As featured in April/May 1998
Righteous Therapy
African-American Women’s Humor is Good Medicine and Great Laughs
By Sylvia Charmaine Hicks
What could be so funny that you’d laugh out loud and hard and keep on cracking your side? Nothing can quite tickle your funny bone like the humor of African-American women. When these women gather and start talking around their kitchen table, on phones and behind closed doors, the laughter soon roars.
Dr. Daryl Cumber Dance, like many African-American women, grew up hearing black women laughing — laughing about their hair, about men, women, white people, signifying old ladies, the church and preachers, the town drunk and events in their lives or even each other. Whether the jokes and anecdotes were true or just tall tales, didn’t matter, only that the tradition was passed on to the next generation, from mother to daughter. Little did Dance know that the “comic relief” she witnessed as a child was something special, rarely shared with the outside world.
Now, as professor of English at the University of Richmond (Virginia), Dance knows all too well that the humor of African-American women has been largely ignored and overlooked in other studies of American humor. She also is author of several books focused on black folklore, such as Shuckin’ and Jivin’ and Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans, as well as other titles including Long Gone, Fifty Caribbean Writers, and New World Adams.
From her previous research, Dance had long been disappointed by the limited information available on humor and African-American women, particularly Southern women. So, when Anita Cherry, of Norton Publishers, called to discuss the subject, Dance was all ears. Prompted by the possibilities of another book project, she immediately drafted a proposal to Norton Publishers and days later agreed to begin this monumental undertaking.
Honey, Hush! An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor,
compiled and edited by Dance, presents a broad assortment of humor and insight from African-American women. The anthology covers all forms of African-American women’s humor, literature, popular culture and folklore. Actual selections vary from slave narratives, essays, jokes, comic routines, proverbs and rap to the dozens and other works. The stories, poems, cartoons, memoirs, one liners and songs created from the lives of African-American women combine the wit and wisdom of vintage artisans and contemporary black women from slavery to the present day.
The 287 selections examine the humor of the Harlem Renaissance writer and personality, Zora Neale Hurston, and many established writers such as Dorothy West, Alice Childress, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, Louise Merriweather, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Ann Petry, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor and Carolyn Rodgers. The list doesn’t stop there, but also includes Moms Mabley, Whoopi Goldberg, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Terry McMillan, Bonnie Allen, Patrica Williams, Barbara Neeley and Valerie Wilson. The forward is done by Nikki Giovanni.
As Dance explains the title, you can visualize the scene she describes of a lady striking a pose with her hand on her hip, saying “Honey, Hush!,” and you know she doesn’t want you to be quiet. Instead, this exclamation is used among black women as a friendly encouragement, a mild suggestion of playful disbelief, or a suggestion that one is telling truths that are prohibited.
She credits her friend and colleague, JoAnne Gabbin, a professor and member of the Wintergreen Writers Collective, with giving her the idea for the title. The Wintergreen Writers Collective, a Virginia-based group of African-American writers and scholars, was an important source of inspiration. Many of their works appear in the anthology.
Dance tells us that humor is often exaggerated tales and lies, but is most often expressed simply for the humor itself. She further explains in the introduction that humor is not always cute and delightfully funny, but that for African-American women, it has been more of a means of survival. The power of humor has served as a cushion for their falls and struggles through the civil war, integration, welfare reform, Newt Gingrich or just dealing with everyday life.
When we consider the struggles of everyday living for African-American women, we have not survived without humor. I recently typed an e-mail greeting to a friend and explained my lack of communication over the year, one in which I worked in the Caribbean for five months, suffered two stokes, recovered, and completed 18-hours of graduate classes in a 10-week summer session before starting a new job. As I typed � was the pits!” I started laughing. The more I thought about the typed line, the harder I laughed. Then I understood what Dance meant when she says our humor comes out of the horrors of our lives, to give us strength and heal our ails, medicinally.
Dance says humor is “righteous therapy,” one that heals and allows for the release of anger or life’s other difficulties. It contributes to our health and wellness. Even recent studies, she adds, show that laughter is “medic relief.” Humor is sometimes defined as God’s aspirin to soothe the headache of reality. Regardless of its healing power and how good it makes us feel, she tells us that laughter and humor are “serious business.”
“We laugh to keep from crying. We laugh to keep from dying. We laugh to keep from killing. We laugh to hide our pain, to walk gently around the wound too painful to actually touch. We laugh to shield our shame.”
Working on the collection was not just a professional undertaking, it was personal. “It’s an awesome experience to be privy to this folklore and literature. It is a thrill because it (the work and humor) has been a pleasure for me all my life, a salvation for me. I’ve enjoyed it all my life. It’s a release,” she explains. “It is a gift that rejuvenates and refreshes our lives.”
You may find the anthology entertaining, shocking and even risqué. The work is a special blend of language that is an important part of African-American women’s literature, culture and folklore. It’s a rhythmical language with unique inflections, colorful metaphors, similes and pure sounds. These truly African-American expressions are an important part of the book.“Nobody can cut eyes and suck teeth like African-American women,” she chuckles. “Black women’s speech with its inflection, style and tone is amazing and inspired me to write introductions for each section. It was important to develop the introductions so readers could understand it and get it right.”
While many selections reflect the humor of the black and female community, there is much that also applies to the human condition regardless of race and gender.
The anthology is organized thematically. Dance begins each chapter with an introduction of the theme to be explored and closes with lists of pertinent sayings and wisecracks entitled “Mama Sez” and “Sister to Sister.”
For example, the chapter “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Black Woman’s Physical Image,” looks at the attitudes women have about their appearance. The section includes Betye Saar’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” April Sinclair’s “Here I Come, Ready or Not,” and the traditional blues song “I’m a Big Fat Mama.” The selections illustrate the refusal of black women to be demeaned by a world that upholds white images such as blond hair, fair skin and narrow hips.
Dance includes selections discussing the “Black Church and Churchgoers.” These include sayings from Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, Carolyn Rodgers and others who poke fun at the black church.
Of course, she doesn’t leave out “My Sweet Papa: Courtship and Good Loving,” and “My Daddy Won’t Stop His Evil Ways: Problems with Husbands and Lovers” that focus on African-American women and the men in their lives. Here she uses pieces from Ruby Dee’s “To Pig or not to Pig” and Sarah Delaney’s “We Ain’t Dead Yet.”
There’s a chapter that looks at humor during periods of oppression and abuse. “Fight, Kick, Bite: Dealing with a Racist and Sexist America” is used to bring many slave memoirs to light.
Dance has long enjoyed the works and humor of African-American women and was happy and committed to sharing with others the laughs and joys it brings. This anthology is not only enjoyable, funny and informative, but it fills a void by representing African-American women’s humor as an important part of American humor.
“This anthology remains timely, and timeless and touches on important issues yet applicable in our recent past, as well as today,” says Dance.
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