Marcyliena Morgan

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In “Finding Oprah’s Roots” (2007), featuring Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s search for answers to questions about Black genealogy, Gates explains that one of Oprah’s grandfathers stopped his formal schooling at an early age to work on a plantation so that he could help provide an education and opportunity for his sister instead. The grandfather did this in an attempt to protect his sister so that she could escape rape and other forms of gender oppression from both White men and women. Gates’s explanation reflects both the way that gender, sexuality, and race defined life in the old South and their consequences for Black life, Black relationships, and Black destinies. This personal sacrifice, in defense of Black women, was commonplace—not at all particular to Oprah Winfrey’s family. In fact, John Gwaltney collected several essays of Black men and women describing similar actions in his book Drylongso (1981). Similarly, when Marcyliena Morgan (2002, 2003) interviewed some thirty adult women in Mississippi in 1990, their stories were overflowing with instances of brothers and fathers, uncles and male cousins who worked and stayed at home so that their sisters could have “respectable” jobs and escape unwanted White-male advances. Morgan spoke to one woman—a teacher and later a proud community leader—who said, “You have to know about my brother” (Morgan 2002). The brother was a laborer, and the woman thought him to be the most brilliant and respectable man in the world. She explained that he gave up his dreams of an education for her. When we consider a young man choosing to sacrifice his life ambitions for a female relative as a common occurrence and shared experience among many African American families, it puts the discussion of sexual relations and race, class, and gender into a distinctive cultural and historical perspective.From Du Bois Review, 3.2:1-18.