The roots of Black love

Ebony, Feb, 1996 by Leorone Bennett

It's no secret. Everybody knows the story of the Blacks and the birds and the bees. That story or, to be more precise, that myth--the myth of a never-never land of loveless love and nonstop sex, of hard-hearted men and heartless women, the myth of a land of endless Catfish Rows where the living and the orgasms are easy--is one of the enduring fascinations of the American public. It has been debated in Congress. It has been discussed by Presidents. It has been annotated and analyzed by scholars.

Love,

Oh love,

Oh careless love.

That's the story.

It's in the songs.

It's in the books.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody--or almost everybody--knows that the Black love current was short-circuited in slavery and that Black men and women have always been at each other's throats and that colored girls have always been left alone to fend for themselves and their babies and to consider suicide and other melancholy alternatives because Black love was not enough. Everybody--or almost everybody--knows that.

The only problem is that the story almost everybody knows is almost totally false.

As a matter of hard historical fact, the true story of Black love--love colored by, love warmed by, love blackened by the Black experience--is the exact opposite of the traditional myth. For regardless of slavery, regardless of segregation, regardless of everything, Black men and women have created a modern love song in life and art that is the loveliest thing dreamed or sung this side of the seas.

This statement will no doubt startle and disconcert people--black and White--who believe the Black love myth. And to understand it pr-operly, to understand how and why Black love survived, to understand how that love bottomed Black America and made it possible for Black Americans to endure, to understand, above afl else, the multifarious manifestations of that love, to understand, for example, why Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote "When Malindy Sings," why John Coltrane played "Soul Eyes," why Duke Ellington wrote "Satin Doll" and why the Commodores said the Sister is "once, twice, three times a lady"--to understand all that, and to relate it to the continuing vitality of the Black love tradition, it is necessary first of all to for-get almost everything we think we know about Black love and go back to the beginning and search there, in the rich loam of the Black experience, for the roots of a love that History couldn't kill.

The operative word here and elsewhere is history. Black love is a product of a particular history. It was born, not on the plantation, not in Harlem, but in Africa, where there were particular, non-european and stable marriage and mating patterns and where women in general and mothers in particular--"The land of the mother," DuBois said, "is and was Africa"--were not cursed by the peculiar sexual demons that seem to be the particular heritage of Europeans in general and Puritans in particular. Two other points are relevant here. The first is that the African cultures that yielded the African ancestors of African-Americans were dancing, giving, expressive cultures. The second is that polygamy was sanctioned in these cultures, although in practice the poor, like the poor everywhere, generally contented themselves with monogamy.

Such, in broad outline, is the general background of the African heritage. And the important point that emerges from all this is that the primal root of the Black love tradition is in a non-puritan, non-uptight soil.

It is scarcely possible to understand the history of Black men and women unless we make at the least an effort to understand this fact and the further fact that the African brought his mind and his ethos--and his eros--to America with him. We can't say with mathematical exactitude how this non-puritan ethos influenced separate elements of Black marriage and mating patterns, but we know with certainty that it was the base of the great creative synthesis our African ancestors made of African and European culture forms.

That synthesis began in the beginning with a curious love pact that seems to have bound together all the slaves that came over together on the same ship. Although these immigrants carne from different nations and different geographical areas, the traumatic experience of capture and confinement seems to have fused them into a proto-clan. At any rate, according to Orlando Patterson, "it was customary for children to call their parents' shipmates `uncle' and `aunt'," and for men and women to "look upon each other's children mutually as their own."

It was thus in love--a love tried by terror and bloodshed--that the African-american adventure began. And it began in a way with the love story of two of the first Black immigrants to English America, Antoney and Isabell, who brought what might have been a shipboard romance to a significant conclusion by marrying in Virginia in 1623 or 1624. Isabell was soon brought to bed with what was probably the first Black child born in English America. The child, a boy named William, was taken from his home in Elizabeth City in 1624 to Jamestown and baptized before the cedar chancel in the Church of England.