Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon.

Edythe Mae Gordon. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton. Intro. Lorraine Elena Roses. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 129 pp. $25.00.

Reviewed by

Lovalerie King University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Add the voice of Edythe Mae Gordon to those of Elise Johnson McDougald, Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Florynce Kennedy, Claudia Jones, Frances Beale, Deborah K. King, Gloria Wade Gayles, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and a number of other writers and thinkers who have engaged the feminist project of articulating the unique situation of African American women vis-a-visa racist, sexist, and classist society. Sandwiched between three short stories and thirteen poems, Gordon's 1935 thesis for the Master's degree in Social Services from Boston University makes up the bulk of Selected Works o Edythe Mae Gordon. In it Gordon utilizes the categories of race and gender to explore the legal, social, religious, economic, and educational status of African American women. Lorraine Elena Roses points out in the introduction to the volume that one senses in reading "The Status of the Negro Woman in the United States from 1619-1865" that Gordon was acutely aware of the pioneering nature of her work. The thesis provides a useful colony-by-colony, state-by-state analysis of how governments functioned, with particular reference to laws relating to slavery. Gordon's meticulous exploration of legal cases and constitutional law "exposes slavery and its sequel, institutionalized racism, as peculiar social constructs." She offers original insight and analysis regarding the evolution of race relations from colonial times, including intriguing data about black slaveholders, interracial liaisons, and the socioeconomic status of poor whites. Personal testimony and other source materials, such as want-ads from eighteenth-century periodicals advertising black women for sale, add authenticity. Gordon sometimes too willingly conflates the experiences of black women with those of black men, and at times minor problems of coherence surface in the text; but the overall value of the thesis far exceeds these minor flaws, some of which might have been remedied by more diligent and informed oversight from her thesis advisor.

Born Edythe Mae Chapman in 1896, Gordon received her secondary schooling in Washington, D.C., at the prestigious M Street School, which boasted faculty members Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Gordon's life, as Roses presents it, is intriguing. She was married for a number of years to Eugene Gordon, whom Roses describes as a "stalwart proponent of Marxist principles of class struggle and an advocate of both racial and gender equality." Gordon's husband wrote for the Boston Post from 1919 to 1940; he also contributed articles to American Mercury, Plain Talk, and Scribners. In 1935, along with radical activist Cyril Briggs (who edited The Crusader), he published a pamphlet entitled The Position of Negro Women which documented "the fact that the majority of African-American women found employment only as domestic servants." Available biographical data on Edythe Mae Gordon, according to Roses, ends with three final points of reference: a transcript sent from Boston University in November 1938, a note included with two of Gordon's poems published in Negro Voices the same year, and the 1942 Probate and Family Court record of her petition for divorce. Whether her sudden disappearance from public documents after 1942 is related to her dissolved marriage is a question which, for now, remains unanswered.

Gordon "made her first public appearance as a writer in 1928, in the debut issue of the Saturday Evening Quill, a little magazine edited by her husband, Eugene, and published in Boston." All three short stories included in this volume were first published in the Quill, and one, "Subversion," was listed by the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Committee "as one of the distinguished 'short short stories' of 1928." Gordon's fiction and poetry are part of the Harlem Renaissance, alongside the more familiar names of Helene Johnson and Dorothy West - two of the founders of the Quill - and others such as Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer. Gordon's poems also appeared in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life.

Roses describes Gordon as multivocal in terms of the works included in this volume. The short stories and poems do not overtly address race matters but focus on "personal values and their shaping influence on intimate, especially marital relationships." Notes Roses: "All three stories, written in the classic short story tradition of O. Henry and de Maupassant, are filled with disillusionment, as if to question the institution of marriage itself, although they may also reflect the author's own unhappy experience in marriage." Roses compares Gordon's depictions of "unloving and exploitative wives" to those of Dorothy West. In "Hostess," Mazie leaves a secure, comfortable, but decidedly mundane marital relationship for a more exciting dalliance with a saxophone player - who, subsequently, leaves her pregnant and alone. When Mazie tries to reenter her marriage, she learns that she has been easily replaced by the best friend who had warned her "not to try the patience of her husband too much." Mazie commits suicide. The story's complexity lies in Gordon's subtle articulation of the limits of Mazie's options for self-actualization in the social and political milieu of the early twentieth century.

Irony plays a major role in "If Wishes Were Horses," another story of marital discord and its relationship to socioeconomic status. Fred Pomeroy, an emaciated and impoverished writer/fabric store clerk, visits a fortune teller who tells him that his wife will "be able to realize her desires." Gordon then shifts perspectives to relate the wife's dream of flying solo. When the woman awakens, Fred Pomeroy is dead beside her. Widowed, she uses the $50,000 in insurance money to travel abroad - realizing some of her dreams.

"Subversion," like "If Wishes Were Horses," features an ailing and impoverished would-be artist. John Marley is a music teacher whose ill health is due, in part, to his poverty, and his poverty, in turn, is perpetuated by his ill health, because the parents of potential students do not want their children exposed to his illness. Marley recalls that his wife, Lena, had loved him "before worries came, before the cough came, before slender times came," and he tries to convince himself that the doctor's diagnosis is wrong, that he "might live a long time." If he can increase the number of his pupils, "He would then have more money . . . . Lena would then love him as she had long ago." Marley learns through a series of ironic coincidences that his wife and best friend are lovers. Later, over Thanksgiving dinner, he looks at the two of them and at his son, in whose face he sees his best friend's features. Thanking the man for his friendship, Marley asks him to be kind to his wife and son when he is gone and, with biting irony, announces that he "can think of no more appropriate person to ask such a favor of."

Roses comments that, in both "If Wishes Were Horses" and "Subversion," Gordon "seems to be exploring the corrosive effects of capitalist values on personal relationships. She may also have been using gender inversion to mask disappointing marital experiences of her own . . . ." One might also compare the wives in these stories to Dorothy West's Cleo in The Living is Easy - as creatures distorted by their socioeconomic limitations. These stories, models of restraint, differ in a number of ways from Gordon's poetry.

Desire is evident in both the short stories and the poetry, but it is much more prevalent in the poetry. Additionally, specific gender identification of the persona is noticeably absent in most of the poems. The easy exception is "I Under- stand," which expresses sorrow related to a barren heterosexual liaison. The persona, clearly a woman, understands the connection between the man's leaving and her own barrenness. Poems like "April Night" and "Sonnet for June," conversely, leave the speaker's gender unarticulated or unfixed. In "April Night," after suggesting in the first stanza that a desolate April night is splashed with dreams by a gleaming, cool, dripping rain, June (which may be woman or month) is addressed in the lines:

I am ravished with your primrose beauty, The wind-swept sky, lined with immortal hue. For me you are my frailest dreams come true; O glorious-tinted June, have pity! . . . You are eternal as a mountain pine; All day, I kneel below your petalled shrine

This final line is very similar to the final line in the four-line "Sonnet for June": "And all the day, I kneel at your altar." Interestingly, Eugene Gordon married a woman named June after he was divorced from Edythe Mae Gordon. Perhaps Gordon's creative writing will, at some future date, help to illuminate more of the author's personal and professional life.

Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon is part of the series of works featuring black women writers from the period between 1910 and 1940. True to its mission, the series - which includes works by Fanny Jackson Coppin, Gertrude Pitts, Anne Scott, Zara Wright, Frances Joseph-Gaudet, and several other women - reintroduces writers and/or works that would otherwise be unknown to contemporary readers. Edythe Mae Gordon's work will resonate most loudly among those of us who share an interest in examining the multiple impact of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism on our attempts to self-actualize.