Let Her Cook: Black Foremothers Seizing Destiny

 African American Women's History to 1940

Never gave a damn, I ain't never gave no f***

Fell out with them hoes, we ain't never makin' up

Back for everything I ever lost, I'm on a mission

We turned the whole house into a booth, we in the kitchen

Uh, let her cook

At the beginning of the semester, I was given a selection of folders from the Trinity University Archives with which I would learn how to develop finding aids and other archival tools. The folder I chose was entitled “African American Women’s History to 1940.” I found it interesting that there was no beginning date and dove into the collection to determine a better idea of when African American women’s history should begin. The question is an interesting one that could be explored all on its own, but alas we’d never make to 1940. It’s this author’s opinion that we should begin with one of the oldest institutional mentions of negro women.

In 1662, Virginia legislators passed a law that would serve as the basis for a legal doctrine known as partus sequitur ventrem or “the birth follows the womb,” referring to the fact that a child’s freedom or enslavement hinges on the legal status of their mother. The next act made women’s agricultural labor taxable. These laws illustrate the inherently political existence of black women in America as chattel expected to enrich others with their reproductive and physical labor by societal and systemic design. Sojourner Truth’s 1851 question “Ain’t I a woman?” becomes more pointed with this knowledge in mind. After almost two centuries of institutionalized degradation and humiliation, black womanhood was more of a foil for the cult of True Womanhood than a parallel feminine experience. When one’s very identity precludes them from all the supposed privileges of femininity one learns to disregard those norms and define womanhood on one’s own terms…

“Never gave a damn, I ain't never gave no f***”

When your identity is an affront to polite society and your freedom is a crime, there’s no need to hold anything back. African American women resisted enslavement in great and small ways. Some sabotaged equipment to slow work down, many others employed  lawsuits, while others deprived “owners” of their property by absconding, even with their children. Harriet Tubman, another figure from the collection, put her body on the line to resist slavery at every turn. Her fainting spells were a result of taking a blow meant for another. Her self-emancipation did not end with her personal freedom. Even after she assisted her family members, she was persuaded to continue ferrying passengers along the Underground Railroad. When the Civil War broke out, she led a raid into the South Carolina low country. Tubman wasn’t the only woman whose circumstances forced her to move and live boldly. The collection also contained a few copies of articles about the Edmonson sisters. At 15 and 13 years old they became public figures when the largest recorded escape attempt was sparked by their desperate bid to escape being sold to a New Orleans brothel. The operation was unsuccessful due to a combination of foul weather and fouler betrayal. The escape made local and national news and mobilized the abolitionist community to raise funds to secure their freedom. The sisters joined the abolitionist movement and never stopped working for the betterment of others. The women of this collection where just like many other invisible aunties and mothers whose work was completed with the quiet confidence born of necessity and resilience. Resilience became a cornerstone of black womanhood as the manifold challenges of emancipation gave way to the hellscape of Jim Crow.

"Back for everything I ever lost, I'm on a mission."

            Black women continued to labor for social uplift on all fronts. In education women like Mary McLeod Bethune taught and founded schools contributed to the largest literacy boom int the country. Women like Ida B. Wells fought for their voices and visibility in the Women’s Suffrage movement. Community organizations like Mary Church Terrell’s women’s clubs worked on the front line to provide safe spaces for social gatherings and community service. Their work was rarely singular. Wells is more known for her prolific anti-lynching journalism than her resistance to segregation at suffragette marches. Bethune also consulted with the UN to help draft its charter guaranteeing respect for human rights. From the darkest night of slavery to the nebulous dawn under the clouds of Jim Crow, our African American foremothers modelled what they couldn't teach: self-definition, resistance, and resilience.

"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them." - Sojourner Truth