A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon by Michael K. Johnson (review)

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• A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon by Michael K. Johnson
• Jennifer S. Tuttle

Michael K. Johnson, A Black Woman's West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, 2022. 265 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $9.99.

A Black Woman's West recounts the life of Rose Beatrice Gordon (1882–1968), a writer, businesswoman, physiotherapist, and talented performer whose nearly lifelong residence in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, illuminates the experiences of ordinary African American women in the rural western United States during her lifetime. Michael K. Johnson also folds in a rich recounting of her family history and of life in the community, illuminating African American history in Montana Territory and early statehood. Johnson enhances this superb biographical and historical work with two appendices, one reprinting several of Gordon's newspaper writings and another comprising an excellent bibliographic essay on African American Women in the American West. Gordon was best known as a prolific author of memorial tributes; A Black Woman's West is, in turn, Johnson's own tribute to Gordon herself.

Beginning by reconstructing the histories of Gordon's parents, Anna and John, who settled in Montana Territory in 1881, Johnson narrates the growth of the family to include five children and charts their coming of age amid the "surprisingly multicultural [End Page 282] environment" of White Sulphur Springs, demonstrating how important the town's "streets, businesses, buildings, and . . . people" were to the developing identities of Rose and her siblings (15, 22). In the process, Johnson documents the expansion and contraction of the area's Black population, which by 1950 had shrunk to just Rose and her brother Robert. The Gordons' story reveals how life in White Sulphur Springs under the shadow of Jim Crow was both similar to and different from that in the country at large; Johnson lingers helpfully on the complex ways that minstrelsy was practiced in the town and on how the Gordons navigated racism's tensions in, and through, public performance. Johnson's recovery of not only Rose Gordon's but her mother's life is one of the most meaningful contributions of this volume, detailing Anna's unrelenting labor, at great personal cost, to "ensur[e] her family's survival and well-being" (45).

Rose Gordon herself led an eventful life, her ambitions circumscribed by economic necessity, racial discrimination, and family obligation; for example, although she was class valedictorian, she postponed a hoped-for nursing career to help her mother run the family restaurant and store, taking up massage therapy late in life as she struggled to retain ownership of the family home. Yet as Johnson convincingly argues, "During a period when Black women in America were consistently denied a public role and voice, and when their primary economic role was as domestic servants, Rose both established her economic independence and made a place for herself in the public sphere" (3). Indeed, Johnson credits Gordon with "invent[ing] her own literary genre, the memorial tribute," of which she published hundreds in the Meagher County News between the 1940s and the late 1960s (6). Among the volume's reprints is "My Mother Was a Slave," "the only published first-person narrative of nineteenth-century African American migration in Montana," a 1955 autobiography that also incorporates a biography of Anna (4). Through these late-in-life tributes, Johnson argues, Gordon reconstructed a home, a "protective place in memory"—a gesture not unlike that performed by African American women in other times and contexts, as scholars such as Angela Davis and bell hooks have shown (157). Gordon used her writing to resist and remind, [End Page 283] "assert[ing] her right to belong" and insisting "her fellow citizens" remember "the continuing African American presence in the state and in her hometown" (172).

This volume makes clear Gordon's undisputed place among both western American and African American literary traditions; in Gordon's tributes, Johnson concludes, she "blended the concept of the West as a place shaped out of human endeavor with the African American literary tradition of homeplace and identity forged in the human heart" (157). Gordon's story and writing are...