On Black Girls in Literature
The Baby-sitters Club. Caddie Woodlawn. Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys. The Baby-sitters Club: Little Sister (Karen books). The Boxcar Children. The entire Harry Potter series. The Children’s Classics series. Anne of Green Gables. The Left Behind series. Little House on the Prairie.
I’m currently making my way through the Well-Read Black Girl anthology by Glory Edim (which is a fantastic read, y’all, go check it out), and I’m struck by Glory’s question for all the authors in the book:
“When was the first time you saw yourself in literature?”
Growing up, I was a voracious reader. As a child, I was chubby and felt unattractive and didn’t have many friends. I distinctly remember asking my elementary school teacher for a pass to go to the school library instead of to recess, and for whatever reason, my teacher granted this request. From elementary school well into middle school, I would take my recess (and sometimes my lunches too) to the library, where I would read through whatever caught my fancy that day. I remember setting the goal to work my way through the entire shelf of Nancy Drew mysteries, soon after that starting the Hardy Boys series on the shelf just below.
When I thought more deeply about Glory’s question, however, it didn’t take me long to realize that the beloved children’s books I grew up had very few characters who looked like me, still less as protagonists. I loved reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life on the midwestern prairie, but her life bore so little resemblance to mine. I also used to love the “Children’s Classics,” which basically took the standard canon of Western literature that you might find on a list entitled “100 Greatest Books You Must Read” and turned them into books with simplified language and an illustration on every other page. (I still haven’t technically read Ivanhoe, but I have the gist of the plot thanks to the Children’s Classics series. Same for Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and many, many other so-called “classics.”)
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I learned my father worried about my mother’s preferred school option for us because he was concerned about diversity in our learning experiences. He wanted us to see ourselves in literature. My mother took up this challenge gallantly, and I remember her instituting weekly trips to our public library and extra-curricular book reports, where we would have to read additional books and write our parents a summary of what we learned. After awhile, I realized that the books on this reading curriculum all angled in a different direction. Biographies of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Sojourner Truth started popping up. Sounder. Walk Two Moons. The Watsons Go To Birmingham. The list went on.
While I’m sure I enjoyed the children’s version of the Sojourner Truth biography, the first time I remember truly seeing myself in literature was in Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The protagonist, Cassie, is an outspoken Black girl living in a world that looked nothing like mine. She has all brothers; I have all sisters. She lives in the rural South; I lived in the citified North. And yet she showed me to me. It was the first time I can remember reading a book that was about a Black girl. Not one that included a Black girl somewhere in the background (shoutout to Jessie in the Babysitters Club). No ma’am. Cassie Logan is both the narrator and protagonist. We see the books through her perspective; we understand her world through her eyes.
When I read the Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry series again as a teenager, I began to see myself in another character, Cassie’s cousin Suzella. In the second book, Let the Circle be Unbroken, Cassie’s family receives an extended visit from Suzella Rankin, their (very) light-skinned, long-haired, unquestionably beautiful cousin who is fair enough to pass for white. Suzella’s experience of passing isn’t one that I shared, but I did understand the reactions to her physical appearance. When puberty hit, I grew something like 6 inches, which meant that my baby fat redistributed itself dramatically and suddenly people were calling me “beautiful.” I didn’t know what to make of this newfound attention; mostly it made me want to hide. Because of her beauty and smarts, Suzella is courted (unsuccessfully) by a number of men, old, young, Black, white, worthy, and not. In the midst of this, she struggles to make sense of her mixed-race identity while maintaining stellar grades at school. I saw myself in Suzella’s not-always-graceful rebuffs to her would-be suitors, the way she hides in the house with Big Ma to avoid unwanted male attention, and the way in which she is constantly asked to make a choice between the two sides of her identity. For me, this internal split is cultural, not racial, falling between my Ethiopian side and my African-American side. My choice to pass or not wasn’t with my racial identity, but the hallmarks of being asked to choose sides of myself still resonated with me.
When I graduated college, I received a copy of Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and I can only describe that book as transformational for me. In it, Walker describes the feeling of college awakening her only to how much she didn’t know about her own blackness (she is an alumna of Sarah Lawrence College). I understood deeply. Even after leaving Harvard with a minor in African-American studies, I felt only newly aware of how much reading and study still lay ahead of me, especially if, like Alice, I hoped to be “a whole woman, a full human being, a black woman full of self-awareness and pride.”
Since then, I’ve had a running reading list, primarily of authors who are women of color. I’ve been reading Lorraine Hansberry, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Rita Dove, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, June Jordan, Tayari Jones, Toni Morrison, Brit Bennett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nayyirah Waheed, Maya Angelou, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Warsan Shire, Tomi Adeyemi, Audre Lorde, Isabel Wilkerson, Roxane Gay, Eve L. Ewing, Akwaeke Emezi, and many, many more. All these women have something different to teach me, and continue to reflect back to me not just myself in literature but Black women in the future, in the past, in the present. Their voices have helped me learn more about myself in the past few years than I may have known about myself, ever. And even with all that, my reading journey has only begun.
As I build my reading list for 2019, what should I add? What has been transformational reading for you? And, to quote Glory Edim’s excellent question, when did you first see yourself in literature?