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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Students at University of Puerto Rico 28th Day on Strike

Similar to the issues that universities in the mainland United States are facing, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) are, too. However, they have taken more severe actions and seem to be much more tenacious than that of students in the United States. In addition, students at UPR are getting support from other universities around the world (Spain, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, UC Berkeley, and CUNY), nonetheless, UPR is receiving little media attention on this issue from the U.S. This can be related to the colonial history of Puerto Rico.

Visit here for more info: @Democracy Now

Or @New York Times

No Shade, My Obama: Musings in Postracialism II

By: Regina N. Barnett

After a nearly three year drought, Aaron McGruder blessed the masses with a fresh season of The Boondocks. While hilarity ensued – “Dick Riding Obama” is what’s hot in them streets! – one has to look past the comedy and question the severity of numerous issues McGruder raises about yet another postracial “moment” in American history – the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. “Ehh.”



The show opens with an introduction by German filmmaker Werner Herzog (who makes a cameo appearance). Herzog visits Woodcrest in hopes of documenting the campaign of Barack Obama. He gathers the “usual suspects” – Huey, Riley, Granddad, Tom and Sara DuBois, and Thugnificent – to discuss the impact of Obama’s presidential campaign on race relations and America. What is most peculiar about the framing of this episode is Herzog’s covering of an American historical moment.

While it is no question that Obama is a global icon, I find it fascinating that McGruder selected a controversial German filmmaker to help construct the episode’s intent. Herzog’s presence in the show embodies the underlying social-political charges against Obama to be a communist, an outsider, and a threat to American democracy and life. Even more intrusive in our attempts to deconstruct this opening installment is the idea of foreign spectatorship and its (often presumptuous) racial associations based upon social trends and media imagery. Herzog’s questioning speaks on two levels – the cynicism of a foreign spectator towards not only American racial politics but black American politics andthe aloofness of the African American community in their associations with Obama strictly based on his skin color. This is made (painfully) obvious with Thugnificent’s inability to name the three branches of government while being interviewed by Bill Maher. In similar fashion to his interview with Herzog, Thugnificent discusses his social awakening and fervent support of Obama because of his blackness. While Herzog subtly points to his aloofness, Maher blatantly speaks to his political detachment and, pulling from his own intellect and white privilege, snobbishly remarks “if you are what black leadership is, I’m glad I’m a white man.”


It’s Barry, Bitch: Respectability, Responsibility, and Manhood
President Obama’s electoral campaign and his struggle with black masculinity are well documented in both social and academic circles. What is intriguing and, to an extent, refreshing, is McGruder’s willingness to push the envelope about Obama’s reputation and representation in America. McGruder satirizes Obama to embody the numerous intersections of black manhood and Americanism – the buck, the uncle tom, the token politician for a major party, the problem solver, and the pop culture icon. McGruder removes Obama from the bubble of respectability and fetishizing that he occupies within the black public spectrum. Sarah DuBois, the white wife of Tom DuBois, speaks about Obama from a strictly sexual lens, reducing him to a sexualized black body. Tom, who could be Obama’s foil, is threatened by Sarah’s attraction to Obama and desperately attempts to trump him to keep his wife in lust of his masculinity.

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Aiyana Jones Not Even Safe In Her Dreams

By: Saida Grundy

Little Black girls go to sleep to dream, not to die. Radiant flashes of whimsical light should have lit the vivid imagination of a slumbering 7-year-old Detroit girl. Instead, a flash-bang bomb -- the handheld stun grenade most commonly used in active combat by the United States military -- exploded blinding light into her room, and from the accounts of her father and the family's attorney, gravely burned her before she was fatally shot in the neck by the Detroit police officers raiding her home.

This is what it means to go to sleep when you're Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Black, and innocent, and your bedroom is a battleground in the so-called "War-on-Crime" in one of America's poorest cities. After all, the police who raided Aiyana's home were on the hunt for a murder suspect wanted for the shooting of a 17-year-oldDetroit boy.

In this business-as-usual state of extreme police militarism, dangerous Black suspects are somehow more dangerous than other dangerous suspects. And innocent Black citizens are somehow less innocent than other innocent citizens. Never mind the yet-to-be confirmed details of the incident report that the police were at the wrong apartment in a multi-family building. Never mind that no one in Aiyana's household has been conclusively linked with the wanted suspect, because when the War-on-Crime in America becomes a war on the Black and Brown urban poor, it's a war on you. What does it care that you're only seven?


Read more: @Essence

Rand Paul and Segregation

By: Blair LM Kelley

It seems as though Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Kentucky, son of Texas congressman Ron Paul, and self-proclaimed representative of the Tea Party movement, has some serious difficulty explaining his approach to questions of race and civil rights. During an appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Paul started by saying that he liked civil rights and opposed discrimination; he even claimed he would have marched with Martin Luther King had he been old enough. However, he suggested that he would seek to end the parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required privately-owned businesses that served the public to desegregate. Just as Paul was misrepresenting his ability to join the 1963 March on Washington (he was born in 1963), he was also attempting the impossible feat of appropriating King’s legacy while arguing for dismantling one of the movement’s most substantive victories.

When pushed by Maddow to explain comments he had made to The Louisville Courier-Journal , Paul argued that the parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that require private businesses serving the general public to serve all customers without regards to their race, gender, religion, or national origin need further “discussion.” He insisted that he agreed with the parts of the Act that required publicly owned facilities like public transportation to serve everyone regardless of race, but that private businesses should have been exempt. He asserted that the government shouldn’t “want to harbor in on private businesses and their policies” and that by forcing businesses to integrate, the Civil Rights Act was deciding “that restaurants are publicly owned rather than privately owned.” According to Paul, the historic battle to be served at lunch counters at Woolworth’s or Kress stores, or to use the public restrooms or water fountains in those stores was, in fact, an intrusion. For Paul, the desegregation of these businesses was a kind of “government takeover” that infringed on the First Amendment rights of segregationist business owners to say “abhorrent things.”

Paul’s comments echo with the arguments made to advocate for segregation in his state before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1891 it was State Senator Tipton Miller from rural Calloway County, Kentucky, who proposed a new law requiring railroads “to furnish separate coaches or cars for the travel or transportation of the white and colored passengers.” It detailed an efficient and cost effective means for privately owned railroad lines to divide passengers that left blacks jammed behind uncomfortable partitions marked with “appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which it is set apart.” Segregation was favored by businesses in Kentucky and the new law was a way to codify the preferences of white passengers throughout the state.

In response, a group of black educators, ministers, and businesspeople from Kentucky organized the Anti-Separate Coach movement. They attempted to halt the passage of the separate coach law, organizing mass meetings, drawing up protest documents, and presenting petitions to the governor and the state legislators. They called their campaign “moral warfare” and insisted that they deserved “true and just recognition” in every part of their society. Their battle continued even after the law was passed, and they organized a test case to challenge the new law. However, the Federal court upheld Kentucky’s segregation law as constitutional, arguing that integration would make African Americans “the special favorite of the laws.”

Based on the idea that businesses should have a right to chose whom they would serve, within the next two decades there would be no places for black travelers to ride without unjust treatment, no places where they could eat while traveling, and no hotels where they could stay overnight. The first law that offered substantive relief to millions of black southerners was the hard fought for 1964 Civil Rights Act, which defined public accommodations as hotels, stores, gas stations, and restaurants that serve the general public. Paul’s argument that he is “for civil rights” yet against this “intrusion” in private business, strikes at the heart of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and attacks the legacy of protest in his state and our nation.

This article is crossposted at Salon.com.

Blair L. M. Kelley is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Kem Releases Single "Why Would You Stay", from Intimacy

For all you folk that like great and soulful music, you will love this new song by Kem. His latest song "Why Would You Stay?" is truly moving and intimate, as Kem tells us in his promo video, Intimacy is what separates the "boys" from the "men". His song truly does some separating, I have been listening to Kem for quite some time (thanks to my mom), he is now one of my favorite musician/singer, truly engaging with his music bringing nothing but the greatest sounds. If one is to judge from his new song we can only expect the new CD to be amazing. For the TRUE Kem lovers, the new CD is expected to drop in July. You can purchase the song on Amazon or iTunes for .99 cents, you can't beat that.

Check out CD promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5UveeASpmo

Check out new song: http://www.singersroom.com/music/Kem/Why-Would-You-Stay/2312

Yes We Did

"Yes We Did," and of course, "This is a big fucking deal" at least in the words of Vice President Biden. Those are the phrases that are going through my head right now. After almost a year of debating on whether or not to pass the health care reform (HCR) bill, after all the childish and stall tactics by the Republicans--it passed. At this moment, I am reminded of why I voted for Obama, I had faith and still have faith, I believed that he would move this country forward, despite all the challenges, he is. These are the moments when citizens of the United States should say, thank you, President Barack Obama! Obama is focused, his eyes are set on a goal, and he will let nothing get in the way--regardless of the disrespect from the Republican party, he is resilient.

In addition, we cannot forget the honorable, most distinguished, Nancy Pelosi, who worked furiously to make sure this bill passed. More importantly, she didn't allow the Republican party to get under her skin; she is truly the speaker of the house! As fellow friend, Dr. Soyini Madison said, " being a woman is no longer a precondition," Pelosi deserves the utmost respect. For without her constant push of speaking and negotiating with congressmen/women, this historic bill wouldn't have passed. Pelosi, thank you for your hard-work and dedication!

As an asthmatic, thus, having a precondition--without this healthcare bill, I would be otherwise disadvantaged and turned away. This was not only important to me, but to other members of family and network of friends. The African American communities are filled with illnesses that are considered "preconditions," and most are uninsured. This bill will benefit all of them and the families who are struggling to pay hospital bills. Despite the polls, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do, and I am very proud.

This is the first step, I do hope that the administration follow through with the fixes. I believe that the public option should be a part of the health care bill, for some it would be very beneficial. As an African American male, pro-feminist, pro-choice; I believe that women, all women, should have the right to safely terminate unwanted pregnancies. It is my sincere hope that the American people would see the benefits of this historic and amazing bill.

In the words of VP Biden, "THIS IS A BIG F***ING DEAL!!"