Laboring to Tell: At the Limits of Oral History
by
Cinnamon Williams
“I did have a few women cancel at the last minute or stand me up altogether, but this happened only in Tallahassee, Florida—this was the only city where this happened, and I have no explanation for it. A total of four women failed to follow through with the interview there after agreeing to being a part of the book. They have yet to respond to my follow-up calls to find out what happened or to reschedule.” –E. Patrick Johnson, Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History
“A proper regard for security and reciprocity are vital to the establishment of rapport in core black enclaves. The prudent are wary and slow to bestow confidence.” –John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America
Oral history is supposed to redeem the violence of the archive. Encounters with the archive’s power to distort, fragment, render inhuman, or flat out lie as Emily Owens would have it, have propelled scholars across Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies to assume a hospitable stance towards those methods that might help us write against the enclosures of the disciplines (Owens 2023, 3). The method promises many things for those of us researching in more recent time periods—a complication of and complement to the record; a more textured representation of marginalized people’s lives; a chance to meditate on the essence of someone’s narrative rather than the “truth” or “validity” of the historical moment that surrounds it.[1] And yet, as E. Patrick Johnson contends in the introduction to Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History, oral history is not without its snags (Johnson 2018, 14). For what happens when a traumatic recounting disrupts the narrative? Or when an interlocutor is unable to talk about something? What happens when the researcher and the researched collide? When the incompatibility of your academic interests and their everyday desires is made apparent? And what if you never even get to any of these problems? What if they just don’t want to talk with you?
This brief essay ponders a kind of archival failure that continues to seize Black women’s stories—not the kind found in slavery’s archive when Black girls are “transformed…into commodities and corpses” but the kind felt in elderly Black women’s articulations of fragility, exhaustion, annoyance, and, frankly, disinterest in excavating their lives for the sake of academic projects (Hartman 2008, 2). That is, even as we imagine that oral history can generate a wider variety of Black women’s narratives and secure their position in the (re)telling of Black histories, there remains a need to wrestle with those occurrences of Black women—especially Black feminist activists of the mid-to-late twentieth century—refusing the labor of narrating their lives, memories, and experiences, even for other Black women working as academics. The writing is grounded in some of the responses I received for interview requests with Black feminist activists working between the 1960s and 1990s, including: ignoring contact attempts; responding to contact attempts with ambivalence; or simply refusing interview requests due to declining health or disinterest. As an advanced graduate student, I encountered all of these scenarios with more frequency than I did acceptances to requests. I maintain that these kinds of (non)responses are not a dead end for those of us interested in documenting the experiences, interventions, and motivations of Black feminist activists, nor are they proof that the method cannot be deeply useful to Black feminist historians. Rather, they are possibilities for seriously reckoning with the aftermath of activist labor on Black women and conceding that interlocutors are laborers in the production of knowledge, too.
Black Women’s Refusals to Recount
In the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, I was desperate to augment a chapter of my dissertation that focused on a Black feminist organization active in the United States throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. While the section was methodologically anchored by archival research and discourse analysis, I knew that the organization still lived on in a slightly different iteration and that some of the women who had founded it were young enough to still be alive. I had yet to come across an extended treatment of the collective in any scholarly work and thought it incredible that it had flown under the radar for so long. What I could not glean from the pile of newsletters—the members’ relationships with each other, the kinds of conversations they had in advance of forming the group, the problems they encountered in trying to organize with allies, how they felt about their work, the kind of resistance they might have encountered—I hoped to fill in through a series of oral history interviews. For months, I contacted various people on Facebook and Instagram, sent messages to their accounts, searched for phone numbers, resent messages to more accounts, and dug around the Internet for emails. Finally, I made contact with the son of one of the main organizers, who was happy to share her personal phone number with me and hint that she had talked about her work at least once before with a student and might do it again. “I know she loved her time in the organization and that it was really special to her,” he mentioned before hurrying off the phone to get back to work.
When I dialed the number and Ms. Carter answered, I shared a bit about myself and why I had been trying to contact her.[2] She was polite and to the point. “Yes, I did talk to one student about this a while back . . . I don’t mind talking with you about the collective, but it has to be short. I’ve been managing a lot after having recently buried my mother. I also have arthritis and really can’t sit the way I used to.” Before she ended the call about ten minutes later, Ms. Carter shared her email address with me, said she would be happy to send any documents she could find, and assured me that we would talk soon. The interview never happened. When I emailed her at various intervals to follow up about it—the next day, two weeks later, a month later, and again almost six months later—the messages went unanswered. Notably, this was not the only Black woman activist that I had tried to secure an interview with for the dissertation. Two other women from the same organization could not be reached across multiple platforms, and similar attempts to contact other women from two different Black feminist organizations were met with the same resounding silence.
While the refusal invoked here invites speculation about why some of these women did not respond, it also breaks open assumptions about which women might be most excited to talk about their lives on the record in the first place. Black feminist activists declining interviews that seek to document their groundbreaking perspectives forces us to rethink the notion that these kinds of conversations are “reciprocal affirmations” that benefit the woman interviewee as much as the so-called feminist interviewer (Gluck 1977, 5). Feminist scholars have repeatedly asserted that oral history—and even adjacent methods such as ethnography and qualitative interviews—increases women’s self-esteem, grants authority and power to research subjects, and allows marginalized women to place History on trial (Gluck 1977; Stacey 1991; Hinton 1998). Collecting oral narratives from women, then, is often imagined as a fundamentally feminist and profoundly corrective project precisely because the institutional, written document is deemed masculine, distanced, sterile, and unable to hear what Gerda Lerner marks as the “different rhythm” that organizes women’s lives in the private realm (Lerner 1992, xxiv). For historians of Black women’s lives and labors, the potential for correction carries even wider implications. Black women’s lives tend to be offbeat with those “different rhythms:” work has never only been inside the home; the so-called private realm is right within the state’s reach; major life events assumed to confer the protections of womanhood—marriage, pregnancy, childbirth—often beget more interpersonal and structural violence.
Universally ascribing the feminist label to this mode of doing history obscures how feminist methodological practices continue to “establish a new canon with white female experience at its core” (Etter-Lewis 1991, 44), in this case, the experience of easily granting an interviewer access to one’s life. The constellation of circumstances that merge to determine Black women’s willingness or ability to share their narratives (whether out of their control, such as aging, or due to their personal feelings about the ask, such as disinterest or deep sadness about the time that they are being asked to reflect upon) means that we cannot easily conclude that all Black women are eager to place their lives in anyone’s historical record. The enslaved and incarcerated Black women and girls to whom we would like to grant narrative closure—Venus, Adeline Morrison, Nancy Morris, Jane—were swallowed by a different kind of institutional monster, but perhaps narrative closure is sometimes not available to those of us working in the contemporary moment, either (Hartman 2008; Owens 2023; Haley 2016; Fuentes 2016). In other words, archival failure is not limited to slavery or Reconstruction. Even if our subjects are alive, they may not want to talk to us. Even if Ms. Carter enjoyed her time in that collective and remembers their work as powerful and transformative, she may consider me a mild nuisance at this stage in her life.
Moreover, we cannot assume that Black feminist activists and Black feminist academics always have the same desires or that an interview will yield similar advancements, even if the academic has motivations that appear noble, benign, or radical. At the very least, acknowledging this possibility of collision engenders serious consideration of the academic capital accrued through securing new and insightful information about Black women’s radical politics and praxes—the “employment, honoraria, royalties, and stellar salaries, generating personal wealth or portfolio management” that Joy James exposes as the structural distinction between on-the-ground activists and academics who may not be as proximate to repression, surveillance, or the grinds of daily survival (James 2020). After all, the interviews I was working to secure were, ultimately, beholden to industrial mandates that I put a twist on a formerly beloved insight, that I deploy a robust and interdisciplinary methodology, indeed that I show something new as part of building my “scholarly enterprise” (Gluck and Patai 1991, 2). The conventional “concepts of connection, or gender assumptions of unity” are, at best, unstable in this context, even for a first-generation, Black woman grad student precariously perched in the academy, and, at worst, parasitic (Jordan 2003, 13). The point is not that Black feminist historians and theorists should give up on oral histories or assume a defeatist stance about the practice but that sharing some identities or political sensibilities with the subjects we wish to interview does not necessarily provide for easy, seamless, or inevitable connection.
Counting Interviewee Labor
Despite the conceptual and contextual constraints that sometimes make it difficult to capture Black women’s lives, oral history remains a prized method for the field, especially for studies of the mid-twentieth century. As Patricia Miller King remarked in an essay about the process of collecting narratives for the Black Women’s Oral History Project (spearheaded by Letitia Woods Brown and housed in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library), collecting these stories remains necessary precisely to illustrate how Black women “have improved the quality of life in 20th-century America for black people and all citizens” (King 1986, 91). It is a sentiment that runs through intellectual projects that aim to not just archive Black women’s lives but to advance a field that constantly must prove “that Black women in America [have] a history at all” (Berry and Gross 2020, x). How hard Black women labor—to make history, to keep history, to make and remake archives—remains at the center of desires to document and analyze their lives. What remains less acknowledged is how these Black women interviewees are called on to marshal certain affective resources and expend their own energies in the production of history.
To mark Black women’s refusal to craft oral narratives about their lives as a justified and important stance is to assert that such narrative crafting is labor—particularly physical, in Ms. Carter’s case due to the arthritis she alluded to, but likely psychic and emotional as well. This acknowledgement complicates the notion that interviewing Black women is inherently Black feminist, as it makes space to consider the differences in our desires, our positions, and our understandings of meaningful work. It also highlights the necessity of being reflexive and critical about both the traditional archive and the panoply of methods that we hope will save us from its lacunae. If we can “respect what we cannot know,” then we can admit that Black women’s history is always an incomplete project and there are some intricacies of Black women’s lives that we may never recover (Hartman 2008, 3).
References
Berry, Daina Ramey, and Kali Nicole Gross. 2020. A Black Women’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
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. New York: Routledge Press.
Fields, Karen. 1994. “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly.” In History and Memory in African-American Culture, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, 150-163. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fuentes, Marisa. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gluck, Sherna Berger. 1977. “What’s so Special about Women? Women’s Oral History.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 2, no. 2 (Summer): 3-17.
Gluck, Sherna Berger, and Daphne Patai. 1991. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge.
Gwaltney, John Langston. 1993. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. New York: The New Press.
Haley, Sarah. 2016. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June): 1-14.
Hinton, Dawn Michelle. 1998. “Black Women Build Community: An Examination of the Radcliffe Black Women Oral History Project.” PhD diss., Western Michigan University.
James, Joy. 2020. “Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition.” Black Perspectives, July 20, 2020. https://www.aaihs.org/airbrushing-revolution-for-the-sake-of-abolition/.
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2018. Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Jordan, June. 2003. “Report from the Bahamas, 1982.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3, no. 2: 6-16.
King, Patricia Miller. 1986. “Forty Years of Collecting on Women: The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College.” In Women’s Collections: Libraries, Archives, Consciousness, edited by Suzanne Hildenbrand, 75-100. London: Routledge.
Owens, Emily. 2023. Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Stacey, Judith. “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 111-119. New York: Routledge Press.
[1] See Karen Fields’ “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly,” which beautifully articulates the tensions between history and memory.
[2] Name changed for privacy.
