According to bell hooks love is work, and one of the contributing factors to the lack of success can be found in the black woman’s refusal to submit to her counterpart’s will. While personally having in been in relationships with women who perpetuated the myth bell hooks brings up in “Doing the Work of Love,” I am much more inclined to believe that as a people this is not the reason for the lack of success amongst black couples. In the short stories “The Store” and “Young Lions,” Edward P. Jones does a good job effectively describing an alternative view of the struggle facing the black relationship providing two different but very real situations.
In “The Store” Jones gives the reader two different women whom both from afar could appear to be right in line with hook’s “matriarchal black woman.” The story revolves around a young man who is in pursuit of a young lady by the name of Kentucky. Kentucky starts off playing the strong and dominant role in the relationship. It has been joked around by many popular comedians that women control men with their “pussy”. Upon telling the story of the first time the he was intimate with Kentucky he explain, “I had waited a long time, something quite unusual for me. I had started to think I would be an old man with a dick good for nothing but peeing before se would let me get beyond heavy petting” (91). Kentucky then goes commanding his attention by giving him the rules in a true matriarchal fashion, “Listen: Thou shall have no other woman before me. I can take a lot but not that” (91). Though those words appear to resound with confidence, upon looking more closely it becomes apparent that she says those things out of her. By asking him to give solely her his allegiance it was an admittance that he had hers. On page 94 he admits “Kentucky and I fell into an easy, pleasant relationship, which is not to that i didn’t tip out on her now and again.” This admittance that even though the relationship is pleasant he still feels the need to tip out is more of a contributing factor than a black women having problems with docility. In “Doing the Work of Love” bell hooks calls this the reneging from the social contract in the form of betrayal (121).
In “Young Lions” Jones paints a relationship where the woman, Carol, is being completely taken advantage of by a man who is too involved with his own world to totally grasp the concept of love being a work. Carol invest as much of herself as possible into the relationship. This investment is expressed through the frequent writing of notes professing her love to Caesar. Upon returning home at night Carol would often find the “notes still pinned to the pillow, undisturbed and so perhaps unread” (55). In order to gain the attention she desire she began posting her notes on milk cartons. Despite putting them to the milk carton, they still were left undisturbed. Carol then admits that she didn’t care what wrong Caesar did in the streets as long as he remained romantically faithful and away from other women. This reneging and betrayal from Caesar’s end would have been the contributing factor not a power struggle between the two parties. Caesar was so much in power that he convinces Carol into going out and robbing a woman with him, simply by reminding her that he doesn’t “ask a whole fuckin lot” (72). It is clear who does all the submitting and who the powerful one in this particular depiction from Jones.
The idea of women being the all powerful figure does not hold true according to the relationships that Jones has painted. I do believe however, matriarchal do women exist, especially once their resumes start to grow in length. Perhaps if Kentucky didn’t make her boy work so hard in the beginning of the relationship, he wouldn’t have become bored so early on. Perhaps is Carol didn’t smother Caesar when he was home, he would have felt no need to run the streets. The betrayal does happen on the male’s end, yes, but would it happen if not for the pressures given to men? There honestly cannot be any one reason why the black relationship has lacks success rates. Both women according to Jones only wanted loyalty, and no one person wants only one thing from another.
