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A fascinating look at a pivotal period in Zora Neale Hurston's life
that reimagines her complicated legacy. Zora Neale Hurston, an
anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by
tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out
of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to
regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends
meet. In The Chase and Ruins, Sharony Green uncovers an
understudied but important period of Hurston's life: her stay in
Honduras in the late 1940s. On the eve of an awful accusation that
nearly led to her suicide, Hurston fled to Honduras in search of a
lost Mayan ruin. During her yearlong trip south of the US border,
she appears to have never found the ruin she was chasing. But by
escaping the Jim Crow south to Honduras, she avoided racist
violence in the United States while still embracing her
privilege—and power—as a US citizen in postwar Central America.
While in Honduras, Hurston wrote Seraph on the Suwanee, her final
novel and her only book to feature white characters, in an attempt
to appeal to Hollywood's growing appetite for "crackerphilia"
(stories about poor white folks) and to finally secure herself some
financial stability. In a letter to her editor, Hurston wrote that
in Honduras, she may not have found the Mayan ruin she was looking
for, but she finally found herself. Hurston's experience in
Honduras has much to teach us about Black women's lives and the
thorny politics of postwar America as well as America's long and
complicated entanglement with Central America. In an attempt to
find historical meaning in an extraordinary woman's conceptions of
herself in a changing world, Green unearths letters, diaries,
literary writings, research reports, and other archival materials.
The Chase and Ruins encourages us to reckon with and reimagine
Hurston's fascinating life in all of its complexity and
contradictions.
Another addition to the Southern Women series, Alabama Women
celebrates women's histories in the Yellowhammer State by
highlighting the lives and contributions of women and enriching our
understanding of the past and present. Exploring such subjects as
politics, arts, and civic organizations, this collection of
eighteen biographical essays provides a window into the social,
cultural, and geographic milieux of women's lives in Alabama.
Featured individuals include Augusta Evans Wilson, Maria Fearing,
Julia S. Tutwiler, Margaret Murray Washington, Pattie Ru ner
Jacobs, Ida E. Brandon Mathis, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald, Sara Martin May eld, Bess Bolden Walcott, Virginia
Foster Durr, Rosa Parks, Lurleen Burns Wallace, Margaret Charles
Smith, and Harper Lee.
It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial
relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level, but we
have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships,
especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view.
Likewise, the frequency with which southern white men freed
enslaved women and their children is now generally known to those
familiar with American history, but less is known about the
financial and emotional investments in them made by these men.
Sharony Green presents three case studies with evidence from
surviving letters that indicate a kind of "love" existing between
the ex-slave mistress and her former master. She follows the
journey of these women and children from the south to Cincinnati,
which had the largest per capita population of mixed race people
outside the South during the antebellum period.
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Alabama Women - Their Lives and Times (Paperback)
Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Susan Youngblood Ashmore; Contributions by Christopher D. Haveman, Susan E Reynolds, Sharony Green, …
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R1,102
R940
Discovery Miles 9 400
Save R162 (15%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Another addition to the Southern Women series, Alabama Women
celebrates women's histories in the Yellowhammer State by
highlighting the lives and contributions of women and enriching our
understanding of the past and present. Exploring such subjects as
politics, arts, and civic organizations, this collection of
eighteen biographical essays provides a window into the social,
cultural, and geographic milieux of women's lives in Alabama.
Featured individuals include Augusta Evans Wilson, Maria Fearing,
Julia S. Tutwiler, Margaret Murray Washington, Pattie Ru ner
Jacobs, Ida E. Brandon Mathis, Ruby Pickens Tartt, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald, Sara Martin May eld, Bess Bolden Walcott, Virginia
Foster Durr, Rosa Parks, Lurleen Burns Wallace, Margaret Charles
Smith, and Harper Lee.
It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial
relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level. But we
have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships,
especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view. While
it is known that Cincinnati had the largest per capita population
of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum
period, historians have yet to explore how geography played a
central role in this outcome. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers made
it possible for Southern white men to ferry women and children of
color for whom they had some measure of concern to free soil with
relative ease. Some of the women in question appear to have been
"fancy girls," enslaved women sold for use as prostitutes or
"mistresses." Green focuses on women who appear to have been the
latter, recognizing the problems with the term "mistress," given
its shifting meaning even during the antebellum period. Remember Me
to Miss Louisa, among other things, moves the life of the fancy
girl from New Orleans, where it is typically situated, to the
Midwest. The manumission of these women and their children-and
other enslaved women never sold under this brand-occurred as
America's frontiers pushed westward, and urban life followed in
their wake. Indeed, Green's research examines the tensions between
the urban Midwest and the rising Cotton Kingdom. It does so by
relying on surviving letters, among them those from an ex-slave
mistress who sent her "love" to her former master. This
relationship forms the crux of the first of three case studies. The
other two concern a New Orleans young woman who was the mistress of
an aging white man, and ten Alabama children who received from a
white planter a $200,000 inheritance (worth roughly $5.1 million in
today's currency). In each case, those freed people faced the
challenges characteristic of black life in a largely hostile
America. While the frequency with which Southern white men freed
enslaved women and their children is now generally known, less is
known about these men's financial and emotional investments in
them. Before the Civil War, a white Southern man's pending
marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free
an African American woman and their children. And as difficult as
it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of
connection sometimes existed between these individuals. This study
argues that such men-though they hardly stand excused for their
ongoing claims to privilege-were hidden actors in freedwomen's and
children's attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as
African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War. Green
examines many facets of this phenomenon in the hope of revealing
new insights about the era of slavery. Historians, students, and
general readers of US history, African American studies, black
urban history, and antebellum history will find much of interest in
this fascinating study.
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