A Novel Approach: Using Fiction
by African American Women to Teach Black Women's History

Beverly A. Bunch-Lyons

The idea of using literature in the history classroom is not new. In a recent class I experimented with this methodology, exploring how literary works could be used to examine the intersections of race, class, and gender (along with skin color and even hair texture) in African American women's experiences in the United States.1 The students in this small class were primarily seniors, and roughly 70 percent were African American women. The remaining 30 percent included a single African American male, and male and female students of European descent. The majority of the students had taken courses in either black studies or African American history, so most entered the course with at least a baseline knowledge of African American history.	1
The summer and fall before teaching the course, I spent a great deal of time reading and selecting the material. I wanted works that were interesting, well written, and sophisticated but still accessible to undergraduates. I wanted to teach the course thematically but also chronologically when possible. In order to reach back into the eighteenth century, I chose to begin with an examination of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, a poet who gave birth to the black female literary tradition during her short life (1753-1784). We would then move rapidly through time to land finally in the 1990s with the popular novel by Terry McMillan, Waiting to Exhale. I initially intended that all ten books in the course be fictional, but, after agonizing for several weeks, I decided to include several nonfiction works as well. These late additions seemed especially suitable for discussions of family dynamics and urban poverty, as well as black women's organizational and club involvement.	2
Each week I began the class with a mini-lecture discussing possible themes for the week but also providing the historical context for the time period covered by the novel. These mini-lectures proved particularly helpful for students who had not taken courses in history or African American studies. They also assisted students in understanding how African American women fit into larger social and political structures.2	3
When the semester began, the language of the 1700s made Phillis Wheatley's poetry and prose challenging for students, even after I provided an introduction. However, few failed to see how eighteenth-century society constructed Wheatley as a black woman. Wheatley's race and gender served to peripheralize her entire existence in the Anglo worlds of Boston and London. Because she was a woman of African descent, her abilities to think and write expressively were called into question. So students immediately confronted one of the issues that would become a theme throughout the course: How have black women challenged the negative connotations associated with being black and being a woman? Wheatley's ability to write so eloquently challenged notions of black and female inferiority. Less explicitly, her work challenged the morality of slavery by invoking the ideology of freedom expressed by those around her during the period of the American Revolution.3 Students completed this work with the knowledge that Wheatley was an exception. Most slave women were denied the opportunity to obtain the intellectual tools necessary to use pen and paper to resist efforts to dehumanize and debase. Instead, they had to resort to other tactics, such as those demonstrated in our first novel of the semester, Octavia Butler's book Kindred, published in 1979.4	. . .