You're going out there where people won't welcome you? You're going on there where people not like us, don't want to hear about how you survived? Survive?
For Black parents, one from Chicago and the other who fled Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the early 1970s, there was a place beyond the neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago, where white people resided, and Black people couldn't be seen as invading without consequences.
It was of interest to white America, particularly white women, to read of the lived experience of Black women. I remember how white women used to wave a copy of Sula or I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, shouting, love it! It felt as if a game of peekaboo if not voyeurism was a foot because I noticed that not one of these women, fellow colleagues, never wanted to discuss a Black-written novel with me. However, if I mentioned some food item or other, one or two didn't hesitate to inform me that, according to what so-and-so wrote, I was following a Black tradition! As if to say, again, good for you!
Well, my grandmother used to tell me about her and her siblings eating sugar on bread. A meal in New Orleans because my great grandfather, a poor working-class man, would have enough money to feed six or seven mouths. Would that have been a meal in the Black tradition, too?
I remember arriving to teach for the University of Wisconsin system in 2000, at Parkside and then at Platteville, I had to smile and act as if I admired the "progress" white women were making teaching Black women's literature and even Muslim women's literature. In the meantime, I wasn't allowed to "dirty" the English department with my presence at Parkside. I was placed, some distance away, in the Education department where the chair and one or two faculty were Black.
For Loyola University Chicago, I taught Black literature; and yet, at Parkside, I had to ask the Ethnics department chair permission to teach a woman of color and an African Diaspora course. When I asked the chair about teaching a Morrison/Faulkner course, that is, Beloved and Absalom! Absalom!, I was told, no! Mind you, my dissertation emphasis was William Faulkner: Southern Chivalry. Southern violence.
What is the theme of Beloved, if not Southern violence
At Platteville, I never saw my student evaluations. The chair confiscated them. That is, she removed them from the colleague who was the union president at the time. This colleague, by the way, was the same one teaching Muslim women! I never heard that she stood up for me, and, of course, my time teaching there ended when the year-long contracted ended.
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