"I sing the blues of a woman that has to tell it like it is

I sing church, a sister throwing off the trials of the week ending, and pulling on strength, from another sister or brother, for the new week a-coming.

I sing the song of play, for children too have wisdom

I sing Mama, looking alone at Toshi and Kwan"   Bernice Reagon

But when, and how does one begin to build a movement out of this in some ways elusive, perhaps errant, and in any case emotional sensibility?

"We been had/we been took/we been misled"

Radcliffe College is sponsoring in May, through the offices of assistant dean Doris Mitchell, a symposium entitled "Black Women: Myths and Realities." The guiding rationale appears to be that sisters can begin to approach the task of self-definition and self-direction with definite focus. It is an excellent idea, and the title in particular encompasses the dilemma in which we find ourselves. For example, we watched our seduction by the Moynihan myth of the black matriarchy. And continually, still, we miss the union and explication of our perceptions of the reality through which we are living, and through which we wish to live; simply because it is so easy to accept the idealizations, those titular and usually meaningless idealizations of our being.

FEMINISM. Not just the 'same rights' as men; 'as in political and economic status'; which was made obvious in 1949 with the publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. No, more than anything else the righteous and intrinsic concern of teminism appears to me to be the liberation of one's psychology, and one's self-definition, from the essentially incorrect and oppressive definition of some other.

"I

am a black woman

tall as a cypress

strong

beyond all definition still

defying place

and time