Silent Grace

               In the film, The Great Debaters, the Debate team from Wiley College was on their way, the evening prior, driving in the night looking for the place they planned to stay the evening when they drove up on an African American man being lynched. There was a mob of white people, surrounding their victim hanging over a fire. Someone from the crowd shines a light on the windshield of the car that the debate team was in and see them in the car. Everyone in the mob begins running towards their car. They struggle to turn the car around while being surrounded but thankfully they get away. When Mr. Tolsen and the debate team safely arrive to the house they will be staying in, Henry Lowe gets out of the car and walks away. In the middle of the night he arrives back to the house intoxicated and James Farmer meets him on the front porch to escort him into their room. This is a point in the movie where young James Farmer’s innocents is compromised for the realities of the brutalities that Black people are exposed to during this time period in Texas. Here is a short dialogue from this critical scene in The Great Debaters.

James: “You think you are the only one hurting.”

Henry: “You are never going to forget what you saw out there. Getting hanged is the easiest part of it.”

James: “What do you think he did?”

Henry: “He didn’t have to do nothing. In Texas they lynch negroes.”

James: “It doesn’t matter how good we are, this is all useless. We’re just a bunch of negroes debating each other on subjects that we all agree on.”

Henry: “Don’t talk like that.”

James: “Why”

Henry: “Because you can’t, not you.”

 I identify, what I believe to be, some similarities between the characters of James Farmer and Black woman author, Zora Neal Hurston, whom is heavily focused upon in the text that I am reflecting on, Black Womanist Ethics.

               In Katie G. Cannon’s literary work, Black Womanist Ethics, she dives into articulating a relationship between ethics and faith. She explains that her religious mission was seeking to make sense of the relationship between the Christian doctrines within the Black Church to the “suffering, oppression and exploitation of Black people in the society.”(1) “How could Christians who were white, flatly and openly, refuse to treat as fellow human beings Christians who had African Ancestry?”(1) The focus of Cannon’s writing was to demonstrate the ways that Black women “live out a moral wisdom” that is not accepted by the white, male focused society. (4). The author navigates the reader with this focus in mind, through-out chapters with themes such as, Black women’s history, moral situations of the Black woman, Black woman’s literary traditions, the virtues within the Black community and life as a Black woman depicted by a Black woman writer, Zora Neale Hurston and “the correlation between the action-norms formulated within the existing framework of the Black religious heritage and the continuing social matrix in which Black people find themselves as moral agents.”(9)

               In chapter one Cannon depicts for us, in an effort to articulate the historical context, the Black woman as the “work-ox” and the “brood-sow.” The black woman was responsible for the all the domestic jobs within the home, labor in the field, catering to the needs of white women and children and then taking care of her own family, if and when she got home. Cannon referenced that Black women were viewed as objects of the slave master, through which Black women were constantly a victim of “white male sexual assault.”(37) I believe that rape and sexual violence represent the very heart of evil, sin, brutality and darkness in our world. Black women experienced utterly brutal, unimaginable suffering; the violence that Black women endured is inconceivable to me. Their lives were filled with horrors and somehow they still possessed a strength to continue to live through it all with steadfast faith and hope that someday they would be delivered, set free from the abuse of their bodies and souls. I believe that these women endured the worst conditions life has to offer a human and that in that very raw state of being alive that God had to be with them and in them in order for them to survive. Zora Neal Hurston offered a message of hope; she wrote, “ for all of us who lived the misery of being made to be something other than what we were; for all of us living who picked cotton and bore children unwanted and still find ourselves in strange fields and lying on cold beds, there are changes still due and coming.”(145)

               What I found to be so beautiful about Zora Neale Hurston’s life was that she dedicated her life and incredible gift of writing to a steadfast hope that she would impact the way that people viewed Black people and Black women specifically. She wrote, “I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges with the boundaries.”(147) Zora Neale Hurston sought to make an impact on the way that white people thought about African Americans. “Hurston was trekking through the South collecting the Black classics in music, art, dance and literature with hopes of eventually correcting dominant misconception about the quality of life in the Black context.”(108) In a lot of Hurston’s literary works she creates characters that practice a “quiet grace,” these women and men “overturn the normative moral structure of the oppressing society” in a search for truth.(127) I believe that many of the characters that she created were a reflection of who she was and who she wanted to be.

               While I was reading about Zora Neale Hurston in, Black Womanist Ethics, I identified a similarity in the innocence and passion possessed by Zora and character, James Farmer, in The Great Debaters. James Farmer grew up in an educated, protected home with a father that was a professor at Wiley College. James attended college at a young age and was the youngest member of the debate team. Zora grew up in an entirely African American community, in which her father was the Mayor. Cannon makes connections that because of Zora’s isolation of growing up in a Black community, this strong and rare context could be much of the spring that fed her innocents and dedication to change. In the scene that was referenced at the beginning of this reflection, James Farmer’s innocents is compromised for realities of the hatred and oppression of black people. Later in Zora Neale Hurston’s life there is this life-changing moment, in which she is being accused of sexually abusing a child. After this experience, in Zora’s writing you can sense her hopelessness for the first time in Cannon’s text. This was the point in her life where she felt like change was not possible and that maybe all her efforts were futile, just like James when he said, “it doesn’t matter how good we are, this is all useless.”

               Sexual violence and rape is pervasive in our world, country and community. I would like to know more about the ways in which women have been empowered and prepared to fight against sexual violence. I hope to learn more about Magdalene and Thistle Farms, a non-profit empowering and rehabilitating women who were previously drug abusers and prostitutes, founded here in Nashville by a Vanderbilt Episcopal Chaplin.

 

Bibliography:

Cannon, Katie G. Black Womanist Ethics. Scholars Press, 1988.