Undoing the Independent Black Woman: Nina Simone's Four Women

It is quite the dismal epiphany when one ultimately discovers that they’ve been branded the Independent Black Woman — be it through blatant naming or subtle (mis)treatments.

Finally, you realize that, for a large part of your life, you've watched as other women and girls were treated with softness while you remained the subject of "tough love" — if any love at all. You begin struggling to understand why you have never received love or care with equal manner and intensity as other people around you seem to — no matter how much love and care you dole out. All too suddenly, you're sent spiraling from the revelation that you never desired to be the Independent Black Woman and you’re not even sure when that became who you were. It becomes a silent question that you turn around and around in your subconscious, "when did I become the Independent Black Woman?" Your mind takes you as far back as it can remember and you boil the answer down to two possibilities — either you were somehow born into Independent Black Womanhood or you were placed in a position where, from a very young age, you became aware of the fact that the love and care that you wanted to receive had to come from within or you’d never get it — thus creating the Independent Black Woman that you've come to be.

The real answer, however — the truth that breaks and builds?

You never agreed to be the Independent Black Woman and it was never who you were. The Independent Black Woman was and is a socially constructed label that someone stuck to you based on their perception of how much you seemed to need them. Based on what? Your darkness, fatness, tallness, loudness, quietness, opinionatedness, drivenness, willingness to be oneself, and any other arbitrary reason that people conjured in their minds about who you were. Then, they made their decision on how much love or care they were going to give you based on that perception of who you are. It is a kind of circular thinking, where the labeler doesn't see that your supposed lack of need likely stemmed from an actual lack of provision. But because you had no options, because you could not change your darkness, fatness, tallness, loudness, quietness, opinionatedness, and drivenness, and you cut down on being yourself as much as possible without disappearing into nothingness, you believed what they said. You believed that you were indeed the Independent Black Woman, needing nothing from anybody. So you asked nothing of anyone. Eventually, you were blamed for having fallen victim to the label as you were told “closed mouths don’t get fed.” Before you knew what was happening, you became highly attuned to the fact that you were stuck with nothing and nobody but yourself to provide for all of your physical needs (food, shelter, etc.) and also assuage your innate human need to receive love and care from other humans.

And what is love?

According to bell hooks, love is not to be treated as some kind of abstract concept because that lack of definition only leaves room for misinterpretation and, in turn, harm. Hooks says that love should be treated as a verb – something that one does intentionally. In her book, All About Love: New Visions, hooks writes, “when we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.” Love cannot exist in the same space as abuse of any sort, including neglect. Additionally, care, we know, is a tenant of love. A necessary piece to complete the puzzle. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary reads “if you care about something, then you think it is worthy of your time and it is of concern to you.” It can be used as a noun (ex: she provides care) or a verb (ex: she cared for her). In this way, care can also be seen as the desire to protect someone or something or the actual act of doing so. Keeping these references in mind, we can deduce that love is, in essence, a combination of three tenants

• Intentional affection

• Intentional presence

• Intentional absence of harm

So, what does it mean when a person is not subject to love and care? or when a person, a Black woman especially, does not receive enough of it? It stands to reason that this absence makes the Black woman susceptible to abuse and devoid of protection. Without intentional affection, we fall victim to glibness and perfunctory niceness. In our romantic relationships, we unknowingly humor shallow lusts - often mistaking them for affection. Moreover, what does a woman who has been perceived as unneeding of love since childhood (due to her Independent Black Womanness) become? Naturally, this brand of adultification that we experience shapes us into caricatures of ourselves, in a way, to protect ourselves from the world that rejects us.

Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” rings loud and true, in this regard. Black Women find that we must choose who we are going to be in order to safeguard our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. We must struggle to participate in a life and world where we are seemingly unwanted, despite having obviously been made to exist, through no choice of our own. In this way, we find ourselves checking boxes that do indeed match certain pieces of the puzzle that creates our personalities; however, there are so many boxes missing, making it difficult to express ourselves as complex and whole human beings. Nonetheless, we choose the boxes that do apply and forget about the missing ones — which often leads to us losing pieces of ourselves in the process. There is no choice, really, but they tell us to choose. Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, Peaches. Who are we? Who are you? "All" is not an option, and "none" is not an option because we’ve already been labeled.

Are you the strong Black woman who cares for everyone and bears everyone’s weight, while consciously ignoring the fact that you are collapsing beneath your own?

Are you the fatherless woman, either literally or figuratively, who’s taken care of themselves for as long as you can remember? The woman who is perceived as soft until you open your mouth and accidentally prove that there’s a brain in there – ultimately putting off anyone who might have been considering loving you?

Or, perhaps, the overtly sexual beauty who owns her body and chooses what you’ll do with it, with whom you’ll do it, and for what price - be it monetary or otherwise?

Nay, the fighter. The Angry Black Woman who wears her anger on her sleeve. You don’t smile in anyone’s face, you don’t bow to any kings, and you don’t laugh anymore. That is – if you ever laughed at all; you don’t quite recall. You don’t try to make anyone comfortable, rather you bask in their discomfort, and perhaps you even scowl at those women who bend themselves to the desires that men hold for them.

All in all, the Independent Black Woman allows people to choose how much love and care we receive. The idea has harmed Black women to no perceivable end. They told us that because we are too much of who we are, we do not need love, we do not need to be cared for. When, in reality, those people are simply unwilling to love the us that they (1) perceive us to be and (2) hate us for being. Love and care, to them, are only for those who they can imagine as meek, for only the perceivably meek are deserving.

So – what can we do?

Let us reject the Independent Black Woman as a box for them to force us into. Let’s embrace our independence and our Black womanness without denying our innate need and desire to be cared for, loved, and treated with softness. Let’s love each other hard, even when they won’t love us. Let’s be sisterly and motherly and open to receiving love and care whether or not we’ve been taught that we deserve it. We deserve it.