listening to Brian Eno

Moody argues that sentimental narratives established a triangulated relationship between reader, text, and the text’s social goal by assuming a shared moral code. Reviewing a history of masking and silence that strove to protect black women’s bodies—especially in representations among academics and public figures—Moody speculates that higher-class or more “composed” leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper are more palatable role models for cautious academic critics.
The radical or “excessive” church ladies articulate religious ecstasy and embodied spirituality; as she notes, their rhetorical excess spills over the careful surfaces (and disciplines) of academic theory—an excess of sexuality, emotion and embodied self-articulation that cannot be entirely explained or controlled by the historical record or religious and moral conventions of black womanhood (171-172). Personal narratives, religious visions and physical ecstasy, transgressions of motherhood and/or social expectation—none of these experiences, narrated in an effort to convey a spiritual path and convert the reader, fit the mold of nineteenth century black feminine propriety. It is powerful if you are willing to engage and explore the excess as truly what it is: beyond the rational, an engagement with communal and embodied power that transcends routine and social expectations, that may be ecstatic and sometimes awful, but always channels our most profound hopes. Its power is why Bambara asks us cautiously: “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”