Invisible Women and ‘Respectability Politics’

How a literary conversation among Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and others unfolded over decades—and continues today

One of my idiosyncrasies as a reader is that I obsess over sentences from my favorite writers. This includes an obsession with sentences I don’t like, or with which I strongly disagree. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time arguing (in my head) with James Baldwin’s passages about the grooming of Black children, such as this one: “One’s hair was always being attacked with hard brushes and combs and Vaseline. One’s legs and arms and faces were always being greased so that one would not look ‘ashy’ in the winter time. I hazard that the Negro children, of my generation anyway, had an earlier and more painful acquaintance with soap than any other children, anywhere.” It’s not that what Baldwin described was false, but I disagree with how he reduced these grooming rituals to self-hating pathology. For some of us, hair combing and skin moisturizing was, and still is, a ritual of caring.

Care for a writer includes disagreement, I believe. It is a sign of investment in their words. And so it has been for me with Toni Morrison’s description of “Mobile women” in The Bluest Eye, which I’ve written about on several occasions. I consider Morrison to be the greatest American novelist I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many). But I can’t stand this passage. She criticizes college-educated, coastal Black women of Alabama for what people now call “respectability politics.” This contemporary terminology is a riff on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s use of the term to describe the social conservatism developed among late-19th and early-20th-century Black women church organizers. These women, Higginbotham argued, used being respectable as an argument against the ways they were depicted and degraded in the dominant society. They created their own image of what it meant to be a decent woman. I bristled at Morrison’s account for harshly generalizing about these women.

“Respectability” is roundly criticized these days, but for Morrison to criticize it in 1970 placed her in a small yet mighty tradition of Black women writers who saw little usefulness in defining oneself through opposition to how one is seen. Earlier examples include the beautifully wanton and proud heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston, and Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), who leaves her employment at a college that is a thinly veiled representation of the Tuskegee Institute (now University), where her colorful attire and sensuality are seen as shameful.

Last week, I was rereading Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel, Invisible Man—and I mean rereading in the sense of going back to read certain pages and passages repeatedly. Early in the novel, the protagonist—a student at Ellison’s fictionalized version of the Tuskegee Institute—encounters a man named Trueblood on the outskirts of the school. The protagonist has taken a wealthy white donor too far beyond campus, and there, they meet Trueblood, who is a source of deep shame for the Tuskegee community because he raped and impregnated his daughter. His wife (his daughter’s mother) is pregnant at the same time. The Tuskegee Institute community wants to get rid of him. The local white community, however, is fascinated with him and, according to Trueblood’s account, frequently come to talk to him. He says that they pay him to hear all the prurient details of his life.

Trueblood begins his description of raping his daughter with a reflection on how he felt when he saw “Mobile women” in his youth. Those women, presumably, were women he had consensual relationships with. But how Trueblood viewed them, and how they were seen collectively, was surely shaped by how the larger society saw Black women, with a kind of hypersexual pallor cast across them. Trueblood justifies his own violence. He says he was dreaming but also implies his daughter seduced him, producing the same feeling in him as those Mobile women did.

Suddenly, rereading Ellison, I saw Morrison’s “Mobile women” differently. Respectability was a consequence, I realized. It was a direct response to literal as well as representative violence. Mobile was a port city, a place of violence and vice. These women held themselves stalwart against forces of destruction. And in the process, Morrison sharply pointed out, they became judgmental and even cruel to those who were less buttoned up.

I began to think about many of Morrison’s sentences in The Bluest Eye as an extended conversation with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Her character Cholly does the same violence as Trueblood to his daughter, but Morrison offers Cholly a backstory—his own experience of sexual violence at the hands of white men—not as justification but as context for the repetition of violence. In Invisible Man, the protagonist winds up bringing the wealthy donor to a bar where professors who are experiencing mental illness hang out with sex workers. These workers seem to be the only people around who actually understand the horrifying structure of white supremacy. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola, the victimized child who is neglected by the entire community, often visits with three local sex workers, who offer incisive critiques of patriarchy. These women reserve their greatest tenderness for respectable church-going women and for Pecola. Their hearts are soft for girls and women held captive in one way or another by an unjust society.

Nella Larsen’s Quicksand is answered by Morrison as well. At the end of that novella, when imaginative and wanderlustful Helga has gone from being constrained by African American respectability to exoticized by Europeans, she finds herself penitent at a holiness church, which swallows her whole into marriage and childbirth. We feel Helga’s desperation at the end of Quicksand. In a text about different people who live with the same social forces, Morrison articulates the source of Helga’s suffering. Being held captive to theologies or ideologies that constrain women’s expression and desires is personally disastrous.

A central part of my love for literature is that it is a conversation. I’m less interested in remarkable craft if it abandons context and tradition. To read and respond, however one responds, is to enter the conversation. Over time, one aspires to become a better conversation partner, a more thoughtful listener and respondent.

I still bristle at “Mobile women,” but I’m starting to understand. No matter one’s reasons for holding strong convictions and being judgmental, tenderness matters.