"It's a Time in the Land": gendering black power and Sarah E. Wright's place in the tradition of black women's writing.

The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society. (Carmichael and Hamilton 44)

Written during the height of the Black Power Movement, Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) offers a woman-centered vision of an impoverished, besieged black community finally "closing ranks" in order to combat the systemic and individualized racism that seeks to destroy whatever community it cannot control. Set on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1930, Wright's novel implicitly draws a parallel between the nationalist, back-to-Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s and the Black Power movement gaining strength in the late 1960s. Wright's novel is informed by the dual influences of Black Power and women's rights, asserting as it does black women's self-respect as a necessary, foundation for "the coming black nations of the world" (Wright, This Child 179). A forerunner of texts such as Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), Wright's novel is a powerful rejoinder to male-gender-specific notions of race reform.

When Stokely Carmichael assumed the leadership of SNCC in 1966, "the civil rights phase of the black liberation struggle was drawing to a stalemated conclusion.... the traditional southern-based nonviolent civil rights movement had largely ground to a halt and was in its death throes" (Allen 27). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been passed into law through direct nonviolent actions led by Martin Luther King, Jr., but the effectiveness of these laws for poor and working-class black Americans was undermined by the inconsistency with which they were enforced. In his critique of these laws, historian Robert L. Allen writes:

Perhaps the most significant indication of the middle-class nature of the

civil rights movement was the fact that it did absolutely nothing to

alleviate the grim plight of the poorest segments of the black population.

As late as 1968, a group of six doctors found evidence of widespread and

long-standing malnutrition and starvation in the rural south. (27)

For Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton, and other leaders of Black Power, the solution to the problems wrought by systemic, institutionalized racism was economic and cultural expressions of group solidarity that would strengthen the standing of black communities politically, economically, and psychologically.

Sarah Wright's This Child's Gonna Live interrogates the male-oriented perspective articulated by Black Power spokesmen.(1) Like her contemporary Ralph Ellison, Wright wrote only one novel. But unlike Invisible Man, now regarded as among the most important African-American novels, Wright's This Child's Gonna Live, named "the most important book of 1969 by the New York Times (29 June 1970), is mentioned only sporadically in bibliographies of African-American literature, even those whose exclusive focus is African-American women writers.(2) I hope this essay will serve both as an introduction to Sarah E. Wright's work for readers not yet familiar with her and as a spark to rekindle the interest of those who are. Her novel is not an easy one to read, but for anyone interested in African-American literature, in the modernist novel, in American history, or in the relationships between men and women, Wright's novel can be richly rewarding.

This Child's Gonna Live needs to be restored to its place in the tradition of African-American women's writing because it bridges the movements for Black Power and for women's rights. While careful in her own creative work to create positive portrayals of African-American men, Wright nonetheless criticizes all American men, including African-American men, for "begging for a popular recognition of what is fictitiously called `manhood,' a begging which takes the form of attacks on women launched from many different directions" ("Negro" 8). In other words, while working within the parameters of a political movement dedicated to the still-contested rights of African-Americans, Wright is particularly attentive to the way that ideas about masculinity may depend on misogyny for their articulation. This idea is carried through in her novel with unparalleled commitment: Men, black and white, use women, black and white, to consolidate their positions of relative power. But Wright also makes clear that white women use black men and that black women may be the harshest critics of other black women who fail to meet certain standards of conduct. In her plot and in the portrayal of her characters, Wright redefines both Black Power and women's rights by showing how they can work in tandem. Black manhood, as she shows in the figure of her protagonist, Jacob Upshur, need not be created by attacks launched on women's integrity and dignity. And feminism need not rely on oversimplified visions of abusive or obtuse men to dignify women. Wright's portrayal of the relationship between black men and women and the children they raise, her attention to the kinds of work men and women do, the double standards of sexual conduct for men and women, and the intimate, violent interaction of black and white communities find their ways into many of the novels that have been published since 1969. But nowhere is the articulation of these themes so subtle or so beautiful as in This Child's Gonna Live and the different political economy it configures.

Biography

... we had managed to create a kind of Harlem Renaissance downtown, reverberating to the rising struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements around the country. (Wright, "Lower" 593)

Sarah Wright was Elizabeth born in Wetipquin, Maryland, on December 9, 1928. Her father, Willis Charles Wright, like the male protagonist in This Child, was an oyster man and a farmer whose strength and dignity inspired Wright to speak out against "social and literary works which demean the black man, provide half-truths and fail to render the complexity of black life in America" (Guilford 294).(3) Wright s mother, Mary Amelia Moore Wright, did farm and factory work in addition to meeting her responsibilities as a mother and homemaker. Her parents' struggle to raise their children with love and dignity encouraged Sarah Wright to portray the "laborers of the world," both men and women who work outside and within the home, with special care and dignity.

In 1945, at the age of sixteen, Wright left Maryland to attend Howard University. There she studied under Sterling Brown and Owen Dodson, and met Langston Hughes, whose involvement with her work lasted until his death in 1967. No longer compelled to straighten her hair and otherwise emulate non-African standards of beauty, Wright left Howard in 1949 without having graduated, and moved to Philadelphia. There, she combined social activism with writing poetry, and finally found work with the Kraft family, who owned the small publishing and printing firm that would publish Wright's volume of poetry Give Me a Child, co-written with Lucy Smith, in 1955.

Like the novel that was to come later, this slim volume of poetry has at its center the daily lives and struggles of black Americans, particularly the difficulties of raising children in a violent society engaged in wars abroad and injustice at home. Both the struggle and the optimism typical of Wright's work are apparent even in the section titles: "No Greater Love," "If You Raise Children," "And You Work for a Living," "In the Midst of War Trying for Peace," "Knowing Democracy is for All the People Eagerly Looking Forward," and "Toward a Making of Spring." For Wright, the connection between America's domestic racial policies and its foreign policies, especially during wartime, deserves attention: The

poems "Home is the Warrior," "Play on a Witch," and "Speaking of Lines" show the parallels between the fight for democracy in Europe and for enfranchisement at home. In this respect, Wright's literary work predates Stokely Carmichael's fuller elaboration of the connection between foreign and domestic policies that justify defining African-American communities as colonies within an imperialist structure.(4)

Wright lived in Philadelphia until 1957, when she moved to New York. Along with Abbey Lincoln, Maya Angelou, and Rosa Guy, Wright founded the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage, a continuation of her earlier work in Washington and Philadelphia to affirm black women's beauty. Along with her activist work, Wright also joined the Harlem Writers' Guild, whose members at that time included John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, Alice Childress, Paule Marshall, and John Henrik Clarke, among others. In 1991, Wright described the Guild's weekly meetings as

a sacred although by no means always

solemn occasion. It was a time for

reading aloud our works-in-progress

to one another.... But we were serious

even in our laughter, for we were all

about the quest for truth, for justice,

and for a world open to love. ("Lower"

593)

It was during these turbulent political years in New York that Wright decided that "in order to articulate our people's experiences with authority and artistry" she would need to become "a serious student of fiction" (Guilford 295). It was at this juncture that Wright began work on This Child's Gonna Live. But as the only person of color in her apartment building, Wright had to suffer listening to the screams "Nigger whore! Nigger whore" from the "half-mad woman of a half-mad society" who lived in the apartment below. These sexualized racist taunts "contributed a special tension to the normal tensions of trying to write while exhausted after coming home from a full-time job, and dealing, at the same time, with a new marriage" ("Lower" 594).

The strength of that novel, and the reason that I believe it speaks to today's academic audience, is the thoroughness with which Wright shows how subtly entwined are racism and sexism, and how both are deployed in the service of capitalism by monied white men who stand to benefit. It is Wright's success in portraying the interconnectedness and ultimate inseparability of these systems of oppression that makes her novel like other modernist texts, difficult to understand at the first reading. In my reading of the novel that follows, I will focus first on Mariah Upshur's struggle as a woman and mother in a community with strict codes for female sexuality (codes constantly being impressed on Wright by the downstairs tenant), and then on Jacob's struggle as a black man to provide for his family in an economic system permeated with racism. Ultimately though, the black woman struggling with self-doubt and social alienation because of the sexual history her body produces and exposes and the black man struggling with economic injustice and racial violence join together to reclaim and recreate a more just community for African-American children. In the final analysis, as Carmichael and Hamilton would have it, this is a novel about how black men and women close ranks against all kinds of oppression in order to enter into and redirect the history of their community.

The Novel

"Love is a funny thing. It just sneaks up on you all kinds of ways. Wraps itself around your shoulders sometimes.... Sometimes it won't do a thing but mash you down in the church grounds. But love is a funny thing. Makes you say things you don't even have a mind to say." (This Child 267)

This Child's Gonna Live may be read as a narrative of a man and a woman joining together and coming to consciousness, although for Mariah and Jacob racism makes full knowledge of their own histories impossible because, even combined, their perspectives produce a fragmented narrative rife with secrets. Mariah's point of view opens the novel, and she is the narrative's emotional anchor. Mariah learns about the history and heritage her body reproduces, literally and figuratively, in private encounters with other women, especially Bannie Dudley, a relatively wealthy white woman. But in keeping with Wright's commitment to portray sensitive and dignified black men, Jacob's point of view does control some chapters, adding complexity and richness to the texture of the novel.(5) He learns about his family's role in the community' through public confrontations about land and money. The double, male/female perspective allows for an emphasis on the interconnectedness of public, economic history and private, sexualized history. For the African-American community of Tangierneck, Maryland, these two histories must be rewoven if one is to understand and address the racism of the white community.

In keeping with the double perspective, the narrative is driven by a conflict between Mariah and Jacob. Mariah, pregnant with her fifth child, wants desperately to leave rural Tangierneck for Baltimore, where she imagines there are more opportunities for black Americans.(6) Uneasy with her role in the community because of her sexual transgression (first with Jacob before they were married, and later with Dr. Albert Grene, who delivers their daughter), Mariah picks potatoes, shucks oysters, and cans tomatoes in order to make money for her journey north with her children. Leaving Tangierneck--permanently--is Mariah's obsession. For Jacob, however, the goal is not to leave Tangierneck but to reclaim it; that is, to regain the family land that his father Percy lost to Bannie Upshire Dudley in an economic transaction whose specifics are obscured by the taboo sexual relationship between them.

While Bannie is peripheral to the narrative (she appears only once, and even then just to die), she and the history of sexuality and racism she embodies and represents are in other ways as central to the narrative as they are to the people of Tangierneck. That her role is as unprounounced as it is points out not Bannie's insignificance, but the local white community's power to obfuscate its part in violent and systemic racism. Apparently, Bannie's mysterious death--following an attack she has blamed on Percy Upshur--initiates a reign of racial violence that forces Jacob and Mariah to flee Tangierneck for uncertain refuge in a town ironically named Chance. But before they leave, the three Upshurs (Mariah, Jacob, and Percy) have a simultaneous revelation: "All of a sudden it hit Mariah like a bolt of thunder that it was not Bannie's death why they got beat. It was the land ... the land! She looked to Jacob--to his papa. Both of them looking like lightning just struck" (226). The campaign of terror--beatings, fires, eventually a lynching--that people in the Neck suffer at the hands of the Paddy Rollers who are nominally looking for those involved in Bannie's death ultimately leads to the exposure of Anglo-America's political and economic systems' deep implication in violent racial and economic oppression, as we discover the extent of Banker Nelson's determination to gain control of Bannie's land. With the representation of Bannie, Sarah Wright takes on white women's complicit role in the emasculation of black men and the exploitation of white women for the economic gain of white men.

Bannie Dudley becomes the narrative's silent center---she is the talk of the town, the talk of the house--but she herself is absent, unseen until the end of the very long first day of the novel, October 30, 1929, one day after the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.(7) Wright's choice of this date signals the demise of a free market economy and capitalism. That the novel opens--and Bannie dies--on the eve of the Great Depression bespeaks a parallel between local and specific manifestations of racism, economic exploitation, and sexual transgressions with a large-scale national collapse. In the deft laying and delaying of narrative events, Wright exposes the extent to which racial violence is motivated by economic gain. But the glimmers of triumph for the Upshurs suggest that being able to understand and articulate that motivation is the first step in the economic shake-up that will be necessary, as Stokely Carmichael suggested, if "black people are to control their own lives."

Mariah

A virtual wilderness of the human mind exists with respect to what it is to be a woman, a mother, a responsible-minded citizen, a creator of significant and humanly meaningful work, a thoughtful person. (Wright, "Negro" 8)

"Oh shit!" Mariah said to herself, and she just kept on walking. (This Child 270)

Wright's novel, published in 1969 and reprinted by The Feminist Press in 1986 and in 1994, has at its center the life of a black woman struggling to survive economically and emotionally. In this, Wright anticipates the themes that would reach wider audiences with the critical and popular successes of writers Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and others. In the opening words of her novel, Wright sets the tone for much of what follows:

Sometimes the sun will come in

making a bright yellow day. But then

again, sometimes it won't.

Mariah Upshur couldn't see herself

waiting to know which way it was

coming as she fretted to see through

the sagging windows squeezed

between her upstairs roofs. The bed

with Jacob's legs sprawled all over her

was a hard thing to stay put in.(1)

Although she is still able to hope that the day may be a good one, Mariah Upshur's mind, house, and bed all are cramped and uncomfortable. The weight of her husband's body pins her in a place where she cannot read the signs of her own future. Sexuality and poverty combine (if not conspire) to keep Mariah down and in the dark, both literally and figuratively. But because of Mariah's indomitable spirit, it is the experience of being held down and sprawled over that makes her so determined to get up. The tension that Wright creates between an optimism that searches for a sunny day and the material hardships that make any day, sunny or not, a struggle for survival informs the entire narrative, as Mariah frets to find a better life for her young and unborn children.

Though she seems much older, Mariah is a young woman of twenty-three who is pregnant, at the novel's opening, with her fifth child. "She had the same tight skin, the same turned-up nose that people used to say went with her 'high-minded gallop' when she wasn't doing a thing but marking time on Tangierneck's slowing-up roads. Pyorrhea in the gums had taken all of her back teeth, but her jaws stayed firm and slanty--pretty as a picture of any white girl's" (1-2). Her sons Rabbit, Skeeter, and Gezee suffer from chronic colds caused by malnutrition; Rabbit also suffers from worms. The fourth child, a girl named Mary, died as an infant when the local midwife failed to disinfect the bandages laid on the child's navel. While Mariah's long-term goal is to get her children out of Tangierneck and into Baltimore, her more immediate goal is to deliver her unborn child at a hospital rather than at home because she is determined, as the title suggests, that this child, unlike the others (specifically the girl child Mary), will live. That the child does live, and is named after the town's free black founder, Jacob's grandfather Bard Tom, suggests that Mariah's struggles on behalf of her children ultimately succeed, although perhaps not in the ways she intended.

Throughout the course of the novel, Mariah learns to balance her needs with her children's, her husband's, and her community's. What makes Wright's portrayal of her life so moving is not that Mariah actually manages to do all these things (which she does) but that she does so without being a superwoman, a tyrant, or a saint. Mariah Upshur is hard-working, loving, stubborn, violent, tender, cold, murderous, life-giving, and self-sacrificing. She adores her children but slaps them; she loves her husband but has sex with other men. Beyond issues of racial violence, class oppression, and sexist double standards, Wright's text signifies how hard it is to show people you love them when everyday is a struggle for survival.

While many women-centered novels emphasize the importance of a community--or at least a small group--of women who support and defend each other, Mariah Upshur is without friends. She feels their absence keenly while outside fetching water, holding a one-way conversation with Jesus (indicated by italics throughout the novel):

Wished there was somebody I

could talk to, Jesus. Somebody with

some sense....

As if thinking could make it real,

Irena flowered into sight, away down

the road....

And right behind Irena, arms

flaying the morning air and waving,

was coming that powerful bodied

Vyella. Always did bloom big.... Big,

toothy-mouthed grin smiling the blessing

of the Lord all over the place....

Hollering for Irena to slack up. But

both of them were just a-coming!

Coming my way in the morning!(33)

Watching the women hug each other is, for Mariah, a sexual as well as an emotional experience:

Wished somebody's come and hug me

like that. Felt the juices flowing every

which way all through her. Could let

herself go in a minute if she wanted to.

A heat that felt good to her thighs

crept up and nudged her in the belly

... but the sisters went off the road

into Tillie Reid's house. Sight liked to

have made her heart give out!(33)

Although both her gaze and her desire might be read as homoerotic, they are significations of Mariah's exclusion from community. Eventually, Vyella befriends Mariah (who will raise her children after Vyella's death from consumption). But other than Vyella, and Aunt Cora Lou (who is killed while traveling to Calverton to try to get Mariah into the hospital), Mariah is ostracized by the women of Tangierneck for her sexual transgressions.

The shaming of Mariah eight years earlier by the church elders, including her own parents (" The Committee of Your Judgment. Shouted you out of the Church" [95]), produced the constant feelings of guilt that distort Mariah's perspective and destroy her sense of self-worth. When her best friend Rosey dies from complications of a pregnancy she tried to hide, Mariah finds herself drawn forward to confess her own sin (having sex with Jacob, to whom she was not yet married). Thinking all the other girls would come forward with her, Mariah is shocked to realize she stands alone, singled out to take the wrath of the community. Confined by her mother until Jacob marries her, Mariah never recovers emotionally from the trauma of her public shaming.

Ironically, the only woman Mariah can turn to for help in getting the money necessary for delivering her baby in a hospital is Bannie Upshire Dudley, the white woman whose sexual desire for Mariah's father-in-law caused--or at least exacerbated--the town's economic hardship in the first place. As Mariah stumbles through the dark to seek help from Bannie, however, she finds the frail white woman lying in the swamp, nearly unconscious after having been choked by an attacker. Bannie tells Mariah, whom she mistakes for the white wife of her overseer, that Percy Upshur has strangled her because of his sexual desire for her. The racial misidentification is important because Bannie cannot admit her own sexual desire for a black man to another white woman; that is, she must convince "Anna" that any sexual relationship between herself and Percy Upshur is the result of his violent sexual desire for her, rather than hers for him. After realizing that her rescuer is Mariah rather than Anna, however, Bannie finally admits that she wanted, quite desperately, to be loved by Percy. While her "confession" still makes Percy the more active lover, her own desire for him becomes quite clear: "`Percy said I had the onliest thing he ever would love. Promised me everything ... the land ... said that to me way long before he ever met Bertha Ann. Give me a baby. I'm the onliest thing keeping that baby going'"(139). The baby to which Bannie refers, however, is now a full grown man who, in all likelihood (although the narrative never says so explicitly) is the biological father of the baby Mariah now carries. So again, searching for help and support, Mariah is confronted with a reminder of what she perceives to be her sinful ways.(8) And, even more ironically, she learns that the poverty she and her children now suffer is caused by Bannie's greed on behalf of her son, whose sexual activity is yet another source of shame and struggle for Mariah.

The intensity of Mariah's guilt about herself as a woman with sexual desires has more explicitly political, racialized implications as well. In the dream sequence that opens the novel (Mariah falls back to sleep while pinned by Jacob's legs), Mariah has a vision of her father, Pop Harmon, "only man in Tangierneck who ever paid off his land entirely to Percy Upshur." Commenting on her desire to head north to the cities, Pop Harmon says:

"It's the time of a storm all over

for the colored man. They lynching

colored men every day by the wholesale

lot just south of this swamp, and

up there in them cities, too. But in a

different sort of way."

"But what about the colored

woman?" Mariah tried to answer him

back. "All I keep hearing is you all

talking about the hard time a colored

man's got."

"See my scars! See my scars!

Colored woman's always been more

privileged than the man. You ain't got

no hard time in this community." (8)

Trying to plead the cause of the black woman (which she can only do in her dreams) simply reinforces in Mariah her exclusion from "this community" because her father denies the reality of her burdens. In addition, because appearing naked in a dream (as her father has had to do to show his scars) signifies a death in the family, Mariah feels even more guilty than usual when her aunt Cora Lou is killed working on her behalf. Everywhere Mariah turns for support her alienation from the community of women and men is exacerbated.

While Pop Harmon is undoubtedly speaking out of Garveyism (which peaked in the 1920s), Wright's rendering of his ideas about the black nation had special resonance in the late 1960s, when many African-Americans turned away from pacifism to a more militant stance that was decidedly masculine. In 1970, Frances M. Beale, national coordinator of the Black Women's Liberation Committee of SNCC, described that male perspective this way:

Since the advent of black power, the

black male has exerted a more prominent

leadership role in our struggle for

justice in this country. He sees the system

for what it really is for the most

part and rejects many of its values and

mores, but when it comes to women,

he seems to take his guidelines from

the pages of the Ladies Home Journal.

Certain black men maintain that they

have been castrated by white society

but that black women somehow not

only escaped persecution but even

contributed to their emasculation. (25)

Wright embodies this masculinist perspective in Pop Harmon, who explains to Vyella later in the novel that" `a woman is a mighty unclean person unless they learn how to respect their menfolks. Menfolks just have to put up with them.... Women supposed to take to the keeping of the house and not to the keeping of business outside the house! Supposed to obey their man!'" (179). The black nationalism being espoused simultaneously denigrates women, makes the entire category of "woman" inferior to "man," and expects that women's participation in building black nations will be limited to domestic drudgery for the sake of "menfolks' "comfort. Pop Harmon asserts:

"Yeah, yeah, Vyella, we got to wait yet

awhile before the coming of the third

horseman. For our time has not yet

come. We got to accumulate enough

money for to go into business for our

ownselves. Build up something for the

coming of the black nations of the

world." (179)

Although she laughs aloud at Pop Harmon s sexism, Vyella is quiet when he speaks of black nations. And because Vyella takes him seriously, Mariah wants to as well. But looking down at her newborn daughter, she can only think," `You ain't gonna be no part of the black nation, young 'un. You ain't fitting to be a part of it. Me neither. Me neither. You ain't the right color. And I done sinned. Jesus, take me home!'" (179). Intraracial color prejudice informs Mariah's recognition. Her psychological guilt about her sexuality becomes physically embodied in her daughter's skin color. Her own experience of alienation from her community shapes her belief that her daughter will similarly be excluded from the black nation: The sins of the mother will be visited on the children. Mariah has internalized the masculinist articulation of black nationalism and consequently feels that her own life, along with her daughter's, for which she has fought so hard, is ultimately of no value. For Wright, Mariah's struggle as a woman means finding a new means of self-definition, one that will allow her to see and sustain the value of her experiences to her community.

By the end of the novel Mariah Upshur's position in the community and, more importantly, her sense of self-worth have changed. Mariah's estrangement from the community is registered in her (and the community's) sense of her sexual transgressions. It is only as she discovers that she is not alone in her transgressive sexuality--that Bannie and Vyella also carry hidden burdens--that Mariah is able to forgive herself and act on behalf of her community. Far from being excluded from a community of women, or a coming black nation, Mariah takes her place at her husband's side to reclaim the lost land that is the literal and figurative foundation for all the children of Tangierneck, Maryland. She has changed, I think, because she has willingly assumed the responsibilities of raising not only her own surviving children but those of Vyella (who has died from consumption) and of Cora Lou (who was run down by white teenagers). By accepting these children, Mariah enacts a commitment to the community, recognizing, as she does so, the common burden borne by all. While initially she was concerned only with the fate of her own children, finally she has embraced the town's children, who suffer directly and indirectly from racial violence and economic oppression. In other words, while neither simplifying nor essentializing motherhood, Wright suggests that it is Mariah's position as a mother that enables her to take charge of the "closing of the ranks," and in so doing she remaps the significance of maternity in the political formation of any new nationalist community.

Jacob

Receiving the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Literary Excellence in 1988, Sarah E. Wright made explicit her sensitivity to the unique position of black men in America:

... our torments, the torments of our

people, and the very real torments of

African-American women cannot be

laid at the doorstep of the African-American

male. It is not a matter of

shutting one's eyes to the very read suffering

that Black women and children

suffer at the hands of Black men. It is a

matter of opening one's eyes and the

eyes of one's audience to the agony of

being a Black man in America, an

agony which so tragically is turned

both inward and upon his loved ones 

in many cases. (Wright,

"Responsibility" 36)

In her portrayal of Jacob, Wright succeeds in showing a loving black man in the process of being overwhelmed by racial violence and economic injustice. In the representation she exposes much more: the extent to which racial violence against African-Americans works on behalf of the economic gain of Euro-Americans, who use violence to maintain their control of land, capital, government, and education. She overturns the stereotype of the black rapist by drawing attention to the sexual desire of white women who use their economic power to seduce black men. But she does all this while clarifying the ambiguous position many black men occupy. While Jacob is sympathetically rendered insofar as he is a victim of racism and economic injustice, he practices a hypocritical double sexual standard. Wright makes clear that, as far as the community at large is concerned, he is nearly exempt from the sexual codes that his wife disobeys at her peril, that he expects to have the last word in family disagreements, and that it is his prerogative summarily to move his family to inadequate housing in another town. But for all this, Jacob's occasional coldness to Mariah is produced by his inability, rather than his unwillingness, to show her love. Just as Mariah is unable to connect with the women to whom she turned for support, Jacob is unable to connect with Mariah because he feels inadequate as a "man"; that is, as a provider and as a father. This explanatory strategy absorbs the black nationalist discourse of the 1960s, but reconfigures its rhetoric of black male victimization in order to emphasize an emergent black feminist answer to Frances Beale's question "Who has been oppressing whom?" (25).

While Mariah's alienation from the community is registered through sexual transgression, Jacob's is measured by his inability to reacquire his family land. Mariah learns about sexual history; Jacob learns about the history of the land that is the economic foundation of Tangierneck--and the measure of his own manhood. On his way to work, Jacob is apprehended by Tillie Reid and Ol'Jefferson, who demand that he speak to his father about recovering the land lost to Bannie. If he can recover the land, not only will their rents go down, but the town will have a place to build the schoolhouse donated by the "Rosenwald man" (63). Thinking only about how to feed his own children, Jacob is reluctant to talk to either because of their outspoken views on race relations that he, at this point, would rather ignore.(9) Still, he reminds Tillie (who has accused Jacob of badmouthing her husband Willie):

"... the next time [the cop] Adolph

catches Willie Reid drunk and ranting

and railing on them corners against

white people, he's going to maul his

brains for sure....

"We ain't never had nothing

around here like that drinking mess 'til

them migrant workers come along.

Place had a respectable name. Can't

even borrow money from the bank.

First thing the bank man'll tell you is

colored's too trifling."(60)

Jacob remains aloof from any explicitly outspoken politics, but he links Willie Reid's anti-racist speeches with the coming of migrant workers (that is, he connects race to issues of class and labor). However, he does so only to express his opposition to the connection. With his recognition of how the political economy and the marketplace conspire against all blacks, he can no longer in good conscience refuse to try to reclaim the land.

For Jacob, the loss of his family land is such a serious assault on his "manhood" that he fantasizes murdering Bannie in revenge:

Don't see how Papa got himself

all mixed up with Bannie in the first

place. But I'm gonna find out Gonna

find out how Miss-white-money-grabbing

Bannie got her hands stuck down

in my pockets squeezing my manhood

....

Tong slipped down in Jacob's

hand. He didn't even realize he was

squeezing the thing so tight ... the

throat ... the soft, pink throat. Killing

Bannie. Wasn't gonna lord it over him

anymore! Killing every last one of her

kind! Tong fell to the ground. A warning

from the Lord! And Jacob trembled.

(47-48)

Jacob's unspoken thoughts clearly indicate the parallel between his racialized economic and sexual positions: It is a "white-money-grabbing Bannie" who "squeez[es] his manhood."

Thus, while Mariah believes that Percy has indeed attacked Bannie (as Bannie herself alleged), the text reveals what is more likely the case: that Jacob has attacked Bannie to avenge the loss of his manhood. Wright never reveals the identity of Bannie's attacker, however, thereby avoiding individualized blame. Assuming, however, that it was Jacob who attacked Bannie, then his quest for his family's land brings down on the Neck a reign of racial terror which results, ultimately, in the lynching of his father.(10)

After Percy's body is recovered and buried (he had been missing for six weeks), Jacob moves his family to Chance. During these months, Jacob isat his nadir as a man. His father has been lynched; his wife has delivered a child who is clearly not his own; his children grow sicker each day until his first son dies; and his family land is now firmly in the hands of white bankers. After the early deaths of several family members, including their own son Rabbit, whose body is infested with worms, Jacob and Mariah return to Tangierneck just as poor as ever but now with the additional burden of adopted children. Increasingly impoverished by the extra mouths to feed and overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, Mariah finally wades into the cold Atlantic waters of "The Gut." Surprised by the chill of the water that was to end her problems, she wades back out to see Jacob coming down the road "doing a new style of running. Faster than fast" (272).

By the end of the novel, Jacob has rescued Willie Reid from the Paddy Rollers, seen firsthand why he should never have cast his lot with the bankers, and made significant progress in buying back his family's land so that the town can have a public school. And, finally, he accepts the girl-child fathered by another man and takes on, with Mariah, the raising of other children (one of whom is also his by Vyella). As they walk toward their home and children together in the final scene, Mariah refuses to explain either her venture into or retreat from the water: She will only say," `Jacob, I forgot to put the dough to bake in the oven so you and the children could have some nice hot bread for your dinner.'" A baptism and a rebirth, her immersion in water allows for her return as nurturer, giver and provider of life, and keeper of memory.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States--and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south--must be liberated.... For racism to die, a totally different America must be born. (Carmichael, "What We Want" 601-02)

For racism to die, a totally different America must be born." The child who must live, according to the title of Sarah Wright's novel, is a girl whose biological paternity is unclear but who has been accepted, at last, by her mother's husband to be raised in a newly extended family of children orphaned by systemic and violent racism. By coming together to raise this female child, Jacob and Mariah have brought together disparate histories. Like the perspectives woven by her protagonists, Sarah E. Wright ties together strands of histories. Hers is both a feminist novel about the perils of sexuality to which women's bodies are vulnerable and a novel of Black Power, showing the potential of men and women to come together to fight oppression. In 1991, Wright described the task before the writers of the 1960s this way:

The gaze of our Harlem Writers

Guild was focused not only on the

South. We were also at one with the

seething ghettoes of the North, our

ears attuned to Malcolm's message.

And it was the year of Africa. We

threw ourselves into solidarity work

for the great freedom movements of

the Congo ... linked arms and hearts

with the South African freedom struggle

... were in the forefront of bringing

a consciousness of Africa to our

people.

Our writers' workshop seethed

with discussions about art and freedom,

about the responsibility of the

artist to make a better world. ("Lower"

594)

For Wright, the power to make a better world comes through knowledge--knowledge of violence, of exploitation, grief, and rage. But in the final analysis, the power and the will to effect change is grounded in love. In the acknowledgments that follow the text of her novel, Sarah Wright repeats the dedication of her volume of poetry: "To all who love: to humanity entire, / To the borning of a child called Freedom." Unfortunately, Wright's novel, buried in neglect for so long, did not free the Black Nationalist movement from its sexism. Only later would an emergent black feminism begin to articulate Sarah Wright's plea and her gendering of the power of blacks in America.

Notes

(1.) Even today Black Nationalist discourse does not easily accommodate black women's political issues. See hooks and Wallace.

(2.) For example, Wright is mentioned in African American Fiction Writers after 1955 and in Living Black American Authors: A Biographical Dictionary, but not in Masterpieces of African-American Literature (1992), Black Literature Criticism, African American Writers (1991), or Black Women Writers, 1950-1980. The fact that her work appears only sporadically is both a sign and a cause of the critical neglect her work has undeservedly suffered.

(3.) All the biographic information in this essay is taken from Guilford.

(4.) Essential to Carmichael and other black militants' articulation of nationalism, of course, is Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, originally published (in French) in 1961.

(5.) Mariah's point of view controls chapters 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15; this leaves Jacob with chapters 3, 4, 6, and 9. Chapter 14 is shared by both. I should note that This Child employs third-person narration throughout, but that narrative point of view is always bounded by the vision of either Mariah or Jacob.

(6.) The novel begins on the day the stock market crashes, October 30, 1929. African-Americans were still leaving the rural South for Northern cities during The Great Migration, usually dated from 1915 to 1960 (see Harris vii).

(7.) Jacob draws attention to the date first: "`It's been a bad October, Rah. November's almost here'" (14). Subsequently, Skeeter asks his mother for two cants for the Halloween party" `out to the Hall tomorrow night'" (25) (implying that the date would be the 30th). Then, on p. 109, we see men reading the 1929 almanac.

(8.) Wright never discloses the entire nature of the relationship between Mariah and Dr. Grene. We never know why or how often or at whose insistence they had sex. Mariah's son Rabbit repeats what he has heard in the fields: "`Every baby coming in the Neck right now is more than likely Dr. Grene's'" (93).

(9.) Tillie also insults Jacob, saying, "`Hear tell you don't know Mariah's with a baby either 'til she owns up to it'"(59).

(10.) It is important to note, however, that not only does Wright not assign blame--or even suggest Jacob's part in the assault--but that the cause of Bannie's death is radically over-determined. Mariah, who had considered drowning Bannie, thinks she killed her by leaving her alone with a box of pills; Bannie implicates Percy; the reader suspects Jacob; the townsfolk speculate the bankers killed her for her land; and the bankers imply that Albert Grene (Bannie's son) poisoned her.

Works Cited

Beale, Frances M. "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female." 1970. Joan Jordan Papers, Box 1. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. 1967. New York: Random, 1992.

Carmichael, Stokely. "What We Want." Civil Rights and African Americans: A Documentary History. Ed. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991. 599-605.

Guilford, Virginia B. "Sarah Elizabeth Wright." Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Dictionary of Literary Biography 33. Detroit: Gale, 1984. 293-300.

Harris, Alferdteen, ed. Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

hooks, bell. Talking Beck: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End, 1989.

Wallace, Michele. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. London: Verso, 1990.

Wright, Sarah E. "Lower East Side: A Rebirth of World Vision." African American Review 27 (1993): 593-96.

--. "The Negro Woman in Literature." Freedomways Winter 1966: 8-10.

--. This Child's Gonna Live. 1969. New York: Feminist P, 1986.

--. "The Responsibility of the Writer as Participant in the World Community." Zora Neale Hurston Forum 3.1 (1988): 35-39.

Jennifer Campbell is an assistant professor of American literature at the College of Holy Cross. She would like to thank Thadious Davis for introducing her to the work of Sarah E. Wright, and for reading drafts of this essay.