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Chapter 5 “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world” Storytelling and the Black Feminist Tradition Woman should not be compelled to look to sexual love as the one sensation capable of giving tone and relish, movement and vim to the life she leads. Her horizon is extended. Ana Julia Cooper, The Woman’s Era We help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider ​ I n 1936, on the eve of Zora Neale Hurston’s departure to the Caribbean for what would be her last major ethnographic expedition, she wrote a letter to an Alabama librarian, William Stanley Hoole. In her letter, Hurston laid out the basic plot for a book that she had been kicking around for some time. It would be her follow-up novel to Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and in it she would tell the story of a brown woman: Who was from childhood hungry for life and the earth, but because she had beautiful hair was always being skotched upon a flag-pole by the men who loved her and forced to sit there. At forty she got her chance at mud. Mud, lush and fecund with a buck Negro called Tea Cake. He took her down into the Everglades where people worked and sweated and loved and died violently, where no such thing as flag-poles for women existed. Since I narrate mostly in dialogue, I can give you no feeling in these few lines of the life of this brown woman with her plentiful hair. But this is the barest statement of the story.1 172 Native Speakers The story of Janie Crawford, this “brown woman with her plentiful hair,” would become Their Eyes Were Watching God, the most celebrated work of the Hurston canon. It was a novel that would establish her reputation as a Black feminist icon in the 1980s after a long and dreadful critical hiatus. However, in the heightened political context of the late 1930s, Hurston’s account of a woman’s struggles to find erotic and emotional fulfillment in the all-Black communities of Florida was read as a simple folkloreinfused love story by White critics and a dangerous foray into exhibitionistic exoticism by African American critics. In the end, Their Eyes Were Watching God would further distance Hurston from her Harlem contemporaries , who for the most part found the book to be entirely devoid of social consciousness. While White critical commentary about the book generally celebrated both its universality as a love story and its supposedly accurate picture of the particularities of Black life in the South, Their Eyes Were Watching God got a markedly different reception in the parlors and literary salons of Depression-era Harlem. In fact, the book’s success with White reviewers played into the growing sense among African American critics and the literary left that Hurston was a literary climber, willing to sacrifice social reality for a pretty turn of the phrase. Lippincott, Hurston’s publisher, added to the problem by marketing the novel as a timeless love story with universal appeal, opening up the door for criticism that would focus all too rigidly on the novel’s putatively romantic central plotline. As M. Genevieve West points out, “Promoting the novel as a romance . . . created a lens through which her contemporaries, her worst critics among them, read the novel. The designation effectively suggested that Hurston was not a serious writer in a time when the social crises of the Great Depression and rampant racial discrimination demanded serious change.”2 This critical frame earned the novel thinly veiled scorn among the literary intelligentsia of Harlem, who generally gave it tepid and sometimes even antagonistic reviews. In perhaps the most infamous of these negative reviews, author Richard Wright summarily dismissed Their Eyes Were Watching God, claiming, “The sensory sweep of [Hurston’s] novel carries no theme, no message, no thought” lending itself to “significant interpretation .” Unwittingly revealing his own gender bias, Wright invoked a tradition of writing by Black women to lend weight to this dismissal. After admitting that “Miss Hurston” had talent as a writer, he complained that her prose was “cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley” and suggested that her novel was [3.138.141.202] Project...

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