By Sikivu Hutchinson
In her 1970’s
anthology In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker asks, “What did it mean for a Black
woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time…Did you have a genius of a
great great grandmother…whose body was forced to bear children (who were more
often than not sold away from her)”? It is a question, she says, “with an
answer cruel enough to stop the blood.” The question of the deferred artistic dreams
of Black women ancestors is central to the new National Geographic Aretha
Franklin biopic Genius, written by acclaimed playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Genius attempts to peel back the onion layers of Franklin’s
meticulously crafted public image. In so doing, it foregrounds the normalized
violence Black women experience in Black families, the church, and the entertainment industry.
As an admirer of
Franklin’s towering 1972 Amazing Grace church concert album, I was excited to see the biopic. Franklin’s gifts
as an accomplished pianist, writer, composer, and arranger are often given
short shrift in her deification as soul music’s paragon. These gifts are on
full display in the 2018 Amazing Grace documentary, which showcases Franklin’s musical dexterity and
command, as well as her volatile relationship with her father, civil rights
icon Reverend C.L. Franklin. There is a vivid
scene in the film in which C.L. pats sweat from Franklin’s brow as she sits at
a piano onstage. This intimate gesture
is a subtle yet telling window onto their alternately tempestuous and tender
history; one that was fraught with the secrecy of sexual and domestic violence.
Genius interweaves scenes of the domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and early
pregnancies Franklin suffered with references to C.L.’s rape and “impregnation”
of a 12 year-old girl in his congregation.
As a revered Christian
patriarch, C.L.’s heinous actions have often been rationalized as an artifact
of a “less enlightened” era (indeed, the word “rape” is seldom used to describe
the trauma he inflicted on the young child). Part of the reason why I wrote my
new novel Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of
Rory Tharpe was
because I wanted to explore how White and Black America reveres and
reviles self-determining Black women musicians steeped in these histories of
sexual violence and resistance. Raised in the Southern Black blues tradition of
visionary guitar artistry, Rory, the novel’s protagonist (loosely modeled after
trailblazing Black queer rock, blues and gospel guitarist Rosetta
Tharpe), is a queer former child
prodigy battling depression, addiction, and music industry marginalization. A
traveling musician with no recording contract, she fronts an all-male band
whose dependency is an albatross as she fights to secure her publishing rights
and regain her footing in the corporate rock regime of the late seventies. Her
relationship with her organist-manager mother is foundational to both her
creative struggle and inner demons as a survivor of sexual abuse in the Black
church. Traveling from a middling
dive-gig in Boise, Idaho to Nashville, she becomes entangled with the rock
industry juggernaut of a Janis Joplin-type figure named Jude Justis. Justis/Joplin, of course, signify the long
tradition of white minstrelsy and theft that has historically informed the
commodification of African American cultural production in general and rock
music in particular.
My novel also situates
this conflict within the context of cult religion, the prosperity gospel, and
the rise of televangelism as a cultural force. For Black women, respectability
politics are a crucial
element in the enforcement of these morally policing institutions.
Respectability, or the conformity to “feminine” norms of purity, piety, and
submission, based on deference to heterosexual male authority, is especially
constraining for Black women sexual violence survivors. Genius spotlights
the intersection of Black women’s creativity and respectability politics amidst
straightjacketing Black Christian religious traditions. Franklin’s struggle for
independence and control from her father shapes the series’ stab at a womanist
ethos. Long perceived as the prototypical “strong Black woman”, Franklin’s
resistance to C.L.’s efforts to dominate her career and personal life gives
rare insight into the creative autonomy of an elusive figure whose artistic
discipline has long been dwarfed by her legend status.
Alice Walker
addresses this dynamic in Gardens. She frames Black women’s creativity
as a constant process of reinvention. It is a process that involves reclaiming
the lives of "grandmothers and mothers of ours (who) were not Saints, but
Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in
them for which there was no release." Acknowledging, calling out, and
coming to terms with the legacies of abuse that these women (often) suffered in
silence is central to this journey.
In her piece “Aretha
Franklin, Sexual Violence and the Culture Dissemblance”, Rachel Zellars argues that respectability politics, Black patriarchy, and silence around
sexual violence in African American communities contributed to Franklin’s deep
guardedness about her career and family. The long tradition of protecting Black
men first and foremost, while prioritizing racialized violence against Black
men, has often undermined Black women’s push for accountability on sexual
violence. As Zellars notes, “This seemingly
intractable custom of silence has been long curated and reinforced in Black
communities, Black organizing, and Black intellectual work. Against a backdrop
of enduring stereotypes about Black womanhood and a reactive protectionism
extended primarily to Black men, the ‘culture of dissemblance’ has helped
minimize Black women’s
and girls’ experiences of sexual violence. It has, at times, encouraged a
short-sided historical narrative of plantation
violence,
emasculation, lynching, and mass incarceration
while centering the experiences of Black men. Pragmatically, it has fostered a
decorum of intracommunity censorship that pits Black women who remain silent,
powerfully, against those who detail their own stories and name names.” Genius
juxtaposes multiple scenes of graphic and implied violence with Franklin’s
meteoric rise as a multi-talented musician who commands both studio and stage
with her expertise. It implies that
women who did name names, such as Franklin’s mother, Barbara Siggers (a
talented singer and piano player in her own right who died at the tragically
young age of 34), were “invisibilized”.
In Rock
‘n’ Roll Heretic, women who name names are also penalized and victim-shamed
by the community, while those who remain complicit are alternately rewarded and
betrayed by the very Christian religious power structures they cosign. Fellow Black
women who cosign, downplay or deny sexual violence are key to the novel’s raw
exploration of Black women’s stifled creativity and ambivalent solidarity,
which troubles the highly westernized, male-centric narrative of the singular
“genius”.
In Genius,
Franklin is shown rising to the challenge of the political turbulence and
racial strife of the sixties and seventies while maintaining her artistic
integrity in a white man’s corporate music world. Yet, legacies of trauma and
abuse still informed her desire to craft a storybook public image and family
life. In this regard, as Zellars notes, she was like scores of everyday Black
women, who, “faced with social conditions too commanding to…overcome, found a way to keep going, to keep working, and to
manage the terror of violence by holing it up and tightly protecting its
secrecy.” It is a lesson that continues to be a bitter pill to swallow in our
celebration of Black genius.
Rock 'n' Roll Heretic will be featured at the Saturday, March 27th, Women’s
Leadership Project Black
Women in Rock Women’s History Month youth-led roundtable
with Black women electric guitarists from across the nation.
