Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

Save $7.20 at Amazon.com! Read chapter 1

Unafraid of the Dark, Rosemary Bray's remarkable memoir, chronicles the life, struggles, and triumphs of an African-American woman growing up during the 1960's. It is a story about love, gender and racial identity, and overcoming obstacles, told in precise, eloquent, and refreshing prose. Bray narrates her coming of age in a turbulent home environment framed by domestic abuse and poverty in Chicago. She proves herself to be an exceptional child through her love of books and learning. She earns a scholarship to the Francis W. Parker school, a private preparatory school in Chicago, and in 1972 matriculates to Yale University as part of the first significant group of black women to be admitted. Bray talks about her experiences as a budding socially conscious author, leading to notable appointments as a writer at Essence and The Wall Street Journal and as an editor of The New York Times Book Review. This book is a wonderfully inspirational success story. But Bray goes leaps and bounds beyond the typical "if I can do it, so can you" narrative. Unafraid of the Dark has a specific purpose, thesis, and calling.

Bray guides us through the corridors of her memory and personal history, describing both the good and the bad and how they relate to each other in her life. As a child, she survives her father's daily rages and violence, seemingly random but rooted in racism. She writes that her father "was haunted by the vision of white affluence he saw only from the periphery. [His] quest for manhood spilled over into a lust for domination." Both the randomness and the roots of her father's bitterness become integral to how Bray defines herself and responds to the world around her.

When faced with the prospect of raising four children on her husband's unstable, habitually gambled-away income, her mother registers for Aid for Dependent Children. A life of government dependency ensues for the Bray family. Bray brings to life the embarrassment of having to use food stamps, the necessity of hiding her father's household presence from the AFDC officials, the critical role of church and education in her personal growth, and her mother's unflagging perseverance in providing for her children despite the dire circumstances. One winter, the AFDC check does not come on time and the gas is turned off, making cooking and keeping warm impossible. However, "if having the gas shut off was tragedy, you wouldn't have known it from Mama's explanation. With the help of a huge old paint bucket, some leftover charcoal, and one of the racks from the useless oven, Mama improvised a grill." This creativity epitomizes the making-a-way-out-of-no-way mentality that keeps her mother-and therefore her family-alive and thriving.

As Bray looks inward, she looks outward. Her memoir is a complex book that captures W. E. B. DuBois' idea of double-consciousness. She quotes The Souls of Black Folk: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."

Bray's is a story that describes the humiliating blurring of the realms of public and private in the life of the welfare recipient. She also highlights the phenomenon of living in "two worlds" both as an African-American functioning in a white society and as a woman thriving in a male-dominated world.

As I read Unafraid of the Dark, I felt like I was looking into a mirror. I also grew up as a welfare dependent, earned a scholarship to Germantown Friends School, a private preparatory school in Philadelphia, and then matriculated at Yale. I also had a very turbulent relationship with my father—although instead of gambling and hustling, mine was a drug addict and alcoholic. His actions and perceptions of the world influenced my definition of myself and how I relate to the world.

Like Bray, I have a mother who, when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, bravely fought her way through them for my benefit. Like Bray, I used reading and writing as childhood forms of escape—and now find that they are two of my important tickets out of poverty. Furthermore, my double-consciousness has as many levels as hers. Not only have I had to deal with being African-American in predominantly white institutions of learning, but I have been poor in places where most folks, including the African-Americans, are middle class to rich: truly a double burden.

Bray powerfully articulates that when on welfare, you lose your identity as a private individual. You become a statistic, a subject. "To receive AFDC, you had to relinquish any hope of privacy in your personal and social life. Who lived with you, or slept with you, or spent your money was now the business of the state." Because of your inability to support yourself and your family financially, dependence defines and controls your livelihood. It therefore has a tremendous stronghold on your life. Autonomy is no longer an option; private life is framed by public life. Throughout her narrative, Bray shows how, for many people on welfare, this causes a tireless and painful political awareness. Just as the state keeps a watchful eye on each welfare recipient, the watchful eye is often reciprocated but without the element of power and agency. Instead, welfare recipients look back with fear, vigilance, and sometimes paralysis.

For Bray, the pursuit of education keeps her in perpetual physical and psychological transit between her poor black neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago and the predominantly white and affluent educational institutions of Parker and Yale. To get to Parker, Bray must take a bus, the El, then another bus, a significant geographic adjustment. When she finally gets there and learns her way around, she realizes the huge financial disparity between herself and her schoolmates. When she compares her home life to the lives of the other students, she painfully writes, "Being black was not the worst of it; I realized that afternoon that I was poor, too. I was ashamed." In attending these affluent schools, Bray becomes the visible minority, racially and economically. Her private self becomes the subject of public focus and discourse—a loss of autonomy and privacy very similar to the effects of being on welfare.

Unafraid of the Dark is more than an autobiography. It exemplifies the significance of interweaving the personal and the political. Bray braids her personal story in with larger political issues and events ingeniously. Early in the memoir, she offers an example of an encounter she has as a young girl with Dr. Martin Luther King at a rally in Chicago during his efforts to mobilize poor and African-American communities of the North just before he died. The anecdote illustrates that, even as a young child, her personal and political consciousness were intertwined. She frames every illustration of her past in the context of historical figures and debates such as Black Migration North, the rebirth of the feminist movement, the black power movement, the infamous Chicago Mayor Daley, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

In her recollections of Yale, she recounts a trend in law enforcement on Yale's campus in the 1970's, yet still prevalent today,in which black men, including some of her friends, were regularly targeted by police authority. Bray relates this trend to the historic tension between black men and police in Chicago, particularly under the Daley administration. Through examples like these, she successfully articulates the relationship between personal history and historical or collective identity. The layering of the personal and the political suggests that Bray's memoir might function as a kind of case study. I would actually argue that this work is more than a study of the effects of the welfare system on an individual or the issues a person faces when moving out of dependence on public assistance.

In the preface, Bray asserts, "I have written this book, in part, to show the good that could happen—that did happen—under the welfare system of the 1960's." Consequently, even with her negative feelings toward aspects of public assistance, Bray sets out to prove that welfare, before the recent changes made by politicians in the name of welfare reform and contrary to popular opinion, did have positive results. She uses herself as the prime example.

On the national level, a five year lifetime limit for women and their children to receive cash assistance has been implemented. States now have the power to decide independently how they will interpret this law as it relates to issues such as disabled children, medical benefits, and childcare subsidies. Pennsylvania, my home state, has already taken drastic measures to cut welfare provisions. Knowing this and reflecting on my own life, Rosemary Bray is right on target. If this law had been in place when I was 9, 10 or 11 years old, my mother, younger brother, and I would have been out on the streets.

Five years is not enough time for a single mother to get a solid education, a good job, and reliable, affordable childcare. This reform bill assumes that everything in life will go according to schedule for the welfare recipient on this five year plan. It blatantly ignores important factors such as unexpected sickness, family emergencies, or the difficulty and time involved in actually finding jobs. Although the proponents of welfare reform are often the ones who shout about "family values," this very bill embodies what is anti-family, anti-women, and anti-children. The so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act has the dangerous potential to prevent other Rosemary Brays from reaching their goals and bettering their lives. Unafraid of the Dark is a directed, political piece of work. Bray does not aim to entertain, impress, or appease anyone through her memoir. Using her life as example, she makes a powerful case against the recent draconian cuts to welfare provisions. She encourages people to ignore and critique the conservative hype about the supposed ills of welfare, and she uses her life to offset the stereotypes of people who are living or have lived on public assistance.

Bray's book serves as a mouthpiece for many on welfare who are working hard, achieving, and slowly but surely making progress towards the goal of financial independence. This work also serves as a voice for the children in poverty, born and yet unborn, who because of the recent reconstruction of national welfare guidelines, may not—will not—be able to overcome the dire and complex obstacles to get out, and stay out, of poverty.

Unafraid of the Dark is a conclusive and clear rebuttal to the overly-publicized and misinformed right-wing and watered-down liberal arguments against welfare. Who is Bray's intended audience? Everyone, because this issue is relevant to all Americans. Today, we cannot discuss the issue of welfare without discussing issues ranging from the power and autonomy of the states to stereotypes of women, from women's rights to race. In a time when welfare is being put on public trial, Bray's politically-framed autobiography becomes an editorial. It takes on the force of a direct mandate—a challenge to Americans to rethink the welfare reform issue and to consider the possible consequences of their conclusions, their opinions, and their political action—and non-action.