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Hattie is Big Mat's wife. When the Moss Brothers travel North, Hattie is left behind pregnant. Big Mat receives a letter from Hattie saying that she fell and lost the baby.
Sugar Mama is a prostitute from "Mex Town."
Anna is fourteen or fifteen years old and Sugar Mama's niece. Sugar Mama sent for Anna from New Mexico, thinking she would bring more business. At first, Anna tries to sleep with Melody, but when Big Mat defends Anna after an owner at the dog fight hits her, she becomes infatuated with Big Mat. Anna moves into a shack with Big Mat, where she endures his beatings.
Smothers is a crippled laborer. In an article published in "MFS Modern Fiction Studies", John Claborn claims that Smothers is "a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain." Claborn notes that Smother's legs have been mutilated in a violent steel mill incident, and claims that "Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, and made into steel. "
After Smothers dies in a mill accident, his co-workers memorialize him by turning the steel scraps from the accident into watch fobs, wearing these around their necks for luck.
The Moss brothers sharecrop on Mr. Johnson's land in Kentucky. Mr. Johnston had stopped giving the family food credit after Big Mat killed the mule Mr. Johnston had lent them, and claims the Moss family's share of the crop for the next two years to pay for the loss of the animal. However, Mr. Johnston wants to prevent the brothers from leaving to work in the North, so he tells Big Mat that he will give the Moss' a mule so that they can continue to work their land, and offers Melody and Chinatown work doing odd jobs around his farm.
Big Mat identifies the Kentucky riding boss as the son of a poor white sharecropper. When Big Mat goes to get the mule he was promised by Mr. Johnston, the riding boss, eager to exert his power, insults and whips Big Mat. Big Mat loses his temper and attacks the riding boss, prompting the brothers' departure to the north.
Bo is the "boss of stove gang" who catches Chinatown and Melody staring at the woman with the "rotted" breast. Bo points Chinatown and Melody in the right direction of the bunkhouse.
Mike is an Italian open-hearth worker who helps the brothers learn the ropes around the mill.
O'Casey is the diminutive pit boss in charge of the brothers' group at the mill.
Zanski is an old, Slavic laborer who works with the brothers in the pit and works at the lunch car with his granddaughter, Rosie. He's eventually fired from the mills.
Rosie is Zanski's granddaughter who waitresses at the lunch car. Later in the novel it is revealed that she also works as a prostitute.
There is something very timely in Attaway's implicit warning against the industry of the North, as Edward Margolies suggests in his introduction to the 1969 edition of the novel: possibly he [Attaway] saw his worst fears realized in the rapid spread industrial wastelands and the consequent plight of urban Negroes. From one point of view Attaway's feelings about the sanctity of nature now seem almost quaint in an age of cybernetics.
The Moss brothers idealize nature, looking back on their homeland of Kentucky with a certain pastoral fondness. Although the nature of the South is idealized, in both the North and the South nature is dying. In the South, Attaway highlights the overworked land, Big Mat's barren wife Hattie, the family’s extreme hunger, and the drudgery of plowing all day with no reward. Likewise, the urban landscape of the North is also painted as dismal and dying. In the North, Attaway shows the defilement of natural landscape, evident "in the pollution of the 'dirty-as-a-catfish-hole river with a beautiful name: the Monongahela," as well as the "'mountains of red ore, yellow limestone, and black coke,' that line the river banks."
Attaway exposes the danger of destroying nature through the voice of the mill worker Smothers, who repeatedly warns his fellow workers of the destructive power of the machines. Though the workers seem to see Smothers' prophecies as merely "half-mad, shrill rants," Claborn argues that "Attaway goes out of his way to invest [Smothers] with a strange dignity and characterize him as a Tiresian speaker of truth. " Smothers sees that destruction of nature "can lead to can lead to industrial accidents, understood as the land avenging itself against humans. "
Attaway depicts how African American sharecroppers were forcibly deprived of many of life's necessities. In Kentucky, the Moss brothers had to use newspapers attached to the wall in order to provide a bit of insulation, and they are so hungry that they chose to smoke or chew tobacco in an attempt to suppress their appetites. One way that they deal with this hunger is through music, and the novel opens with Melody playing the "hungry blues" on his guitar, which he hopes will distract his family members from their empty stomachs.
In an article published by "Negro American Literature Forum", Edward E. Waldron claims that Attaway depicts an intricate examination of the "death of the blues", or the death of folk culture, with the Moss brothers' move from the South to the North. The changes in Melody and Chinatown reflect the overall changes that southern blacks experienced in the Great Migration, as they have to leave their folk ways behind in order to survive their new, "industrially-oriented environment."
Stacy I. Morgan also alludes to the ways in which the brothers' mind-set has shifted upon migrating to the North. Their vastly increased income in the North allows them new opportunities and multiple ways to spend their new capital, emphasizing instant gratification "
Morgan also notes that the Moss brothers' fear in the train scene, during which their inability to see each other fills each brother with a terrifying sense of isolation, may be Attway's way of highlighting an issue that confronted many who moved during the Great Migration: the "absence of material links to the family, community, and lifeways of former homes, which w[as] frequently demanded by the circumstances of the migration journey northward—a journey that, for many African Americans, did necessarily commence under cover of night. " Morgan asserts that with the absence of these links to their former selves, it was especially difficult for the migrants to retain any former cultural identity in their new homes.
One of the tragic outcomes in the novel, according to Klotman, is the loss of continuity in the lives of men who are almost human sacrifices to the industrial Moloch created by an unseen hand grasping for profits.
Claborn claims that Big Mat embodies the link between mechanic and racial violence. Once he is deputized, given power by the white law enforcement, and charged to "suppress the white workers," he "relishes the terror he inspires." Claborn notes that, "once the strike begins and the furnaces start to cool down because there are not enough workers to keep them burning, Big Mat single-handedly tries to keep the machines functioning," and claims that this "impossible effort" shows that "Big Mat has himself become a machine." "Only as he dies […] does Big Mat glimpse the reality that, in siding with the mill owners and in becoming a machine, he has become an agent of oppression."
Myth of the American Dream and the working class.
Attaway's novel depicts how industrial technology dehumanizes working class laborers, alienates workers from the products of their labors, and also highlights how capitalism moved towards mechanized standardization and away from individualized artistry and craftsmanship.
Attaway's novels were not a major attraction to critics at their time of publication. Although Attaway's novels were received well, they have not been as critically acclaimed as other novels written during the 1940s, including "The Grapes of Wrath" (Steinbeck, 1939) and "Native Son" (Wright, 1941) which have both maintained an exceptional reputation for radical novels written during the Great Depression. Attaway did not continue writing novels after "Blood on the Forge", but instead went on to successfully write and produce songs, music and screenplays.
Mr. Potter (2002) is a novel by Antiguan born writer Jamaica Kincaid. It tells the story of a girl growing up without a father. When Mr. Potter, the father, died, a part of the girl (Elaine) died with him.
"Abeng" means an animal horn or musical instrument in the Twi language of the Akan people of Ghana.
The abeng has had two historical uses in Jamaica. It was used by slaveholders to summon slaves to the sugar fields. It was also used by the Maroon army as a method of communication. In a recent lecture at the University of St. Thomas, Cliff said that the title was a reference to both of these uses, though neither appears in the novel's text; they are referenced in the book's foreword. She further explained that the title is an attempt to "take back" Jamaican history.
The Crossover is a 2015 children's book by American author Kwame Alexander and the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor. The book, which is told entirely through verse, was first published in the United States in hardback on March 18, 2014 through HMH Books for Young Readers. The story follows two African-American twin brothers who share a love for basketball but find themselves drifting apart as they head into their junior high school year. They also run into many obstacles that they must overcome, like a girl who starts conflict between them, Alexis.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a 1976 novel by Mildred D. Taylor, sequel to her 1975 novella "Song of the Trees".
The novel won the 1977 Newbery Medal. It is a central part of the Logan family saga which includes three sequels, "Let the Circle Be Unbroken" (1981), "The Road to Memphis" (1990), "All the Days Past, All the Days to Come" (2020) and a prequel, "The Land" (2001).
The novel explores the struggles of African Americans in 1930s Southern Mississippi through the perspective of nine year old Cassie Logan. Taylor uses the novel to highlight several themes including Jim Crow segregation, Black landownership, sharecropping, the Great Depression and lynching.
Nine-year-old Cassie Logan is walking to school with her siblings Stacey (twelve years old), Christopher-John (seven years old), and Little Man,(six years old), in rural Mississippi. Cassie talks about the land which the Logan family lives on. It belonged to Harlan Granger, but he sold 2000 acres of it in 1886 to cover his taxes during Reconstruction. Their grandfather bought two hundred acres in 1887, then another two hundred acres in 1919.
At school, Cassie and Little Man notice that the books they use were originally in new condition distributed to the white kids, finally given to the black students once they're in bad condition. Their teacher Miss Crocker meets with Cassie's mother, Mary, who is also a teacher at the school. Mary calmly glues a piece of paper over the chart containing the racist information. She hands them back to a dumbstruck Crocker. That Saturday their father, David Logan, comes home from his railroad job in Louisiana, bringing with him L.T. Morrison to assist in planting, farming, protection, and other jobs, as Morrison was fired from the railroad for a fight that was the white men's fault. Papa leaves the next day to catch a train.
Outside, Cassie accidentally bumps into Lillian Jean Simms on the sidewalk. Lillian Jean orders her to get down in the road and apologize. Cassie tries running, but Lillian Jean's father twists her arm and throws her onto the road and orders her to apologize by calling her "Miz Lillian Jean" as though she were an adult. To Cassie's horror, her grandmother reluctantly enforces Mr. Simms's command, and she is forced to apologize.
When they get home, they find their uncle Hammer Logan from Chicago is visiting with a shiny silver Packard. Cassie tells him what happened and Hammer drives away seeking revenge, but is stopped and calmed by Mr. Morrison. Mama tells Stacey to get Mr. Morrison to stop Hammer because she is worried Hammer will be lynched for attacking a white family. She later finds him alive and unharmed.
Before going to church, Hammer gives Stacey an early Christmas present, a wool coat whose sleeves are too long. At church, T.J. teases Stacey about the coat, claiming the ill-fitting sleeves make it look "like a fat preacher's coat". Eventually, T.J. convinces Stacey to give him the coat, since it would fit him better. Mama is furious about this, but Uncle Hammer tells Stacey to let T.J. keep the coat.
Papa comes home for Christmas and is staying until spring. On Christmas night, Lillian Jean's younger brother Jeremy brings nuts for all the Logan children, as well as a handmade flute for Stacey. Papa warns Stacey to be careful about being friends with Jeremy, explaining that as he gets older, he may change and become as racist as the rest of his family. The next day, Papa calls the children into the barn, whips them and tells them never to go to the Wallace store again.
Time passes and Papa starts leading the boycott against the Wallaces' store. Mr. Jamison visits and Big Ma signs papers transferring the land to Papa and Hammer. Jamison also warns them to be careful, as they could still lose their land if they continue their boycott. Mr. Granger asks for the land again, but Papa still refuses. Hammer returns to Chicago.
Cassie makes "peace" with Lillian Jean, calling her "Miz Lillian Jean" and being her friend by carrying her books to and from school. As Lillian Jean begins trusting Cassie, she tells her all her own secrets, as well as those of her friends and brothers. Cassie eventually exacts her revenge by leading Lillian Jean into the woods, where she drops her books on the ground and starts taunting her. Lillian jean punches her and they fight. Cassie forces Lillian Jean to apologize for all the humiliation she inflicted on her, then threatens to reveal all of Lillian Jean's secrets if she tells anyone what happened.
T.J. is caught cheating again and fails for another year. He tells Mr. Wallace about the Logans' organized boycott of his store and how Mrs. Logan does not teach from the county-issued textbooks because she believes they contain biased information. Mr. Granger, Mr. Wallace, and a school board member fire Mrs. Logan on charges of teaching unapproved subjects. Stacey blames T.J., who denies it was his fault. As his black friends begin to shun him over this, T.J. turns to hanging out with Jeremy Simms' older brothers Melvin and R.W., who manipulate T.J. and mock him behind his back.
Papa, Mr. Morrison, and Stacey go to Vicksburg; on their way back, they find one of the wagon wheels has been tampered with. As Papa fixes it, they are ambushed by the Wallaces. They attempt to shoot Papa with a bullet that grazes his temple. However, this startles the horse into running off, causing the wagon to fall and crush Papa's leg. Mr. Morrison attacks the Wallaces, snapping Dewberry Wallace's back. Later, Mr. Granger uses his banking influence to make the Logans' mortgage note due for full payment within a week even though the Logans had four more years to pay it. Uncle Hammer sells his car and other items, allowing the Logans to pay their mortgage.
The sheriff arrests T.J. and Cassie realizes that Papa set the fire to save T.J. Stacey asks what T.J.'s fate will be. Papa replies that he will be convicted of Mr. Barnett's murder and may be executed. Cassie, overwhelmed by the news, silently goes to bed. Although Cassie never liked T.J., she cries for him and the land.
At the time of the book's publication, "Kirkus Reviews" wrote, "Taylor trusts to her material and doesn't try to inflate Cassie's role in these events, and though the strong, clear-headed Logan family is no doubt an idealization, their characters are drawn with quiet affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human fallibility." In a retrospective essay about the Newbery Medal-winning books from 1976 to 1985, literary critic Zena Sutherland wrote of "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry", "There is no doubt that this book remains today as effective dramatically and as important sociologically as it was when it appeared... This is not an unflawed book, but it is a memorable one."
In addition to a Newbery Medal, the novel was also a National Book Award finalist and Coretta Scott King Award honoree.
The Burbank Unified School District banned the book from the curriculum due to complaints from four parents who allege the material in the book could lead to potential harm to the district's Black students.
In 1978, the novel was adapted into a television film directed by Jack Smight and starring Claudia McNeil, Janet MacLachlan and Morgan Freeman. The film won modest praise, including two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing.
Transcendent Kingdom is a novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in the United States on September 1, 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf (). "Transcendent Kingdom" was found in Literary Hub to have made 17 lists of the best books of 2020.
The novel follows 28-year-old Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience in her fifth year at Stanford University, and her Ghanaian-American mother, who is suffering from a deep depression.
While experimenting on lab mice for her research, Gifty gets a call that her mother is not feeling well. She sends for her mother so she can take care of her and is overwhelmed by the remembrance of the first time her mother fell into a similar depression, when Gifty was 11.
Gifty's mother and her father, affectionately nick-named The Chin-chin man, were Ghanaians who met and married late. They had a brilliant son, Nana, and after his birth Gifty's mother, seeking a better life for her child, relocated to Huntsville, Alabama where a cousin of hers was studying. Gifty's mother was forced to take menial jobs, eventually become a caretaker to abusive and racist elderly patients. Gifty's father eventually relocated to America to be with his family but was only able to find unstable work as a janitor.
Gifty was born a few years later, and was an unwanted pregnancy.
Nana's death and Gifty's mother's attempted suicide push Gifty away from religion. A bright scholar, she attends elite universities and chooses a path in neuroscience studying addictive behaviour. Her past and her continued belief in God mark her as an outsider and she has trouble opening herself up emotionally. In the present, unable to help her mother she finally reaches out to a colleague of hers who supports Gifty as she attempts to help her mother.
In an unspecified future time, after Gifty's mother has died of natural causes, a now married Gifty who is flourishing as a scientist and runs her own lab continues to attend church.
The book drew positive reviews upon publication. "The Washington Post" named it "a book of blazing brilliance". "USA Today" called it "stealthily devastating" while "Vox" gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. It is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston's best known work. The novel explores main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny".
Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received. Since the late 20th century, it has been regarded as influential to both African-American literature and women's literature. "TIME" included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
Janie Crawford, an African-American woman in her forties, recounts her life starting with her sexual awakening, which she compares to a blossoming pear tree kissed by bees in spring. Around this time, Janie allows a local boy, Johnny Taylor, to kiss her, which Janie's grandmother, Nanny, witnesses.
As a young slave woman, Nanny was raped by her white owner, then gave birth to a mixed-race daughter she named Leafy. Though Nanny wanted a better life for her daughter and even escaped her jealous mistress after the American Civil War, Leafy was later raped by her school teacher and became pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy began to drink and stay out at night, eventually running away and leaving Janie with Nanny.
Nanny, having transferred her hopes for stability and opportunity from Leafy to Janie, arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older farmer looking for a wife. However, Killicks doesn't love Janie and wants only a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner; he thinks she doesn't do enough around the farm and considers her ungrateful. When Janie speaks to Nanny about her desire for love, Nanny, too, accuses Janie of being spoiled and, soon afterwards, dies.
Unhappy, disillusioned, and lonely, Janie leaves Killicks and runs off with Jody (Joe) Starks, a glib man who takes her to the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Starks arranges to buy more land, establishes a general store, and is soon elected mayor of the town. However, Janie soon realizes that Starks wants her as a trophy wife to reinforce his powerful position in town and to run the store, even forbidding her from taking part in the town's social life. During their twenty-year marriage, he treats her as his property, criticizing her, controlling her, and physically abusing her. Finally, when Starks's kidney begins to fail, Janie says that he never knew her because he would not let her be free.
Suddenly, the area is hit by the great 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning and becomes increasingly jealous and unpredictable. When he tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, she fatally shoots him with a rifle in self-defense and is charged with murder.
At the trial, Tea Cake's black male friends show up to oppose her, but a group of local white women arrive to support Janie. After the all-white jury acquits Janie, she gives Tea Cake a lavish funeral. Tea Cake's friends forgive her, asking her to remain in the Everglades. However, she decides to return to Eatonville. As she expected, the residents gossip about her when she returns to town. The story ends where it started, as Janie finishes recounting her life to Pheoby.
Janie Crawford is the main character of "Their Eyes Were Watching God". At the beginning of the story, she is described as naive, beautiful, and energetic. However, as the story progresses, Janie is constantly under the influence and pressure of gender norms within her romantic relationships. As she navigates each of her relationships with men, Janie ultimately loses her confidence and self-image, conforming to roles that the husbands want her to fill.
Then, in Janie's second relationship, she left Logan Killicks in an attempt to pursue a better future with her new husband, Joe Starks. Joe was the Mayor of Eatonville and achieved incredible wealth, placing Janie in a higher status than her peers, since she was "sleeping with authority, seating in a higher chair". Janie believed that her life would change for the better. However, she was confined in the roles of a housewife and was made to be Joe's prized possession. "The king's mule, and the king's pleasure is everything she is there for, nothing else".
In Janie's third and last relationship, she was able to experience true love, on her own terms, with her third husband Vergible "Tea Cake" Woods. Janie was older than Tea Cake by nearly twelve years. He loved and treated her better than her previous husbands. While she was no longer strictly confined by the gender roles placed upon her by her previous husbands, she was still easily influenced and manipulated by Tea Cake. Janie was forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake in self defense after he developed rabies.
Logan has traditional views on marriage. He believes that a man should be married to a woman, and that she should be his property and work hard. Everyone contributes to tending the family land. He believes Janie should work well from dawn to dusk, in the field as well as the house, and do as she is told. She is analogous to a mule or other working animal. He is not an attractive man by Janie's description of him and seems to be aware of this. As such, his prospects at finding a mate based on attraction and his age are slim, thus the reason for approaching Nanny early on about an arrangement of marriage to Janie when she comes of age.
During the course of their brief marriage, Logan attempts to subjugate Janie with his words and attempts to make her work beyond the gender roles in a typical marriage. He does not appreciate her streaks of independence when she refuses his commands and he uses her family history to try to manipulate her into being submissive to him. At one point, he threatens to kill her for her insubordination in a desperate and final attempt to control her.
Joe "Jody" Starks is Janie's second husband. He is charismatic, charming and has big plans for his future. Janie, being young and naive, is easily seduced by his efforts to convince her to leave Logan. Ultimately, Joe is successful in gaining Janie's trust and so she joins him on his journey. Joe views Janie as a princess or royalty to be displayed on a pedestal. Because of her youth, inexperience, and desire to find true love, Jody easily controls and manipulates her into submitting to his male authority.
Jody is a jealous man, and because of this he grows more and more possessive and controlling of Janie. He expects her to dress a certain way (buying her the finest of clothes, with tight corsets) and requires that she wear her long, beautiful hair—symbolic of her free spirit and femininity— covered and up in a bun, so as not to attract too much unwanted attention from the other men in Eatonville. He considers her long hair to be for his enjoyment alone. He excludes her from various events and the social gatherings in Eatonville to further his dominance and control over her. He restricts her from being friendly with the other townswomen, requiring her to behave in a separate and superior manner.
However, Tea Cake shows tendencies of patriarchal dominance and psychological abuse towards Janie. He isn't always truthful with her and shows some of the same characteristic traits exhibited by Joe Starks and Logan Killicks. For instance, he keeps her from working with the rest of the people down on the muck because he believes she is above common folk. Consequently, until Janie asserts herself with Tea Cake and joins the others in working, she gains a bit of a reputation for thinking herself better than everyone else.
In a show of male dominance in their relationship, Tea Cake takes $200 from Janie without her knowledge or permission and spends it on a nice guitar and a lavish party with others around town without including her in the festivities. While accounting for his spending of her money, he tells Janie that he had to pay women that he deemed unattractive $2 each to keep them from the party. He then gambles the remaining amount to make the money back and excludes her from the gambling scene. What differentiates him from Joe in this regard is that Janie regularly confronts him and he acquiesces to her demand that she not be excluded from aspects of his life.
Another tendency that Tea Cake shares with Joe is his jealousy and need to maintain some amount of control over Janie. When he overhears another woman speaking poorly to Janie about Tea Cake and attempting to set her up with her brother, Tea Cake decides to take matters into his own hands. First, he discusses with Janie, a conversation he overheard between her and Mrs. Turner, a local café owner. He criticizes Mrs. Turner's appearance (like Janie, she is mixed-race) and then successfully executes an elaborate plan to ruin her establishment. Finally, he slaps Janie around in front of Mrs. Turner and others to show them that he is in charge and to assert his ownership over her.
In the end, Tea Cake plays the role of hero to Janie when he saves her from drowning and being attacked by a rabid dog. Tea Cake himself is bitten and eventually succumbs to the disease. Not able to think rationally and enraged with jealousy, he physically attacks Janie and she is forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake. Therefore, she effectively ends her emotional attachment to the men in her life and the desire to seek out and realize her dream of true love.
Janie does not find complete independence as a woman until after the death of Tea Cake. She returns to Eatonville with her hair down and she sits on her own porch chatting with her friend Pheoby. By the end of the novel, she has overcome traditional roles and cultivates an image of the "liberated black woman."
Throughout the novel, Hurston vividly displays how African American women are valued, or devalued, in their marital relationships. By doing so, she takes the reader on a journey through Janie's life and her marriages. Janie formed her initial idea of marriage off the beautiful image of unity she witnessed between a pear tree and a bee. This image and expectation sets Janie up for disappointment when it came time to marry. From her marriage to Logan Killicks to Tea Cake, Janie was forced to acknowledge where she stood as a powerless female in her relationship.
Hurston wrote "Their Eyes Were Watching God" while living in Belle Glade, at the home of Harvey Poole, who, as manager of one of the local labor camps, informed her tremendously about bean picking, and the labors of African-Americans on the muckland. The book was also written while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti to research Obeah practices in the West Indies.
Hurston's political views in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" were met with resistance from several leading Harlem Renaissance authors.
Novelist and essayist Richard Wright condemned "Their Eyes Were Watching God", writing in a review for "New Masses" (1937): Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction… [She] can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley... Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
Ralph Ellison said the book contained a "blight of calculated burlesque."
Alain Locke wrote in a review: "when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly—which is Miss Hurston's cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?"
"The New Republic"s Otis Ferguson wrote: "it isn't that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better". But he went on to praise the work for depicting "Negro life in its naturally creative and unselfconscious grace".
Not all African-American critics had negative things to say about Hurston's work. Carter G. Woodson, founder of "The Journal of Negro History" wrote, ""Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a gripping story... the author deserves great praise for the skill and effectiveness shown in the writing of this book." The critic noted Hurston's anthropological approach to writing, "She studied them until she thoroughly understood the working of their minds, learned to speak their language".
Meanwhile, reviews of Hurston's book in the mainstream white press were largely positive, although they did not translate into significant retail sales. Writing for "The New York Times", Ralph Thompson states: "the normal life of Negroes in the South today—the life with its holdovers from slave times, its social difficulties, childish excitements, and endless exuberances... compared to this sort of story, the ordinary narratives of Negroes in Harlem or Birmingham seem ordinary indeed."
For the "New York Herald Tribune", Sheila Hibben described Hurston as writing "with her head as with her heart" creating a "warm, vibrant touch". She praised "Their Eyes Were Watching God" as filled with "a flashing, gleaming riot of black people, with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness".
"New York Times" critic Lucille Tompkins described "Their Eyes Were Watching God": "It is about Negroes... but really it is about every one, or at least every one who isn't so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory."
As universities across the country developed Black Studies programs in the 1970s and 1980s, they created greater space for Black literature in academia. Several prominent academics, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Addison Gayle, Jr., established a new "Black Aesthetic" that "placed the sources of contemporary black literature and culture in the communal music and oral folk tradition". This new respect coupled with a growing Black feminism led by Mary Helen Washington, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and others would create the space for the rediscovery of Hurston.
Hurston first achieved a level of mainstream institutional support in the 1970s. Walker published an essay, "Looking for Zora", in "Ms." magazine in 1975. In that work, she described how the Black community's general rejection of Hurston was like "throwing away a genius". The National Endowment for the Humanities went on to award Robert Hemenway two grants for his work to write Hurston's biography. The 1977 biography was followed in 1978 by the re-issue of "Their Eyes Were Watching God".
In 1975, the Modern Language Association held a special seminar focusing on Hurston. In 1981 professor Ruth Sheffey of Baltimore's Morgan State University founded the Zora Neale Hurston Society. Hurston had attended the school, then known as Morgan Academy, in 1917.
In 1978, Harper and Row leased its rights to "Their Eyes Were Watching God" to the University of Illinois Press. However, the printing was so profitable that Harper and Row refused to renew the leasing contract and instead reprinted its own new edition. This new edition sold its total print of 75,000 in less than a month.
The "New York Times"s Virginia Heffernan explains that the book's "narrative technique, which is heavy on free-indirect discourse, lent itself to poststructuralist analysis". With so many new disciplines especially open to the themes and content of Hurston's work, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" achieved growing prominence in the last several decades. It is now firmly established in the literary canon.
On November 5, 2019, the "BBC News" listed "Their Eyes Were Watching God" on its list of the 100 most influential novels.
In a conversation with Jody, Janie defends 'womenfolk,' disagreeing with the sexist claim that God made men "different" because they turn "out so smart" (70). When she states that men "don't know half as much as you think you do," Jody interrupts her saying, 'you getting too moufy Janie... Go fetch me de checker-board and de checkers' (70–71) so that he and the other men could play (Bernard 9).
Oreo is a satirical novel published in 1974 by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor. The novel, addressing issues of a mixed heritage child, was considered "before its time" and went out of print until Harryette Mullen rediscovered the novel and brought it out of obscurity.
The book has since acquired cult classic status.
Ross uses the structure of the Theseus myth to both trap Oreo and allow her to reinvent it. Oreo's white father, who abandoned her, forces her to live out this inherently white, male narrative. However, the trope of lost patriarchy is essential in black cultures so Oreo can reappropriate the myth and make it entirely non-foreign. Furthermore, Oreo reinvents the archaic myth by living a black narrative through it, suggesting that blacks can reappropriate themes from the white culture they are forced to live in. The search for paternity within the Theseus myth is essentially futile since Oreo gains nothing from finding her father, which undermines the importance placed on the search for paternity.
"Oreo" is a picaresque novel, that revolves around our picaroon, Oreo. It is a fictional tale about the adventures and conflicts she faces on her search for her father. It falls under the category of Post Soul Aesthetic, modern works that expands upon the possibilities of the Black experience, and arguably New Black Aesthetic, works that describes the black experience from the perspective of the culturally-hybrid, second generation middle class. The comedic style of the novel helps to subvert the trope of the "tragic mulatto" and position Oreo as a "thriving hybrid."
The novel is told from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person. The novel strays from traditional narrative form. The novel exemplifies the essence of postmodernism, fragmentation through its structure.The chapters are broken into subsections. The novel uses diagram, equations, menus, tests, ads, letters, other sources to break and supplement the narrative.
Ross employs different narrative structures throughout the course of the novel. Mainly, the episodic nature of the book is similar to the picaresque story structure. The charisma and wits of Christine, especially in contrast to the foolishness of characters like Parnell or even her father, exemplify the use of this narrative. Elements of the bildungsroman are also present, such as the contrast of the cultures of Christine's upbringing in Philadelphia compared to that of New York.
Most notably, "Oreo" draws heavily upon the Theseus myth, so much so that a quick reading guide at the end of the book summarizes the story's events in terms of the myth. The names of the novel's chapters are also references to the Greek myth.
While the novel is told from a third person omniscient point-of-view, there was a strong and deliberate choice to have the reader still be limited in fully understanding what goes through Christine's mind. While her journey is fun and adventurous, Christine runs into certain situations in the novel that can be viewed as traumatic. For example, her near-rape at the hands of Parnell and her viewing of her father's accident are both very extreme events that elicit immediate and raw emotion, yet the reader does not get that from Christine. The reader never gets to go deeper into Christine's mind and is never let in to her true feelings about the journey that she takes to find her father.

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