Each month, the editors of the Oxford African American Studies Center provide insights into black history and culture by offering specially commissioned featured essays, photo collections, and a selected list of articles to further guide the reader. The September 2006 report explores the contributions of women to American literature. Twice a week we’ll offer additional articles that expand on that topic.

When the “lady in brown” in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976) makes an appeal for “somebody, anybody” to “sing a black girl’s song,” it is a clarion call that Mary Helen Washington’s Black-Eyed Susans (1975) anticipates and Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists (1980) answers. These groundbreaking literary scholars had begun the arduous task of recuperating numerous works of literature by black women who wrote despite tremendous odds. As a result of Washington’s, Christian’s, and others’ pioneering efforts-not only uncovering the writers but also fostering serious consideration of their work-the silence was broken, and black women’s writings could be mapped along a continuum that pointed to a long-standing tradition across wide-ranging genres

In this article from Black Women in America, Second Edition, Jacquelyn Y. McLendon profiles the new generation of fiction writers:

Tina McElroy Ansa (1949- ) takes magic realism to the heart of Georgia to illuminate the lives in a small black community. She was born and grew up in Macon, Georgia, the daughter of Walter J. McElroy, a businessman, and Nellie McElroy, a teacher’s assistant. She attended school in Macon and married Jonee Ansa there before discovering the Sea Islands of the Georgia coast. Six years after visiting the islands on her honeymoon, she moved there, and her first book was a nonfiction work about them. In 1989, she wrote her first novel, Baby of the Family. It was a coming-of-age novel with a difference: her heroine, Lena McPherson, had mystical gifts and ghostly conversations. The book was highly praised for its evocation of place and period. Ugly Ways (1993) was set in the same small town. In it three adult sisters try to come to terms with the influence in their lives of the harsh mother they have just buried. The Hand I Fan With (1998) returns to the life of Lena McPherson, bringing her a charmingly erotic lover from the distant past.

Octavia E. Butler (1947- ) is one of the most thoughtful and imaginative authors of our time. The first black woman to make a name for herself in science fiction and one of the few black writers in that field, she takes full advantage of the speculative freedom that the genre allows writers to explore her interest in sociology, biology, race relations, American history, and the future of humanity. She has been a pioneer in bringing black people into the imagined future that is the most common focus of science fiction, and in telling the story of that future in the voices of black women.

Bebe Moore Campbell (1950- ) has a penchant for difficult subjects and controversial issues in both her fiction and nonfiction work. She was born and grew up in Philadelphia, although she spent summers in North Carolina with her father, who was divorced from her mother when Campbell was quite young. She began her writing career selling fiction to Essence and essays and articles to such periodicals as the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post. Her first book was the nonfiction Successful Women, Angry Men (1987), followed by the autobiographical Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad (1989). In that book Campbell wrote about her childhood and the importance of growing up surrounded by loving, approving male figures. Her first novel was Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992), which won her an NAACP Image Award for Literature. Her controversial second novel, Brothers and Sisters (1994), dealt with interracial friendships and intraracial loyalties. It was the first of a string of Campbell novels that would hit the best-seller list, including Singing in the Comeback Choir (1998) and What You Owe Me (2001).

Lorene Cary (1956- ) has chosen as her theme the black woman’s search for and claiming of her own identity. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, Cary readily accepted the opportunity to help integrate a formerly all-male and all-white prep school, St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire. She then went on to the University of Pennsylvania and Sussex University in England. Her first book, Black Ice, told the story of her experience at St. Paul’s. Her second book was a novel, The Price of a Child (1995). Set in the 1850s, it tells the story of Ginnie, who escapes from slavery and then has to reconcile herself to the memory of a child she left behind. Cary’s third novel, Pride (1998), explores the relationships among four black woman friends.

J. California Cooper (19??- ) is first and foremost a storyteller. Born in Berkeley, California, to Joseph C. and Maxine Rosemary Cooper, she has chosen to reveal little about her early life, including her birth date. She began her career as a playwright but was noticed by novelist Alice Walker who suggested that she rewrite some of her plays as short stories. Walker published the result, Cooper’s first volume of stories, A Piece of Mine (1984), herself. Cooper’s second short-story collection, Homemade Love (1986), has been described as a collection of modern folktales, complete with moral lessons. A third collection, Some Soul to Keep (1987), remained in that tradition. Cooper’s first novel, Family (1991), took on a different form but maintained her themes of moral affirmation and of hope that transcends the desolation of the enslaved family the book chronicles. Another short-story collection, The Matter Is Life (1991), is another model of vigorous storytelling with a deep moral center. In Search of Satisfaction (1994) explores two wealthy white families and their links with a poor black family. Cooper has written two more short-story collections, The Future Has a Past: Stories (2001) and Some Love, Some Pain, Some Time: Stories (1996), and a third novel, Wake of the Wind (1998), which provides a compelling story, historical detail, and the strong moral tone that Cooper’s readers have come to expect.

Marita Golden (1950- ) writes with honesty, insight, and grace about a variety of life experiences. Born in Washington, DC, she is the daughter of Francis Sherman, a taxi driver, and Beatrice Reid Golden, a landlady. She received her bachelor’s degree from American University in 1971 and her master’s from Columbia University in 1973, then went to work as a teacher and journalist. In 1983, at the age of twenty-nine, she published an autobiography examining what it meant to be a modern black woman. Her second book, the novel A Woman’s Place (1988), explores the lives of three black women and was highly praised for its language and its honest approach to complex issues. Golden’s second novel, Long Distance Life (1989), follows a young woman in the 1920s who grows up on a farm in the South, moves North, retells the story of four generations of her family through the civil rights movement, and deals with her child’s deadly struggle with drugs. And Do Remember Me (1994) depicts a young woman who gathers the courage to run away from an abusive father to join the civil rights movement. Golden has also published a great deal of nonfiction.

Jewelle Gomez (1948- ) was recognized primarily as a poet and activist until her acclaimed novel The Gilda Stories (1991). Born in Boston, she grew up in Washington, DC, with her paternal grandparents until she was eight and then returned to Boston to live with her maternal great-grandmother until she was twenty-two. She attended Northeastern University, where she became deeply involved in radical protest, then went on to the Columbia University School of Journalism, where she received her master’s degree in 1973. She published two volumes of poetry, The Lipstick Papers (1980) and Flamingoes and Bears (1986), and began publishing insightful reviews and commentaries before writing The Gilda Stories, which track a black lesbian over two centuries of American history, facilitated by a sympathetic family of vampires.

Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ) was first introduced to the reading public of the New Yorker in the early 1970s through a series of short stories. This pattern of first publishing each of her novels as magazine short stories is characteristic of her fictional works, as is her preoccupation with the themes of loss, dislocation, and imbalance of power.

Terry McMillan (1951- ) is a novelist whose success has changed life dramatically for other black women novelists. As Waiting to Exhale climbed the best-seller lists in 1992, publishers began signing contracts for more novels that reflected the lives of black women. A couple of years later, the books started hitting the stands. The results were dramatic. African Americans showed conclusively that they would buy books if they were offered what they wanted.

Dori Sanders (c. 1935- ) has turned a lifetime of working on a peach farm in the summer and doing odd jobs in the winter into memorable fiction. Born near Filbert, South Carolina, she was the eighth of ten children. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was both a farmer and an elementary school principal. After all the other children had left, Sanders and her brother Orestus stayed and worked the farm where they grew up, selling their produce at Sanders’s Peach Shed. Sanders joined other black farm women in a nearby munitions plant during World War II and would later use her experiences there in her second novel. Her first published novel was Clover (1990), which sold exceptionally well, won the Lillian Smith Award, and was made into a Hallmark movie. After this success, Sanders began to spend her winters writing and produced Her Own Place (1993), drawing on her factory experiences.

April Sinclair (1953- ) has written with honesty and humor about the experiences of young black women concerning race, family pressures, and sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual. She was born in Chicago at the beginning of the civil rights movement and grew up there during the subsequent decades of growing black pride. In the early part of the twenty-first century, she lived in Oakland, California, and worked for years as a community organizer and teacher. Her first book, Coffee Will Make You Black (1994), reflected the life of young Jean “Stevie” Stevenson and her struggles to deal with the prejudices of both blacks and whites. The book was a best-seller, and her second novel was a sequel, Ain’t Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice (1995). Her third novel, I Left My Back Door Open (1999) explored different characters but many of the same themes.

Sapphire (Ramona Lofton) (1950- ) discusses the realities of poor black life with a raw power. She was born in Fort Orr, California, on one of the many military bases her family moved to during her early life. Her parents were both in the army. She attended and dropped out of San Francisco City College in the 1970s, then moved to New York, where she supported herself with odd jobs, started reading her poetry in the Village during the 1980s, and went back to school. After graduating with honors, she enrolled in graduate school at Brooklyn College and began teaching reading. Her first book, American Dreams, was a combination of poetry and prose that received excellent reviews for its brutal insights. An excerpt from one of the poems in the book, “Wild Thing,” was quoted out of context and caused considerable controversy. Nonetheless, she won the MacArthur Scholarship in Poetry. Push (1996), her first novel, tells the story of Precious Jones, a sixteen-year-old victim of sexual abuse by both her parents. For this work, Sapphire won both the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s First Novelist Award and the Book of the Month Club Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. Her next book was a volume of poetry, Black Wings Blind Angels (1999).

Each month, the editors of the Oxford African American Studies Center provide insights into black history and culture by offering specially commissioned featured essays, photo collections, and a selected list of articles to further guide the reader. The September 2006 report explores the contributions of women to American literature. Twice a week we’ll offer additional articles that expand on that topic.

In this article from The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Stefanie K. Dunning looks at the life and works of Alice Walker.

Alice Walker, perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (1982), has always been committed to social and political change. This was nowhere clearer than in The Color Purple, which brought to light questions of sexual abuse and violence in the black community, while demonstrating the liberatory possibilities inherent in every life. The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, who is the victim of systematic gender oppression, at the hands of first her stepfather and then her husband. Despite the severe abuse Celie endures, she is a triumphant character who ultimately achieves a free and comfortable life. The principal male character—Celie’s husband, Albert—is also redeemed and so transcends his abusive past. Many critics have argued that The Color Purple is Walker’s best work, noting its inspired epistolary style (i.e., written in the form of letters) and the dynamic voice of its protagonist.

Although The Color Purple was an enormous success, it sparked considerable controversy. Some black men, who felt that her portrayals of them reinforced animalistic and cruel stereotypes about black masculinity, condemned Walker for her complexly drawn male characters. These unfair criticisms coincided with the premiere of the film The Color Purple, which did not depict domestic abuse in the complicated ways the book did. This iniquitous criticism obscured the significance of the novel, which exposed aspects of black female struggle unfamiliar to a mainstream American readership. Yet long before The Color Purple drew the attention of popular audiences, Alice Walker’s work had already established her as an accomplished artist and activist. Her work explores race, gender, sexuality, and class, building on Walker’s observations and experiences as a child and young adult in the rural South.

Childhood and Youth

Alice Walker was born on 9 February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children. Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, which meant that they farmed land belonging to someone else in exchange for living there. The system of sharecropping was one of cruel inequity; black workers were often exploited for their labor and rarely were paid what the crop they produced was worth. Because of this, Walker has often said that the system of sharecropping was worse than slavery because unlike slavery, sharecropping masqueraded as paid labor when in reality it was not. Walker was a hard worker and applied these lessons to her studies. Walker was an excellent student and valedictorian of her high school class; for her academic achievements she won a scholarship to Spelman College and ultimately completed her education at Sarah Lawrence College.

After graduating from college, Walker participated in various progressive movements. Never content simply to wait for an injustice to disappear or be rectified by someone else, Walker was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and worked in the voter registration drives. She had the opportunity to meet Martin Luther King Jr., and she attended the March on Washington. Embodying the feminist adage that “the personal is political,” Walker was married to a Jewish civil rights lawyer, Mel Leventhal, and they became the only legally married interracial couple in Mississippi at the time. She was also among the first people in the United States to teach a women’s studies course, which she instituted at Wellesley College. That these events had quite an impact on the young Walker is evident in her writing.

Art as Activism

Just as her experience growing up in the rural South in a sharecropping community would influence and shape her later work, so too did her experiences with activism during the civil rights movement. In Walker’s work, the relationship between her activism and her art is clear, as she repeatedly examines and exposes oppression. Walker does not simply draw back the curtain on injustice; she also imagines the transcendence of that injustice in her work. For this reason, it has often been said that all of Walker’s novels have “happy endings.” What this suggests about Walker is not that she is unrealistic but rather that she is interested in ways people who have been marginalized can overcome oppression.

Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), clearly draws on her experiences as a child in a sharecropping community and offers not only a critique of gender and race relations under that system but also a vision of what is possible through change. The Third Life of Grange Copeland depicts the family of Grange, his wife, Mem, and their son, Brownfield. Sharecropping renders Grange abusive and neglectful of his family; he leaves them and goes north. When his mother commits suicide, Brownfield decides to go in search of his father but never makes it farther than a few miles from home. Slipping into the same cycle of sharecropping and abuse that characterized his parents’ relationship, Brownfield becomes far more abusive than his father and ultimately ends up in jail for murdering his wife. Grange returns, largely reformed during his time in the North, to lovingly raise his granddaughter, Ruth, who, as the heroine, anticipates the strong female protagonists that characterize Walker’s work.

Like all of her heroines, Alice Walker is herself an agent of change. Walker once said that the best role model is someone who is always changing. Instead of desiring a long shelf life, Walker asserts that she wants to remain fresh. This commitment to fluidity and evolution characterizes both her life and her work. This is especially clear in her novel Meridian (1976). Walker’s experiences at Spelman College may have provided her with the setting for Meridian, the story of a young woman of the same name who attends a college, much like Spelman, for young black women and becomes a daring activist, willing to die in order to protect black people from injustice. It is a book that also draws on many themes in Walker’s own life, specifically her Native American heritage. In the novel, Meridian’s father educates her about the Native Americans who occupied the land before they did and shows her their ancient burial grounds, which are eventually destroyed in the course of the novel. Meridian also articulates Walker’s notion of “womanist” politics, in that it features a female protagonist evolving through the pain of gender and racial inequity.

Womanism and beyond

The term “womanist,” coined by Walker in 1983, asserts that not only gender oppression but also race oppression must be confronted, which affects and shapes gender in inexorable ways. Furthermore, the term “womanist” conjured a conception of blackness and womanness that feminist theory had been unable to represent; it not only provided the meaning of these intersecting identities but also connoted something of the spirit of them. Womanism enabled black women to articulate their commitment to gender liberation while not requiring them to forsake their struggle for race liberation as well. In womanism, Walker synthesized various liberation ideologies that have often been at odds. Womanism has repeatedly been invoked to describe the complicated interplay between race and gender faced by African-American women and represents another of Walker’s major contributions to the study of literature and feminism.

In keeping with her womanist politics, Walker continued to engage difficult issues in her later works. Her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) focuses on a character who was featured minutely in The Color Purple, Tashi. Tashi, an African woman married to Celie’s son in The Color Purple, subjects herself to the practice of female circumcision. In Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker explores her physical and emotional pain around this “traditional” African practice. This novel drew less mainstream controversy but engendered some academic controversy. Many scholars, especially scholars working in the area of Africa, saw Walker’s novel as an Americanized condemnation of African culture, arguing that she was an outsider interfering in a culture she knew nothing about. Walker, however, felt that she was able to understand what it means to be physically maimed because when she was eight years old her brother blinded her in one eye with a BB gun. In Walker’s view, a lifetime of partial blindness provided a fitting metaphor to help her understand the burden of going through life with a part of your body violently excised by a society that does not take seriously the pain inflicted on the bodies of girls. Walker referred to her blinded eye and the wounds born by the women who endured circumcision as “warrior marks” in a film of the same name she made about female genital mutilation with Pratibha Parmar. Despite the criticism engendered by Walker’s discussions of female genital mutilation, what remains indisputable is that Walker’s concern for young women was the impetus for the creation of the film and her book Possessing the Secret of Joy.

Like Possessing the Secret of Joy, much of Walker’s work is characterized by a thematic interest in cultures and people outside the American context. These themes are fully developed in her novel The Temple of My Familiar (1989). This novel features characters from a range of cultural backgrounds, including South American, African American, and Native American. Walker’s interest in Latin-American culture, which was first articulated in The Temple of My Familiar, can also be seen in her novel, By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998). In another work, Walker focused on questions of interpersonal and communal healing. Titled The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000), this work is a semifictionalized account of her relationship with her former husband and chronicles other important relationships in her life. She also wrote Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit after the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001), which proposed peace, love, and healing as antidotes to tragedy and tyranny.

Walker’s work demonstrates a remarkable grasp of the political realities of systematic oppression. Walker is such a prolific writer that it would be impossible to discuss all of her work; she has written in almost every form and genre. Her first published work, in fact, was a book of poems called Once (1968). Her poetry embodies some of her most profound insights. Walker’s legacy of activism is to be found not only in her work but also in her contribution to the lives of emerging writers and in her homage to the black writers who preceded her. Because of Walker’s interest in Zora Neale Hurston, Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God is now considered an essential African-American text. Walker has also written about Langston Hughes, another figure important in her life, and established a scholarship for emerging writers in the name of Hughes and Hurston at Spelman College. In this way, Walker has unambiguously contributed to the art of writing, both on and off the page. Like her work, which always offers the unexpected but necessary commentary, Alice Walker is an artist who has succeeded at remaining fresh.

(photograph courtesy of the Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of University of Pennsylvania, Schoenberg Center)

Each month, the editors of the Oxford African American Studies Center provide insights into black history and culture by offering specially commissioned featured essays, photo collections, and a selected list of articles to further guide the reader. The September 2006 report explores the contributions of women to American literature. Twice a week we’ll offer additional articles that expand on that topic.

In this article from Black Women in America 2nd Edition, Margaret B. Winkerson looks at the life and works of Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun.

Lorraine Hansberry (b. 19 May 1930; d. 12 January 1965), playwright.

Lorraine Hansberry was a celebrated black playwright who was born in Chicago, Illinois, and died in New York City at the age of thirty-four after a scant six years in the professional theater. Her first produced play, A Raisin in the Sun, has become an American classic, enjoying numerous productions since its original presentation in 1959 and many professional revivals during its twenty-fifth anniversary year in 1983–1984. The Broadway revival in 2004 brought the play to a new generation, and earned two Antoinette Perry (Tony) Awards for individual performances. The roots of Hansberry’s artistry and activism lie in the city of Chicago, her early upbringing, and her family

Early Years

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was the youngest of four children; seven or more years separated her from Mamie, her sister and closest sibling, and two older brothers, Carl Jr. and Perry. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a successful real estate broker who had moved to Chicago from Mississippi after completing a technical course at Alcorn College. A prominent businessman, he made an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1940 on the Republican ticket and contributed large sums to causes supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. Hansberry’s mother, Nannie Perry, was a schoolteacher and later ward committeewoman who had come north from Tennessee after completing teacher training at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University. The Hansberrys were at the center of Chicago’s black social life and often entertained important political and cultural figures who were visiting the city. Through her uncle, Leo Hansberry, professor of African History at Howard University, Hansberry made early acquaintances with young people from the African continent.

The Hansberry’s middle class status did not protect them from the racial segregation and discrimination characteristic of the period, and they were active in opposing it. Restrictive covenants, in which white homeowners agreed not to sell their property to black buyers, created a ghetto known as the “black metropolis” in the midst of Chicago’s South Side. Although large numbers of black Americans continued to migrate to the city, restrictive covenants kept the boundaries static, creating serious housing problems. Carl Hansberry knew well the severe overcrowding in the black metropolis. He had, in fact, made much of his money by purchasing large, older houses vacated by the retreating white population and dividing them into small apartments, each one with its own kitchenette. In doing so, he earned the title “kitchenette king.” This type of tiny, functional apartment became the setting in A Raisin in the Sun, just as the struggle for better housing drove its plot.

Hansberry attended public schools, graduating from Betsy Ross Elementary School and then from Englewood High School in 1947. Breaking with the family tradition of attending southern black colleges, Hansberry chose to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison, moving from the ghetto schools of Chicago to a predominantly white university. She integrated her dormitory, becoming the first black student to live at Langdon Manor. The years at Madison focused her political views as she worked in the Henry Wallace presidential campaign and in the activities of the Young Progressive League, becoming president of the organization in 1949 during her last semester. Her artistic sensibilities were heightened by a university production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. She was deeply moved by O’Casey’s ability to universalize the suffering of the Irish without sacrificing specificity and later wrote: “The melody was one that I had known for a very long while. I was seventeen and I did not think then of writing the melody as I knew it—in a different key; but I believe it entered my consciousness and stayed there.” She would capture that suffering in the idiom of the Negro people in her first produced play, A Raisin in the Sun. In 1950 she left the university and moved to New York City for an education of another kind.

In Harlem she began working on Freedom, a progressive newspaper founded by Paul Robeson, and turned the world into her personal university. In 1952 she became associate editor of the newspaper, writing and editing a variety of news stories that expanded her understanding of domestic and world problems. Living and working in the midst of the rich and progressive social, political, and cultural elements of Harlem stimulated Hansberry to begin writing short stories, poetry, and plays. On one occasion she wrote the pageant that was performed to commemorate the Freedom newspaper’s first anniversary. In 1952, while covering a picket line protesting discrimination in sports at New York University, Hansberry met Robert Barron Nemiroff, a student of Russian Jewish heritage who was attending the university. They dated for several months, participating in political and cultural activities together. They married on 20 June 1953, at the Hansberry home in Chicago. The young couple took various jobs during these early years. Nemiroff was a part-time typist, waiter, Multilith operator, reader, and copywriter. Hansberry left the Freedom staff in 1953 in order to concentrate on her writing and for the next three years worked on three plays while holding a series of jobs: tagger in the garment industry, typist, program director at Camp Unity (a progressive, interracial summer program), teacher at the Marxist-oriented Jefferson School for Social Science, and recreation leader for the handicapped.

A sudden change of fortune freed Hansberry from these odd jobs. Nemiroff and his friend Burt d’Lugoff wrote a folk ballad, “Cindy Oh Cindy,” that quickly became a hit. The money from that song allowed Hansberry to quit her jobs and devote herself full time to her writing. She began to write The Crystal Stair, a play about a struggling black family in Chicago that would eventually become A Raisin in the Sun.

Drawing on her knowledge of the working class black tenants who had rented from her father and with whom she had attended school on Chicago’s South Side, Hansberry wrote a realistic play with a theme inspired by Langston Hughes. In his poem “Harlem,” he asks: “What happens to a dream deferred?…Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?…Or does it explode?” Hansberry read a draft of the play to several colleagues. After one such occasion, Phil Rose, a friend who had employed Nemiroff in his music publishing firm, optioned the play for Broadway production. Although he had never produced a Broadway play before, Rose and his coproducer David S. Cogan set forth enthusiastically with their fellow novices on this venture. They approached major Broadway producers, but the “smart money” considered a play about black life to be too risky for Broadway. The only interested producer insisted on directorial and cast choices that were unacceptable to Hansberry, so the group raised the cash through other means and took the show on tour without the guarantee of a Broadway house. Audiences in the tour cities—New Haven, Connecticut, Philadelphia, and Chicago—were ecstatic about the show. A last-minute rush for tickets in Philadelphia finally made the case for acquiring a Broadway theater.

Celebrity

A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March 1959 and was an instant success with both critics and audiences. The New York critic Walter Kerr praised Hansberry for reading

"the precise temperature of a race at that time in its history when it cannot retreat and cannot quite find the way to move forward. The mood is forty-nine parts anger and forty-nine parts control, with a very narrow escape hatch for the steam these abrasive contraries build up. Three generations stand poised, and crowded, on a detonating-cap (New York Herald Tribune, 12 March 1959)

Hansberry became a celebrity overnight. The play was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959, making Lorraine Hansberry the first black playwright, the youngest person, and only the fifth woman to win that award.

In 1960 the NBC producer Dore Schary commissioned Hansberry to write the opening segment for a television series commemorating the Civil War. Her subject was to be slavery. Hansberry thoroughly researched the topic. The result was The Drinking Gourd, a television play that focused on the effects that slavery had on the families of the slave master and the white poor as well as the slave. The play was deemed too controversial by NBC television executives and, despite Schary’s objections, was shelved along with the entire project.

Hansberry was successful, however, in bringing her prize-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, to the screen a short time later. In 1959, a few months after the play opened, she sold the movie rights to Columbia Pictures and began work on drafts of the screenplay, incorporating several new scenes. These additions, which were rejected for the final version, sharpened the play’s attack on the effects of segregation and revealed with a surer hand the growing militant mood of black America. After many revisions and rewrites, the film was produced with all but one of the original cast and released in 1961.

In the wake of the play’s extended success, Hansberry became a public figure and popular speaker at a number of conferences and meetings. Among her most notable speeches was one delivered to a black writers’ conference sponsored by the American Society of African Culture in New York. Written during the production of A Raisin in the Sun and delivered on 1 March 1959—two weeks before the Broadway opening—“The Negro Writer and His Roots” is in effect Hansberry’s credo. In her speech, Hansberry declared that “all art is ultimately social” and called upon black writers to be involved in “the intellectual affairs of all men, everywhere.” As the civil rights movement intensified, Hansberry helped to plan fund-raising events to support organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Disgusted with the red baiting of the McCarthy era, she called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Later she criticized President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, arguing that his actions endangered world peace.

In 1961, amid many requests for public appearances, a number of which she accepted, Hansberry began work on several plays. Her next stage production, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, appeared in 1964. Before that, however, she finished a favorite project, Masters of the Dew, adapted from the Haitian novel by Jacques Romain. A film company had asked her to do the screenplay; however, contractual problems prevented the production from proceeding. The next year, seeking rural solitude, Hansberry purchased a house in Croton-on-Hudson, forty-five minutes from Broadway, in order to complete work on The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

Early in April 1963 Hansberry fainted. Hospitalized at University Hospital in New York City for nearly two weeks, she underwent extensive tests. The results suggested cancer of the pancreas. Despite the progressive failure of her health during the next two years, she continued her writing projects and political activities. In May 1963 she joined the writer James Baldwin, the singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, and other black and white individuals in a meeting in Croton to raise funds for SNCC and a rally to support the southern freedom movement. Although her health was in rapid decline, she greeted 1964 as a year of glorious work. On her writing schedule, in addition to The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, were Les Blancs, Laughing Boy (a musical adaptation of the novel), The Marrow of Tradition, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Achnaton, a play about the Egyptian pharaoh. Despite frequent hospitalization and bouts with pain and attendant medical conditions, she completed a photo-essay for a book on the civil rights struggle titled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964).

In March 1964 she quietly divorced Robert Nemiroff, formalizing the separation that had occurred several years earlier. Only close friends and family had known; their continued collaboration as theater artists and activists had masked the reality of the personal relationship. Those outside their close circle only learned of the divorce when Hansberry’s will was read in 1965.

Throughout 1964 hospitalizations became more frequent as Hansberry’s cancer spread. In May she left the hospital to deliver a speech to the winners of the United Negro College Fund’s writing contest in which she coined the famous phrase, “young, gifted, and black.” A month later, she left her sickbed to participate in the Town Hall debate “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash,” at which she and her fellow black artists challenged the criticism by white liberals of the growing militancy of the civil rights movement. She also managed to complete The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which opened to mixed reviews on 15 October 1964 at the Longacre Theatre. Critics were somewhat surprised by this second play from a woman who had come to be identified with the black liberation movement. Writing about people she had known in Greenwich Village, Hansberry had created a play with a primarily white cast and a theme that called for intellectuals to get involved with social problems and world issues.

Lorraine Hansberry’s battle with cancer ended at University Hospital in New York City. She was just thirty-four years old. Her passing was mourned throughout the nation and in many parts of the world. The list of senders of telegrams and cards sent to her family reads like a who’s who of the civil rights movement and the American theater. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window closed on the night of her death.

Hansberry left a number of finished and unfinished projects, among them Laughing Boy, a musical adapted from Oliver LaFarge’s novel; an adaptation of The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt; a film version of Masters of the Dew; sections of a semiautobiographical novel, The Dark and Beautiful Warriors; and numerous essays, including a critical commentary written in 1957 on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (a book that Hansberry said had changed her life). In her will, she designated Nemiroff as executor of her literary estate.

Hansberry’s reputation continued to grow after her death in 1965 as Nemiroff, who owned her papers, edited, published, and produced her work posthumously. In 1969 he adapted some of her unpublished writings for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. The longest-running drama of the 1968–1969 off-Broadway season, it toured colleges and communities in the United States during 1970–1971. A ninety-minute film based on the stage play was first shown in January 1972.

In 1970 Nemiroff produced on Broadway a new work by Hansberry, Les Blancs, a full-length play set in the midst of a violent revolution in an African country. Nemiroff then edited Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, published in 1972 and including Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?, a short play about the consequences of nuclear holocaust. In 1974 A Raisin in the Sun returned to Broadway as Raisin, a musical, produced by Robert Nemiroff; it won an Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award.

In 1987, A Raisin in the Sun, with original material restored, was presented at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and other theaters nationwide. In 1989 this version was presented on national television. The year 2004 saw the first Broadway revival of the play. With the hip-hop star Sean “P. Diddy” Combs in the lead role of Walter Lee, the show attracted a large and diverse audience. For her performance as Lena Younger, Phylicia Rashad won the first Tony for best performance by an actress in a drama ever awarded to an African American woman. Audra McDonald won her fourth Tony for best featured actress for her role as Beneatha.

In March 1988, Les Blancs, much of the original script restored, was presented at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, the first professional production in eighteen years.

Hansberry made a significant contribution to American theater, despite the brevity of her theatrical life and the fact that only two of her plays were produced during her lifetime. A Raisin in the Sun was more than simply a “first” to be commemorated in history books and then forgotten. The play was the turning point for black artists in the professional theater. Authenticity and candor combined with timeliness to make it one of the most popular plays ever produced on the American stage. The original production ran for 538 performances on Broadway, attracting large audiences of white and black fans alike. Also, in this play and in her second produced play, Hansberry offered a strong opposing voice to the drama of despair. She created characters who affirmed life in the face of brutality and defeat. Walter Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, supported by a culture of hope and aspiration, survives and grows; and even Sidney Brustein, lacking cultural support, resists the temptation to despair by a sheer act of will, by reaffirming his link to the human family.

With the growth of women’s theater and feminist criticism, Hansberry was rediscovered by a new generation of women in theater. Indeed, a revisionist reading of her major plays reveals that she was a feminist long before the second wave of the women’s movement surfaced. The female characters in her plays are pivotal to the major themes. They may share the protagonist role, as in A Raisin in the Sun, where Mama is co-protagonist with Walter; or a woman character may take the definitive action, as in The Drinking Gourd, in which Rissa, the house slave, defies the slave system and black stereotypes by turning her back on her dying master and arming her son for his escape to the North. In The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Sidney is brought to a new level of self-awareness through the actions of a chorus of women—the Parodus sisters. Likewise, the African woman dancer is ever present in Tshemabe Matoeseh’s mind in Les Blancs, silently and steadily moving him to a revolutionary commitment to his people. Hansberry’s portrayal of Beneatha as a young black woman with aspirations to be a doctor and her introduction of abortion as an issue for poor women in A Raisin in the Sun signaled early on Hansberry’s feminist attitudes. These and other portrayals of women challenged prevailing stage stereotypes of both black and white women and introduced feminist issues to the stage in compelling terms. Documents uncovered beginning in the 1980s revealing Hansberry’s homosexuality and sensitivity to homophobic attitudes have further increased feminist interest in her work.

(Photo courtesy of the Eva Jessye Collection, Pittsburg State University, Kansas; Special Collections Department, Leonard H. Axe Library)

Each month, the editors of the Oxford African American Studies Center provide insights into black history and culture by offering specially commissioned featured essays, photo collections, and a selected list of articles to further guide the reader. The September 2006 report explores the contributions of women to American literature. Twice a week we’ll offer additional articles that expand on that topic.

In this article from The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Susan Butterworth looks at the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston.

The oral tradition of southern black folklore was an art and a skill handed down from Africa, preserved through slavery, and still thriving in the early years of the twentieth century, when Zora Neale Hurston came of age. The tradition was preserved through generations of rural southern culture and began to decline when the black workers left the agricultural South for the cities of the North. Zora Neale Hurston was singularly placed to record this material as folklore and to transform it to art through fiction. Zora Hurston’s place and date of birth are obscured by the selective secrecy and mythology that veiled her personal life. Hurston wanted her contemporaries to believe that she was born 7 January 1901 in Eatonville, Florida. Birth records revealed years later, however, that she was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.

Early Life in Eatonville

The circumstances of her early life and family and the influence of growing up in Eatonville, Florida, are of primary importance in understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s life and works. Hurston’s father, John Hurston, had been conceived in slavery in Alabama, the son of the master and a slave. He moved with his strong-minded, intelligent wife, Lucie Potts, and seven children to the remarkable town of Eatonville, a tiny township in central Florida—organized, incorporated, and governed by black people—where he was a successful carpenter and Baptist preacher.

Zora Hurston’s youth as the intelligent daughter of respected Eatonville citizens was conducive to her self-esteem and her feeling of safety, free from the sense of second-class citizenship common in southern black life. Her circumstances also led to an inborn appreciation for the richness of southern black culture. Eatonville was a melting pot of black Americans from all over the South. The people there were a bottomless source of stories. The young Zora’s eyes and ears were open to the rich life of the community around her. She later wrote, “From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top.” The porch of Joe Clarke’s general store was the scene of “lying contests,” stories, songs, jokes, folklore. With this porch Hurston created a powerful image, an icon, throughout her work. It appears in her novels, her drama, and her folklore as well as her autobiography. This safe and comfortable childhood ended abruptly with the death of her mother. Hurston wrote the moving deathbed scene in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and her autobiographical novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Hurston’s father remarried in haste, but his new wife did not want his children and the siblings dispersed to relatives and boarding schools.

The young Hurston made her own way as a black woman in the world of the American South, working as a maid or nanny when she could. These times were the ten lost years that she never mentioned, that she erased from her story. No doubt these were the years when she learned the traits of survival and self-sufficiency. She emerged as a ladies’ maid and helper with a touring Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. Hurston was able to return to school in Baltimore in 1917, attending Morgan Academy and graduating in 1918. An eager student, she went on to Howard University in Washington, D.C., always working her way through school with odd jobs. Hurston blossomed at Howard and published her first short story in the college literary magazine, Stylus, in 1921.

In 1924 Hurston published her short story Drenched in Light in Opportunity magazine. Drenched in Light is thinly disguised autobiography, a story about a joyful child in Eatonville. The message is that the young protagonist is poor and black but “drenched in the light” of family, community, and culture. The story is a statement of affirmation, written by a woman who has pondered her identity and origins.

The Harlem Renaissance

The following year Hurston submitted a story, Spunk, and a play, Color Struck, to Opportunity’s literary contest. Both won prizes. The Opportunity awards dinner, a showcase for young black talent attended by literary New York, was Hurston’s entrée to the Harlem Renaissance. The vibrant, confident young woman with the unusual background and stories was noticed. Annie Nathan Meyer, a founder of Barnard College, obtained a scholarship for Hurston. Fannie Hurst, a popular writer, gave her a job as secretary and companion.

Hurston continued to write and publish short stories and plays, with Eatonville as her subject. Critic and biographer Robert E. Hemenway (1977) characterizes some of the work of this period as hackneyed, all theme with little plot. Yet the Eatonville material was compelling, matchless in its place in history and culture, and Hurston had an eye and ear for her subject along with a conviction of the importance of her message. She had not, however, yet found her genre or her voice. She was still struggling with her craft and her perspective.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of a fertile flowering of black art, music, and voice in the 1920s and 1930s. Zora Neale Hurston was a presence in the Harlem Renaissance, meeting everyone, being noticed, becoming a full-fledged member of the “niggerati,” as she called the black literary community. In 1926 she organized the short-lived radical journal Fire!! with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Hurston found herself in the role of proletarian in New York City as she found the Harlem Renaissance largely a movement of northern-raised, middle-class black artists who were a generation removed from the source of their material. These were black artists who had absorbed a mainstream conception of high art; who took material with black origins and formalized it—for example turning the spirituals of the southern Baptist churches into composed and arranged songs to be performed for white audiences in concert halls. The goal of those presenting the “New Negro” and his art was to prove that black art and culture were equal to white art.

Hurston, however, was the genuine article, the folk, and her mission was to present and preserve the folk voice as she knew it from her youth in the South. Further, Hurston had a sense that the folk material that she loved was not a lower form of art but an oral tradition that had enabled the black people to survive with dignity and strength. Her goal was to glorify and preserve a form of black expression that she felt was being diluted by urbanization.

“The Spyglass of Anthropology”

At Barnard College, Hurston studied anthropology under Franz Boas, a noted authority in the field. She found that anthropology offered a scientific framework for her folklore. She had not found a voice for the Eatonville material in the short story genre; anthropology gave her the form she was searching for. In the introduction to Mules and Men (1935), Hurston wrote that she had to have “the spyglass of anthropology” to begin to codify her experience in Eatonville. Anthropology gave her the opportunity to look at her community culture and folktales with the objectivity of a social scientist; the step back from her personal experience helped to reconcile her to her past.

Soon Hurston was doing fieldwork for Boas in Harlem. Then, in February 1927 she was given a grant to collect folklore in Florida. Previously, some black folklore had been collected by white researchers, but their findings were often influenced by stereotypes and misconceptions of the black personality and experience. Hurston was unique: a black scholar and social scientist with a deep understanding of the culture she would study.

This first folklore-collecting trip was not very successful. She wrote later that people were suspicious of her Barnard manner and told her only what they wanted her to hear. She returned to Boas and admitted her disappointing results. Wise Boas was not surprised. Perhaps the cocky, confident Zora needed to learn from a failure.

Patronage

In the fall of 1927 Hurston met Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman who was to play a major role in her life. Mrs. Mason was patron to several black artists, including Langston Hughes. At the behest of her eccentric whim, her protégées called her “Godmother.” Hurston signed a contract with Mrs. Mason that enabled her to go back to the South on another collecting trip. Mrs. Mason gave her a car and $200 a month and in December 1927 Hurston departed again, intending to begin in Mobile, Alabama, travel to Florida, and end up in New Orleans, Louisiana, to gather and record tales, songs, games, customs, and voodoo rituals of rural southern black Americans.

Hurston had learned from her first expedition. She would need the patience and imagination to live as a part of the community, not as an outsider, a northern-educated scientist. In Polk County, Florida, she created the fiction that she was a bootlegger’s girlfriend running from the law. She was welcomed into the lumber and railroad work camps, where she kept her ears open and took notes. Her Florida work ended when she was nearly knifed at a “jook joint” by a woman jealous of Zora’s attention from the men. She went on to New Orleans to collect voodoo practices and rituals, becoming an initiate under several practitioners.

That year spent collecting in the South under Mrs. Mason’s patronage was pivotal for Hurston. The financial support was liberating. Her collecting was so fertile that she drew on the material from this trip for the rest of her life. Hurston matured. She began to see the stories and customs of her childhood and her culture as part of a pattern of black experience and survival and to fit her own life as a survivor into the pattern. On the surface she was a scientist working on a folklore-collecting expedition, but underneath she was becoming a novelist who could connect the collective stories with individual experience in an expression of art.

Hurston spent much of 1929 living on Mrs. Mason’s money and organizing her field notes. Living in South Florida, Hurston met West Africans and became interested in their customs, folklore, and dancing. She began to make links between African-American and African-Caribbean folklore. She spent some time in Nassau in the Bahamas in 1929 and 1930, living again within the community, learning and collecting songs, dances, and customs.

Hurston was beginning to chafe at the restrictions of her contract with Mrs. Mason. She had the Florida and New Orleans material organized and ready for publication. She wanted to work on some new, independent projects, while Mrs. Mason contended that the contract was not fulfilled until the folklore material was published. Unfortunately, Mrs. Mason held the title to the material and Hurston was prohibited by the contract from publishing anything without Mrs. Mason’s approval, so if Hurston wanted to see her book in print, she had to submit to Mrs. Mason’s terms. Hurston spent nearly two years organizing her vast notes and material. She published Hoodoo in America in the Journal of American Folklore in 1931 and looked for a book publisher for a scholarly presentation of her findings.

Both Hurston and Langston Hughes were living in New Jersey in a sort of artists’ colony where Mrs. Mason put up her protégées. Hurston and Hughes began to collaborate on a play, Mule Bone, a series of skits and songs based largely on the folklore that Hurston had collected in Eatonville. The first act takes place on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store. Hurston envisioned a form of theater that would present authentic material in an aural context, in an exuberant and accessible manner.

The Mule Bone project and her relationship with Langston Hughes fell apart in a bitter misunderstanding that was worsened by tensions relating to Mrs. Mason’s patronage. Hughes left the Mason payroll, feeling increasingly guilty about enjoying caviar in her home while writing about the blues of his people. Hurston needed Mrs. Mason’s patronage for a while longer, until she found a publisher for her collection. Hughes and Hurston became estranged; then Hughes discovered that the play was in negotiation with a theater company, to be produced with Hurston as sole author. He filed suit. It turned out that their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten had sent a draft of the play to the theater without Hurston’s knowledge, but the damage was done and the play was never produced.

The Great Day

Hurston’s relationship with Mrs. Mason was finally severed in March 1931 while Hurston was still searching for a publisher for her folklore collection. She found herself with a need to earn a living. She also found herself with a growing conviction that her stories and songs could be better presented in some living form than in a scientific journal. She envisioned a revue that would be artistically true to the folk tradition, including comedy, songs, and dances.

Hurston wrote and staged the theatrical revue The Great Day (1932), using her collected folk material and including authentic Jamaican dancers and drummers. The revue was structured around a day in a railroad work camp, ending with an evening at the “jook.” Produced on a shoestring with Hurston ingenuity, the performance in January 1932 was an artistic success. She was to use the same material for several years, repeating the New York City performance. Hurston also created a new version at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and took that show on the road. She still had no publisher for her folklore collection and so earned her living by this theatrical expression of her material and experience.

Hurston tried her hand at various academic jobs in the South, working on her conception of authentic theater in college drama departments. Hurston the scholar, with her Barnard credentials, and Hurston the exuberant voice of Eatonville, with her theatrical successes, sought to present an authentic and traditional form of expression. Her goal was to bring legitimate folklore to theater and concert audiences.

Segregated Florida in the Great Depression was not a fertile ground for black theater production, nor was Hurston’s vocation in academe. She was later awarded a fellowship to work on a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia starting in 1935, but by that time her focus was on a new form of expression for her experience.

Jonah’s Gourd Vine

Hurston turned to fiction in hopes of producing income and finding a medium for her Eatonville voice. She published The Gilded Six-Bits in Story magazine in August 1933. This is a mature story, set in Eatonville, and was the catalyst in attracting the publisher that she needed. The Philadelphia publisher J. B. Lippincott noticed the story and asked her for a novel. She rented a cabin in Eatonville and sat down and wrote Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934).

This, Hurston’s first novel, is a blend of autobiography, folklore, and fiction. The book succeeds because the voice of Eatonville pours from her pen. The story is authentic, based on the life of her father, the Baptist preacher born into slavery. John Pearson rises with determination, the help of his strong wife Lucie, and his gift for poetry. But John has a fatal flaw; he is a philanderer. After his wife dies, in a deathbed scene based on the death of Hurston’s mother, John—filled with guilt but bewitched by his lover with the help of a hoodoo man—remarries in haste and eventually is cast out by his congregation.

The use of the collected folklore is central to the novel, which describes customs, food, celebrations, and the telling of “lies” on the porch of the general store and is written in the black vernacular. John’s farewell sermon, a triumph of language and poetry, is quoted directly from a sermon Hurston collected while in Florida.

If sometimes the transitions are flawed, if the reader is brought too abruptly from the folklore material to the fictional plot, Hurston nevertheless has the gift of knowing where to leave autobiography behind and move into the realm of fiction. From the suggestion of hoodoo in John’s hasty remarriage to his failed redemption, Hurston departs from life and finishes the fictional tale. Jonah’s Gourd Vine was written in a fresh and knowledgeable voice, with an ear for dialect and using material and a setting that Hurston was uniquely placed to present.

Language is at the heart of the novel, as it was at the heart of all of Hurston’s subsequent writing. Her authentic and original use of the black idiom, a language rich with proverbs, wordplay, imagery, and metaphor, is a solid achievement. John Pearson is aware of the power of language; his gift for language raises him from laborer to leader. Most important, language, especially black language, is honored in Jonah’s Gourd Vine. John’s poetry rises from a culture that values skill and improvisation in oral art, from the store porch and from the pulpit.

Mules and Men

Pleased with Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Lippincott agreed to publish Hurston’s folklore collection, which became Mules and Men. Lippincott wanted the anthropology material popularized for the average reader. Hurston devised a form, a story within a story, in which she puts the folklore into context, creating a first-person role for herself as narrator and collector as well as the third-person role of social scientist and observer.

Hurston found a voice when she put herself as a character in her report. She created herself, the semifictitious narrator. Her introduction to Mules and Men is a statement of her method and identity, uniting her own past in Eatonville with the curious researcher. Hurston was criticized by the scholarly community for putting too much of her own personality into a scientific report. She was apprehensive of how her mentor, Franz Boas, would react to the form, but he agreed to write the preface and presented his protégée as a collector who was able to penetrate the true inner life of her subjects.

Hurston was sometimes accused of being less than scrupulous in her writing and collecting. She was as much an interpreter of the folklore she collected as an objective scientist. The line between fact and fiction was not always sharply drawn. Perhaps she embellished. Perhaps some of the tales are stories that she herself contributed to the lying sessions on the porch of the village store. Shortly after Mules and Men was published, Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to go to Jamaica and Haiti to collect material on religious practices. She spent much of 1936 and 1937 on those islands.

Hurston’s personal life was always complicated; she revealed as little as possible in her writing. She was married at least twice, and possibly another time during the lost ten years in her early life, those years whose existence she denied by changing her birthdate. There is, however, a chapter titled “Love” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). One of her marriages was to Herbert Sheen, her sweetheart throughout the Howard and Barnard years. The marriage itself was brief; the conflict between marriage and career may have been the reason for its failure. The turmoil surrounding the marriage may have contributed to the failure of her first collecting expedition in early 1927.

Their Eyes were Watching God

The trip to the West Indies in 1936 and 1937 occurred at the time of another breakup, this time of an affair between Hurston and a man twenty years younger than herself. This man, she said in Dust Tracks, asked her to marry him and give up her career, “that one thing I could not do.” Thus, it is no coincidence that the book she wrote in exile from this affair was the story of a woman who is determined to find her own identity on her own terms, and a story of a love affair between a vibrant older woman and a younger man.

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Hurston’s masterpiece, an elegant short novel about a young woman’s search for self, for love, for freedom. The novel has the familiar autobiographical elements: a parent born in slavery, Eatonville, the porch of Joe Clarke’s store, a hurricane scene drawn from a storm she experienced in the Bahamas in 1929. It draws heavily on folklore and on black history, culture, and language.

The heroine is Janie Crawford, a young black woman raised by her grandmother, a former slave. When Janie feels the stirrings of sexual awakening, her grandmother quickly marries her off to an older man who can provide land and security. Once Janie realizes that love will not come to this marriage and that her husband will treat her as another piece of property, a mule to be worked, she runs away with Joe Starks. Joe is an ambitious young man on his way to Eatonville to make something of himself. He becomes the mayor and storekeeper of the town. Joe expects his wife to play the role of “mayor’s wife” and to work in the store, but he does not encourage her to join in the storytelling on the store porch or to mingle with the other women in the village. She is an adjunct to Joe’s prestige and is not allowed any personal expression or voice. For both of her husbands, upward mobility focuses on ownership and suppression of Janie’s own self-awareness. Janie sadly watches Joe become more pompous and demeaning, and this marriage, too, becomes loveless.

There is a moment of awakening in each marriage as Janie gradually becomes more self-aware. She walks away from her first husband when she realizes that he wants her to be “de mule uh de world.” Joe Starks represents change and the outside world and Janie is ready to move on. Later, after years with Joe, she understands that she has learned to keep her inner and outer lives separate. “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” This woman’s awakening is a universal feminist theme, black or white.

Joe Starks dies and Janie is liberated from his oppression. Now a wealthy widow, she meets Tea Cake, an easygoing black man years younger than she. He is a free spirit who loves life, gambles without apology, and awakens laughter and stories in Janie. At last Janie blossoms, finally fulfilling the promise of womanhood that was nipped in the bud when her grandmother married her off to a respectable old man. Janie and Tea Cake leave Eatonville, walking away from disapproving public opinion, and live a joyous life picking beans in the Everglades.

The story ends tragically, however. Escaping from a violent hurricane, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog. He succumbs to rabies himself and becomes irrational and violent; ultimately, Janie is forced to shoot him in self-defense. She is acquitted at her trial, and returns to Eatonville to live out her life, happy that she has at last known a true love and joy in life.

The novel is pure Hurston, infused throughout with folklore and autobiographical elements. She spans the history of black people in the South from the end of slavery through the 1930s. She writes with a lyrical ease, transforming folk tales into metaphor, rendering dialect with her impeccable ear. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a feminist novel, resonating with a black voice. A woman’s freedom lies in discovering her own voice and identity apart from her husband; a people’s freedom lies in preserving their own voice and identity apart from the oppressor. With this novel, Hurston achieved a literary expression for her experience.

Tell My Horse

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), is Hurston’s report of her collecting experience in those islands. The practice of voodoo was a powerful spiritual experience for Hurston. She treats voodoo as a serious religion, originating in Africa and coexisting with Roman Catholicism. Tell My Horse, like so much of Hurston’s work, is written in an original mix of style and genre, travelogue and political commentary mingling with observations on art, dance, practices, and customs that only the now-experienced, mature, and confident Hurston could provide. Typically, she shifts between the first- and third-person voice, using the first person for observation and commentary, the third person to report history and politics. She describes instances of possession, the hierarchy of voodoo gods, and details of ceremonies, information that would only be accessible to an initiate. The book is illustrated with photos, including a remarkable photo (and report) of a zombie in Haiti.

After the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tell My Horse, Hurston returned to Florida. Through 1938 and 1939 she worked in the South, collecting, writing, working on drama projects. There was another short-lived marriage, this time to Albert Price III in 1939.

Moses, Man of the Mountain

Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) was published at Hurston’s zenith. The novel is complex, a display of virtuosity in character, background, language, themes, and satire, a Hurston blend of Eatonville, Africa, and finding a way into freedom. The basis of the novel lies in the African and voodoo approach to Moses, revered as a man of power who could talk to God face-to-face, and in the identification of American black slaves with the enslaved Jews in the Bible. The novel is set in Egypt and the promised land, but the characters are rural black Americans with the speech and mannerisms of Eatonville. The Jews of the biblical tale are black Americans and Pharaoh and the Egyptians are whites.

The voice of Eatonville, as interpreted by Zora Neale Hurston, is humorous and feisty. This was resented by some black leaders and intellectuals, who were beginning to complain that Hurston was too narrowly focused on Eatonville and that she ignored the many negatives of southern black experience. Moses, Man of the Mountain lacks bitterness. Hurston was expected as a black writer to write a protest novel, exposing the racial injustice of the South. She was determined instead to celebrate black culture in literature.

Dust Tracks on a Road

Having written five books in five years, Hurston was at a crossroads. Her publisher, J. B. Lippincott, suggested she write an autobiography. She moved to California in the spring of 1941, where she worked on the manuscript of Dust Tracks on a Road and as a story consultant at Paramount Studios.

Dust Tracks on a Road is a book that mirrors the division that emerged in Hurston’s life. The early part of the book, where she describes her background, childhood, and early life is vibrant with stories and scenes and the voice of Eatonville. The reader sees the hopes and dreams of the joyful child whose father, the preacher, showed daily how language could enthrall, whose mother urged her to reach for the stars, and whose ears were tuned to the “lying” on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store in Eatonville. The reader experiences that child’s helplessness and despair at her mother’s deathbed and begins to grasp the tenacity and self-reliance Zora Hurston needed to get an education and reach New York City and professional recognition.

Once Hurston reaches the point where she acknowledges her patron—Mrs. Mason, her “godmother”—she begins to lose the vibrancy of Eatonville’s stories and her own confident voice. Her tone changes, becomes awkward and ingratiating. Dust Tracks on a Road’s vitality seems to be a casualty of her odd patronage relationship. As she brings society and politics into the picture, her voice falters. Reactions were mixed. Whites liked the book; it harmed her reputation with her black peers, however.

Indeed, by the mid-1940s Hurston seemed to be losing her voice. A novel and a proposal were rejected by Lippincott, though she was publishing magazine articles and continuing to work on the black college circuit. Politically she grew more conservative; her voice shifted from the self-confident first person of idiomatic black speech to the artificial third person of unpopular political viewpoint.

Seraph on the Suwanee

In 1947 Hurston signed a contract with Charles Scribner’s Sons for a novel about a white southern family. Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) was written in Honduras, on a trip to look for a lost city, financed with the advance money from Scribner’s. She had ambitions for Seraph on the Suwanee. She hoped to challenge literary conventions, to prove that a black woman could write about whites. The novel tells the story of a poor white family in Florida that gradually achieves upward mobility and of a woman who struggles with her identity in marriage. The language of the novel is the southern vernacular. Hurston hoped to show that southern blacks and whites had language and cultural influences in common.

The early reviews of Seraph on the Suwanee were favorable. Just at the time that Hurston and her publisher would have promoted the new book, however, a bombshell fell. Hurston was accused of sexually molesting a ten-year-old boy. The charges were false. Hurston was able to prove that she was in Honduras at the time the incidents were alleged to have occurred; the boy was shown to be disturbed. But the damage had already been done. A national black newspaper, Baltimore’s Afro-American, picked up the story and created a lurid scandal. Hurston was devastated. She considered suicide. She removed herself from the public eye as best she could. Seraph on the Suwanee was to be her last published novel.

Hurston did recover from this blow. She moved back to Florida, bought a houseboat, planted a garden. She continued to write magazine articles for a mainstream audience, worked as a maid, did some substitute teaching in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her articles were increasingly conservative in tone and it was difficult to find publishers for her work. Money was a problem. Her health deteriorated. In 1959 she had a stroke and entered the St. Lucie County Welfare Home. She died there on 28 January 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

The Legacy

Why did Zora Neale Hurston decline from her standing as a vibrant presence in the Harlem Renaissance, a fertile interpreter of black folklore, and a lyrical writer to become a poor woman buried in an unmarked grave? Part of the answer lies in the struggle for money. The need to make ends meet overcame her art and her scholarship in the end. At the mercy of patrons and publishers, it was always a struggle to collect, to keep writing, to make art. The Eatonville voice that Hurston so loved faltered as she looked for a mass magazine audience. An outsider in the white world of publishing, she was criticized by black leaders and intellectuals as well. Then the scandal of the false sexual accusation broke her spirit. She finally became bitter.

Hurston’s strength and gift was pride in the folk heritage embodied in her Eatonville experience. This emphasis on culture did not translate well to politics. She was outspoken; she wanted to affirm her belief in the individual, her belief that a black background need not be tragic. Black opinion accused her of ignoring the dark side of life in the American South, giving a whitewashed picture of southern black life. She grew even more conservative after the scandal. She was always an outsider but she had always been exuberant, excited by her work, believing in it. She lost her voice, she retreated to her garden, she was poor, she became ill, she died quietly.

Zora Neale Hurston’s books were out of print for thirty-five years. Then, in the late 1970s, black writer and scholar Alice Walker wrote an essay, Looking for Zora, and interest in Hurston was revived. In Zora Hurston, black women writers found a rare model, a woman who wrote in the black vernacular, who affirmed black folk culture with pride and exuberance.

Zora Neale Hurston left a record of an oral folk tradition that she was uniquely placed to provide. She had a clear, individual, woman’s voice, even if she was at times inhibited by her white patron, her publishers, and her need for cash. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God has become a classic of African-American feminist literature, yet the theme of a woman finding her voice and equality in marriage is universal.

Zora Hurston was at her best when interpreting Eatonville. She was happiest in Florida, and at her worst when struggling for money. She was proud to have “the map of Dixie on her tongue.” The creation of an original black literature based on pride in the language and folk tradition of African Americans was Hurston’s lifelong goal and her major contribution.

photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

Each month, the editors of the Oxford African American Studies Center provide insights into black history and culture by offering specially commissioned featured essays, photo collections, and a selected list of articles to further guide the reader. The September 2006 report explores the contributions of women to American literature. Twice a week we’ll offer additional articles that expand on that topic.

In this article taken from Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Dr. Bernard W. Bell exames the dual tradition of African American fiction.

“Anyone who analyzes black literature,” writes literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “must do so as a comparativist … because our canonical texts have complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black.”

This has long been the considered judgment and is now the prevailing wisdom of most African Americanists. Because of the distinctive history and acculturation of Africans in the British colonies in North America, the literary tradition of African Americans is most meaningfully assessed in the context of the tension between their attitudes toward their African and European cultural heritages and their oral and literary heritages. Every American writer of African descent works within and against the dual tradition—oral and literary, African and European, romantic and realistic, male and female—that each inherits as part of his or her North American cultural legacy. African American writers participate in the elusive quest for status, power, and identity within the context of these dual traditions. Each writer’s contribution and significance are therefore influenced by his or her relationship to past and present writers, as well as by the relationship of his or her texts to others in the tradition, both in the Eurocentric sense of literary formalism and in the broader Afrocentric cultural sense.

While a Eurocentric world-view privileges Greece, Rome, and Europe as the birthplace of civilization and the universal standard of cultural excellence, an Afrocentric world-view, as the neo-Hoodoo aesthetician and artist Ishmael Reed brilliantly illustrates in his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), challenges our conventional wisdom and represents ancient Africa, including Egypt, as the more historically and archaeologically valid cradle of humankind and cultural diversity. Although either unknown or unacknowledged by many people, it is generally accepted by scientists that human beings evolved at least two million years ago in East Africa and southern Africa, moved into Europe and Asia much later, and finally came to the Americas over the Bering Strait from 12,000 to 30,000 years ago. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker employs magical realism in The Temple of My Familiar (1989) to reconstruct this story and to recreate the primordial sub-Saharan African mother of us all, whether we call her Lucy or Eve.

From his Eurocentric perspective T.S. Eliot writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and compose a simultaneous order.” In contrast, from a dual African and European perspective, Richard Wright states in “Blueprint for Negro Writing”:

"Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer. Every iota of gain in human thought and sensibility should be ready grist for his mill, no matter how far-fetched they may seem in their immediate implications."

Similarly, Gates argues that:

"Literary works configure into a tradition not because of some mystical collective unconscious determined by the biology of race or gender, but because writers read other writers and ground their representations of experience in models of language provided largely by other writers to whom they feel akin. It is through this mode of literary revision that a “tradition” emerges and defines itself."

The point here is not that black literary texts are self-reflexive, self-sufficient, closed intertextual sign systems. Nor is it that all black writers choose to invoke African muses and to deploy exclusively black sources and strategies in creating their texts. Rather, it is that black literary texts are sign systems whose referents are nonliterary as well as literary texts that illumine the meaning of the shared experiences of black Americans and the complex double consciousness that, as aesthete and social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois explains in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is the special burden and blessing of African American identity. It is equally important to remember that, as critic Ann duCille argues, “Traditions and the Canons that confirm them are made not born, constructed not spawned.” For this reason “mythologies of race, gender, and class have a great deal to do with the invention of such traditions and … there is a great deal at stake in the creation myths of literary canons.”

Dual Tradition of the African American Short Story

A useful typology of valued writing by and about African Americans divides our literary tradition into documentary, autobiography/biography, and imaginative genres (i.e., short stories, novels, poems, and plays). The focus of this essay is the dual tradition of African American fiction: short stories and novels. What, then, are the creation myths and facts of the African American short story? The consensus of African American literary critics is that Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” which appeared in 1853 as a serial in his North Star and in Julia Griffith’s Autographs for Freedom, is the first lengthy short story, or novella, published by a black American. Some African Americanists, however, still claim this historical distinction for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Two Offers,” serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine of September and October 1859 and for William Wells Brown’s brief narrative “A True Story of Slave Life,” which was published in the Anti-Slavery Advocate in December 1852. The differences in generic definitions and chronology, as apparent in this case, often rest on questions of the length of a narrative and whether the narrative was serialized or published in hardcover. Even more problematic for many contemporary cultural and literary critics is the dual folk and literary tradition of the African American short story and novel. On the one hand, it is a fact, as critic Robert Bone states in Down Home (1975), his history of African American short fiction, that the “Afro-American short story is a child of mixed ancestry. Two cultural heritages meet and blend in its pages: the one Euro-American, literary, cosmopolitan; the other African-derived, oral in expressive model rooted in the folk community.” On the other hand, it is a myth to claim, as Bone does, that the “short fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt cannot be understood apart from that of Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable. Similarly with Paul Laurence Dunbar and Thomas Nelson Page; Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank; Eric Derwent Walrond and Lafcadio Hearn.” Bone’s cultural and political position is that “books by white authors are a far more important influence” than black folklore as “the primary source of black fiction.”

As literary historian and critic Frances Smith Foster reminds us in her introduction to Minnie’s Sacrifice; Sowing and Reaping; Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels (1994) by Frances E. W. Harper, we should not subscribe to the anachronistic, reductive, and occasionally racist position that the works of early black American writers “should be read as attempts … to imitate the literary productions of Euro-Americans.” Edgar Allan Poe established the theory and practice of the American short story, especially the traditional conventions of single effect, tone, length, and unity outlined in 1842 in “Twice Told Tales.” But African Americans, as their early short stories reveal and as V. F. Calverton noted in the introduction to his Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), “gave whatever [cultural forms they] took [from the West] a new style and a new interpretation.”

Smith also argues that we should no longer subscribe to “the myth that the oral folk tradition—particularly as manifest in the secular arena: the work songs and the blues, the trickster tales and the barroom toasts—is the only authentically black art prior to the twentieth century.” In her opposition to the claims of some vernacular theorists, Smith neglects the fact that most antebellum blacks were illiterate slaves in the South. She still provides a valuable service, however, by stressing that readers need to know and to acknowledge that many African Americans of the past, especially free blacks in Northern cities, “were as capable of appropriating as they were of assimilating, [and] that they could not only signify in conversation but also in correspondence.” Most important, Foster reminds us that “[w]hen we seriously think about those journalists and poets, scientists and novelists, preachers, teachers, and politicians who wrote for publication and who, when the established media refused their submissions or disrespected their cultural contributions, founded their own newspapers, magazines, and publishing companies, often risking and sometimes losing both their savings and their lives, the commitment of a significant portion of African Americans to a viable written literature becomes clear.”

Although the tradition of classic modern anthologies of African American literature by African Americans themselves begins with James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) and Sterling Allen Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee’s The Negro Caravan (1941). The best anthologies of stories by African Americans include Langston Hughes’s The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967), Woodie King’s Black Short Story Anthology (1971), John Henrik Clarke’s American Negro Short Stories (1966), and Clarence Major’s Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African American Short Stories (1993).

“The African-American journey to selfhood,” as Major notes in the introduction, “was always deeply ironic. Africans and people of African descent were subjected to legal and illegal slavery in the ‘land of liberty.’ And … [j]ust as irony is a key to the African-American experience, so it is an important device in African-American literature.” This is particularly true of classic stories, from Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” (1899) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Ingrate” to Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), Ralph Ellison’s “Flying Home” (1944), Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” (1972), and James Alan McPherson’s “The Story of a Scare” (1973). Major reminds reader, however, that “if the social experiences of black Americans vary from region to region, the historical stages vary as much, and it’s important to remember the aesthetic and social philosophies, the complexity, of each period of African-American literature.”

Dual Tradition of the African American Novel

In the 1886 edition of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, an anonymous white woman critic speculated that the “the coming American novelist” would be “a woman as well as an African.” Twenty-seven years earlier Harriet E. Adams Wilson, the first African American to publish a novel in the United States, had inscribed in the tradition of the American novel the complex fate of the black American woman novelist, as well as the complex hybrid nature and function of European American and African American novels. It is well known to many students of the novel in the United States that William Wells Brown became the father of the African American novel with the London publication of Clotel in 1853. It was a well-kept secret until the 1980s, however, that Wilson became the mother of the African American novel in 1859 with the Boston publication of Our Nig.

Rather than the “great American novel” or a best-selling romance of the “Feminine Fifties,” like Emma Southworth’s Hidden Hand (which sold more than two million copies, mainly to white women), Our Nig is an intriguing synthesis of the European American sentimental novel and the African American slave narrative. Combining fiction and fact, romance and autobiography, it is addressed primarily to a black audience. Based on the author’s life as an indentured servant in New England, it employs a parodic and polemic style derived from its ethnic double consciousness.

In September 1900 the Colored American Magazine in Boston announced the publication of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South by one of its African American founders, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Although the subtitle indicates that it is a romance, in its preface Hopkins called for novels of social and psychological realism, “We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.” In addition, Hopkins’s rewriting of the myth of racial purity and the realities of racial kinship illustrates how the quest of early African American novelists to define, chronicle, and celebrate the experiences of black people in the United States was influenced by the impact of abolitionism, white terrorism, lynch law, and imperialism on the development of their distinctive culture and consciousness. For Hopkins and other nineteenth century romancers and novelists, the distinction between romance and novel was far from absolute.

Like its mixed European American stepbrother, the African American novel is a hybrid form. It is not the culmination of an evolutionary process in the narrative tradition. Rather it is the product of social and cultural forces that shape the author’s attitude toward life and fuel the dialectical process between romantic and mimetic narrative impulses. In contrast to the European American novel, the African American novel has its roots in the combined oral and literary traditions of African American culture. The novel is one of the symbolic literary forms of narrative discourse that black Americans have borrowed from Western culture and adapted in the quest for status, power, and identity in a racist, white, patriarchal American social arena. The African American novel is a symbolic sociocultural act, not a solipsistic, self-referential linguistic system. “Precisely because successive Western cultures have privileged written art over oral or musical forms,” Gates reminds us in The Signifying Monkey (1988), “the writing of black people in Western languages has, at all points, remained political, implicitly or explicitly, regardless of its intent or its subject.”

In this sense, the nineteenth century romances and novels of William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Wilson, and Sutton Griggs were both private and public linguistic enactments of human relationships, reflecting both ethical and aesthetic decisions inside and outside the text. They were weapons in the struggle for freedom, literacy, and integrity. “Literacy, the very literacy of the printed book, stood as the ultimate parameter by which to measure the humanity of authors struggling to define an American self in Western letters,” Gates writes. “It was to establish a collective black voice through the sublime example of an individual text, and thereby to register a black presence in letters, that most clearly motivated black writers, from the Augustan Age to the Harlem Renaissance.”

Twentieth-century novelists such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, John Alfred Williams, William Melvin Kelley, Ernest J. Gaines, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Leon Forrest, Charles Richard Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, and Ishmael Reed also employ the novel and romance as symbolic acts to explore the disparity between European American myths and African American reality. But they do not approach the narrative tradition from the same ideological perspective as their white contemporaries, black predecessors, or each other. Among other things, social and cultural change has encouraged the movement toward more individualism in the novelists and their aesthetics. Most modern and postmodern African American novelists nevertheless share a common tradition. As members of the largest nonwhite ethnic group in the United States, most African American novelists develop their personal and national identities within and against the distinctive pattern of values, orientations of life, and shared ancestral memories they acquired from and contribute to African American culture.

Relationship of the African American to the European American Novel

How do the dominant themes, structures, and styles in the tradition of the African American novel contrast with those of the European American novel? On one level, as Bernard Bell demonstrates in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987), early African American writers, like some of their white peers, found the freedom of the romance—its delight in rhetoric, allegorical characters, and allegiance to an idealized world—appealing. Black writers have found the novel of social realism equally compelling and appropriate, though, because of their distinctive social and cultural experiences. “I have not attempted to give the reader a mere romance,” writes J. W. Grant in the preface to Out of Darkness: Of Diabolism and Destiny (1909), “but a fiction based on historical facts, written and unwritten.”

Brown, Webb, Delany, Wilson, Dunbar, and Chesnutt generally found it unconscionable to ignore moral questions or the spectacle of people in society. In order to be published and read by their predominantly white editors and multiple audiences, they were often constrained to thunderous silences in their texts. These authors were also forced to explore through irony and parody—tropes subsumed in the black vernacular concept and the performance of signifying—the moral and political issues concerning racism, classism, and sexism of the day.

In contrast, most nineteenth century European American novels addressed an exclusively white audience. With the exception of major novels such as Melville’s Moby Dick, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, they reinforced the ideology of white supremacy, usually defining blackness as the symbol of diabolic or noble savagery. Thus, one of the major differences about perceptions of the nature of reality, between American whites and blacks, centered on the designation of evil in the world. While most blacks satirized the sins of slavery and whites, most whites sentimentalized the slavery of sin and blacks.

Nineteenth-century black novelists tapped the roots of their indigenous ethnic culture for matter and method as much as, if not more than, their white contemporaries. The world-view of the politically oppressed, however, was and is not the same as the oppressors’ world-view. Each group’s historical experience creates a different cultural or subcultural frame of reference; consequently, there will be corresponding differences in the meaning of the archetypal patterns they employ to reconstruct and make sense of their individual and collective experiences.

White and black novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, both draw on aspects of Jewish and Christian tradition—especially messianic and jeremiadic themes, symbols, and rituals—for terms to order their experiences. But since, more often than not, the white man’s heaven is the black man’s hell, black writers generally express strong ambivalence toward its values, whether by symbolic acts of silence or speech, submission or rebellion. Also, in contrast to the search for innocence and the Adamic vision that inform the European American novel, the Manichaean drama of white versus black, the apocalyptic vision of a new world order, and the quest to reconcile the double consciousness of African American identity are inscribed in the texts of nineteenth and twentieth century African American novels.

Brown, for instance, was certainly aware of his debt to the oral and written abolitionist tradition, as his allusions in the first chapter, epigraphs, and conclusion of Clotel reveal. His use of the tragic mulatto and quest-for-freedom motifs, however, differs from that of his white contemporaries. Similarly, Dunbar and Chesnutt continue some of the conventions of the local color tradition while simultaneously changing others, like the power and authority of the blues in The Sport of the Gods and conjuring in The Conjure Woman, to provide more complex, regional truths about nineteenth century black culture and character.

In the twentieth century, Hurston’s rewriting of the sentimental romance in Their Eyes Were Watching God celebrates the liberating possibilities of love, storytelling, and autonomy for black women. Wright’s rewriting of the myths of the “bad nigger” and the American dream in Native Son continues to overwhelm readers with the power of its naturalistic truth. Reed’s rediscovery and revitalization of traditional narrative forms such as the Western in Yellow Back Radio Brokedown, the detective novel in Mumbo Jumbo, and the slave narrative in Flight to Canada intrigue us by their bold experimentation with and celebration of an Afrocentric aesthetic. Alice Walker adapts the epistolary style in the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple, whose theme is a rewriting of Janie Crawford’s dreams of what a black woman ought to be in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved is a Gothic neoslave narrative and postmodern romance that speaks in many compelling voices of the historical rape of black women and of the resilient spirit of blacks to survive as a people.

Thematically and structurally, the tradition of the African American novel is dominated by the struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression and by the personal odyssey to realize the full potential of one’s complex bicultural identity as an African American. This legendary and mythic journey—deriving its sociocultural consciousness from the group experience of black Americans and its mythopoetic force from the interplay of Eurocentric and Afrocentric symbolic systems—begins in physical or psychological bondage and ends in some ambiguous form of deliverance or vision of a new world of mutual respect and justice for all peoples. In short, insofar as there is an African American canonical story, it is the quest, frequently with apocalyptic undertones, for freedom, literacy, and wholeness—personal and communal—grounded in social reality and ritualized in symbolic acts of African American speech, music, and religion.

Whether the appeal is to white conscience or to black consciousness, whether the commitment is to traditional narrative conventions and forms or to modernist and postmodernist experimentation, the value most frequently celebrated in the tradition of the African American novel is the spiritual resiliency of a people to survive. But this ideal of survival is both individual and collective, assumes a dignity for all human beings, and includes opportunity for all to realize their full human potential. The relationships between the factual and fictional worlds of the authors, especially the modernists and postmodernists, and between the authors’ and readers’ worlds, are influenced by sociocultural changes that move authors and readers away from moral and epistemological absolutes about the nature of reality, especially good and evil. This movement encourages African American novelists to rediscover the validity and reinscribe the viability of ritual, fable, parable, legend, romance, and satire in constructing their essentially Blues visions of life. These visions affirm the Constitutional principles of the United States, while exposing the racist perversion of those principles. Storytellers in the traditions of the African American novel thus challenge us to make sense of the unreconciled strivings and folk wisdom embedded in their frequently ironic, parodic, and open-ended texts.

Before the 1960s the protagonist in the African American novel was generally a male who was part rebel and part victim, striving to define himself in the whirlwind of social and cultural forces that denied or threatened to destroy his humanity. On a deeper level, his journey was a ritualistic or allegorical reenactment on a smaller scale of the larger historical experience of his people in the United States. Torn by conflicting loyalties, he ideally attained a measure of peace and fulfillment by first turning inward—drawing what strength he could from himself, his ethnic community, and his usable past—and then outward to some form of social action or vision of a new social order. Since the 1960s black protagonists such as Janie, Vyry, Miss Jane Pitman, Sula, Velma, Celie, and Sethe have been reclaimed, reimagined, and reconstructed to challenge male hegemony and to illuminate the joys and sorrows of those who are poor, black, and female. Stereotypes and archetypes, romantic and realistic characters contend with each other as the novelists seek to create fictions that explore the wide range of black American character and celebrate the self-redemptive, community-empowering values of black American life while criticizing destructive forces. The most distinctive character types include the preacher, the hustler, the matriarch, the messianic leader, the “bad nigger,” the liberated woman, and the blues-jazz figure—both male and female. The most significant sociocultural events to influence the African American novel during and since the 1960s were the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement, and Women’s Rights Movements, which contributed to the successful reemergence of black women writers.

The concept of Black Power expresses the determination of peoples of sub-Saharan African descent to define and liberate themselves. Floyd Barbour’s Black Power Revolt and Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power remind us that the concept has a long history and wide range of meanings. This history ranges from the development of economic and political solidarity and the attainment of full equality as American citizens to the radical reform or, if necessary, revolutionary change of old political, economic, and cultural structures. In “The Black Arts Movement,” black aesthetician Larry Neal tells us that:

"Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique and iconology."

Because the concepts of black art and black power are related to the desire of African Americans for self-determination, nationhood, and solidarity with colonized people of the Third World, both are nationalistic. “One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics,” says Neal. Consequently, he contends, the most authentic writing of blacks during the 1960s was grounded in the lives of the black masses and “aimed at consolidating the African-American personality.”

But in turning its attention inward to the primacy of the black family and the problems of the black community, black power and black arts discourse subordinated the interests, needs, and desires of black women to those of black men and of those of the individual to those of the group. The black masculinist aesthetic, sanctioned by the Black Power and Black Arts movements, subordinated sexual politics to racial politics and privileged the cultural traditions of common black people. As a result, African American women writers had to reconcile their racial double consciousness with the white middle-class feminist movement.

Facile generalizations about the parallels between the struggle of blacks and women for status ignore the complexity and distinctiveness of the history of black women, from the legacy of their African past and slave experience to their experience with industrialization and modern corporate America. As Toni Cade Bambara notes in her 1970 groundbreaking anthology, The Black Woman, a major question for black women of the 1960s and 1970s was how relevant the experiences, priorities, truths, and discourses of white women are to the multiple consciousness of black women. Subject to all the restrictions against blacks as well as those against women, the black woman is for many people, as black folk wisdom and Hurston remind us, “de mule uh de world.” This means, among other things, that the reality of black womanhood is not dependent on black males first defining their manhood. Triple consciousness rather than double consciousness is frequently stressed by black feminists in their analysis of the interrelationship of race, class, and sex in the identity formations of African American women.

With the reemergence of these white and black feminist discourses and the shift in public and federal interest from the rights of blacks and others to the rights of women, editors and publishers like Random House, Ms., New American Library, and the Feminist Press became more receptive to the voices of black women writers. Fiction by Margaret Walker, Rosa Guy, Mary Vroman, Louise Meriwether, Paule Marshall, Kristin Hunter, Caroline Polite, Sarah Wright, Alice Walker, Alice Childress, Ellease Southerland, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Ntosake Shange, and Toni Cade Bambara, among the better known, were all published before the end of 1983.

In Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Bambara told editor Claudia Tate: “What has changed about the women’s movement is the way we perceive it, the way black women define the term, the phenomena and our participation in it … We are more inclined to trust our own traditions, whatever name we gave and now give those impulses, those groups, those agendas, and are less inclined to think we have to sound like, build like, non-colored groups that identify themselves as feminist or as women’s rights groups, or so it seems to me.” This statement not only reveals the heart of the differences that many black women have about the priorities and objectives of the white women’s rights movement, but it also explains in part why Alice Walker adapted the term womanist from black folk expression to signify a black feminist or feminist of color, a woman who, among other things, is audaciously committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. More to the point of readings of contemporary African American novels by black women, the above comments provide the necessary context for a better understanding of why black women are primarily concerned with how racism, sexism, and classism have influenced the nature and function of love, power, autonomy, creativity, manhood, and womanhood in the black family and community.

Reconstructing a Black Female Literary Tradition

In pursuing these themes, black women novelists provide a much neglected perspective and chorus of voices on the human experience. The absence, silence, or misrepresentation of black women in literary and nonliterary texts or contexts, by black men as well as white men and women, is now commonplace knowledge. “Except for Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks, and perhaps Margaret Walker,” Calvin Hernton states with some exaggeration in an extremely rare, sympathetic black feminist essay by a black male in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, “the name of not one black woman writer and not one female protagonist was accorded a worthy status in the black literary world prior to the 1970s.”

Black feminist critics, such as Mary Helen Washington in her introduction to Black Eyed Susans and Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists, applaud the realistic images by black women writers such as Morrison, Walker, Meriwether, Marshall, and Bambara. As illustrated in their fiction, interviews in Black Women Writers at Work, and the pioneer essays on black feminist criticism by Barbara Smith and Deborah E. McDowell, many black women novelists deploy to a greater or lesser degree the following signs and structures: (1) motifs of interlocking racist, sexist, and classist oppression; (2) black female protagonists; (3) spiritual journey from victimization to the realization of personal autonomy or creativity; (4) centrality of female bonding or networking; (5) shared focus on personal relationships in the family and community; (6) deeper, more detailed exploration and validation of the epistemological power of the emotions; (7) iconography of women’s clothing; and (8) black female language. While agreeing with Smith that feminist criticism is “a valid and necessary cultural and political enterprise,” McDowell questions the imprecision of the current definition of lesbianism by black feminists, the possible reductiveness of a lesbian aesthetic, and the vagueness of Smith’s analysis in “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” McDowell advocates that black feminist critics combine a contextual approach with rigorous textual analysis, including a concern for the issue of gender-specific uses of language.

Many black women writers, however, including some feminists and women who acknowledge the influence of male as well as female literary foreparents, underscore the problems of a separate black female literary tradition. Bambara, for example, says: “Women are less likely to skirt the feeling place, to finesse with language, to camouflage emotions. But a lot of male writers knock that argument out. … One of the crucial differences that strikes me immediately among poets, dramatists, novelists, story tellers is in the handling of children. I can’t nail it down, but the attachment to children and to two-plus-two reality is simply stronger in women’s writings; but there are exceptions. And finally, there isn’t nearly as large a bulk of gynocentric writing as there is phallic-obsessive writings. I’d love to read/hear a really good discussion of just this issue by someone who’s at home with close textual reading—cups, bowls, and other motifs in women’s writings. We’ve only just begun … to fashion a woman’s vocabulary to deal with the ‘silences’ of our lives.” Washington agrees, as she argues for a black female literary tradition in her introduction to Midnight Birds and the more recent Invented Lives: “Black women are searching for a specific language, specific symbols, specific images with which to record their lives, and even though they can claim a rightful place in the Afro-American tradition and the feminist tradition of women writers, it is also clear that, for the purposes of liberation, black women writers will first insist on their own name, their own space.”

Because there are many intertextual ties between black male and female novelists, readers should examine the pattern of these intertextual relationships to determine the manner and degree of their distinctiveness, consistency, and frequency in narratives by black women, deciding for themselves whether mutually exclusive black female and male literary traditions exist.

Postmodernism and Contemporary African American Women Novelists

Since the novel is a synthetic literary form, a complex blend of the social and cultural forces that shape the novelist’s attitude toward life and language, especially his or her imaginative use of narrative conventions, it is not surprising that since the 1960s the African American novel has been characterized by continuity and change. During this contemporary period, black novelists sought signs, structures, and styles appropriate for the imaginative reconstruction of their sense of the double consciousness and unreconciled striving of black people, as refracted through their particular vision as artists.

The agonizing knowledge that blacks, who are twice as likely to die at birth, continue to live shorter, harsher lives than whites informed the consciousness of many activists in or witnesses of the radical social developments of the era. These included the Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars; the assassination of major political leaders and civil rights workers; the profiteering of multinational corporations; the launching of the first manned flight to the moon; the emergence of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements; the exposure of the Watergate scandal; and the influence of birth control pills in radicalizing the Women’s Rights Movement. These events swept away most of the traditional grounds for faith in a stable universe, a patriarchal society, a national state, and a mimetic approach to art. Ambivalence toward authority—father, president, God—with its conflicting attitudes of acceptance and rejection of hierarchies and boundaries, deepened and spread to all aspects of life, resulting in a crisis of belief for many novelists and readers.

As contemporary African American novelists attempt to displace personal ambivalence and social absurdity with a new order of thinking, feeling, and sharing based on self-determination, community, human rights, most, such as John Oliver Killens, John A. Williams, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan, and Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker, continue the tradition of social and critical realism. Some, like Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, explore poetic realism; and others, like Margaret Walker, Ernest Gaines, William Melvin Kelley, Ronald Fair, Hal Bennett, Charles Wright, Charles Johnson, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ishmael Reed, experiment in diverse ways and to different degrees with new, occasionally postmodern forms of slave narrative, romance, fable, and satire. Three of the most compelling postmodern novels by black women are Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salteaters (1980), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Alice Walker’s In the Temple of My Familiar (1989). Books by contemporary African American women were extremely popular in the 1980s, with novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan as well as an autobiography by Maya Angelou appearing on The New York Times bestseller list at the same time.

Black Lesbian, Gay, Science Fiction, and Detective Novels

Also in the 1980s, novels by black lesbians and gays, science fiction writers, and mystery writers expanded the boundaries of the tradition of the African American novel. Ann Shockley’s imaginative reconstruction of a transracial affair between women in Loving Her (1970) was probably the first contemporary black American lesbian novel. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), however, is the most celebrated African American novel in which a lesbian relationship is central to the development of the narrative. Walker provides a contemporary black womanist’s vision of the lives of black Southerners in her novels: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), and The Temple of My Familiar (1989). The best of Walker’s novels is The Color Purple. Less compelling as critical realism than as folk romance, it is more concerned with the politics of sex than the politics of class and race. Its epistolary form rewrites from a black womanist perspective the tradition of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady (1747–1748) and William H. Brown’s Power of Sympathy (1789). These two titles are sentimental, sensational tales of heterosexual seduction that initiated the British and European American traditions of the novel. In addition to introducing this form into the tradition of the African American novel, Walker directs an unrelenting attack on male hegemony, especially the violent abuse of black women by black men, in her revolutionary leap forward into a new social order based on sexual egalitarianism. As in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the style of The Color Purple is grounded in black folk speech, music, and religion. Its major theme, a contemporary rewriting of Janie Crawford’s dreams of what a black woman ought to be and do, is a celebration of the independence of Southern black women and black sexual egalitarianism. Lesbianism, rather than heterosexual love, is the rite of passage to selfhood, sisterhood, and brotherhood for Celie, Walker’s protagonist.

Since the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a subtle treatment of black homosexuality and spiritual redemption, and the sensitive, sympathetic examination of white gay relationships in Giovanni’s Room (1956), James Baldwin has been and remains the outstanding black gay novelist not only in modern and contemporary African American but also, for many readers, in Western literature. He has been the model and inspiration for the more recent achievements and popularity in the gay community of Larry Duplechan’s Eight Days a Week (1985) and Blackbird (1986), Steven Corbin’s No Easy Place to Be (1989), Melvin Dixon’s Trouble the Water (1989), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and the bestsellers of E. Lynn Harris: Invisible Life (1991), Just As I Am (1994), and And This Too Shall Pass (1996).

In black science fiction Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Estelle Butler are the major novelists. “Having repeatedly received both Nebula and Hugo awards (the two most coveted prizes in science fiction),” as literary critic Sandra Y. Govan notes, “Samuel ‘Chip’ Delany is one of the field’s preeminent authors. He is also a writer who, while working in a genre long dominated by whites, brings to his speculative worlds a black presence and a subtle black perspective.” Of his nearly two dozen novels, racial heritage and ethnicity are most apparent and essential to the characters and multilayered plots of Nova (1968) and Dhalgren (1975). Octavia Butler has also received the prestigious Nebula and Hugo awards, as well as a MacArthur fellowship in 1995. She is the author of more than a dozen novels. “In each of the published novels,” Govan writes, “the implicit struggle for power revolves around explicit conflicts of will and the contests of survival a heroine endures.” Butler’s most outstanding transracial novels are Kindred (1979), a neoslave fantasy; the Patternist saga Patternmaster (1976); Mind of My Mind (1977); Survivor (1978); Wild Seed (1980); Clay’s Ark (1984), which traces the pattern formed by the mentally linked descendants of Doro, a 4,000-year-old Nubian; and Parable of the Sower (1995) and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998). Butler also wrote the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). The trilogy examines the struggles of humans with war and gene-transplanting extraterrestrials.

In the 1990s the African American detective novel experienced a resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim. Inspired by Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies (1937) and by Chester Himes’s examination of racial, class, and gender issues in the ten detective novels in which he created the unparalleled hardboiled detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major published, respectively, the postmodern antidetective novels Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Reflex and Bone Structure (1975). More recently, however, black detective authors, including women, and black detectives, especially women, have proliferated. Some of the most popular novels in the genre are Dolores Komo’s Clio Brown Private Investigator (1988); Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994); Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Dead Time (1992) and Slowburn (1993); Nikki Baker’s In the Game (1991), The Lavender House Murder (1992), and The Long Goodbyes (1993); and Valerie Wilson Wesley’s When Death Comes Stealing (1995). But the most popular and critically successful contemporary black American detective novelist since Chester Himes is Walter Mosley. Each of his four novels—Devil in a Blue Dress (1990); Red Death (1991); White Butterfly (1992); and Black Betty (1994), which was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award—is set primarily in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California and traces the self-development of Easy Rawlins as a compassionate yet struggling black detective from 1948 to 1961.

“American fiction,” James Tuttleton writes in “Tracking the American Novel in the Void,” “is among other things a self-conscious enterprise intent on nothing less than appropriating the liberty claimed in the great political and social declarations so as to remake afresh the fictive forms of representation.” As black American authors develop their distinctive voices within and against the larger tradition of fiction, this intent is also implicit in the double consciousness that is encoded in African American fiction. Thematically and structurally, therefore, from Brown and Wilson to Reed, Morrison, Delany, and Butler, the dual tradition of African American fiction is dominated by the dialectical tension between oral and literary traditions, by the struggle for freedom from all forms of oppression, and by the personal odyssey to realize the full potential of one’s complex biracial and bicultural identity as an African American.