River deep, mountain high: modern-day griots pass on ways to hurdle racism

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 25, 1996 by Linda Quillian

With wise deliberation. Lawrence-Lightfoot allows her narrators to show that the damage of self-hatred is pervasive in the African-American struggle toward "the dream." Former nun, research chemist and university dean, Toni Schiesler seems the most "damaged" by intra-racial stratifications Throughout Schiesler's narrative, deliberate color distinctions in her descriptions of beautiful women pervade and are so consistent that even Lawrence-Lightfoot, the objective scientist at inquiry, is struck that Schiesler's aesthetics for beauty are "often linked with their fairness." Particularly ripe with the current of intra-racial bias is Schiesler's experiences as a cloistered nun in the Oblate community.

Although the cloistered life shielded her from some of the racial warfare in the real world, it did not protect Schiesler from the color castes within the convent ... the hierarchies of color were rigorously drawn and rarely challenged. Light-skinned nuns dominated the elite positions, while dark-skinned sisters had to be extraordinarily talented to counteract their assumed low status. Even though their hair was always cropped and their heads covered, everyone knew who was blessed with "good hair" and who was cursed with thick "nappy hair."

Despite the fact that Schiesler has subliminally absorbed the aesthetics of America, she is keenly aware of the contradictions of self-hatred and is saddened by the creative talent she has seen undermined and throttled because of it. Her history unveils the "insidious hierarchies of color within the convent" which prevented more talented nuns opportunities because they were dark, and encouraged those obviously less talented to greater opportunities because they were light. Both Cannon's and Schiesler's narratives deftly weave the message that the African American's greatest obstacle toward achievement is often himself, like a "transplant" re-rooted and misled into embracing and feeding on the lethal "values" of the limed soil into which it has been thrust.

The contradictions of self-hatred are both hysterical and heart-rending as they weave and wind through observations like those of Cheryle Wills who believed that her brother, Eddie, was a Black Panther but knew that Black women were "definitely not his type," or of Tony Earls, who at a particular interim, dated several single, Black women but chose to marry a white divorcee with a child from her previous marriage.

In her successfully pragmatic integration of memory and life, Lawrence-Lightfoot's I've Known Rivers is the kind of work that grabs one by the collar and jerks the reader forward. Her "griot's compendium" teaches not only how to achieve the American dream, but also the responsibility inherent in passing the baton forward. Its truths reveal that education can be asylum or abyss, talent credited or crushed, aesthetics self-defined or mimicked and confidence cultivated or crippled. Its accumulated experiences provide, like American slave narratives, instructive tales of cunning and survival. As their expressed desire at middle age to "pass the baton on," these achievers' 20th-century narratives are revealed from the heart and gut to further "individual empowerment, community building and cultural transmission" of a people's underlying legacy.