SIMILAR BY GENRE

Charles Chesnutt's 1899 The Conjure Woman (introduction by Robert Farnsworth, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983; includes two collections: The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth. Also available edited by Richard Brodhead, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) is a collection of short stories that draws heavily on folklore. A white narrator, John, with his wife leaves Ohio to reside in North Carolina, where they are met by black Uncle Julius McAdoo, who becomes his coachman and tells him stories about the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy. Chesnutt's stories include both an exterior frame, narrated by John, who offers an idyllic portrait of the post-bellum South; and an interior story narrated by Uncle Julius, who informs John about southern life and culture as he sees it. True to the form of slave tales, double meanings coexist. Uncle Julius's explanations appear simple on the surface, but embedded within his telling are examples of his own cunning. He undercuts the wholesome picture of the South created by the external narrator, who is invariably and repeatedly outwitted by clever Uncle Julius. Chesnutt explores psychological intricacies of the lives of blacks in the midst of violence and racial hatred.

Chesnutt's tales make interesting reading beside Joel Chandler Harris's 1880 Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (edited by Robert Hemenway [Hurston's literary biographer], New York: Viking, 1982). Harris, a white man who spent some of his youth on a plantation near Eatonton, Georgia, during the days of the Civil War, learned firsthand the plantation lore that he would later turn into the commercially successful children's stories about the adventures of the ever-clever Br'er Rabbit. From Harris's artfully-spelled Negro dialect, generations of southern white children grew up hearing these tales read aloud by similarly naïve white parents, who never understood the double meanings of the wily actions of Br'er Rabbit.

The inspiration for Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane (edited by Darwin Turner, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) came from a short hiatus in Sparta, Georgia, not far from Harris's home in Eatonton. Unlike any other book that existed at the time, Toomer's short, yet dense book is a compilation of songs, poetry, and short fiction that reflects the actual folk speech of the blacks he worked among in Sparta. The work today may be classified as a prose poem, with compact and precise images combined with the flowing cadence of prose. The book is divided into three parts: the first is set in a black southern rural landscape where an intellectual attempts to understand the rich texture and complexity of men's attraction (both white and black) to black women. Particularly horrifying and yet beautiful in its language is the story “Blood-Burning Moon,” as Toomer makes clear the power and embedded violence and doom in black-white love relationships. The second part of Cane is set in Washington, D.C., and the third part tells the story of Kabnis, serving as the thematic coherence for the whole book. The African-American experience is one of displacement—from Africa to America, from slavery to freedom, from the South to the North. Kabnis comes to the South to teach, but he loses his job, and realizes that he does not fit in the world in which he finds himself. Toomer's work plays the paradox of feelings; it is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing. The book builds in its painful intensity in such a way that escape from it appears unreachable. Toomer and Hurston occupy prominent positions on the dais of captivating prose stylists.

SIMILAR BY LITERARY MOVEMENT

Essential reading must include The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the N.A.A.C.P's Crisis Magazine, edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999). Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began a year after the organization itself. W. E. B. Du Bois was the editor from the first issue in 1910 until 1934, and again from 1944 to 1948. Designed as a journal for social and political thought, from its earliest days it also published creative writing, becoming a major contributor to, and development vehicle for, the black literary movement that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Crisis, read far beyond its NAACP membership, provided a forum for young artists from across the country to read each other's work and to see that Harlem was fast becoming the center of and a magnet for artistic expression. Besides the impressive editor, the staff included James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Walter White. Both Du Bois and Johnson had reputations as accomplished and brilliant writers. While Du Bois lent his voice and talents primarily to the essay genre, developing positions on the political and social issues of the day, he placed the job of literary editor in the capable hands of Jessie Fauset. She has earned the unofficial title of “midwife” of the Harlem Renaissance for her work in discovering, encouraging, and publishing new talent, which was to include Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps.

This anthology covers four of the major creative literary genres: poetry, short fiction, plays, and essays. The latter genre includes a collection of personal, literary and cultural, and social essays. Among the forty-six writers represented, the selections prove to be both historically important—such as Langston Hughes's first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”—and a reminder of lesser- to little-known pieces that encourage new attention to writers often overlooked. The essays range widely from a short autobiographical sketch of the sculptor Augusta Savage, who was raised by a poor Florida family with fourteen children, but who manages to make her art in spite of, though often limited by, others' responses to her race and her ongoing shortfall of financial resources; to commentary from Du Bois and Alain Locke on two novels by younger writers worth reading as they represent the future: Jean Toomer's Cane and Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion.

Similar in purpose and focus to The Crisis Reader is its companion anthology, The Opportunity Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Urban League's Opportunity Magazine, also edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999). Charles Johnson was the first editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life when it began in 1923. Under his leadership and the particular timing of the journal, new artists, by whom the Harlem Renaissance would become defined, gravitated to this latest outlet for creative expression. Johnson and his staff took the initiative for helping the young artists find employment, scholarships, and white patronage to support their budding talents. This reader includes Hurston's first published short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea.”

Pre-dating the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson's 1912 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Penguin, introduction by William Andrews, 2000; Vintage, introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1989) has historical importance to the movement. Johnson was also a talented writer of light operas, musical comedies, and popular songs, including the Negro national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” He is perhaps best remembered as the author of God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927). His first novel is the story of a man from Georgia, who had a black mother and a white father, who decided to take a wife and sent his black mistress and son to Connecticut. Throughout the narrator's life, as he travels from the North to the South to Europe with his millionaire patron, he experiences a sense of isolation—not being permitted to enjoy either side of his heritage.

He notices first others' reactions to his skin color, which prevents him from the growth that he sincerely wants in his own artistic expression in music. In order to have the kind of freedom that he desires, and as a result of the fear he feels while watching a lynching on a trip to the South, he decides to pass as a white man, denying his mother's contribution to his existence. Born in Jacksonville, Johnson shares Florida roots with Hurston.

Claude McKay's 1928 Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987) is set around 1919 at the close of the First World War and during the boom years of the “Great Migration” (1916-30) when about one million blacks made the move from the South to New York and Chicago. Jake, deserting his post, returns from a war in which he saw no fighting but was assigned to unload ships. Jake heads to Harlem where he takes a job as a longshoreman, only to find out that he has been hired to break a strike. He quits immediately and finds work on the Pennsylvania Rail Road as a chef. Here he meets a waiter named Ray, called the “Professor” because he prefers reading and studying and his dreams of being a writer to the good times of Harlem's night life. Both men will tire of Harlem; Ray finds employment on a boat leaving for Australia and Europe, and Jake seeks a reunion in Chicago with his girlfriend, the former prostitute Felice. Jake and Ray can be interpreted as a representation of the Booker T. Washington vs. W. E. B. Du Bois debate. Though the positions of Washington and Du Bois are complex and need to be considered within their respective contexts, they can be simply reduced in McKay's text to accommodating white men's expectations of blacks' capabilities versus holding strong and certain to the dreams of wherever a person's intelligence can lead.

Home to Harlem has been referred to as the first African-American bestseller when it was released in 1928, but the stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression contributed to the end of the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Wright's 1940 Native Son would be the next book to bring significant attention back to black writers. In McKay's most well-known novel, he gives perhaps one of the best and most honest representations of life in Harlem, with its rent parties, its music, and its underside of violence and prostitution: “Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem” (15). McKay's novel sets the stage and gives ample flavor to the Harlem that Hurston called home in the late 1920s.

Langston Hughes's 1930 Not without Laughter (New York: Scribner, 1995) is a coming-of-age story of a boy named Sandy, who must figure out the best way to combat racism, poverty, and oppression without being destroyed by it. The novel is set in Kansas in the first decades of the 1900s. Sandy lives with his mother Annjee, who is a maid for a white family; his sometimes-present, irresponsible father, Jimboy; and his grandmother Hager Williams, who is a washerwoman. Two other aunts, Annjee's sisters Tempy and Harriet, are frequent visitors in and out of his grandmother's home. Young Sandy stands witness to the world of family conflicts and those conflicts complicated by being black and poor in a world ruled by whites. The book concludes after his mother's relocation to Detroit, Hager's death, and Harriet's eventual success in her musical career. Sandy now has to determine what choices he will make in his own life.

Considered one of the leading literary talents of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes's gifts expanded to competency in many genres. He is perhaps best remembered as a distinguished and prolific poet. He also wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays, and edited various anthologies. Hughes's novel, published two years after McKay's, takes the reader out of the city to rural America, but not the South. His choice of Kansas is autobiographical, but it also serves to suggest that racism in America was not exclusive to the South. Hurston and Hughes, for a while, were close friends and collaborated on a play, Mule Bone. Before the play could ever be produced, they had a falling out and never spoke to each other again.

Jessie Fauset (1882-1961), born nine years before Hurston and outliving her by a year, is Hurston's closest contemporary. Like Hurston, she also wrote four novels: There Is Confusion (1924) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) (New York: G. K. Hall, introduction by Thadious M. Davis, 1995), and Comedy: American Style (1933) (New York: G. K. Hall, introduction by Thadious M. Davis, 1995). She wrote her last novel before Hurston would write her first one, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). Reared in New Jersey, Fauset spent most of her adult life in New York City. Central in each of her novels are light-skinned, educated Negroes, some of whom pass for white. For Fauset, the mulatto becomes a metaphor through which she explores identity and difference as they concern blacks. In Fauset's last novel, Comedy: American Style, Olivia Blanchard is obsessed with skin color. She seeks the lightest possible male as a means to producing white children. In Olivia Blanchard, Fauset has created a woman incapable of accepting herself in the culture in which she must live. Believing that her problems will be solved by passing for white, Olivia makes choices that are unhappy solutions for a far more complicated issue.

Like Hurston, Fauset had mixed critical reception to her novels and each was written while she was employed full time. She wrote her last three novels while teaching French (1927-44) at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York. In correspondence with Du Bois, Fauset makes a remark that Hurston herself spent a lifetime advocating: it was “worthwhile to teach our colored men and women race pride, self-pride, self-sufficiency (the right kind) and the necessity of living our lives, as nearly as possible, absolutely instead of comparing them always with white standards” (quoted in Davis's introduction to Comedy: American Style, xix).

SIMILAR BY THEME

Maya Angelou's 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam, 1983) is set in the 1930s and 1940s in Arkansas, Missouri, and California. Angelou's memoir has also been called a novel. While Hurston's novels have autobiographical moments, she also uses her own childhood home as the geographical heart and center of three of her novels. Stamps, Arkansas, provides that physical place for Angelou's Marguerite (Maya) Johnson, who, like the younger Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, is intelligent, curious, and fascinated by life around her. Though Janie never knows her mother or father and is raised by her grandmother, Maya knows her parents but feels safe and free with her grandmother in Stamps. Angelou's book is far more concerned with the intrusion of and treatment by whites, particularly the Ku Klux Klan, on her family's life, which is not of major significance in any of Hurston's novels.

Thematically, Hurston's Their Eyes compares with Angelou's memoir in an interesting way around the treatment and role of women and talking. When Maya is eight years old, she is raped by her mother's lover. As a result of this incident, Maya chooses not to talk, except to her brother Bailey, because talking, she perceives, is dangerous. The rapist is eventually arrested and though he is sentenced to a relatively short time in prison, he never serves time. He is, however, murdered in a type of vigilante justice. While Janie wants to talk, Joe Starks deprives her of much opportunity to do so. To choose silence or to have silence thrust upon one's self—is one preferable to the other?

In Gloria Naylor's 1988 Mama Day (New York: Vintage, 1989), the story of Miranda (Mama) Day's grand niece Cocoa is, like Janie's story in Hurston's novel, the story of a “journey into interiority.” Mama Day, mother to no child of her own, but the deliverer of hundreds of babies on the mythical island of Willow Springs, is the embodiment of mystical powers. She knows that it will be through Cocoa that these powers will be passed on because she is the only one left that is a direct descendant of the great-grandmother of them all, Sapphira Wade.

The novel opens in 1999 on Willow Springs, where Naylor introduces readers to a place different from all others, a place where “everybody knows, but nobody talks about the legend of Sapphira Wade” (3); moves to New York where George and Cocoa have met each other; and then alternates between the reality of New York and the different kind of thinking that exists in Willow Springs. Cocoa is fortunate to meet her Tea Cake in her first husband, George, and like Tea Cake, George too will die too soon; he, too, will lose his life in trying to save his wife's life.

When George finally visits Willow Springs with Cocoa and meets her grandmother and her great aunt, he weathers a storm that wipes out the bridge to the mainland, not quite as severe as Hurston's hurricane, but substantial in its fury and destruction. Through the tempest in the weather and Cocoa's sickness, Mama Day has the opportunity to discover important information she realizes for the first time about Sapphira and Bascombe Wade. The journey into interiority happens for her as she connects more of an understanding of her own past with the future she sees in Cocoa. For Cocoa, her journey takes longer. The recovery from George's death, a second marriage to someone who will never be able to fill his shoes, two children who are not George's, and recurring visits to George's grave on Willow Springs, will finally, after fourteen years, yield in Cocoa “a face that's been given the meaning of peace” (312). At the end of both novels, Janie and Cocoa know that the love of a good man is with them still.

This same theme of the journey into interiority plays major significance in Paule Marshall's 1983 Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Plume, 1992). Avey Johnson is on a cruise at the beginning of Marshall's novel, but the planned vacation turns into a suffocating experience. All Avey knows is that she must get off the ship and return home, but she cannot name the reason she feels this way. Departing the ship on a small island where everyone speaks Patois, she begins an immersion into her own lost tradition. Dreams, ring shout dances, cleansing baths, and, perhaps most importantly, meeting up with Lebert Joseph, who becomes her Papa Legba figure, the Lord of the Crossroads, who meets people in crises and leads them in the direction they are meant to go. It is through and with Joseph that Avey makes sense of her life—the early days with Jay before he became Jerome and the good times evaporated, and all the way back to her distant ancestors and the African tribe that claimed them. Janie's journey explores the horizons of love, while Avey's journey is a movement backwards through time to connect with the parts of herself that were lost in her assimilation into American culture.

Hurston's influence on Marshall's prose can be seen in the description of Avey's response to her wait for her husband Jay to come home: “something shattered in her mind. It seemed the china bowl which held her sanity and trust fell from its shelf in her mind and broke” (91). Hurston uses a similar image when Janie finally concludes what her life with Joe Starks will be like: “She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered” (72). In both novels, this shattering of certain notions of life with Jay and Joe, respectively, does not halt the journey; rather, the realization helps both women to understand what they must do in the moment to survive.

By novel's end, Avey knows she must return to the house in Tatem, the former home of her own great-aunt, where Avey as a child had heard the story of her ancestors' arrival from Africa—“They took them out of the boats right here where we're standing” (256). She knows too that as the avatar, the embodiment or incarnation of a god, she must be the one to tell her grandchildren the story, so that the past can be a part of the future. Janie tells her story to Pheoby, who can then tell that story to others because Janie knows that when a story is told to an intimate friend, it is a means of telling others: “You can tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf” (6). In both novels, the story learned in the journey must be told.

Toni Morrison's 1977 prize-winning Song of Solomon (New York: Plume, 1987) also takes the protagonist, Milkman Dead, this time a young man, on an eventual search for his identity. A striking difference here is that Milkman sets out on this quest to find gold, but ends up with something greater than gold, an understanding of his paternal grandfather's real name and the story of his African heritage. While his mother, father, Aunt Pilate, his cousin and long-time lover Hagar, and best friend Guitar Bains all make demands on his time, energy, values, and lifestyle, by novel's end Milkman comes to see that in his final leap, “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337). Ultimately, what matters in Hurston's novel and this book, is the voyage to the horizon and the discovery for both Janie and Milkman not how someone else wants them to live and think, but their own increased and deepened sense of self understanding, made clear by a connection with something greater than the self alone. This search for self and a connection to something beyond are apparent in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee.

The journey into interiority in Ralph Ellison's prize-winning 1952 Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995) leads the narrator in the exact opposite direction from Janie's travels: the invisible man loses his scholarship in a southern college and must go north to Harlem to make his way; Janie, in her succession of marriages, travels deeper into the South to find her happiness. The mild-mannered narrator loses his innocence up north: unasked-for electric shock treatment after his accident at Liberty Paints turns him into an activist, and he draws the attention of the “Brotherhood.” However, by novel's end, the narrator has fully discovered his invisibility and winds up living underground in a room with purloined light. He never does find the happiness that Janie does in her relationship with Tea Cake. The narrator is restricted and limited at every turn by the oppressiveness of the white male power structure. On the other hand, Janie makes her way in the world where there is more to celebrate than to lament. At the close of Ellison's novel, he has the narrator conclude with questions that suggest clearly that the narrator's dilemma is not an isolated one: “What else [than tell his story of thwarted dreams] but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: “Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581).

But Janie is not trying to speak for others. She concludes that life, because she has known love, as she herself has defined it, is a wonder and a delight. It is enough to celebrate alone.

Alice Walker's 1982 The Color Purple (New York: Washington Square Press, 1998) is set in Georgia, Tennessee, and Africa during the 1920s through the 1940s. In Walker's book, it is her character Celie, who, with the help of her sister Nettie, her husband's mistress, her own short-time lover Shug, and God, makes the journey inward to discover a self worthy of love. Raped by her stepfather and beaten by her husband Mr. _____, Celie accepts the abduction of her children, and general ongoing abuse and neglect. She is called ugly and worthless enough times that she comes to believe this status must be her lot in life. The letters Celie writes to Nettie and to God are her only outlet of venting to a world that is deaf to her situation. Shug teaches her to stand up for herself, and, more importantly, that she is worth loving. Celie's move, literal and figurative, from isolation into community parallels her emotional journey from despair to joy. As Hurston says in Jonah's Gourd Vine, and Celie learns when she leaves Mr. _____ to go to Memphis with Shug, “half the joy of quitting any place is the loneliness we leave behind” (156). Janie and Celie travel different paths, but both find peace in a place that has the literal and figurative meaning of home.

Additional coverage of Hurston's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: African-American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers, Vol. 6; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 15; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 12; Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 2; Black Writers, Eds. 1, 3; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 85-88; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 61; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 7, 30, 61; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 51, 86; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Multicultural Authors, and Novelists; Drama Criticism, Vol. 12; Drama for Students, Vol. 6; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Feminist Writers; Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 3; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 3; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 4; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 1, 6, 11; Twayne's United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 121; and World Literature Criticism.