Last week I attended a conference titled “Slavery Archives and Affect,” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, in Harlem.
The African American studies scholars and historians Michelle Commander and Natasha Lightfoot organized the convening. The invited speakers were Black women who study the past and the present while sometimes speculating about the future. The audience was made up of these scholars, Schomburg Center research fellows, graduate students from around New York City (and some from as far away as Texas), community members from the city (one woman came with her mother who was about to celebrate a 98th birthday!), and historians from the area and beyond, including the lauded senior women’s historians Catherine Clinton and Christine Stansell. The mood in the auditorium was expectant and high spirited. Many of those gathered had not been to a conference since the onslaught of COVID.
It felt special to be in a space with people who had a hand in shaping my development as a scholar and a writer. I took my first African American women’s history seminar in college with Catherine Clinton and then worked as her research assistant. She introduced me to phenomenal books by bell hooks, Deborah Gray White, Jacqueline Jones, and others, as well as to the WPA narratives, a key source in slavery studies. Two other professors who were instrumental to my immersion in Black women’s studies during college were Barbara Johnson, who taught the classic course called Black Women Writers, and Maryemma Graham, who taught an African American literature survey in which I first read Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. When I was in college, Harvard’s African American studies program was hanging on by a thread under the stalwart leadership of Professor Werner Sollors. Under those challenging circumstances, most of the women I studied with, including Dr. Graham and Dr. Clinton, were visiting faculty members. It may surprise you, sensing what a mild-mannered person I am, that I was among a core group of around seven students in the Afro-American Studies Department who organized the 1990s campus protests in defense of the program. Those protests, which included sitting in at the dean’s office in University Hall (yes, terrifying; I did think I might be kicked out of school and break the hearts of my parents and grandparents) contributed to the university’s renewed commitment to the department. Within a year of our student action, renowned scholars Henry Louis Gates, Anthony Appiah, and Phillip Brian Harper (my thesis advisor), were hired, soon followed by the arrival of the esteemed historian of Black women’s and U.S. history, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. I graduated the year before Professor Higginbotham arrived. I did not have the opportunity to take a class with her, but I have found that chances seem to circle back around in life. When I joined the faculty of the History Department in 2018, I had the joy of working with Dr. Higginbotham, the chair.
I had been invited to the “Slavery Archives and Affect” conference at the Schomburg Center to accept the Harriet Tubman Prize (awarded by the Lapidus Center of the New York Public Library) and to speak in the opening keynote session with my good friend and colleague, the bold historian Celia Naylor, director of the Africana Studies Department at Barnard College. I offered a brief talk about my book, All That She Carried, presenting the idea that Ashley’s Sack (the object at the center of that book) is a material culture archive. Afterward, Celia and I engaged in an exchange that was both personal and free flowing, given that we have known each other since we were both in graduate school studying Black slavery in the Cherokee Nation. That dialogue was livestreamed and briefly posted to the Schomburg YouTube site; we then requested that the video be retired, as the exchange had been geared toward that group rather than a wide public audience. The conversation had been informal and forthright in a way that surprised us and the audience, too, touching on topics like how one manages a career that maintains personal allegiance to vision and purpose while also recognizing the pressures of academic and institutional expectation. The Q & A that followed with the audience also delved into sensitive areas, such as how to confront slavery and the slave trade in Africa as well as contemporary strife on the continent, and how to manage writing for diverse audiences.
Celia asked a number of intriguing and probing questions that set the tone for this depth of engagement – about what I see as the purpose of my work and what it has been like to write history, fiction, and personal essays over these first two decades of my career. Time has a strange way of moving quickly and slowly. It’s hard to believe I completed my PhD in 2000 and started my first faculty position at UC Berkeley that year. I published my first book, Ties That Bind, in 2005. It all seems so long ago. And yet, it seems like yesterday when Celia and I were on the campus of Dartmouth College (I was a pre-doctoral fellow there; she was a graduate student at Duke) planning and hosting what is often credited as the first national conference on African American and Native American histories, literatures, and relations, “Eating Out of the Same Pot” (2000). (For anyone feeling curious about my past books and recent events, check out my website at tiyamiles.com for reviews. You can also find information about my previous environmental education project, ECO Girls, on this site.)
Celia Naylor’s question about the purpose of my work stumped me for a second. The question is so big. It invited a kind of honesty and thinking through of the fundamentals of life choices not usually called for in academic settings. I stumbled into an answer about how I had never really set out to be a historian, which is true. I didn’t add that I’ve always wanted to be a storymaker, and that I had first set out to do that by studying African American women’s literature in college and then in my master’s program. I gravitated toward Black women writers of the 1800s and early 1900s (my undergraduate thesis was on Pauline Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces; my MA thesis was on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy and her rediscovered novels republished by the literary scholar Frances Smith Foster, who was my thesis advisor at Emory). I only turned to history when I realized that literary study (at least, as I was first introduced to it in the late 1980s and early 1990s) required formal and theoretical analyses of textual structures and elements, when what I was most interested in was historical context and social commentary, as well as the multiscale impact of these author’s stories and ideas. I wanted to know why these women told their stories and how their textual art affected their lives, their readers’ lives, and community and national understandings. I was interested in tracing the cultural lineages that inspired these writers’ work and the ways that their writing circulated in a cultural present or future. I was captured by the notion of the West African griot figure transplanted over time and space onto the soils of the Americas and gendered feminine. (An interesting aside: at the National Council of Public History conference held in Atlanta last April, Fath Davis Ruffins, a founding scholar of Black women’s public history and senior curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, said adopting the term and role of the “griot,” or traditional oral storyteller, became popular in African American creative and historical circles in the 1960s.) I was intrigued by the choices that Hopkins, Harper, and their cohort made to write in different genres and to adapt popular forms like the romance (women’s sentimental fiction of the Victorian era) or the western to communicate social and political ideas. I was fascinated by how, through their storytelling, they were emerging out of, reconstructing, and re-presenting histories.
And I secretly wanted to join, in whatever small way I could, a beautiful and brave tradition of carrying stories that the people need. I wanted to study Black women’s and Native American women’s histories and texts (and the overlapping spaces between) to understand, share, and then extend in my own voice, revelations about healing, which are necessarily revelations about meaning, connection, and resilience.
I didn’t say all of this on the Schomburg Center stage. In fact, I don’t recall what I said exactly, but I do know that Celia spun my verbal straw into gold, paraphrasing my response as: “Maybe the purpose is healing.” And this is why we meet and share ideas -- to arrive closer to clarion truths. Because yes, Celia, the purpose is healing. This is what storywork is all about: helping us to recognize and treat our wounds, to slow down and take stock of meaning, and to see that connection (with other people, with nature, with spirit, with beauty) is the only way to make it through. Every human being struggles with pain and loss, disappointment and longing, fear and envy. In the histories of Black people and Indigenous people, these traumatic collective and personal histories take particular forms – but we are all, as humans, subject to the difficulties inherent in being here within these bodies and on these grounds. Healing is the ethos and practice that gets us through, together. I feel such a debt of gratitude to those Black women writers of the past who used words to diagnosis ailments and then to mix creative curatives, always using history as a tincture.
After that keynote session ended, as people gathered near the stage to talk before moving out to enjoy the formal reception, Catherine Clinton came up to me and said something close to these words: “You always said you weren’t aiming to be a historian. You wanted to be a writer. Now you’re doing both. You and these women have changed the field.”
So here is to doing both: making stories for our times, while giving history -- a powerful force and shared resource -- its due. It’s an effort I keep on making, most recently in my revised and republished first novel, The Cherokee Rose.
At the end of the last post, I promised to share my take on a certain bestselling historical romance novel about “wallflowers” in London and environs. I will say that the book occupied my time as I flew out to New York and that I lingered on the copious details about fashion and country estate decor, but that I didn’t finish the novel. For me, there is something less than compelling about supposedly gorgeous (by traditional western cultural standards), utterly innocent (same) heroines. (If you have found historical romance novels that satisfy your intellect, your political leanings, and your desire for a fun, dopamine-rush read, please share!) I also listened to the political commentary book, What’s Our Problem, on that trip. I found the analysis interesting and the tone (with charming drawings) fresh, but I did wonder why the author spent so much time criticizing the so-called “woke” cancel culture of the progressive left and hardly any time at all exposing the travesty of serious state censorship and educational assault in Florida.
I’m currently reading a book about reading by the Cherokee literature scholar, Kathryn Walkiewicz, titled Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth Century State. I’ll keep you posted!
And for those of you who are now eager to explore Celia Naylor’s penetrating historical analysis, I highly recommend her latest book on plantation ghost tourism: Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths about Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica.
I agree with Celia, your writing has always felt healing to me too, Tiya. You seem to have that inner drive to want to experience wholeness. You help us envision what it could look like — even when it doesn’t seem to exist yet. And it’s endearing when you let us readers know that sometimes you have your doubts and the path is not clear.
This post got me wondering about the nature of healing. We often think of healing as bringing about a change that restores wholeness. But spiritually speaking, healing can also be the revealing of an inherent wholeness — a wholeness that always exists but may be temporarily unseen.
There are women writers who seem to know this truth in their souls. When I close my eyes, I see Edna Lewis in her field of sunflowers or Joy Harjo playing her sax. I know these women’s lives haven’t been smooth but they’ve learned to create from a timeless, loving center. Like you, I’m grateful to be given such beautiful elders to try to echo!
Christine Stansell?????