WHERE IS THE LOVE:  BLACK LOVE AND BLACK HISTORY
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

    Frederick Douglas never really knew his exact birthday.   When slaves were born, their births were so insignificant that they were not recorded.   Through oral history, they knew they were born “at planting time,” “at harvest time,” “when it was cold.”   Best he could figure, Douglas was born in February of 1817 (some say 1818).   He chose February 14 as his birthday. One might wonder why.

    Valentine’s Day had been celebrated since the 17th century in England, and the celebration was known in the United States.   Though Douglas is not expansive on the subject, was he making a statement about love in choosing his birthday?   It is a fascinating speculation given what we now know about the role love played in Douglas’ life -- the way the free woman who became his first wife, Anna Murray, risked everything (including her savings) for him and bore five children to him; the way a German abolitionist, Ottilie Assing, became involved and enthralled by him even as he remained married (a story masterfully fictionalized by Jewell Parker Rhodes in her book Douglas' Women), and the devotion that his second wife, Helen Pitts, a white woman who had once been his secretary, preserved his legacy at the home that is now a national monument in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.

     Perhaps Douglas did not have love in mind at all when he chose his birthday.   Maybe it was a random pick.   Still, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson declared Negro History Week the second week of February, he purposefully had in mind a week that included both the recorded birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, the leader who got credit for freeing slaves even though he didn’t, and Frederick Douglas, the slave who asserted his birthday because he didn’t know it.   Negro History Week became Black History Month and that history of the second week is often swallowed.   So, too, is the love that motivated the celebration of our history.

     I speak not of romantic love, though it too has a place in our history.   I speak of the agape love to which Dr. Martin Luther King so frequently referenced.   When one looks at the life and the history of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, one understands that he acted out of love for black people.   His life’s work reminds me of the wonderful King quote, “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.   You don’t need to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.   You don’t need to know the theory of thermonuclear dynamics to serve.   All you need is a heart full of grace and a soul full of love.”.   Where is the love among African Americans these days?   The love, the agape, which allows us to treat each other gently?   The love that is understanding of our capabilities and our limitations, that puts us in historical and economic context and endures?   I have heard two sisters, Sonia Sanchez and Dr. Johnnetta Cole, speak of black people spending just one week speaking only kindly of each other, and I am always struck with the “Willie Lynch” notion that it is nigh-impossible for some of us to do that.   Where is the love?

     Where is the romantic love and the commitment to family, and the understanding that these are not always the same thing?   With issues of family formation plaguing the African American community, it was sweet relief to read an absorbing book by Detroit columnist Betty DeRamus titled,   Forbidden Fruit:   Love Stories from the Underground Railroad.   DeRamus chronicles some of the hurdles that slaves were willing to clear in the name of love – folks who paid for themselves and their spouses, folks who ran away together and apart, free black folks who submitted to temporary enslavement in order to stay with a spouse.

     Joseph Antoine was such a man, and DeRamus writes of him in her book.   A free black man, he agreed to indenture himself to his wife's master so that the couple could stay together, but the odious master put them on the slave market, and sold them.   Though they gained a measure of reprieve, they were treated so badly they had to escape.   Joseph Antoine’s wife died in his arms as they fled slavery in 1804.   DeRamus writes, “Joseph Antoine would have understood . . .desperate attempts to rescue wives and children.   He probably wouldn’t have understood why, between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of black women married by age twenty-four plunged from 56 percent to 23 percent as more black men shambled into prisons, died young, or found it difficult to imagine making enough money to support a family.   Joseph Antoine’s largely forgotten story. . . is a powerful reminder of how far some black men and women once went to determine who and how they would love.”

    We lost a little piece of love when Ossie Davis made his transition on February 3.   The brother was such a brother, he of resonant voice and courtly manners, acting skill and powerful oratory.   His indelible imprint, for me, comes from two things.   One is his masterful eulogy of Malcolm X, in which he described him as “our Prince,” and “our shining black manhood.”   But for all his acting and speaking, Ossie Davis should also be known as a lover, Ruby’s lover, a man who was married for 57 years to a partner who was every bit his artistic equal.   Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee modeled every dimension of love, admiration, affection, and partnership, and too, like Frederick Douglas and Carter G. Woodson, they loved black people.

     They loved us – do we love each other?   This Black History Month, in the midst of speech and teach, commemoration and celebration, where is the love?