The Genesis of the Mad Black Woman

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

– Amos 5:24

For a few moments, after reading this article, I would like for you to close your eyes, and regardless of your race, creed, color, or gender, imagine that you are a woman, in particular, a sixteen year-old black woman living in West Africa in 1806. You live in a small village with your parents, siblings, and your extended family. One starlit night, you are awakened from a deep, peaceful sleep by the sounds of sudden, hectic, and violent fear, seasoned with screams and the snapping of whips and the dull clinking of mettle on flesh. You peer from your small abode to see your fellow villagers beaten, whipped, and fettered by a cadre of mean and desperate men of both your color and of a color of pale skin utterly alien to you. You shriek, but that is a mistake that will cost you your freedom, because your shriek is so loud that it captures the attention of several of the kidnappers, who now turn toward you. You take off running, but you don't get far. They have tied and fettered and chained you together with the rest. Your march to the ocean shore begins. You will never see your family again, but right now, you are too terrified to be angry.

You arrive at the shore and the ship, dehydrated, dirtied from your journey, and soiled from your own bodily fluids. Some salt water is thrown on you to preliminarily reduce your stench and that of your condemned compatriots. You are pushed and pulled into the darkest recesses of the ship's bowels. You are paralyzed with horror, but you are still not angry - at least not yet.

Sweat and stool and urine and vomit and menses drip on your body and your face in the darkness as the ship heaves to and fro on the waves taking you to an unknown destination for an unknown purpose. After too long a time, you are brought into the sun to be rinsed and stretched. Some of your mates jump into the sea, finding more hope in the fathoms and among the sharks than with mankind on the boat. Others are carried out dead, thrown overboard as carrion for the ocean and "slippage" for the ship owner. A little water, some crusts of bread, an ocean breeze, and the light of day have now given you sufficient energy and insight to feel the birth pangs of rage. That same light also allows the ship's captain to see how pretty you are, even with another human's vomit in your hair.

And so you get cleaned up - better than the others - and you are brought to the captain's quarters for your first of many sexual encounters not of your volition. By the time you reach your new land, you have been through an unprecedented traumatically physical, psychological, and spiritual cataclysm that has only just begun.

It is now 1811 and you are 21 years old - a young beauty. You have learned the language and settled into your new, hard life. But you fall in love and you jump the broom. Everyone comes to the wedding, even the master, and the master's son, slightly older than you. He got married not long before you, but he is spoiled and arrogant and cruel, and he drinks. And he has an eye for you.

One very dark night, his liquor and a disagreement with his wife provide him the dark gumption he will need to stride to your cabin, demand your husband's departure, and have his way with you. If you refuse, he will take it out on your husband. If your husband resists, he will kill him. Your choice is a living hell, death, or both. You choose the living hell because, for you, it is known and familiar.

As your body rocks with this alien on top and inside you, you wonder where your husband is. In the window watching, listening to his wife being raped? Did he run from himself and you to the shore of the brook on the property? Is he somewhere drinking hooch to numb the pain or mindlessly chopping wood that is plentifully chopped?

When the master's son is through, he pulls up his pants, grabs his rum bottle and goes quietly into that dark night, not a word spoken. Your husband returns, but he cannot look at you. You open your mouth to start a sentence that begins with his name, but before you can get his name out of your mouth, it becomes stuck to the palm of the hand he is slapping you with. He is enraged by the fatal wound to his humanity and self-respect, and rage such as this is humanly impossible to contain. To direct it at the master's son is suicide. To direct it all at himself would drive him to it. The only way he can live to the see the sun rise is to blame you in some way for his shame, and so you get a beat down from him in addition to the one your pelvis just received.

He beats you, but who do you have to beat but yourself? You have no one - no one to beat, no one to hold and forgive you for that unspeakable thing which is not even your fault - not even your mother is there to dry your tears. Now you know anger - true, entrenched anger. Anger that builds with each visit from the master's son and the beatings that follow from him when you resist and from your husband when you don’t. Anger that insinuates itself, not only in your life, but in your history and your heritage as your daughters and granddaughters meet similar fates and in the fates of all your black sisters similarly situated - loved by and in love with men who can't protect them, can't provide for them, and can't fully respect themselves or you because of an elaborate artifice of entrenched laws, systems, traditions, customs, habits, and folkways that emasculate them at every turn. Anger at the outrage and flagrant, rank injustice of the whole damned thing at every level imaginable. This anger lays in the womb, admixes in the soil, and even brands the DNA, ambiently looking to manifest with every successive generation upon the next series of rehearsed offenses of the black woman, both subtle and overt, like a recessive disease gene waiting to be expressed with the exposure to the right etiological agent.

A fortunate few never get exposed to that agent and smile through life. Some sequester the emotional or financial resources necessary to overcome the rage. But it is always lurking - if not in that particular woman ratcheting her neck indignantly side to side or clicking her teeth, then in the community of the women from which she is derived. And she is hurt, perplexed, and sympathetic to it at varying times and to varying degrees.

Almost every slave descendant in America is either a product of a outright rape, sexual coercion, or a descendant of a victim of the same. Remember this when you see a "mad black woman." Of course, you may say "that was so long ago. She should be over what happened to her great-great-great-great-greatmother." But how do you get over what has never been discussed? Where is the black woman's #metoo moment? When do they get to confront their history of tens of thousands of Dr. Larry Nassars and Harvey Weinsteins? How do they end the rage? It is time for justice for slave descendants - all of them. And for black women, especially the angry ones - "Time's Up."