Women's Voices, Black and White

Abstract

twentieth century have revised and fiction to render enslaved mothers genderless. In fact, implication is that formerly enslaved women can regender themselves only in a space of physical freedom. The fictionalized slave narratives of Beaulieu's study are result of feminist and civil rights revolutions that lead to a revision of our under standing of women and black family relations and of the role that gender plays in narrativizing history (4). Furthermore, these neo slave narratives allow contemporary readers, especially black women, to unburden themselves of their collective guilt about slavery by finding in black women writers and in their heroines a means of celebrating both race and gender. Beaulieu discusses Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) as a transitional work and then develops her thesis principally by exam ining Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), J. California Cooper's Family (1991), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979). These texts are not so much slave narratives as they are 'freedom narratives: stories that celebrate freedom