On theme is a production of iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media, December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy five. Sometimes I know I go places in the diary that take my breath away, as if there were someone else living inside me, with her own determined will to see and speak clearly. Because I don't write to protect myself or to say things I don't dare say to others. I don't cater to any pampered image of myself as a too sensitive
soul for whom the world is too much. In the Diary her only friend, neither too fragile nor too sensitive. I have many true friends, and the portrayals I have known I have asked for. I don't write to hide from the world. Today's episode Diary dialogues I'm Katie and I'm Eves. Kathleen Collins was a writer, filmmaker, and activist. She's known for works like the nineteen eighty two film Losing Ground, as well as the plays In the Midnight
Hour and The Brothers. Sadly, Kathleen died from breast cancer in nineteen eighty eight at the tender age of forty six, before most of her work could be published, so Kathleen's daughter, Nina Collins, took to the task of diligently gathering her mom's work and releasing it.
In twenty sixteen, Echo Press posthumously published a collection of Kathleen's stories called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love, and in twenty nineteen, Notes from a Black Woman's Diary was published. It features a selection of her fiction, letters and diary entries, including the diary entry that you heard at the beginning of this episode.
Now, it was a diary entry, but it was also a kind of commentary. She's actually reflecting on some of her older diary entries, pausing to think about why she wrote and what the diary meant to her. In my opinion, this is a brave act. The other day, I was just thinking about going back to look at some of my old journals, and I was already starting the sweat. Girl.
You know, I've thrown away and ripped up all my old journals and I regret it. Yeah, like especially the ones I've had when I was really young. But they're just so embarrassing, and I'm like, I want to make sure no one ever sees these, including myself.
Yeah, that's how I feel about looking at my own and not even once I were that old. How old were the ones that you were?
It was that you ripped up the last ones I think I ripped up. I was truly like in like middle school or something, which now I'm like, oh, it would be like funny to like go back and look at them. I have someones from like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen era. I haven't ripped those up, but baby, I will, I will.
I haven't learned you just said.
She did it. No, because like the closer I am to that age, I'm like, nah, that's embarrassing, Like you know, I can't have it nobody looking at me late that. Yeah, and I have some diary entries from you know, this year that I will likely you rip up later on.
Yeah, I know I got something from last year.
Girl.
It's a lot of them in there that I don't want to see, and I just couldn't imagine publishing them of my own volition. Yeah.
And then even the fact that she's like commenting on herself that makes me like, I don't know if I would.
No, I wouldn't be able to do that. I don't think I would. I mean, when I go back when I was wanting to go back and look at my old journal entries, it was for practical reasons. I was like, oh, I know, I put some story ideas in there somewhere. I had some notes that I took about yoga or something like that. But I knew I was gonna come across other stuff while I was in there. I was like, I'm not trying to sift through all that to find what I need.
Yeah, even not even like diaries, but the pictures you take and then your phone like makes a little video of like the status fucking day.
Of coming up.
You know what it is? Yeah, yes, same energy, same energy, but almost a little worse because AI is doing that to you, and you're doing it to yourself when you're going back to the journals, putting yourself through that mess.
But I'm on the same page as you. So there aren't many diary entries in Notes from a Black Woman's Diary, but you get the best of both worlds. You get some of the original entries, and you get this meta narrative where the author gets to analyze her past self
with more context and insight. Kathleen's entries give us a peek at contemporary published diaries, but they're a tiny sliver of a long history of black women writing their innermost thoughts and feelings on paper that includes their history of slave narratives, letters, and autobiographies. And through all of these published and unpublished diaries, we get to learn more about historical eras and culture, about the biographies of our ancestors,
and about the day to day experiences of communities. Plus we get a sneak peek into the private, interior worlds of everyday people, unmarred by the specter of surveillance. And to be honest, it feels a little voyeuristic, but we're lucky to have the diaries that we do. So let's grab our tiny keys and crack open the padlocks on a few diaries. First up, Francis and Rowlin Whipper. Francis was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in eighteen forty five,
and she was the oldest of five girls. Her father dealt in lumber. Not much is known about her mother, but the family had a fair amount of social and political status in black circles in the city, and they were considered free people of color. Frances was well educated and she and her sisters were proponents of women's rights
and suffrage. Was a teacher, and she was a writer, and she was so good at her jobs that abolitionist and politician Martin Delaney commissioned her to write his official biography. That made her the author of the first biography of a freeborn Black American man.
As an avid writer, Francis also kept a diary in eighteen sixty eight that still exists today. It's one of the oldest by a black woman from the South, and it's housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. But I just called that the Blacksonian Trial. In her diary, she writes about what she's reading, Dante, Shakespeare, Thomas Carlisle. She talks about writing her book, finishing it,
and about its publishers and the pay for it. There's a little name dropping here and there on lectures and readings that she attended, like Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this diary entry, she talks about famous abolitionists and journalist William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the anti slavery newspaper The Liberator. Wednesday, February twelfth, eighteen sixty eight, mister William Lloyd Garrison spent the morning with me.
I thank him a grand, noble soul, a singularly perfect development of God's highest humanity, a great intellect consecrated to one idea. I felt a reverence while in the presence of this great man who came to the rescue of a gaped and helpless people. God marked him out from the number to his truths. But is he a humanitarian? How can his practiced pen and ready heart remain uninterested while the same wrong exists under another form. God knoweth
his purposes and the instruments best adapted. She mentions the anti slavery meetings that she goes to, and we learn a little bit about how anti black violence is showing up in current events that affect her. Sunday, August second, Columbia, South Carolina, reached Columbia about six o'clock. Mister Hipper met me at the depot with his buggy and took me to my boarding place, where an elegant and spacious room awaited me. Breakfast was tempting. My dear friend mister Adams
was in to see me. Very soon after my arrival. Charlotte came to see me in the morning but Kate did not went to church in the morning with Harry Maxwell and mister Adams, the governor, and all the members were there. Quite an excitement created on account of the disappearance of Joe Howard after the visit of the Ku klups Klan at night, and we get some insight into some of our socio political opinions. Saturday, February twenty second,
Washington's birthday. But if things continue as they are, there will be but little country left to celebrate it. For myself, I am no enthusiast over patriotic celebrations, as I am counted out of the way politic. I wrote very satisfactory today. Matthews brought me the Commonwealth and other papers. There was a grand description of Reverend to Bartell, Charles Elliot Norton and O. Bronson Alcott appear of the finest spiritual essence. I heard him at the Anti Slavery meeting. Also GB Fothenham.
But she gets into some Monday moments too. She talks about her travels and snowstorms and all the folks she knew who were getting married while she was alone, and she talked about her later relationship with lawyer and legislator William James Whipper. Thursday August twentieth woke early wondering whether to throw up the sponge or accept a loveless life or not, felt as though w could not love anyone. A letter came from him today which restored me, A
real love letter. What does throw up the sponge mean? I mean, I get the gist, but I was like, I've never heard that idiom before.
Maybe like, oh, I'm just an old maid cleaning my house.
I'm throwing up the spode.
Actually that makes sense, that's probably it.
I mean, there were a lot of domestic workers at the time. That was a lot of black women's jobs.
I was also thinking it meant something about like birth control. I feel like it wasn't there some type of sponge?
Yeah? Or is I don't know. Yeah, I think that was a method of birth control back then. Yeah. Still, those are two guesses. Yeah. I was thinking when I was going through all of her stuff, like, I feel like I wanted to be her friend when I was reading her diaries. I mean that might just be my delusion, but yeah, but I just loved how much she cared about writing and about learning and just about all the works she was reading, like actually critiquing it and having
thoughts on it. There were moments where she was like, I was talking to I can't remember the person's name, but ostensibly a friend or an associate. I was talking to him and he said this about this piece, and I couldn't deal with that. I couldn't handle it. He was wrong. I liked her remarks and her reflections on how she felt about the work. I liked how she was like, that person needs to do some more work, like their writing needs to be tightened up, or their
lecture needs to be tightened up. I really appreciated that element of her work, and she wrote so much about it. And I know this was just one year of writing, of detailed writing about her life, but you could tell she spent a lot of time in the books in the weeds, and she really enjoyed the knowledge, gathering, consciousness, raising elements of everything.
So she wrote that biography of that man. Did she write more public facing work that would kind of get into her cultural critic bag or was it all in her diary.
I think it was mostly in her diary. H Yeah, I might be wrong about that, but she didn't do a ton of public writing that I know of.
And I think that's a testament of the time that she was writing into, because now I can't really imagine someone like her just writing that stuff in their diary. And maybe that's just like the bubble I'm in, but it seems like nowadays, if you are really in the books and you got a little pin you can push, you're pitching the Atlantic, you're pitching the New York Times, you're pitching the Cut, you know, yeah, and you're not
going to just like keep that to yourself. And it's interesting too, because I imagine she didn't think about having an audience for this diary, but now we like write for an audience. I feel like even in our diaries, we write for like thinking like, oh somebody might read this, like not even just like oh yo, man, going through your stuff, but like, oh later when I'm the famous and people want to read my diaries, like let me, let me put a little funk on this, you know,
instead of just like writing normal like you would. Right, Do you feel that way, because I feel like i'd be like, I feel that way. We write a little better.
I feel that way for myself. So for me, when I write in my journals today, it's more about I don't want if anybody finds it, I don't want them to read this. Sometimes I be leaving out names because of that. But then I have to check myself and be like, girl, be honest, you are writing this for you, so just get it out here, like you don't have many places you can do that. I don't really think about that in my journals from a larger perspective of
like what society would read later. However, I do know that I have this self surveillance of thinking about what if this goes into the archives one day? So it's not necessarily conscious for me, but I can't see it being unconscious because the reality of it is that I have a podcast, I write things, you know, So I have things that will exist already in the public sphere in some way potentially on the internet for eternity until
the Internet blows up. So I do probably un blove next week, next week, thank god, because some of that stuff needs to go away. Yeah, so I do. I don't find myself self censoring like for that reason per se, But I have an awareness that like, I mean, do I want archives, you know? Do I want my estate to put some of things in the archives. Do I want to be worthy of that? Yes, I think that's the thing I would like to be worthy of that, Like my work will actually be meaningful to people in
the future. But do I want my journals and diaries to go there? No, absolutely not. But that is what happened with Francis, and her eighteen sixty eight diary gives us a pretty detailed view of life in Boston and South Carolina in the reconstruction era, so it goes beyond just her personal reflections about her life. When we get back from the break, we'll jump forward about half a century to the lively generative period that was the Harlem Renaissance.
Up next, Alice Dunbar Nelson. Like Francis, Alice advocated for political and social causes. She was in wom men's clubs, organized for suffrage and focused her journalistic efforts on topics like World War One, racial equality, and education. And she wrote essays, short stories, and poems. So she shared a lot of her thoughts in public. But her diary was published in nineteen eighty five, and it was the second book length diary of a black woman to be published.
The first was activist writer and educator Charlotte Forton's in nineteen fifty three. Alice's diary provides an unfiltered look into her raw emotions as she endured personal ups and downs. As doctor Akasha Gloria Hall says in the book Give Us Each Day, the Diary of Alice Dunbar Nelson. During the periods when she kept the diary, Dunbar Nelson's life
was in flux or crisis. Alice started writing her diary entries in nineteen twenty one, and her last entry is on, as she put it, the last night of a disastrous year of nineteen thirty one.
But a big chunk of her entries are missing from nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty.
Five mm hm, because we don't have evidence of them. We don't know if Alice wrote during this period, but it is likely that she did, so we'll just have to be okay with that gap. But beyond that, we have a lot of her thoughts and sometimes she even typed entries on separate sheets and stuck them on the pages in her diary. Sometimes she put flyers, cards and invitations in the diary. Here's the first entry. In a preface,
she wrote just after she began keeping her diary. Had I had sense enough to keep a diary all these years that I have been traveling around, particularly that memorable summer of nineteen eighteen when I did my bit traveling through the South for the Council of Defense, well there would be less confusion in my mind about lots of things.
Now I begin this day to keep the record that should have been kept long since that flux that doctor Hale mentioned, the confusion that Alice mentioned that's present across the entries. She talked about her writing, her social advocacy, and her teaching, but she also wrote about how she struggled financially and how she was quote forty six years
old in nowhere Yet. Nine years after that comment, she wrote the following Saturday, September sixth, nineteen thirty, lay in bed and finished per roots is the master of the day of judgment and have been wanting to commit suicide all day. Life is such a god awful mess and I'm such a total and complete failure. God.
We have more suicidal ideation, losing jobs, business and publishing struggles, health complications.
Spiritual development, romantic flings, learning to drive deaths in the family, celebrations of spring. She takes us on a whole rollercoaster. We get to learn about her writing submissions and subsequent rejections, which we're getting her down. Monday, November two, nineteen thirty one, sent Harlem John Henry to The Crisis Today. She had sent the poem to the Bookmen, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and
other places. According to Alice, the rejection from the Bookmen came back quote disgustingly prompt and yeah, I can relate, but anyway, Harlem John Hemn Reviews. The Armada was eventually published in the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis in January of nineteen thirty two. At the time, writing was a boys club that was hard for black women to break into, and it was hard for Alice to balance keeping up
with her work and her activism. Her work did grow more popular over time, but her funds did not reflect that. She started her journal entry on August nineteenth, nineteen twenty nine. This way, I am so flat broke that it is funny. An epidemic of poverty seems to have struck us all.
It wasn't all doom and gloom, though there were bright spots, moments where she drank and danced and hot from party to party.
Thursday, December eighth, Well, here sitting in the little bear dressing room of Robinson's famed Colosseum, while outside, a jazz band consisting of five slim black youths are discoursing about the snappiest rendition of don't We Have Fun? One Shimmy's automatically. Even in my big coat, huddled with the proper missus Miller, mine Hostess, and the no less proper Missus Robinson, I let go hoarse, voice and all, and shake a shoulder and croake a line or two to help on the
jazz noise. As her diary shows, Alice had quite a complicated life. It's disheartening to see how Alice went through that same rejection and struggle that so many other black women writers did at the time. It's also hard to see the mental challenges that she faced in her own words.
But at the same time we see that Alice lived a full life and worked hard and played hard, and just like so many artists today, she questions the strength of her work and her self worth my diary it's going to be a valuable thing one of these days. She said on September twenty first, nineteen twenty eight. And I'd say she was right.
So she was pretty cognizant that people would be reading this afterwards. Yes, I think she was. I think she knew that there was a possibility of that, and hers was entertaining to me. So I wonder if she was kind of doing that for the future gaze she.
Could have been she might've known her life was kind of a reality show in a lot of ways. I mean, there were a romantic there were love interests on the side.
There was party, yeah, the party, all the rejections, the drinking.
People love a little.
A good little underdog David and Goliath moment. She's getting all these rejections. But I mean she's known as a big deal of the Harlem renaissance now. But if she hadn't been writing all those things like who would know that you're I say, got rejected seven times and from which places? Right?
She was like, let it be know. Yeah, they played in my face. And that's my favorite part about reading journals. I mean you really get that insight into what they were truly thinking.
Yeah, and what mattered because there's a million things that happened to you that even if you do keep a journal, you're not writing about like you could step on somebody foot at the intersection. You probably not going to write about that in your journal, but they're gon'll be like this bitch stepped on my lubitus.
And you also get an insight into, like I guess if you want to do some cycle analyzing, into what they choose to include and what they don't choose to include. So there might be things that we now in hindsight, you know about them, and we know those things happen, and they may have represented it a different way in their diaries or they might not have included it at all. But there's also those moments where you read through stuff like this and I say, and I think, why did
they say it like that? Why does she say did my bit? What does that mean? What's behind that? You know, there's a lot of subtext behind certain things and things where you can see the brackets there, you can see the parentheses, and something else happened. We might not get to know about it through the diaries, especially because there are probably some she wrote that are completely missing for many years.
Yeah, and things that also can't be like really cooperated, like Okay, you went on these travels. There weren't like as many pictures back then, videos like maybe no one knew you were traveling like this, or maybe you had like a few official stops, but you was going off to little joy it on the side, you know. So it's interesting to hear that, But it's like, I guess it's kind of the same way now for people who
are not famous. I don't think someone like of her caliber could do that now could do what like say, like I'm trying to think of like a well known writer now, Tana hose Coats people know where that at, Like he don't want people know where he at, and people trying to picture. We saw Tanahsey here. You know, he bought a house in Brooklyn. You know, I was just trying to be normal buying house. They plastered that
in like a publication. He's like, I can't live in this house anymore, Like I ain't want the streets to know where I'm at.
Oh, And it goes deep. It's not even just seeing you in public. They see this plant in the background in this corner and this stop light on this street, and they're like, let me zoom in. I can find out where that is Google maps. Let me go check.
I bet his diary it's good, but I know maybe he would keep it for people to see, maybe he have some directions or I don't know, but I just don't think that in the time period we're living in, writers can have like that anonymity. We just have to go by the word of their diary, like there's other ways to check and fact check what they said and get some corroboration that wasn't available back then. And that happens so often for historians and scholars who are going
back and looking through people's work. And when I'm going back and looking at people's biography, sometimes that'll be the only work. Sometimes it's an autobiography. Sometimes it's biography that was an official biography that where they specifically talk to the person and wrote the biography for them. And you have to go on their word for us today because we don't have any other sources to be able to
fact check. So you end up with inaccurate information. And some of that information is like more key, some of its small things. But like for instance, like with birth dates, people lied about their birthdates all the time. They be lying by decades by decades, location child.
They just be making stuff up and knowing they don't know, which I love. That's one of my favorite parts about reading biographies. But one thing I did like was that first diary entry that I read, when she talked about how she wished she would have written journals before. I really love that because she's commenting on the significance of
diary writing just for herself. Because so we were talking about how she probably knew that there would be some observation of her diary entries at some point, or imagine there might be, or assumed there would be, but it clearly was doing something for her mental state, and she acknowledged that, and she said, you know, I wouldn't have had the confusion now if I think that was the truth. I think this is a moment of an unreliable narrator.
I think she was still confused because life is life, and life was life and for her, because we haven't even gotten into Paul Laurence Dunbar who he had tuberculosis I think it was, and he was prescribed alcohol for it and got hooked on alcohol. So I mean not laughing because it's a funny, funny thing, but it's just like it's really dramatic, Like her life is really dramatic in a lot of that is shown in this diary.
And she'll end some of the years like it'll be the way the book is organized as chronologically, and doctor Hole will give this kind of overview of what's to come.
In the year, which is saucy. Just read those and you're like, oh my god. But you get to the end and she'll be like, this year was terrible. Yeah, And I'm like, girl, you're still confused. And that's okay or is just her perception of things, because I know, like I'll be complaining about stuff and people be like girl, and they'll like be like boom boom boom, like laying out all this stuff about my life that they see from a different perspective. But I'm just complaining about like
this one thing that's getting on my nerves. And it's like, well, just how I feel like you can see all this stuff like oh you pop in blah blah blah.
Well I don't feel that way.
It was that terrible year.
I am one there with you. I feel you on that. I think it's because the negatives often outweigh how the positives feel.
Yeah, there you feel them more. You feel them one hundred percent more. It's so easy for me to go back and lay out all the really bad things that happen rather than the ups and I have to in my own life. I check myself on that a lot of the time and definitely make sure that I acknowledge those things and offer myself gratitude. I got to come back to earth sometimes. But she did go through a lot.
She had deaths in the family and dealt with the marital issues, stepping out, her, stepping out, him, stepping out, step step.
Stepside to side, front to back, double dishes.
Girl, they was doing line dances at a cookout. So yeah, I think that was her perception of how things went. And there were ups and downs in her life, and we got to read about it, and we got to read about it, and I am grateful for it. I think there are many stories that could come out of her life, like dramatize or fictionalized stories that could come out of her life. Yeah, that is clear from her diary.
Oh it could be like you know how Moesha had the diary, okah diary. It could be her doing a little voiceover and then it like goes into the little vignette of what she wrote about.
Okay, next production coming up from.
Eves and Katie, somebody give me a studio. So after the break, our last diarist brings us home. Last, but definitely not least, Alice Walker. Yeah, another Alice, So we'll call her by her last name. She's a little different than our last two diarists because she's still living and because her journals were published recently.
Yep, Valerie Boyd edited Gathering Blossoms under Fire, The Journals of Alice Walker nineteen sixty five to two thousand. It was published in twenty twenty two, so we get a kind of real time look at how Walker changed as a person and as an artist over time. There's a good chance y'all know her, especially with the release of the twenty twenty three version of The Color Purple film. But Alice Walker is a writer and activist, best known
for writing the novel The Color Purple. The book made her the first black woman to win the Police Surprize for Fiction, but she also wrote the novel The Temple of My Familiar, the nonfiction book In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, and many poetry collections, along with dozens of other works. Suffice it to say she has classics in
the literary canon. So it makes sense that now, as she enters her eighties, we get to take a peek behind the curtain and see how she thinks about the big capital eye issues and the small joys of life. She wrote about her discovery of Zora Neil Hurston, her Grave, and other black women authors whose quote lives ended in
poverty and obscurity. As she put it August twenty first, nineteen seventy three, I did not return to this notebook to write about the Caribbean cruise in July, but to write my impressions of Eatonville and my hurt and horror at the neglect of Zora's memory as evidenced by her Grave. I still can't write about it, but I must. She wrote a lot about love, relationships, and romance. July sixteenth,
nineteen ninety nine. The Mother Piece says the sun will shine again soon, that there is a chance to be lovers in a way that heals old wounds. That I can handle complexity except when I'm tired. I want a simpler life, fewer things, more quality, time with people I love. She also wrote about how her work made her feel. June sixteenth, nineteen seventy three. I'm glad, I wrote in Search of our Mother's Gardens to read at the Ratcliffe Symposium on Black Women. But why did I have to
burst into tears in the forum later? The truth is that in a way, I am not embarrassed by tears if they are speaking to feeling in life, as opposed to abstractions which the forum presenters were indulging in June was wonderful. She hugged me. And after Barbara and tear said, you're trying to carry your mother and the weight is too heavy. June said, but why shouldn't you carry your mother?
She carried you, didn't she? That is perfection? In a short response, it is just that I learn as I write about her, all our mothers, just how fantastic they were and are. Sometimes I want to write about smashing a white face, but it always comes to this. I would rather write about our mothers, write up until time to smash. Then I just smash, and then if I live to tell the tale, I probably wouldn't even bother
to tell it. I go back to describing our mother's face, And that same day questions came up related to her social and political ideologies. I am upset deeply about the subservient condition of African women. I wonder how other women feel about this. In an undated nineteen eighty entry, Walker said the following, what do we want, my god, what
do black women writers want? We want freedom? Freedom to be ourselves, to write the unwriteable, to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, to dare to engage the world in a conversation it has not had before. So Katie, I was thinking when I was reading Alice Walker's journal entries that she knew somebody was going to read those.
Yes, she's been famous for a very long time.
She has been famous for a long time, and these entries go back to you to the earlier years of her famous. She's been famous for a long time still.
But the way she was right in the full sentences m dashes, she knew yeah. And it's funny her diary entries like she'll spill some like t on people that are still alive, and most people don't do that. Like girl, you do not care. Like it's funny when you like are encountering like old black people, I think especially they do not care they're like whatever, Like what you're gonna do. They'll just say anything, yes and write it down. Do
you think that's wrong or are you cool with that? I mean personally you didn't talk about me because but I mean I think it's just like honest, Like, I know, people be like mad at you when you like talk about them about some shit they did, like you did it. Like, as long as I'm not lying on you, you did it, So don't be mad, be mad at yourself. All I can do is pray for you.
Yeah, they're gonna be mad still though, Keep praying.
But yeah, I do find that like funny about Alice Walker's diary entries. But I do like that hers were released while she was still alive. I think there's something about like the agency of it that I appreciate. She did work with Valerie Boyd, who unfortunately passed away before the collection was published, but she was the editor for it and worked really hard on that. And Emory holds the Alice Walker papers, so you can go to Emory Library and see her diary entries. Not all of them
are like as as neat like some of them. It's just like legal paths and she's drawing stuff, like she had a really beautiful house, like drawing the estate and planning parties, and so it's like really cool to see her social life, all the people she's been in relationships with so many people, like romantic but also just like platonic, Like she's friends with a lot of people and seeing them come in and out of her sphere is really cool too.
Yeah, I like that about I like that. You know, there was name dropping across all these diary entries, all even and sometimes there were closer personal relationships, like with the when we were talking about Francis, those were lectures she was going to see if people. But once we get into Alice Dunbar and Nelson and we get into Alice Walker, they're like, this is who I was colt sing with, you know, yeah, I mean Langston Hughes. You know.
In the journal entries, Alice Walker had an entry of I think it was a poem she wrote to Langston Hughes and he was a mentor of hers, and she obviously had a lot of feelings after he died. And I just felt like spaces were so lively, like I could see the back and forth, like the communication and the camaraderie that was happening between people whose names I know, you know, people who was writing that I admire, or just artistry in general that I admire, and they're like, yes,
this person came to my party. We were at this bookstore, and I'm just like, wow, that seems so warm. It just felt so warm and yellow in so many moments in the diary entries and from a way where we saw the be happy about that, because I feel like now when we look at artists that we admire from the outside, it looks like it can be like a keeping up, like there's images you're trying to keep up with,
or like levels you're trying to reach. It can be a lot of social maneuvering around it, and we don't often get to see when we don't know people people we admire who are in public spheres, like how they feel about their writing, how they feel like, wow, I did this, I'm proud of myself, or I love my people, I'm glad my people showed up for me.
An interview that you know is going to be published on this day, or an acceptance speech where like, of course you have to say those things, but like, what are you saying, like to yourself, like before you go to bed at night.
Yeah, exactly. And it can also seem like people are so self assured about their fame and success and that they're just like this, it is what it is. I'm in these circles now, I'm on this different level now, and it just is. It just be And it's nice to see some of the struggles, like in Alice Dunbar Nelson's case, she had a lot of struggles with getting her work published that she actually talked about, and also seeing the humanity behind the notoriety. Yeah, that was nice.
So Alice Walker did do an interview with The New York Times not that long ago, and she said, quote, I want the journals to be used so that people can see this working through of disappointment, anger, sorrow, regret. So in that sense, it's a medicine book. And I liked that quote. I liked thinking of these diaries as healing. I think that was like a good way to go back and think about all of the diary entries we
have from black women. And we did talk a lot about people who have actual storytelling capacities, but it wasn't that way for you know, everyone, and not to the same extent as to the Alicees was for Francis, but they were medicine for themselves, which they actually said, this made me feel better, As Alice Dunbar Nelson said, there are medicines for people who are reading and getting to see more of that interiority of people that we might look up to or who had challenges, like some of
the enslaved people's narratives, and that we get to see that range of emotions and that it's not all things aren't always so cut and dry, they're not always so wrapped up in a nice, neat little bow like they are when they're presented to us, and even personal narratives like biographies, and I appreciate that, and that we can see that happen over time with the three people we had today, like this is from the eighteen hundred to the nineteen hundreds to this very moment with Alice Walker
still living today.
One thing I would like to see is diary entries from kind of just regular black women, because like these women, they had a certain amount of leisure time. You know, like the first lady, she's living in a time where slavery is existing, but she's a free black woman. But it's like, what was it like to be a black woman with five kids in the South d'ur in the sixties. You know, I don't think those people really had the luxury of sitting down and writing all that down.
They did not. I think doctor Hole actually talks about that in her scholarship. You're starting from a specific place when you have the luxury of these journals, and you can see that influx in these people's diaries too, because some of it is that it's just not extant, but some of it is that they just weren't writing at those times, and those times we have evidence of. But I think sometimes we too can also assume like they just didn't have as much space in their lives to
write these journals. I agree with you, and I also think on the flip side, it's nice to see black women have ease to be able to do that. Yeah, But I think, you know, these women we talked about today, it's like their heritages were really mixed too, and there were free people of color, and they had like high status in society, had money, So yeah, it was a lot of social class privilege that was happening for these people for sure, and education.
How Alice Walker said it could be medicine, Like, I don't know, I don't think I want to get our Alice's level, you know, and most people aren't going to be an Alice Walker, but a lot of people are going to be just more normal. So it's like, what were normal black women who did not have access to all these like really cool scenes and people and travel,
Like where's our medicine? Not saying that we can't get anything from these women who are living different lives than us, but I just want to see more.
More yeah, more variety, more range. I mean, we still ask them for those things today at a media representation, and it would be nice to have those that kind of perspective on this smaller level that is more touchable, that's more accessible to us. They exist, but they're farther and fewer between. And I also would imagine that like archiving
becomes another issue in this for people like that. So these people have families who had spaces to keep them, but we start talking about housing and being itinerant or you know, not always having financial, economic and housing security. You know that probably also went along with the people who were like have five kids and they didn't have this writing stature or any sort of artistic our professional stature,
and travel. These women did a lot of traveling. You know, they didn't have all that and they didn't have people who could keep up with it and make sure that it remained in existence over time. So I think, you know, those are harder, but yeah, we do need more of those, and not just from a personal perspective, I think also from a like sociological anthropological perspective for us to get a better handle and sense of how life was in
the past. And this just scratches the surface of all the diaries that writers and non writers alike have kept. There are the diaries of activists and teacher Charlotte for ingrim Key, journalist Ida B. Wells, poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and writer Jaanita Harrison, and they're all storytellers with some name recognition exactly. There are people like Emily Francis Davis, who was a free black woman in Philly during the Civil War.
She wrote a diary that can help us time travel and see what day to day life was like for her and get engauge on responses to the Civil War. Mary Virginia Montgomery and Laura Hamilton Murray and plenty of other black women named and unnamed have penned diaries.
Now it is time for roll credits, the segment where we give credit to a person, place, or thing that we encountered during the week. Ease, who are what would you like to give credit to?
I'll give credit to Ida b Wells, who we briefly mentioned it today's episode, but she also wrote diary entries where we got to learn more about her journey, her journalism, the events that happened to her, all the work that she was doing back in the day, and you can read those and those are super insightful about her work as well.
I would like to give credit to celebrating posthumous birthdays. Yesterday would have been my grandpa's eighty seventh birthday, and so I made a dish that he was known for making, and me and my family ate it and it was just a way to celebrate that was not sad. So I've been doing that for the last couple of years since he passed and it's fun.
On whatever.
Happy birthday, Grandpa, Thank you, and with that, we will see y'all next week.
Bye y'all bye. On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves, jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on Theme Show. You can also send us an email at Hello at on Theme Dot Show. Had to one Theme Dot Show to check out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.