Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood

Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood
by Mark Anthony Neal

Vergible Wood aka Tea Cake is one of the most endearing Black male characters in African-American literature. Tea Cake was the third husband of Janie, the heroine of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novelTheir Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Readers identify with Tea Cake, in part because he was an everyday man—willing to put in a hard day’s work, playful, thoughtful and at times tender with Janie. I suppose there are many who saw a little of Tea Cake in their Black fathers and may even see Tea Cake in the working class men who struggle in contemporary Black America. I’d like to argue though that there was much more to Tea Cake—that perhaps Tea Cake was a metaphor, a Black folk hero really, for an imagined Black feminist manhood.

In the introduction to the volume Traps: African-American Men on Gender and Sexuality, co-editor Rudolph Byrd (with Beverly Guy Sheftall), identifies High John de Conqueror, a black folklore hero, as a model for Black masculinity. Specifically Byrd is drawn to Zora Neale Hurston’s conceptualization of High John De Conquer, originally published in 1943 and collected in the book The Sanctified Church (1981). According to Byrd, High John serves as an “example of courage, hope, the regenerative powers of song, love and the spirit…a powerful figure who symbolizes the potentialities of Black people and the potentialities of a liberated and liberating Black masculinity.” (5) As Hurston describes him, “Old John, High John could beat the unbeatable. He was top-superior to the whole mess of sorrow. He could beat it all, and what made it so cool, finish it off with a laugh…Distance and the impossible had no power over High John de Conquer.” (70) High John was a mythical figure—“there is no established picture of what sort of looking-man this High John de Conquer was”—“who done teached the black folks so they knowed a hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming.” The importance of a figure like High John de Conqueror resides in the belief, as Byrd writes, that “it is out of this rich field of Black expression that we have fashioned not only a theory of African American literary tradition (signifying) as well as a theory of Black feminism (womanism), but also many of the art forms and life-sustaining traditions of African-American culture.” (3)

Byrd’s use of folklore to highlight the contemporary crisis of black masculinity—“a progressive mode of Black masculinity is needed to counter what is nothing less than the new species of slavery that shackles so many of us”—raises the question of what other folk heroes might be recovered in the service of creating progressive models of Black masculinity. Perhaps such a figure exists—again in the work of Zora Neale Hurston—with the character of Tea Cake, a twenty-something, working-class, happy-go lucky Black man, whose literary presence takes into account the realities of working class life for many Black men.

Janie meets Tea Cake after the death of her second husband Jody Starks, a local businessman in Eatonville, Fl, who left her with a relative fortune for a Black woman in the early 20th century. Tea Cake literally drifts into Janie’s general store (left to her by her dead husband) and immediately becomes a curiosity to her despite their age difference: Janie is in her early 40s and Tea Cake is in his mid-20s. Janie and Teacake’s love affair—and how bold of Hurston capture such (Black) passion and eroticism in the 1930s—becomes a town controversy, less because of their age difference and more so because of Tea Cake’s stature, or rather, lack of social standing. Most of Janie’s friends and acquaintances dismissed Tea Cake as little more than an interloper, desiring access to Janie’s money (“Dat long-legged Tea cake ain’t got doodley squat”). But Janie saw beyond Tea Cake’s youth, lack of money and cavalier attitude (perhaps best captured by his gambling addiction or hustle, depending on your vantage), in large part because of Tea Cake’s ability to be attentive—not simply in the way that one is attentive to someone that they are attracted to—but attentive to the womanist reality that was Janie’s life. To that point there’s a simply lovely passage in the novel where Janie wakes from a nap as Tea Cake combs her hair and she ask “Whut good do combin’ mah hair do you?” and Tea Cake responds “It’s mine too…it feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to mah face” (103)

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