like the dull finale of a “long, whiny, trawling search for a man.” For Tea Cake and Janie, though, the choice of each other is experienced not as desperation, but as discovery, and the need felt on both sides causes them joy, not shame. That Tea Cake would not be our choice, that we disapprove of him often, and despair of him occasionally, only lends power to the portrait. He seems to act with freedom, and Janie to choose him freely. We have no power; we only watch. Despite the novel’s fairy-tale structure (as far as husbands go, third time’s the charm), it is not a novel of wish fulfillment, least of all the fulfillment of our wishes.2 It is odd to diagnose weakness where lovers themselves do not feel it.
After that first reading of the novel, I wept, and not only for Tea Cake, and not simply for the perfection of the writing, nor even the real loss I felt upon leaving the world contained in its pages. It meant something more than all that to me, something I could not, or would not, articulate. Later, I took it to the dinner table, still holding on to it, as we do sometimes with books we are not quite ready to relinquish.
“So?” my mother asked.
I told her it was basically sound.
At fourteen, I did Zora Neale Hurston a critical disservice. I feared my “extraliterary” feelings for her. I wanted to be an objective aesthete and not a sentimental fool. I disliked the idea of “identifying” with the fiction I read: I wanted to like Hurston because she represented “good writing,” not because she represented me. In the two decades since, Zora Neale Hurston has gone from being a well-kept, well-loved secret among black women of my mother’s generation to an entire literary industry—biographies3 and films and Oprah and African American literature departments all pay homage to her life4 and work as avatars of black woman-ness. In the process, a different kind of critical disservice is being done to her, an overcompensation in the opposite direction. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is depressed by Joe Starks’s determination to idolize her: he intends to put her on a lonely pedestal before the whole town and establish a symbol (the Mayor’s Wife) in place of the woman she is. Something similar has been done to Hurston herself. She is like Janie, set on her porch-pedestal (“Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere”), far from the people and things she really cared about, representing only the ideas and beliefs of her admirers, distorted by their gaze. In the space of one volume of collected essays, we find a critic arguing that the negative criticism of Hurston’s work represents an “intellectual lynching” by black men, white men and white women; a critic dismissing Hurston’s final work with the sentence “Seraph on the Suwanee is not even about black people, which is no crime, but is about white people who are bores, which is”; and another explaining the “one great flaw” in Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston’s “curious insistence” on having her main character’s tale told in the omniscient third person (instead of allowing Janie her “voice outright”). We are in a critical world of some banality here, one in which most of our nineteenth-century heroines would be judged oppressed creatures, cruelly deprived of the therapeutic first-person voice. It is also a world in which what is called the “Black Female Literary Tradition” is beyond reproach:Black women writers have consistently rejected the falsification of their Black female experience, thereby avoiding the negative stereotypes such falsification has often created in the white American female and Black male literary traditions. Unlike many of their Black male and white female peers, Black women writers have usually refused to dispense with whatever was clearly Black and/or female in their sensibilities in an effort to achieve the mythical “neutral” voice of universal art.5
Gratifying as it would be to agree that black women writers “have consistently rejected the falsification” of their experience, the honest reader knows that this is simply not the case. In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity, the flaws