Allyn & Bacon / Prentice Hall

Interdisciplinary Studies



The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women's Literature
Valerie Lee, Ohio State University

ISBN-10: 0130485462
ISBN-13: 9780130485465

Publisher: Prentice Hall
Copyright: 2006
Format: Paper; 624 pp
Published: 08/04/2005

Suggested retail price: $84.40
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For courses in Women and Literature and African-American Literature; as well as for courses in women's studies, cultural studies, and African-American studies.

Message:  This is the first comprehensive anthology of African American women's literature that covers all historical periods and all genres.

Story:

Encompassing Pulitzer Prize winners Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove, national icons Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, and prominent cult figures Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, African American women's literature is the one of the fastest growing areas of American literature today.

  • Sheer volume and variety - The only book on the market that covers African American women writers completely.

    • Serves students' needs as a book for literature studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and African American studies.

  • Framing devices - Includes questions for thought and discussion at the end of each writing; two contextualizing essays by scholars in the field; twenty-three pivotal essays from Black feminist/womanist theories; and a unique map that portrays where African-American women writers were born.

    • Gives students an excellent conceptual framework by which they can fully understand the writings presented, making the material more exciting, interesting, and relevant.

  • Flexible arrangement - Organized by three principles (three tables of content): one by chronology, one by genre, and one by theme.

    • Gives instructors great course flexibility by enabling them to present these writings from different perspectives.

  • Comprehensive genre coverage - Contains autobiographies, spiritual narratives, letters, slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, detective fiction, genteel fiction, folk stories, science fiction, romances, historical fiction, melodramas, surrealistic dramas, dramatic monologues, lyrics, ballads, sonnets, choreopoems, prose poems, and all types of genre hybrids.

    • Explores for students the full range of the human imagination.

  • Sheer volume and variety - The only book on the market that covers African American women writers completely.

    • Serves students' needs as a book for literature studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and African American studies.

  • Framing devices - Includes questions for thought and discussion at the end of each writing; two contextualizing essays by scholars in the field; twenty-three pivotal essays from Black feminist/womanist theories; and a unique map that portrays where African-American women writers were born.

    • Gives students an excellent conceptual framework by which they can fully understand the writings presented, making the material more exciting, interesting, and relevant.

  • Flexible arrangement - Organized by three principles (three tables of content): one by chronology, one by genre, and one by theme.

    • Gives instructors great course flexibility by enabling them to present these writings from different perspectives.

  • Comprehensive genre coverage - Contains autobiographies, spiritual narratives, letters, slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, detective fiction, genteel fiction, folk stories, science fiction, romances, historical fiction, melodramas, surrealistic dramas, dramatic monologues, lyrics, ballads, sonnets, choreopoems, prose poems, and all types of genre hybrids.

    • Explores for students the full range of the human imagination.

CONTENTS

Contents by Genre ix

Contents by Theme xii

Preface xvii

Acknowledgments xvii

Map: Writers and Geography xix

Timeline xx

An Era of Resistance: 19th-Century African American Women's Writings Jacqueline Jones Royster xxviii

The Colonial and Antebellum Periods 1

"Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women."

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

"She is mother, and her heart / Is Breaking in despair."

"The Slave Mother"

Lucy Terry Prince (1730-1821)

"Bars Fight" (1746) 2

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

"On Being Brought from Africa to America" (1773) 3

"To S.M., A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works" (1773) 3

"On Imagination" (1773) 4

"To Samson Occom" (1774) 4

"To His Excellency General Washington" (1775) 5

Jarena Lee (1783-1849)

From The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1836)

"My Call to Preach the Gospel" 6

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)

"Ar'n't I a Woman?" Speech to the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, presented May 29, 1851 8

"When Woman Gets Her Rights, Man Will BeRight"-delivered at the annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York (1867) 9

Nancy Gardner Prince (1799c.-1856)

From A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written By Herself (1850) 10

Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879)

From "Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality" (1831) 14

"Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall" (1832) 19

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897)

From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Chapter 1-"Childhood" 22

Julia A. Foote (1823-1900)

From A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879)

Chapter 1-"Birth and Parentage" 24

Chapter 17-"My Call to Preach the Gospel" 25

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911)

"The Slave Mother" (1854) 26

"The Syrophenician Woman" (1854) 27

"Ethiopia" (1854) 27

"Bury Me in a Free Land" (1857) 27

"The Two Offers" (1859) 28

"Our Greatest Want" (1859) 32

"Woman's Political Future" (1893) 33

"A Double Standard" (1894) 35

Harriet E. Wilson (1828-1863)

From Our Nig (1859)

Chapter 2-"My Father's Death" 36

Hannah Crafts

From The Bondwoman's Narrative (circa 1850s)

"A New Master" 39

The Reconstruction Period 41

"But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages."

Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South

"Mrs. Willis was a good example of a class of women of that came into existence at the close of the Civil War. She was not a rara avis, but one of many possibilities which the future will develop from among the ed women of New England."

Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces

Elizabeth Keckley (1824c.-1907)

From Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years as a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868)

Preface 42

Chapter 1-"Where I Was Born" 44

Chapter 9-"Behind the Scenes" 46

Charlotte L. Forten Grimke (1837-1914)

From The Journals of Charlotte L. Forten Grimke

Introduction to Journal, May 25, 1854-June 25, 1854 49

Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855-1948)

A Lofty Study" (1894) 52

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)

From A Voice From the South (1892)

"Womanhood A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race" 54

"The Status of Woman in America" 62

Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930)

From Contending Forces (1900)

Chapter 7-"Friendship" 67

Chapter 8-"The Sewing-Circle" 73

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)

From A Red Record (1895)

Chapter 1-"The Case Stated" 79

Chapter 10-"The Remedy" 83

Expansion, Experimentation, and Excellence: 20th- and 21st-Century African American Women's Writings 86

The Harlem Renaissance 90

". . . Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you..."

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"She wished to find out about this hazardous business 'passing,' this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly."

Nella Larsen, Passing

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

"I Sit and Sew" (1920) 90

From Caroling Dusk

"Snow in October" (1927) 90

Letters from Une Femme Dit, February 20,1926-March 13, 1926 90

Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958)

"The Closing Door" (1919) 94

"The Black Finger" (1923) 103

Anne Spencer (1882-1975)

"Before the Feast of Shushan" (1920) 104

"The Wife-Woman" (1922) 104

"At the Carnival" (1923) 105

"Lady, Lady" (1925) 105

"Letter to My Sister" (1927) 106

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

”The Sleeper Wakes" (1920) 107

From Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1929)

Chapter 1 [Passing] 118

Mary Effie Lee Newsome (1885-1979)

"The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy)" (1922) 121

"Morning Light (The Dew-Drier)" (1927) 121

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886-1966)

"The Heart of a Woman" (1918) 122

"Your World" (1922) 122

"Motherhood" (1922) 122

"Wishes" (1927) 123

"I Want to Die While You Love Me" (1928) 123

Plumes: A Folk Tragedy (1927) 123

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

"Sweat" (1926) 127

"The Gilded Six-Bits" (1933) 132

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Passing (1929) 138

Marita Bonner (1899-1971)

"On Being Young-a Woman-and ed" (1925) 175

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902-1981)

"Heritage" (1923) 178

"To a Dark Girl" (1927) 178

Helene Johnson (1907-1995)

"Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem" (1923) 179

"My Race" (1925) 179

"Magalu" (1927) 179

The 1940s-1959 180

"God help her when she grew up. God help the man who married her. God help her sisters not to follow in her footsteps."

Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy

"Sadie scraped life / With a fine-tooth comb."

Gwendolyn Brooks, "Sadie and Maud"

Dorothy West (1907-1998)

”The Typewriter" (1926) 180

"The Richer the Poorer" (1967) 183

Ann Petry (1908-1997)

"Like a Winding Sheet" (1945) 186

Margaret Walker (1915-1998)

"Ex-Slave" (1938) 191

"For My People" (1942) 191

"Lineage" (1942) 192

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

"Kitchenette Building" (1945) 193

”The Mother" (1945) 193

"We Real Cool" (1953) 194

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 195

Literature of the Black Aesthetic Movement: The 1960s and 1970s

"now woman/i have returned."

Sonia Sanchez, "Homecoming"

"but revolution doesn't lend / itself to be-hopping."

Nikki Giovanni, "For Saundra"

Alice Childress (1920-1994)

From Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life (1956)

"Like One of the Family" 231

"Ridin' the Bus" 232

"All About My Job" 233

"Mrs. James" 234

"I Hate Half-Days Off " 234

Naomi Long Madgett (b. 1923)

"The Old Women" (1978) 236

"Attitude at Seventy-five" (2001) 236

"Gray Strands" (2001) 236

Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

"Still I Rise" (1978) 237

Paule Marshall (b. 1929)

From Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961)

”Brooklyn" 238

Kristin Hunter (b. 1931)

From Guests in the Promised Land (1968)

”Mom Luby and the Social Worker" 247

Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934)

"Homecoming" (1969) 250

"Poem at Thirty" (1969) 250

"The Final Solution/" (1969) 251

"For Our Lady" (1969) 251

"Summer Words of a Sistuh Addict" (1970) 251

June Jordan (1936-2002)

"Independence Day in the U.S.A." (1985) 253

"Song of the Law Abiding Citizen" (1985) 253

"Poem about My Rights" (1989) 254

"Poem for Guatemala" (1989) 255

"The Female and the Silence of a Man" (1989) 256

"Intifada" (1989) 256

Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943)

"For Saundra" (1968) 258

"Nikki-Rosa" (1968) 258

Carolyn M. Rodgers (b. 1945)

"It Is Deep" (1968) 260

"How I Got Ovah" (1968) 260

Literature of the Second Renaissance: The 1970s and 1980s 262

"We waz Girls Together."

Toni Morrison, Sula

"We was Grown / We was Finally Grown."

Ntozake Shange, For ed Girls...

Toni Morrison (b. 1931)

"Recitatif" (1995) 263

Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931)

Motherhood 2000 (1994) 272

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

”A Litany for Survival" (1978) 275

Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)

"Homage to My Hips" (1980) 277

"Homage to My Hair" (1980) 277

Jayne Cortez (b. 1936)

"Rape" (1984) 278

Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)

From Gorilla, My Love (1972)

"The Lesson" 279

"My Man Bovanne" 282

J. California Cooper (b. 1940)

From A Piece of Mine (1984)

”A Jewel for a Friend" 285

BarbaraNeely (b. 1941)

”Spilled Salt" (1990) 289

Alice Walker (b. 1944)

From In Love and Trouble (1973)

"Roselily" 294

Pat Parker (1944-1989)

"For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend" (1978) 297

Sherley Anne Williams (1944-1999)

"Any Woman's Blues" (1975) 298

"I Want Aretha to Set This to Music" (1982) 298

Marilyn Nelson Waniek (b. 1946)

"The Writer's Wife" (1978) 300

"The Lost Daughter" (1985) 300

Michelle Cliff (b. 1946)

From Abeng (1984)

[Nanny, The Sorceress] 302

Octavia Butler (b. 1947)

"Bloodchild" (1995) 306

Ntozake Shange (b. 1948)

From for ed girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1977)

”Latent Rapists" 315

"With No Immediate Cause" (1978) 316

Jewelle Gomez (b. 1948)

"A Swimming Lesson" (1986) 318

"Don't Explain" (1998) 319

Alexis De Veaux (b. 1948)

"The Woman Who Lives in the Botanical Gardens" (1983) 324

Gloria Naylor (b. 1950)

From The Women of Brewster Place (1982)

"Kiswana Browne" 325

From Mama Day (1988)

[Willow Springs] 330

Marita Golden (b. 1950)

From Long Distance Life (1989)

Chapter 3-"Naomi" 334

Rita Dove (b. 1952)

From Thomas and Beulah (1986)

"The Event" 345

"Variation on Pain" 346

"Motherhood" 346

"Daystar" 346

Jewell Parker Rhodes (b. 1954)

"Long Distances" (1989) 347

Literature from the New Millennium: The 1990s to the 21st Century 351

"Trifling! Trifling women! After all I did to raise them right."

Tina McElroy Ansa, Ugly Ways

"Every shut eye ain't sleep. Every good-bye ain't gone."

Itabari Njeri, Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone

Tina McElroy Ansa (b. 1949)

"Willie Bea and Jaybird" (1991) 352

Bebe Moore Campbell (b. 1950)

From Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992)

Chapter 5: ["Two Small Pretty Women Staring Down an Empty Train Track"] 356

From Brothers and Sisters (1994)

[LaKeesha's Job Interview] 360

From What You Owe Me (2001)

Chapter 2: [The Braddock Hotel] 363

Terry McMillan (b. 1951)

"Ma' Dear" (1990) 366

Julie Dash (b. 1952)

From Daughters of the Dust (1999)

"The Story of Ibo Landing" 371

Harryette Mullen (b. 1953)

"Denigration" (2002) 374

"Exploring the Dark Content" (2002) 374

"Souvenir from Anywhere" (2002) 374

Itabari Njeri (b. 1954)

From Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone (1991)

”Ruby" 375

Thylias Moss (b. 1954)

"The Warmth of Hot Chocolate" (1993) 381

"Remembering Kitchens" (1993) 382

Jessica Care Moore (b. 1972)

"princess" (2003) 383

"The poem we have to write before thirty, because people will ask or I don't have a five-year plan!" (2003) 384

"struck!" (1997) 385

Pearl Cleage (b. 1948)

From I Wish I Had a Red Dress (2001)

"Black Ice" 386

Tayari Jones (b. 1970)

From Leaving Atlanta (2002)

"The Direction Opposite of Home" 390

Black Feminist Criticism and Womanist Theories 398

"For people of have always theorized-but in forms

quite different from the Western form of abstract logic."

Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory"

"Black feminist criticism is a knotty issue..."

Deborah McDowell, "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism"

Barbara Christian

"The Race for Theory" (1987) 399

Karla Holloway

"Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African-American Women Writers" (1990) 405

Audre Lorde

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1984) 412

Deborah McDowell

"New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism" (1980) 414

Carla Peterson

From "Doers of the Word": Theorizing African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the Antebellum North (1995)

"The Social Spheres of African-American Women" 421

"Black Women and Liminality" 422

Valerie Lee is the chair of the Department of English at The Ohio State University. She is the former chair of the Department of Women's Studies and is active in the field of African American women's literature.

Encompassing Pulitzer Prize winners Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove, national icons Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, and prominent cult figures Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, African American women's literature is one of the fastest growing areas of American literature today. The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women's Literature is the first comprehensive collection of African American women's literature available today. It covers all historical periods, from the 18th century up through the early years of the 21st century; and all genres: from poems, essays, journal entries, and short stories to novels and black feminist criticism. Organized by three principles—chronology, genre, and theme—Lee's anthology includes questions for thought and discussion at the end of each writing.

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