I have seen a Negro woman sold upon the block at auction. I was walking. The woman on the block overtopped the crowd. I felt faint, seasick...The woman was a bright mulatto, with a pleasant face. She was magnificently gotten up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all; sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest; but her mouth never relaxed from its expanded grin of excitement. I dare say the poor thing knew who would buy her. My very soul sickened. It was too dreadful. I tried to reason. 'You know how women sell themselves and are sold in marriage, from queens downwards, eh? You know what the Bible says about slavery, and marriage. Poor women, poor slaves?

And when Lincoln, Sherman and company found it in their hearts and guns to bring freedom to black male America.

General Ches nut said many people were light hearted at the ruin of the great slave owners. He quoted some one: 'They will have no Negroes now to lord it over! They can swell and peacock about and tyrannize now over only a small parcel of women and children, those only who are their very own family.'

There's nothing like an historical memory to endear a woman to the charms of male society.

Luckily for all of us, the charms of male society have often enough been overlooked. For several Power diarists, reality is experienced in a more direct relation to underlying cosmic forces. Psychologist Joanna Field's experiments with the parameters of consciousness and perception reveal that exhilarating breadth of vision which is the essence of freedom.

I began to have an idea of my life not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know...I came to the conclusion then that 'continual mindfulness' could certainly not mean that my little conscious self should be entirely responsible for marshalling and arranging all my thoughts, for it simply did not know enough...I began to suspect that thought, which I had always before looked on as a cart horse to be driven, whipped, and plodding between shafts, might be really a Pegasus, so suddenly did it alight beside me from places I had no knowledge of.

It is a heady vision; a vision which comes from a world far removed from woman's oppressed sphere in man's socially stratified vale of tears. There is an explosive intrigue in the confluence of these realities. A woman once was wise enough to contemplate woman's struggle in man's hell from the strength of universal vision. Florida Scott-Maxwell was eighty-two and "fierce with reality" when she wrote about the Virgin Mary.

The selfless, tireless one, the rich giver and the meek receiver, with life giving energy flowing like milk from the breast, costing her nothing, is too, too much. Looked at in the grey light of daily living the concept is the demand of the ravening child, and we cannot respond to such a claim in man or child...At my age I care to my roots about the quality of women, and I care because I know how important her quality is.

The hurt that women have borne may have immeasurable meaning. We women are the meeting place of the highest and the lowest, and of minutia and riches; it is for us to see, and understand and have pride in representing ourselves truly. Perhaps we must say to man...'The time may have come for us to forge our own identity, dangerous as that will be.'

Hasta la revolucion.