Can the Archive Speak?: A Case for Archival Oral History and African American Blues Tradition
by
Janée Moses
My first oral history interview with Amina Baraka took place on October 8, 2013, only three months prior to the funeral of her husband, celebrated playwright, poet, and former poet laureate of New Jersey, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. After boarding a train to Newark, NJ, I waited at the curb with growing anticipation for the woman I planned to interview. When I arrived at Newark’s Penn Station, a tall, slender woman exited her car smoothly with a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other. Her gray hair hung loose in imperfect curls and the purple t-shirt and jeans combination seemed both too ordinary and familiar. The loose hair made her look significantly younger than she was. She reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston’s fictional character, Janie Crawford in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Before approaching her, I gazed at Amina Baraka with a similar curiosity to the women of Eatonville, who watched from their porches when Janie return to their community in tattered overalls. After a long drag from her cigarette, Amina Baraka said, “Get in.”
In preparation for our conversation, I contemplated what I already knew about Amina Baraka and what I hoped to learn. She is a black revolutionary singer, poet, and organizer who was a significant leader in her husband’s black cultural nationalist organizations, Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN) and, later, Congress of African People (CAP) in Newark during the era of Black Power. She is also infamous amongst a small circle of journalists and scholars for her refusal to participate in interviews like the one for which I was preparing. I considered various entry points for this initial interview, like LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s dedication in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones: “For my wife, Amina who is responsible for any truth in this, or in the chapters to come!” (Baraka 1997). Feminist oral historian, Katherine Borland reasons that “oral personal narratives occur naturally within a conversational context” (Borland 1991, 63). In imagining a conversational context that would support my oral history interview, I considered that I could assist in the process of excavating Amina Baraka’s story in the same way that Janie’s kissing-friend Pheoby Watson agrees to speak on Janie’s behalf after her long journey.[1] This imagined nexus between the novel and interview prompted an oral history praxis where African American literature and oral history methodology meet and promote the excavation of black women’s narratives about their girlhood experiences, womanhood, personal and political desires in order to call attention to understudied complexities and contradictions in the lives of black radical women.
As a method and field of study, oral history is succinctly understood as a praxis for collecting “memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews” (Ritchie 2014, 1). This simplistic approach to oral history is legitimized by the everydayness of storytelling rituals like asking questions and telling stories. Amy Starecheski acknowledges that oral history is “something we do every day: around the dinner table, on the stoop, at the barbershop,” and that the continuum between everyday storytelling and history-telling practices enables a soft entry into archival oral history (2014, 1–2). According to Starecheski, this continuum of oral history-telling practices, as originally theorized by Alessandro Portelli, is the sequence from informal storytelling wherein the narrator, or speaker, and interviewer, or listener, are familiar and share access to memories to formal history-telling wherein the narrator and interviewer are unfamiliar and must explore memories with the goal of (re)constructing past moments and mining them for the archive (2014, 2).
Ideally, a woman-centered or feminist approach to archival oral history necessitates the use of the oral history-telling continuum. Within western culture, “androcentric genres of communication,” to borrow Kristina Minister’s phrasing, and, by extension, heteronormative centered modes of expression, have created a tradition of speaking wherein women and othered individuals’ voices are devalued within society and in the archive (Minister 1991, 27–28). Minister argues, and I agree, that although the “great migration of women from the private to the public sphere,” and “diachronic communication rituals” have created some semblance of gender equality, “the very communication forms themselves conserves the values” of patriarchal origins wherein communication is power (Minister 1991, 27–28). Furthermore, the feminist framework often narrowly envisions a straw-woman that is raced white, middle-classed, at least, educated, and heterosexual. However, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis’s essay in Women’s Words challenges the feminist approach to archival oral history when doing oral history centered on the experiences of black women. Etter-Lewis writes, “[A]rticulation of black women’s experiences in America is a complex task characterized by the intersection of race, gender, and social class with language, history, and culture” (Etter-Lewis 1991, 43). For Etter-Lewis, the solution to this complexity of understanding an identity that is neither “mythical male norm” or “white female norm” is a search for a “multilayered texture of black women’s lives” (Etter-Lewis 1991, 43) As an African American literary scholar and oral historian, I heed Etter-Lewis’ warning by employing a multi-textual approach to my practice of collecting, archiving, and interpreting black women’s narratives of becoming in a manner that embraces, rather than bridles their cultural expressive practices. In this essay, I use my own oral history fieldwork and archival practice of documenting black radical women’s narratives about their experiences from girlhood through womanhood to demonstrate the utility of informal and formal oral history-telling in an oral history approach that highlights black women’s expressive practices. First, I will describe my oral history fieldwork and the linguistic and theoretical challenges it presented for my formal training as an oral historian and black literary and cultural studies scholar. Second, I will explain why black women’s cultural expressions necessitate an expansion of feminist approaches so that black women’s narratives can be accessed fully.
My oral history career began with an unexpected encounter at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones, and his second wife, Amina Baraka. After a brief explanation of my not-yet-fully imaged project, Amiri Baraka told me that I could set up a meeting time with Amina Baraka. A few days later, I arrived at the home of Amina and Amiri Baraka in Newark, NJ. Amina Baraka instructed me to wait downstairs so that she could get “him.” As he made his way down the stairs, his face showed more clearly in the light. He sat down on the second to last step, and without looking up from tying his shoes, he asked, “How long is this going to take?” I informed him that I was only going to talk to his wife. Their shocked expressions when I said that I would only need to speak to Amina Baraka as she could best narrate the experiences of black women in Newark’s CFUN and CAP specifically, and women who identify as black and revolutionary, writ large, is itself testament to the fact that (oral) histories of the Black Power era radical organizations tend to center the narratives and experiences of black men. I came to Amina Baraka looking for answers to my questions about how black women balanced their roles as revolutionary women, mothers, and wives. As we made our way to the front room with the large windows that provided too much light into the otherwise dimly lit house, she instructed me to call her Amina. I felt uncomfortable referring to this woman, who was only a few years younger than my grandmother, by her first name. Ignoring her instruction, I called her Ms. Amina, expecting that she would accommodate my harmless improvisation. Upon hearing this, and deciding it was an intolerable offense, she cut her eyes at me and said, “I’m just Amina.”[2] As I set up my recorder, her husband made his way to the backroom. While the famous man in the backroom ate loudly, Amina narrated a story of growing up in Newark, the child of working-class union workers, and her later journey to becoming a leader in CFUN and CAP as the head of the organizations Women’s Division.
Over a period of five years, Amina welcomed me into her home to conduct oral history interviews that explored themes related to her girlhood experiences, romantic love, marriage, motherhood, sisterhood, and black radical politics throughout the twentieth century. I utilized grounded theory in my interview approach to ensure that I allowed Amina every opportunity to tell the stories that she wanted to tell. During our discussion of historical facts about black radicalism from the 1940s through the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power era in the late 1970s, theorized as the Long Black Power Movement,[3] my archival approach to oral history-telling practices was formal. I recognized that centering black women’s roles, our recorded interviews, which I transcribed, would become a necessary complement or, perhaps, a challenge to existing scholarship about CFUN and CAP, like Komozi Woodard’s (1999) book A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. I was informal during our discussions of her roles as daughter, granddaughter, lover, wife, and mother, using my own experiences to ask questions about how she negotiated these roles while living in a society that continues to discriminate based on race and gender. We often found common ground to access these intergenerational memories by discussing popular black women figures from the twentieth century including blues, jazz, and soul singers like Ma Rainey, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin and even characters in black women’s novels like Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. By employing examples from African American literary and cultural traditions in my approach to interviewing Amina, I was simultaneously engaging in informal storytelling, because I already knew that Amina had access to the cultural productions and traditions I was referencing, as well as formal history-telling, because we departed from these methods of storytelling to describe Amina’s life story more accurately.
When I asked Amina to describe the women in CFUN and CAP, she stumbled with these words: “I mean these women were not ordinary. Well, I guess they were ordinary. They were put in a place where they couldn’t—” (Baraka 2013). Then, she found balance in this phrase: “They were extraordinary women in a place where they had to become ordinary women” (Baraka 2013). This productive contradiction wherein black women were simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary created a theoretical question about the potential to “construct seemingly antagonist relationships” such as ordinary and extraordinary “as noncontradictory oppositions” (Davis 1999, xv). This contradiction is made legible in black women’s blues traditions. Angela Davis’ canonical text, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism reveals the blues tradition as an African American cultural expression wherein achingly real experiences were embodied and voiced to serve as witness to histories particular to poor and working-class black communities in America in the years following the abolition of slavery, especially black women (Davis 1999, 23–61). Amina’s linguistic challenge created a theoretical and archival turn to the blues tradition. While a wide range of scholars have tackled the historical, cultural, and performance history of the blues tradition, I recognize the significance of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones’ 1963 scholarship, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, to the field and to this study of my approach to Amina’s oral history turn to the blues.
The most productive parts of Amina’s interviews occurred during the song where she would sing a blues woman’s story as if it were her own. She freely sang songs that helped to contextualize her narration and express her emotional connection to the memories she shared. The first time I heard Amina sing, I was stunned and reminded of tales of black women singers who could cause audiences to feel as if they were spellbound (Griffin 2004, 107). She productively misnamed the song—“I’m Glad There Are You”—signaling the importance of a fluid practice between individuality and interdependence. She spoke: “There’s a song, ‘I’m glad there are you’” (Baraka 2013). Then she began to sing: “In this world of ordinary people, extraordinary people, I’m glad there is you” (Baraka 2013). I assumed that Amina was singing this ostensible love song, whose rendition by jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald was popular during her childhood in the 1950s, about her husband. She continued singing: “In this world where many, many play at love, and hardly any stay in love, I'm glad there is you” (Baraka 2013). However, she corrected my thought as if she’d anticipated my assumption: “And I’m talking about the women in that organization. They were beautiful. I mean we had many, many creative women” (Baraka 2013). Within the blues tradition, themes such as individual aspects of “lived love relationships” and interdependent knowledges of black women belonging together are dually expressed (Davis 1999, 3–9). In addition, Toni Morrison theorizes that the origin of African American literature is autobiography, namely slave narratives, with a pointed agenda to tell a singular story that “also represents the race” (Morrison 2019, 234). Considered this way, Amina’s process of telling her singular story in a manner that unearthed the stories of other black women is fitting.
In Beyond Women’s Words, oral historian Lynn Abrams acknowledges that the feminist oral history approach in Women’s Words was an invitation to “dig deeper into the structures of meaning embedded in women’s narratives” (Abrams 2018, 81). However, the singular turn to feminist frameworks has the potential to create disjuncture in women’s narratives as they struggle to uphold a feminist identity that eliminates or conceals contradictions between the theory and their everyday lives (Abrams 2018, 82). During the long Black Power Movement, black women like Amina had access to the language of feminism; and yet they oft found that the possibility of powerful bonds between women, on the basis of sex alone, was not fulfilling. For example, Toni Morrison’s 1971 New York Times article, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” explains the choice between race and gender as frivolous on the grounds that the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s is an argument between white men and white women (Morrison 1971). Literary scholar Mary Helen Washington, writing in 1975 and 1980, argued that black women can reclaim their power, “a power in evidence,” by telling “the stories about their real lives and actual experiences” (Washington 1980, xiii). Any Woman’s Blues, a collection of black women writer’s short fiction stories, reveals that black women’s use of the blues form creates a “wide angled lens” into black women’s lives without the requirement to choose between race or gender (Washington 1980, xiv). According to Washington, the blues tradition in African American literature enables “a sturdier collection, more open to adventure, prouder, more strong-minded, more defiant” recovery of the past with explorations of girlhood, love, betrayal, anger, friendship (Washington 1980, xiv-xv). The blues tradition encompassed all of the elements of Amina’s storytelling, especially her song.
Inviting women like Amina to narrate their experiences in a way that upends patriarchal traditions and restrictions to their truth-telling has required introspection about my roles as oral historian, interdisciplinary scholar, and storyteller. During our first encounter at New York’s Schomburg Center, Amiri Baraka pointed in the direction of Amina at the other end of the room after he realized he couldn’t find a spare business card. As I look back on this moment, I understand it as the nascent stage of my own recognition of the difficulty that would emerge as I theorized and thematized my role as oral historian and scholar and ultimately laborer in transferring the oral history interview from the realm of spoken text to the realm of written, scholarly analysis. This scholarly practice of transferring the spoken texts of black women to a new realm of disciplined, black, feminist-adjacent, cultural and literary heritage is named by literary scholar Marjorie Pryse as conjuring (Pryse 1985). By acting as oral historian and theorizing the everyday experiences of black revolutionary women who are both ordinary and extraordinary, I am bringing together what has been made disparate in academic approaches with what is readily accessible in the storytelling of black women. In pursuit of these interventions, I’ve not only reframed Amina as a blues woman, but myself as a conjurer.
Author's Note
Grammatically, the capital "B" in Black is meant to identify or define a fixed, proper noun and/or acknowledge a political identity. The lowercase "b" is more fitting for a process of being and becoming and a necessary protest to a political identity still reckoning with its embedded patriarchal practices. In my work, I depart from the use of the capital B in Black because the philosophy behind the capital letter reads antithetical to my black women narrators’ expressed processes of becoming and my methodology of destabilizing political blackness in favor of highlighting complex experiences and negotiations of black women and black people.
References
Abrams, Lynn. 2018. “Talking About Feminism: Reconciling Fragmented Narratives with the Feminist Research Frame.” In Beyond Women’s Words: Feminism and The Practices of Oral History in the Twentieth Century, edited by Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Frana Iacovetta, 81-94. New York: Routledge.
Awkward, Michael. 1989. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels, New York: Columbia University Press.
Baraka, Amiri. 2002. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Perennial.
Davis, Angela. 1999. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage Books.
Etter-Lewis, Gwendolyn. 1991. “Black Women’s Life Stories: Reclaiming Self in Narrative Texts.” In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 43-58. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Gluck, Sherna Berger and Daphne Patai (eds. 1991. “Introduction.” Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, 1-5. New York: Routledge.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 2012. “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality.” In Uptown Conversations, edited by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, 1-6. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2006. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial.
Minister, Kristina. 1991. “A Feminist Frame for the Oral History Interview.” In Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 27-42. New York: Routledge.
Morrison, Toni. 1971. “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib.” New York Times. August, 27, 1971.
-------. 2019. The Source of Self Regard. New York: Alfred A, Knopf
Moses, Janée, 2013-2018. Interviews by author with Amina Baraka, audio recordings, 8 October 2013 - January 10, 2018, Newark, NJ.
Joseph, Peniel E., ed. 2006. “Introduction.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, 1-26. New York: Routledge.
Pryse, Marjorie.1985. “Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the “Ancient Power” of Black Women. In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 1-24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ritchie, Donald A. 2014. Doing Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Starecheski, Amy. 2014. “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice.” The Oral History Review 41, no. 2: 187–216. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43863582.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Woodard, Komozi. 1999. A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Washington, Mary Helen. 1986. Any Woman’s Blues: Stories by Contemporary Black Women Writers. London: Virago Press.
[1] In Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels (1989), Michael Awkward argues that Janie Crawford is often misread as a spokesperson. Instead, her friend, Pheoby Watson is the spokesperson as she is speaking on Janie’s behalf after Janie instructs her to do so. It is also important to note that Zora Neale Hurston would not identify herself or her work within the blues tradition. However, my consideration of Hurston’s novel and fictional characters as being useful to the blues tradition is inspired by Alice Walker’s essay, Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and Partisan View where Walker argues that Hurston “belongs in the tradition of Black women singers” like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (91).
[2] When referring to my oral history fieldwork with Amina Baraka, I will refer to her by first name only.
[3] See Peniel E. Joseph’s The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (2006) on scholarship that reconsiders the periodization of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era.
