only way to free themselves is to embrace death.

Coming back to the Nigger joke, the text says, ‘Freedom was easy – the farmer had no objection to that.’ (5) Commenting on it, Rita Bergenholtz says, ‘if there is a message in this novel, it seems to me that it is precisely the opposite: Freedom is never easy. However, Morrison is more concerned with posing questions than with delivering messages. What, we might ask, does freedom really mean. Like all of the Black women up in the bottom Nel is free. Yet for forty-three years she labors under the burden of assuming that she must be the good girl and Sula the evil one. Is this freedom? Nel’s husband Jude is also free. Yet Jude wastes his adult life telling ‘whiney tales’ mostly about how ‘a Negro man has a hard row to hoe in this world’ and other such confronting clichés (103). Is that freedom? Morrison provides no answers, her goal like that of many a satirist, is to provoke thought. For only by frequently inquiring what it means to be free, to be in love, to be human, to be black or white, to be good or evil can we truly be alive.’18

In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o states that mere physical decolonization is not enough. Colonization affects not just the socio-economic-political conditions of the colonized; its main target is the psyche of the colonized. By using its biggest weapon ‘the cultural bomb’ imperialism creates inferiority complex in the colonized. ‘The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.’19

Colonization turns the colonized into a caged bird. S/he becomes so habitual to the caged life that even when the door of cage is opened, it does not fly. Too long stay in the cage not only weakens its wings but also cripples its psyche. So when the cage is finally opened, the bird must re-learn flying. This is what is decolonizing the mind means – rebuilding faith in one’s capacities and oneself. Sula has not only relearned to fly, she enjoys that flying. (Flying becomes the chief motif in Morrison’s next novel Song of Solomon). Nel however remains caged even when the door is open. Only when Nel recognizes the joy of flying and value of Sula as her alter ego, she is finally able to connect with Sula. Her final cry for Sula liberated her from self-imposed imprisonment and points towards female bonding as a means of decolonizing the minds of women.

Dr Manisha Patil