“I was the child who listened closely to grown-up women talking. To this day, I remember how my grandmother, my aunts and great-aunts and elder cousins looked when they talked. I’ve never forgotten how they move their hands and gestured with their arms. The sounds of their voices and much of what they said stays with me. When I was a child, I heard stories told by women…”
These are the words of the renowned storyteller/folklorist and children’s author, Virginia Hamilton, at the close of her book. I want to incorporate Hamilton’s text into my anti-princess campaign for young black women and girls, not just for the stories themselves, but because of Hamilton’s prominence in this literary world and for Hamilton’s description of her original desire to do this kind of storytelling archive to connect/hear the women in her family. 
So today I revisited Virginia Hamilton’s Her Stories. The two stories most relevant to my “campaign” here are “Malindy and Little Devil” and “Woman and Man Started Even.”
Both stories have black women tricking the devil. The first story (from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia) is about a little girl and revises the story of Faustus, the magician who sold his soul to the devil; the second story (from Tennessee) makes women the fallen angels but revises women’s usual partaking of the fallen apple. I point back to my last post about Dr. Facile in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog in comparison to these actual folkways in which spirits, magic, and demons would have circulated in black communities’ orature. Both tales are quite funny and offer completely different kinds of black female heroines. I’m not one to turn my back on a good story with some magic and I have always loved a good story about, what my family calls, haints. Every princess fairy tale has spirits and witchcraft, which are also always already cultural forms and stories too. Since black orature might be the only space where black people are not THE DEMONS or DEVIL itself in such tales, seeing where black women figure in this tradition is important.
Malindy is a little girl who loves to sing and dance: “everywhere she went, she sang about it… and she would sway this way and that, to and fro.” The way the story is set up already makes me laugh—it just sounds like a description I have heard and a little girl who I might have met. Well, apparently, Malindy would sway “to and fro” just a little too much and so one day she dropped her pail of milk on the ground and all over herself. Crying and too scared to go home with no milk and a ruined dress, she sits on the fence and cries until the devil comes along, a wee little furry thing with a long tail, “no bigger than a minute.” The devil is “just starting out with his devilment” and it’s his first case with a child so he makes a pact with Malindy: he will receive her soul when she turns 29; she will, in return, get a new pail of milk and a clean dress. The devil gives her until she is 29 years old to live and returns to collect her SOUL. When he knocks on her door asking for her SOUL, Malindy takes off her shoe, tears off one SOLE, and gives it to him and him, not knowing any better, thinks he has the real thing. Sometimes, to win in the end, you just need clever word-play!
“Malindy and Little Devil” dates back to the 1890s and highlights the kind of humor and love of language play that shapes how I understand African American rhetoric, language, and literacy. I like this fusion of pleasure and politics. There is a kind of joy in telling and hearing these stories, much like what Hamilton describes when she talks about her memories of women’s stories, both in how they sounded from women’s mouths and in the gestures that corresponded. Joy and ongoing participation obviously do not come here from the paraphernalia/brand that you buy. The point of such language play, however, is not merely to just be clever. I can point to numerous examples of creative wordplay in black language, like Lil Wayne’s lyrics for instance. Clever lyrical displays, however, without meaningful content/message mean nothing. It’s the content of the wordplay and what you make it do that matter. Even the meanest and evilest of things, in this case the devil, can be reduced to being “no bigger than minute,” which made me laugh when I first heard it. Telling this kind of story that reduces even the devil to smallness is a rhetorical imagination that seems HUGE to me in the context of Post-Reconstruction, the time frame connected to this story. And even though Malindy did a foolish thing that endangered herself, her life is not over. She can always go back in her head, remember what happened in the past, and then re-cast that history for the present and future, even when the devil comes back.
In “Woman and Man Started Even,” we learn two things about these two characters: “she couldn’t win over him, and he couldn’t beat her. That was the way it was. Just level.” Well, Man just couldn’t stand this. He couldn’t stand the idea of a woman being around that he couldn’t “whip.” Yes, that is exactly what the story says, now if that’s not signifying on men, then I just don’t know what is! So Man went up to God and asked for more strength so he could be better than Woman and was granted his wish. Woman asked God to reverse this but was denied so she got highly upset. In her rage against God, she opened herself up to the devil’s presence who she told her woes to. The devil encouraged Woman to go back to God and ask for the “keys hanging by the left pearly gate.” When she got the keys, she commenced to locking up all of man’s stuff and every place he liked, like the kitchen and bedroom. Even though he was so much stronger now, he couldn’t unlock anything Woman didn’t want him to. And because Woman refused to trade in or share her keys for some of Man’s strength, she’s the one who has the inside knowledge of everything and the real power.
Now if I can get my students to put aside their dutiful, Christian abhorrence of a story that includes the presence of the devil, then they might enjoy “Woman and Man Started Even.” This second story still nests women with the devil and there are obviously all kinds of (subtle?) expectations about women’s chastity and virginity here (i.e., keeping everything locked up). So the story doesn’t overturn men’s dominance but Woman here KNOWS that! She does not believe in, value, or respect Man’s power over her and she will use them locks in every way she can. Power is named and called out, even if it cannot be fully dismantled. She is no victim or passive participant in an unchanging script. There’s no reason why fairy tales and folktales can’t frame such a critical understanding of our social order, especially if black women are going to the main characters. I find both pleasure and political power in knowing that African American folktales for children have offered such examples.
Though the cat was let out of the bag a long time ago and many know this by now, I will do the re-cap anyway. When Disney decided to create its first black princess— the 2009 feature film with Princess Tiana in The Princess and the Frog— the original plan was to name her Maddy. Black folk had a fit because that sounded way too much like Mammy. To make matters worse, “Maddy’s” original role was to be a maid to a white family. The argument was that Disney wanted to be historically accurate for 1920s New Orleans where the job opportunities for black girls would have been solely in the role of domestic servants to whites. Long story short, black folk slowed down some of Disney’s fantasy of animating the “post-racial” Gone With the Wind for “Maddy.” Instead, they made 19-year old Tiana a waitress, working hard to buy her own restaurant. In the end, we obviously still see her serving whites (under the guise of her desire to be an entrepreneur).
There are are so many problems with The Princess and the Frog that they are too numerous to detail here. What disturbs me most is Disney’s proclaimed desire to accurately portray the history of 1920s Jim Crow New Orleans by casting a black girl as a maid while having no interest in representing the historical terror of racism, white violence, or white people’s reign under Jim Crow at this time. The only character who inflicts terror and violence is the dark-skinned, gap-toothed black voodoo man, Dr. Facilier, who releases black-shadowed demons and is later dragged to the underworld for his sins. So in sum, The Princess and the Frog offers black girls and women very little. Though this has not been the focus of this 
Tiana is literally denied a human form/humanity for most of the movie because of her connection to and curse from a black man, Dr. Facilier, making it hardly coincidental that for her to finally receive a prince, he is not black. And while many have praised Disney for creating an interracial relationship, no other princess has been cursed by a black man and then married off into another race. We see flashbacks of Tiana’s very loving father in the movie but he was killed in World War I so, quite literally, loving black men are merely a memory in Tiana’s life while darkness and danger are her present reality in relation to them. Given the mainstream focus on the high rates of HIV and genital herpes amongst black women who are in relationships with black men, this Disney film seems very connected to the demonization of black heterosexual relationships and sexuality. I am not suggesting that these statistics related to AIDs and genital herpes are not serious cause for alarm and necessary political attention for black women and that we can simply ignore these statistics because the media always represents black men as subhuman. What Disney achieves, however, is the erasure of a whole new generation of black boys and young men who can only be cast as Tiana’s most dangerous peers. Black men are only a memory/history of goodness; it will only be white or light-skinned men who can help and love her now. These are dangerous, violent, white supremacist, heterosexist, patriarchal ideologies (not to mention the fact that it only took Tiana’s prince 20 minutes to forego his previous desire for multiple women— which is, perhaps, the biggest delusion of all for a young woman).
As The Princess and the Frog shows, we are not afraid to scare children with demons, black voodoo men, or monsters, so we should be ready to roll out the fire, witchcraft and sorcery of the KKK in U.S. history too. Bessie Smith and the Night Riders delivers on that! The magic and revision in this story means turning a curious, little black girl into the main character who alerts a black woman, Bessie Smith, and thereby saves a black community. Perhaps, then, the best parts of Bessie Smith and the Night Riders are that these black women do not need men to rescue them from real-world danger at all; they recognize the ways that white men inflict terror on black women, not deliver them from it; and they are not cast as mammies/waitresses by way of calling up “history.”
Columbia Records had to make Smith a personal train car because she was not allowed in the ‘whites only’ sections when she traveled. The South Iron and Equipment Company made the car especially for Bessie, with two stories, seven staterooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom so that it could hold everyone in her show, all obviously black people who wouldn’t have the freedom to use the bathroom and eat where/when they wanted in the South without alternate living/traveling quarters. The car could also hold the tent that Bessie’s crew created so that she could perform in multiple, alternate venues right there in the open. The car was painted bright yellow with green lettering so when Bessie came to town, everyone knew it: it was the visual marker of Bessie’s presence as much as it was the visual marker of the reality of de jure segregation.
While she is sneakily listening outside, she becomes the first to notice that the KKK have arrived with the intention of hurting everyone in the tent, with the usual tactics of setting the place on fire. Emmarene runs inside and lets Bessie know. Bessie immediately finds out what is going on, gets alarmed, and so steps outside to confront the white men in white sheets planning to terrorize yet another group of black people with a possible cross-burning, at least. Bessie yells at them for quite a while, threatens them, and warns they better leave. The KKK eventually ride off and Emmarene walks away as a heroine right alongside her idol, Bessie Smith, who invites her to the front row of the show. It may not be a “happily ever after” (racism offers no such thing) but there is a real-life happy ending. The entire community is saved and revitalized by Bessie’s courage, actions, and her music.
This story really does almost feel like a fairy tale in its imagining of one sole black woman being able to shake off a posse of KKK riders but all records indicate that Bessie Smith did just that. In July 1927, robed members of the KKK rode in on one of Bessie’s tent performances and began to pull up the tent’s stakes. When Bessie heard of what was happening, she confronted these white men, shaking her fist at them, cursing at them until they left, and then simply returned to her performance like nothing had just happened. In this story, it is a black woman who saves black people from white men… and it is a little black girl who recognizes and alerts everyone of the danger. The only aspect of this story that is actually fictional is the presence of the little girl. But with this fictive insertion, we see Bessie and Emmarene as a continuum of black women who can offer the most heroic rescue of themselves and their community.
Raising little girls to want to emulate Bessie’s actions here is a world I wouldn’t mind living in. Think back to how Tiana gets fooled by the white bankers who act as if they will let her buy a restaurant (until, of course, her new Prince intervenes.) Does it seem like Bessie or little bitty Emmarene would have made such a misjudgment of a Jim Crow institution and the white men who run it, especially since many of these white men would have adorned themselves in white robes at night as THE MEMBERS of the Klan? Would anyone in that tent watching Bessie perform have been that foolish about trusting white bankers in 1927? Why would we praise a story that represents a young black woman as gullible, exploitable, and naive when her community would have given her the tools to be exactly opposite of all that as the condition of her very survival under racial apartheid? Why would we tell children this kind of story about black people in the Jim Crow South under the ruse of creating the first black princess? And if black men are the site of violence that must be destroyed in order to become feminine princesses, then whose femininity is this? I am not suggesting that we can shelter children from entities like Disney; even if they do not watch the movies, they will hear of them from other children and see the images/brandings everywhere. However, we CAN ensure that children know Bessie…and Emmarene, 
