Amy Rowland
The silencing begins early. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. The words washed over me in an evangelical church in the small North Carolina town of my youth. It’s a town you haven’t heard of, unless you know about Joan Little. She made history there in 1975, and has been erased in the place where she made it. Constant silencing results in collective forgetting.
Joan Little and I share the same hometown, but I never knew she existed until I moved away in adulthood, and happened upon a reference to her groundbreaking case. I might have learned of her in high school, where I learned bits of local history, for example, that my town was the first in the state to erect a monument to the confederate dead, a statue that still stands in the community cemetery.
I might have been playing in the back of my father’s Main Street barbershop in August 1974, as Joan Little, 20, sat in the basement of the courthouse two blocks away. It was in this basement cell that in the early hours of August 27, Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard, was found dead. He had been stabbed eleven times with an ice pick. Joan Little was missing.
I was five that summer, listening for night sounds of hunting dogs and train whistles as I lay in my hot room in a ranch house across from a gas station, so I might have heard as they searched for Ms. Little with dogs and rifles. But I did not know of Joan
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Little or the search or that one judge had threatened to issue an order declaring her an outlaw, allowing anyone to shoot her on sight. I did not know that a week after Ms. Little’s disappearance, an attorney negotiated her surrender. She was indicted for firstdegree murder, a charge that carried a mandatory death penalty in North Carolina in 1974.
I did not know that the following year the trial was moved to the state capital, Raleigh, and attracted national attention, including the support of Ms. Little from Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Golden Frinks, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. I didn’t know when Joan Little was acquitted, and that it was the first time a woman had successfully argued that she used deadly force against a sexual attack.
A first for women in my little town, Washington, North Carolina, and I never heard a whisper of it. I learned about Joan Little years later, first in a magazine article, and then at a talk by Angela Davis, where the mention of my hometown in an Ivy League auditorium made me hot with shame.
I asked several family members what they remembered about the case. They said the details were hazy. “I haven’t heard reference to it in many years,” my mom said. I couldn’t find anyone to talk about it, although everyone of a certain age said they remembered that time, that summer, that event.
The American south has always been better at myth than memory. There is neither marker nor mention of Ms. Little’s case in Washington. It is still hard for me to believe I didn’t know until years after I left. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” James Baldwin wrote with truth and knowing. The south presents an eternal puzzle. Southerners love the past, but they do not like history. There are events, historical and significant, that we are not supposed to talk about. If things are not spoken about for long enough, they disappear. Entire lives go missing, with all those other
words, other voices, other histories. “All those things for which we have no words are lost,” Annie Dillard wrote, though she spoke of a solar eclipse, not a historical one. It’s no coincidence that the south is known as a polite society. It is this very peculiar politeness that censures discussion on race and violence. It would be impolite to talk about Joan Little in my hometown. Mention of her name was forbidden until it was forgotten.
There is a long history of imposed silence, crucial to those telling the story. In May 1836, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted the gag rule, forbidding the House from considering antislavery petitions, or any debate about slavery. Representative James Henry Hammond of South Carolina proposed it. “I believe [slavery] to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region,” he said on the House floor.
Eighteen thirty-six was the second year of hiding for Harriet Jacobs, a slave who had shirked the sexual demands of her owner by hiding in her grandmother’s garret. Edenton is sixty miles from my hometown, but I never learned about Harriet Jacobs in school either. In that “glorious region” of Edenton, she stayed in a “little dismal hole, almost deprived of light and air, and with no space,” to move her limbs, for almost seven years. Jacobs’s dark and stifling “loophole of retreat” was only nine feet by seven feet. Sometimes she heard the voices of her children nearby, but she could not call to them at risk of endangering everyone in the house. “How I longed to speak to them!” she wrote.
“Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you—that I can kill you if I please?” the slaveholder asks Jacobs before she flees.
“You have tried to kill me, and I wish you had; but you have no right to do as you like with me.”
“Silence!” he shouts.
More than a century and a half later, I wonder if southern silence and forced politeness are a result of the white utopia slaveholders saw in plantation life. One of the harshest rebukes of southern children is the admonishment to stop “talking ugly,” a term that enjoys great flexibility by those who accuse others of it. Some ugly talk is rude; some is simply inconvenient. Talking ugly includes sass to parents or elders, bickering with siblings, or asking something that makes a southern adult uncomfortable. Questions about slavery or race can be shut down with this reprimand. To ask white southerners to confront history is impolite. To persist is to talk ugly. What begins as a means of scolding children of any race, gender, or class mutates into a silencing, especially of girls and women.
Given how many women have been forcibly silenced, it troubles me that I often find myself unable to speak. As a white woman, my challenges have been more minor ones of class, power, and language. I think about talking ugly, as the current plea for civility ignores the form it takes in southern culture, of disciplining certain tongues. Civility and politeness are both considered social virtues, although civility applies more to the consideration we owe one another as citizens. Keith J. Bybee writes of the civility paradox: it’s a way of conveying basic decency and also a tool of repression. Though civility and politeness are related, you could say the biblical Satan was often polite but not civil.
Of course, people are not dependent on my words. It’s not a matter of life and death, as it was for Harriet Jacobs, who wrote that the “secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.” Other slaves pitied her impossible position, she wrote, but “they were aware that to speak . . . was an offense that never went unpunished.” She wanted to tell someone about her owner’s relentless demands, but he “swore he would kill me, if I was not as silent as the grave.”
Openly racist and sexist speech is often associated with poor and working-class whites. Consequently, a large swath of intolerant Americans go unseen because they’re more careful where they voice their views.
The most offensive conversation I ever heard was during the Obama years, at a wealthy gated community in the mountains of North Carolina. I was on an ill-fated freelance writing assignment, and the men I was interviewing seemed to find it amusing to humor me with their responses. Since I had once worked at The New York Times, I was a communist, a pinko, one of them said with glee. But they were happy to take me around their golf course and tell me how they saved their hemlocks from woolly adelgids. Later, at dinner at their club, I was told without a trace of irony, “It’s much more inclusive than you’d think. Just the other night, our [Black] nanny was able to sit with the kids on the terrace during dinner.” As the men got drunker, they enjoyed taking me to task for my “communist newspaper,” and the problems with Obama, the “monkey president.” I got a few barbs in, but sharp retorts only pleased and excited them. As I found myself searching desperately for a voice to confront this hatred, I became distracted by one of the men’s wives. She was an expensively preserved fifty-something, both coddled and dismissed by her husband, who obviously held an elevated social position among the other couples. Her husband, the ringleader with a child’s name, had inherited a successful chain of grocery stores. This woman began the evening with a story about the horror of being mistaken for a gardener when a delivery man found her working in her own flowerbed. She had a voice I have often heard in North Carolina, the tone of white women of a certain class and generation. It is a voice that symbolizes, to some, southern femininity, with a cloyingly sweet tone and diphthongs, even triphthongs, and a rounded upglide in the long o. As the night wore on, and drinks were refilled, this woman kept
saying euphemistically, “Shut the front door!” much to the table’s delight. Who was this woman, and where was this voice coming from? Was it a grotesque ventriloquized version of her husband’s ideal? I imagined her wearing the Darth Vader mask my nephew had gotten as a gift, mutating her voice behind the mask to play her role. I had always assumed a woman who used this voice had another one, but just as the mask worn too long fuses to the face, the voice used to please, first in public, then at home, to represent a certain trophy of southern womanhood to her husband, becomes the only voice she has.
When you have been taught, as southern girls are, that to ask questions white adults don’t want to answer, about race, about religion, about violent events of the past, is to talk ugly, you become well versed in the registers of silence and selective speech. Years after breaking free, going to college, and living in a broader world, I struggle with how best to speak. I am now a university lecturer, surrounded by the most highly verbal people I have ever known. The dinner party conversation is totally unlike anything I experienced growing up as the daughter of the local barber, and is something of a competitive sport. On the rare occasion my thought on a subject is solicited, I usually say something noncommittal, brief, cryptic. After one such botched answer, a middle-aged professor looked past me to my husband and said, disdainfully, “She’s very measured, isn’t she?” At another dinner, an emeritus professor, a lovely man, stopped the conversation and demanded, “Say wolf. Now say roof. Again!” Being asked to pronounce words in public settings has happened to me many times. The intent is never malicious; the outcome is always humiliating. Shame is pride’s cloak, William Blake said. I try to leave the cloak in the closet, but sometimes I drag it out and drape myself in it. Then I mumble into the collar. I was struck last year when I heard Zadie Smith tell an interviewer that she
sees people who “rode the meritrocratic wave” as she did, who continue to describe themselves as working class. She doesn’t. “I can’t wave it like a flag whenever I want to.” She added, “It’s ridiculous to claim you can stay in the same mental space.”
It’s true that I am no longer working class. It would be hubristic to think that I speak for others. But I do represent eastern North Carolina when I open my mouth. My accent is a thorn in my throat. I chose to keep it, which is probably a terrible holdover of working class pride. Because what goes unspoken in attention to my accent is that it’s not only southern (which, of course, isn’t an accent at all), but that it’s rural. I wear the cloak and I clear my throat.
I know Adrienne Rich is right when she says, “We can’t wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.” Yet I carry the residual fear of talking ugly, though it has different meaning for me now. It is a fear of speaking clumsily, of not seeming lucid. My trepidation is borne from the rumor that the language of my youth has hampered the development of my thought. Sometimes it is not only a matter of voice, but a crisis of language, after hearing the argument that certain thought is wholly unavailable to certain selves.
I want to contain multitudes. I want to speak in many tongues. I’m stuck with the one voice of someone I used to be, a lost self. It’s like speaking through a ghost. But I have no second voice. It is important that views not be nailed to voices, and ideas to accents. Though it is a temptation I succumb to myself, as I move between worlds (the rural and the rarefied) that have less and less in common.
I think of my family in North Carolina reading this and asking, what on earth is wrong with teaching children to be polite? What
is wrong is that it isn’t applied equally. Boys become men, even presidents, protected under the indissoluble blanket of “locker room talk.” For others, politeness is wielded as a silencing weapon. To refute the devil I might be required to risk both impoliteness and incivility. Because, for some, civility is in danger of becoming a new gag rule, with politeness its devilish enforcer in virtuous disguise. This is not only a southern problem. It is also a problem in polite liberal society. We are taught to respond graciously, with civility. But when does civility become complicity?
In personal terms, I wonder if polite silence has another cost. Just as speaking with the false and idealized voice of someone else’s dream becomes the only voice you have, remaining silent makes you distrust the sound of your own voice, if you have one at all.