Black women, voiceless no more

The terracotta figurine was decidedly a black woman. Full lips, wide nose, fashionable tip of the head. I spotted her almost hidden among some larger items on the auction table recently.

The skirt of her heavy dress had been painted and glazed a soft yellow with cobalt blue ripplings. A scarf was stylishly tied around her head, and she carried a basket of flowers. She had an impossibly small waistline that apparently was some artist’s fantasy.

When I saw her I knew instantly that I would bid on her and take her home to join the other black women pieces I’d bought retail or at auction. You see, it’s not often that I find pieces that look like me (well, terracotta does have brownish tint mixed in with the deep rust color). No one else bidded against me, and I got her for $5.

I looked her over thoroughly, and could find no artist or manufacturer’s name. So I assumed she was someone’s class project. This someone, though, had an artist’s touch because her features were pronounced and she actually looked like a person.

But where would I put her in my house? Not on my fireplace mantle, which was already knee-deep in my auction finds. So I placed her among some African dolls and a lady-in-pink bowl on my windowsill. I soon forgot about her and she blended into my makeshift “collection.”

A few days later, when I decided to write about finding her, I had almost forgotten where I had put her (don’t you hate when that happens!). I checked the mantle. Then I spotted her on the windowsill, again half hidden behind my towering Amazon-like African dolls. She looked so fragile and small among them.

At that moment, I realized that in that spot, she represented what we as black women – heck, all women – feel and think of ourselves sometimes. Small, isolated, unappreciated.

Maybe that’s what struck me about her on the auction table, where again she had been in the back with lesser items blocking her view or my own view of her. We’re used to being relegated to lesser roles – expected to be someone’s mother, or wife, or girlfriend, or significant other, or assistant. Always the ones looked over or passed over for promotions or major projects at work, but not considered a team player if we balked or stood up for ourselves.

It seems to never be about us and what we want.

Could she be representative of us? As black women, we’ve been pushed back, blocked, ridiculed, poked and offered up for pleasure. We were raped and breeded as slave women, depicted as Jezebels, hot mamas and mammies; tapped as everyone’s maid in early movies; stereotyped as fat and happy Aunt Jemima on the pancake box and denigrated by many rappers.

With all that, could you blame a woman for being neurotic? But we aren’t.

Today, we have the ability to control who we are, who we want to be and how we want to be seen. That’s one reason why we started this blog network, We Are Black Women. Blogs – and the internet – have opened up avenues that allow us to inject (and project) our voices into the mix. So Glenn Beck and others like him can call us all kinds of names, but we can toss it right back at them – if we choose to do so. We just have to have the nerve and take the initiative.

Unlike the terracotta woman, we don’t have to be hidden by anybody. We can emerge on our own.