Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues.

Reviewed by Lynda M. Hill Temple University

In this collection, Marita Golden and fourteen black women poets, novelists, and journalists articulate in various styles their vastly different experiences with their own sexuality. As editor, Golden clues us in on what black women writers who contemplate "love, men and sex" reveal through their confessions and testimonies, through what they have witnessed. Reflecting from the present on childhood, adolescent, and adult experiences not always inspired by passion while lived, the essays expose the passion that writing itself has meant for each narrator. A virtual geography of the emotions gets displayed through the writers' cumulative perspectives. Here, pleasure and pain, as well as catharsis and cathexis, have a role. Collectively, the essays illustrate a "stages of life" theme pertaining to black female rites of passage. Jail, premature marriage, erotic awakening and its problems - physical threats, abortion, rape and murder, losing a spouse through death or divorce, long-distance and interracial liaisons, the single life, infidelity, and "coming out" as a lesbian - define parameters for many women's lives, but in Wild Women these phenomena have significance for each writer based on her ideas concerning race and social status.

How not to defy parental guidance and avoid the destiny awaiting wayward girls, for example, becomes a pedagogical message Patrice Gaines presents in her exhortation "Tough Boyz and Trouble: Those Girls Waiting Outside D.C. Jail Remind Me of Myself." Survival extracts its toll on Kesho Yvonne Scott, who writes of herself in the third person as "Marilyn," a heroic woman determined to overcome the barriers that a youthful marriage and economic hardship mean to a nascent writer for whom higher education is a long-sought reward.

To achieve a heroic self-image based on one's struggle to survive social barriers and hardships emerges in the very language used to explain physical pleasure and pain. Audre Lorde's essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" idealizes sensuality and its transformative possibilities for oneself and the world-at-large. "Joy," according to Lorde, focused inward, can be directed outward through the body. How to project joy through physical self-awareness becomes Lorde's rationale for an instructive approach to eroticism, whereby erotic impulses, even when not culminating in sexual acts but reflected upon in response to outside stimuli, can be healing and, in Lorde's scheme, spiritual.

On the other hand, erotic power belonging to the inexperienced can be damaging, as it is for the virgin seeking knowledge in Judy Dothard Simmons's rendition of a young woman's efforts to control her sexuality, needing an abortion to compensate for naivete, trusting, and as a type of self-assertion as insurance against a future of unknowable encounters with limited options. More extreme are the efforts to reconcile innocence with tragedy where the gap between theta is a forgotten childhood rape. In her cathartic remembering of being accosted by neighborhood men at the age of twelve, Doris Jean Austin rejects the idea that a traumatic rupture in one's psycho-sexual development need be revisited when one finally recalls the violation. Emerging as a healed person may be redemptive, but not through reconciliation with erotic pleasure, as Lorde argues. Most unresolvable are acts of violence - irrational, unpredictable, close to home - arising on ordinary landscapes (as in the apartment of a young woman murdered by a man picking her up for a date after she had met him at a party). Marcia Gillespie writes in "Delusions of Safety: A Personal Story" that violent disruptions skew perceptions, until what would be normal mating rituals have become daunting exercises in caution shrouded in fear. To lose one's sense of power and control need not mean surrendering to others, even when their power has the potential to overwhelm and to create a tension between personal independence and victim status, socially proscribed as it sometimes seems to be.

In marriage, eroticism is only one among numerous sensibilities nurturing the bonds between women captivated by love and their husbands. Miriam Decosta-Willis, in "Letting Go with Love," confesses about challenges her husband's protracted struggles with terminal cancer presented. She would discover an emotional wellspring when the couple "achieved an emotional intimacy that was more intense, more fulfilling, than any physical pleasure that we had ever experienced," during, "particularly, the evenings we spent taping questions and answers about his work as a civil rights attorney, state legislator, and mortgage banker." Her writing, reminiscences of his outstanding career, and above all his openness and caring worked together to help Decosta-Willis quell "anxiety, ambivalence, and contradictory feelings." This exemplifies the sort of rehabilitation personal narrative provides, as the author, reviewing her role as a caretaker, notes that aspects of her character have been on trial, although she had previously taken them for granted. She observes her own reaction when her private study became populated by visiting family members as her husband's death drew nigh. ("Now I didn't even have solitude for my private pain.")

Although far less devastating than the death of a dearly cherished spouse, a geographical separation resulting from career decisions leaves Tina McElroy Ansa alone on one end of a telephone wire trying to arouse her body to the same intensity of pleasure she and her husband had come to expect during a long, monogamous (though not necessarily traditional) marriage. Her expose "A New Shower Massage, Phone Sex, and Separation" takes erotic power to a post-modern conclusion. For all of its humor and high-spiritedness - not to mention what it forces us to examine about our assumptions - post-modern awareness can be articulated as a double-edged view of the world. Such are the dynamics of eroticism when Audrey Edwards inspects her experiences with white-male suitors. Despite her admission that stereotypes do often dominate intimate encounters, lusty sex fuels potentially healthy romance. Her essay's title, "Sleeping with the Enemy," (borrowed from a recent thriller film) signals the impasse at least three of Wild Women's contributors find to be an implicit problem with interracial relationships: They cannot discard their cultural baggage from segregation's legacies. But this is so especially for the women writers in the book who were touched and moved to activism by political messages of the generation reaching adulthood during the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, Edwards shares a similar dissatisfaction, even disillusionment, with Simmons. More bitter is the opening tone of Bebe Moore Campbell's "Black Men, White Women: A Sister Relinquishes Her Anger," in which she attempts to and succeeds at moving beyond distaste for what she finally acknowledges are individual choices. Cautioning her daughter against internalizing others' choices as a personal rejection, Campbell advises: "Those choices don't have anything to do with you personally, unless you think they do."

The choice of another becomes more difficult to expunge when it means a spouse's infidelity - the painful subject in Sonia Sanchez's prose-poem "Wounded in the House of a Friend." Sanchez tests the boundaries that separate a mistress's consciousness from a wife's and hers from her husband's and vice versa. Infidelity in itself does not preclude friendship since cheating usually occurs when at least one party remains ignorant, while the alleged victim's feelings of friendship toward the "other" woman and love for the man sustain triangular intimacy. A woman's attachment to a man, finally, has many possible configurations, as Jewell Gomez recalls, when she describes her embracing, as a lesbian, black heterosexual and homosexual men for their support. She illustrates in her essay "In the Wink of an Eye: Black Lesbians and Gay Men Together" not only the multiple dimensions of her own understanding about the different roles men fill in relation to women but of subtleties too numerous to count in men's capacity to provide emotional and intellectual comfort and companionship. Her refusal to abandon men is echoed in ntozake shange's narrative "However You Come to Me" - a celebration of heterosexual mating, which, nonetheless, resounds across categories defined by sexual orientation in its expression of the "joy" Lorde heralds and a narcissistic erotic power seeking full realization.

The collection is capped with an essay by therapist Audrey Chapman. Her text, "Black Men Do Feel About Love," takes a decided turn from self-revelation to speaking on behalf of black men. As a family and marriage therapist, Chapman addresses serious concerns black men have about whether their relationships with women can transcend the cacophony surrounding debates in the public and private spheres. Marita Golden's introduction and commentaries provide a tone and context to unify the varied perspectives.