A Taste Of Power By Elaine Brown Summary

Creating Revolutionaries

Autobiographies are very important pieces of literature because they give us a personal insight into events from an individual’s standpoint as a member of a certain social group. From Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power-A Black Woman’s Story, and Mary Crow Dog’s autobiography, Lakota Woman, we can understand that for these two African American and Native American women, motherhood had beyond a personal reason. These two women had children for the purpose of progressing their revolution and improving the lives of their people. To them, they were not giving birth to a child as simply a member of their family, they were giving birth to whom they hoped would become revolutionaries and warriors.

African Americans

and Native Americans are both historically oppressed groups of people. During the time of slavery African Americans did not have the right to have a family. Children were taken from their homes and sold to white masters who would take them far away from their families. Women were viewed as less than a human being. Their masters always had complete control over them. As Assata Shakur states, “She was considered less than a woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhorse.” Native Americans had some of the same issues. The “white” believed that Native bodies were “dirty” and therefore “rapable”. As Andrea Smith states, “Because Indian bodies are considered ‘dirty,’ they are sexually violable and ‘rapable.’ In patriarchal thinking, only a ‘pure’ body can really be violated” (281). The genocide of Native Americans by “whites” goes as far back as to the time when the British settlers gave Natives smallpox infested blankets to get rid of them and take over their lands. During the black power movement and AIM movement when the women of these two groups of people were given a responsibility, an important task for the improvement of their people, they did not hesitate to fulfill it.

Elaine Brown grew up in North Philadelphia surrounded by poverty and violence. Her mother always told her that she was different and that she was not like all the other black girls. All throughout her childhood she wanted to be “white” instead of embracing her “blackness”. She wanted a better and a different life for herself, something unlike the other “blacks” in her neighborhood and so she did everything in her power to do it. She did not want to accept the real problems that African Americans were facing. The first time she came to the realization that she could not ignore the problems of African Americans anymore was when she came face to face with the girls that she was going to teach piano to. In her autobiography, A Taste of Power-A Black Woman’s Story, she states, “They were me. It was me I saw. There was my face, my pain, my nothing-little-nigger-girl expression lingering on their faces and in their eyes” (100). She also states, “As I looked at the sweetness of their brown faces, I wanted to hide from them and from all I knew. I stood in trance, gazing at the worn books white people had charitably tossed to them to soothe their Judaeo-Christian consciences” (101). This was the moment that Brown realized that she had to do everything in her power to fight for the rights of her people. In this point of her life she discovered the Black Panthers and found a new meaning to her life.

When Brown first met the captain of the women in the movement, Ericka Huggins, as a woman, all her responsibilities become clear to her. Brown quotes Huggins by stating, “Our gender was but another weapon, another tool of the revolution. We also had the task of producing children, progeny of the revolution who would carry the flame when we fell, knowing that generations after us would prevail” (137). As women of the revolution, they had the most important job, the job of creating more revolutionaries because for any revolution to survive the number of members or the number of people willing to fight is always the most important. More children meant more people who could keep the fire going so that there would be no chance of extinction of revolutionaries. The “pigs” were killing them for wanting the rights that they deserved such as the rights of having a family and wanting a voice. It was an on going violent war that needed soldiers. It was either “we get our rights or we give our life” which meant an increasing number of deaths of African American revolutionaries. The “pigs” were killing black revolutionaries and as an African American woman, Brown had the power to create more. She took the words that were said by Huggins and she applied them. Brown states, “However, since I considered it her fault that I had stopped taking birth-control pills, after she encouraged all of us to have at least one baby for the revolution, if my baby were a girl, I was naming her Ericka” (203). This statement conveys that to Elaine Brown and the rest of her female comrades, giving birth was their duty and responsibility. It was the role that was given to them as women of the movement. Their bodies would hold the future for their people.

When Brown runs away from the revolution with her child who is her revolutionary, she states that she was doing the act for her people. In her words, “I was abandoning something, but I was saving something. It was the hope, that had been my hope, and my mother’s hope, and her mother’s hope, and the hope of each of my people- mothers, aunts, brothers, fathers, children. If my life had any meaning left, this hope in one black child would live” (450). In the end of her autobiography she understands that black women were not simply vessels that carried revolutionaries. Simply giving birth is not what would give her people a revolutionary and bring change but it was her political actions and work as well as her role as a mother that would improve the future for her people.

As a Native American woman, Mary Crow Dog had some of the same reasons as Elaine Brown for having a child.

Her people were being sterilized against their will because “whites” thought that Natives were filthy and dirty because of the way they dressed and their lifestyle. “Whites” thought that they did not deserve to live and so they were systematically killing them and overall attempting to eradicate Native culture. Andrea Smith states in her writing, “One doctor in his attempt to rationalize the mass sterilization of Native women in the 1970s stated, ‘People pollute, and too many people crowded too close together causes many of our social and economic problems…we have an obligation to the society of which we are part. The welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out for solutions, one of which is fertility control’ ” (281). Even Crowdog speaks about the forced sterilization of Native women. In her autobiography, Lakota Women, she states, “My sister Barbara went to the government hospital in Rosebud to have her baby and when she came out of anesthesia found that she had been sterilized against her will. The baby had only lived for two hours, and she had so much wanted to have children” (4). This incident was a strong motivation for Crow Dog wanting to have children. Her people were being killed off and her culture was on the brink of extinction. There were signs that read, as Andrea Smith states, “Save a fish; spear a pregnant squaw”

(182).

Very few people were alive who still knew the true native languages, ways and cultures. The ones that did know were both old and dying of age or being murdered by the “whites”. This is why it was important for Crow Dog as a native woman to give birth to progenies or children who would keep the native ways alive and away from extinction. It was one of the few things that she could do for her people as a woman that the male could not. It was a way for the women to fight back.

Giving birth was a symbolic act of resistance against “whites” who were trying to erase natives from the land and its history.

In Crow Dog’s autobiography we see her determination to have her child at Wounded Knee. Having her child there without any modern medication or “white” doctors was symbolic for her and her people. It showed that they had survived without the intervention of whites before and they could still survive. It was an important event for all of the people at Wounded Knee. Crow Dog states, “Denise Banks came in and hugged me, saying, ‘Right on, sister!’ and he was crying, and that made me cry, too. And then Carter Camp and Pedro Bissonette came in with tears steaming down their faces. All these tough guys were weeping”(163). Giving birth to a child did not simply mean bringing a child into the world, it meant bringing a new warrior to the battlefield. As a Native woman, Crow Dog, like Brown, felt that it was her responsibility and something that only she as a woman could do for her people. She had the power to bring new life into the world as another ray of hope for her people and hope that their culture and their native ways would live

on.

From the outside we may think, “What’s the big deal about having a child?” But if we were a part of Brown and Crow Dog’s movements we would truly understand the importance and significance of having a child. Their social movements were working to actively demolish the on going oppressive history of their people. Their people were losing children and family members. They were not even allowed to be in charge of their own communities or in some cases even have a community. As women, they both saw it as their responsibility and duty to provide their revolutions with warriors and fighters. To them, having a child was not about keeping their own family lineage going but it was about keeping their whole race going. It was all about having a child for the revolution and having it for all the things their revolution stood for. It was about giving birth to children who would continue to fight for the rights of their people and who would continue to tell the stories of their people.