Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood

Mark Anthony Neal

Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International,

Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012, pp. 256-263 (Article)
Published by State University of New York Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pal/summary/v001/1.2.neal.html

Access provided by Duke University Libraries (16 Oct 2013 19:55 GMT)

Finding Tea Cake

An Imagined Black Feminist Manhood

Mark Anthony Neal

I have long recognized that my desire to embrace progressive gender politics is, in part, the product of my professional status as a university professor
and the social status afforded that position. The primary advantage is not
necessarily financialthe social rewards of being a professor far outweigh the
economic, especially for those colleagues who teach in the humanities and
are employed at public institutionsbut rather to be found in the flexibility
of our schedules. Since I became a parent thirteen years ago, Ive been able to
attend parent-teacher conferences, serve as a volunteer classroom parent, and
do regular pickup and carpool duty for my two daughters, always aware that
I was one of the few fathers who did so on a regular basis. Comfortable in my
role as a pro-feminist dad, it has often been all too easy to believe the press
clippings and Google searches about how engaged black men are with their
children; even the First (Black) Father has found reasons to opine about this
so-called crisis.
True, my hands-on style of parenting is in sharp contrast to that of my
father, who as a short-order cook, worked twelve hours a day, six days a week.
As a working-class black man, raised poor in the Deep South, who never
learned how to read or write, attending school events and participating in
teachers conferences were a luxury that he couldnt afford. By many standards, it would have been easy to suggest that my father was disengaged, yet
there were late night walks on the weekends to the bodega down the block,
Sunday morning breakfasts where he taught me how to cook, Sunday afternoons of baseball and jazz, and Sunday evenings of Bonanza and McCloud.
My father simply parented to expectationsthose of my mother and a society

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that expected little more of him than being a provider and an example of the
value of hard work. I have no doubt that if my father had been expected to
do moreto perhaps become my primary caregiverhe would have done so
without much fuss.
Even as I am the product of working-class black communities, it is sometimes easy to forget the rhythms of that life; worldviews that often cut against
more bourgeois notions of time and work, that are grounded in survival and
what Ive called social improvisation.1 Such was the case a few years ago as I
stopped at a traffic light in Durham, North Carolina, early one afternoon and
spotted a group of young black men standing in front of a local food truckthe
smell of hot grease filling the air. Though I too was not workingheading
home for a quick sandwich before picking up my daughter from schoolmy
immediate thought was to wonder why these guys were not at work. As
someone who makes a living challenging stereotypical notions of black masculinity, I felt a bit ashamed, remembering another encounter with young black
men at a restaurant, where I was shocked when those men clasped their hands
and prayed before biting into their sandwiches. That incident had a particular
impact on me, reminding me of the extent our understandings of black men
and boys are scripted and made legible in the United States within the context
of the lowest expectations.
As such, I began to reimagine those three black men, now walking away
from the food truck with their fried chicken and fish sandwiches. What if
one of them was a noncustodial parent, who worked a midnight-to-eight in
the morning night shift? What if, despite the fact that the relationship with
his childrens mother didnt work out, they maintained a working parenting
partnership in which he regularly picked up his children from school and sat
with them while they did homework before their mother returned home from
her nine-to-five job? What if said man regularly asked his boys to accompany
him to the food truck, offering to buy them lunch, while also sharing information on how he was making the parenting thing work with his babymama?
And even as I understood that this was a possibility for many working-class
black men, I also intuitively understood how invisible such men are in the
larger society. Indeed I was hard-pressed to even think of a figure in black
popular culture that exemplified those mencaring, nurturing, working-class,
thoughtful, and perhaps even pro-feminist; and then I thought of Tea Cake.
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 Hurstons classic novel Their Eyes Were
Watching God. Readers identify with Tea Cake, in part, because he was an
everyday manwilling to put in a hard days 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

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258Palimpsest
men who struggle in contemporary black Americamen that are often
(mis)represented in the popular media as menacing, thoughtless, and lazy.
Idlike to argue, though, that there was much more to Tea Cakethat 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,2 the late literary scholar Rudolph Byrd (with Beverly Guy-Sheftall),
identifies High John de Conqueror, a black folklore hero, as a model for black
masculinity. Byrd believed High John de Conqueroralso known as Jack or
as Brer Rabbit in other contextswas the figure in whom exists the various
elements that in their totality may serve as a new mode of Black masculinity,
and as an alternative to normative models of masculinity. Byrd was particularly
drawn to Zora Neale Hurstons conceptualization of High John De Conquer,
originally published in a 1943 essay and collected in the book The Sanctified
Church. 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.3 As Hurston describes him in her
essay 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.4 High John was a mythical figure, as Hurston surmises of
whom there is no established picture of what sort of looking-man this High
John de Conquer waswho done teached the black folks so they knowed a
hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming.5
Hurstons tethering of High John de Conqueror to notions of black freedom,
suggest that the progressive aspects of his performance of masculinity was
deeply integral to her vision of the black liberation project. As such, Byrd
proposed to read Hurstons High John de Conqueror as a meditation on
Black masculinity . . . from which we may construct a new mode of Black
masculinity, one which conjures the many interesting possibilities of Black
men, and one which some of us may wish to embrace in this vibrant period of
a marked interrogation of masculinities.6 The importance of a figure such as
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.7 Indeed Byrds highlighting of the
improvisational aspects of High John de Conquerors performance of black
masculinity signals the valuable role that theory might play in such a reevaluation of black masculinity, with Byrd privileging the everyday theory found
in black folklore.

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Byrds use of folklore to highlight the contemporary crisis of black masculinity, arguing that 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.8 Byrd suggests
as much when he describes emasculating forms of masculinity as the new
tar baby to which we have been stuck for far too long.9 Ironically, such a
figure might already exist in Hurstons own canon in the figure of Tea Cake,
a twentysomething, working-class, happy-go-lucky black man, whose literary
presence takes into account the realities of working-class life for many black
men. Indeed the anthropological research that Hurston eventually publishes
on High John de Conqueror might have informed her creation of Tea Cake
years before, highlighting Hurstons own ability to bridge the theoretical with
the everyday, in the same spirit in which Byrd himself later recovers Hurstons
work on black masculinity.
In Hurstons novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, 10 the central character
Janie meets Tea Cake after the death of her second husband Jody Starks, a
local businessman in Eatonville, Florida, who left her with a relative fortune
for a black woman in the early twentieth century. Tea Cake literally drifts into
Janies 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 forties and
Tea Cake is in his mid-twenties. Janie and Teacakes love affair becomes a
town controversy, less because of their age difference and more so because of
Tea Cakes stature, or rather, lack of social standing. Most of Janies friends
and acquaintances dismiss Tea Cake as little more than a hustler-playboy,
out to seduce Janie and squander the small fortune that Jody left behind for
her. As one of the town residents opines, Dat long-legged Tea cake aint got
doodley squat. But Janie sees beyond Tea Cakes 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 Cakes ability to be
attentivenot simply in the way that one is attentive to someone that they are
attracted tobut attentive to the womanist reality that is Janies life. We see
this dynamic at play in the scene when Janie wakes from a nap as Tea Cake
combs her hair and she asks, Whut good do combin mah hair do you?. Tea
Cake responds Its mine too . . . it feels jus lak underneath uh doves wing
next to mah face (103). Tea Cakes response here is less about a masculinist
notion of ownership than a simple acknowledgment of Janies value to him as
a partner.
Tea Cakes desire to touch Janies hair is in stark contrast to Janies second
husband, Jody Starks, who valued his wife for the social currency of her Eurocentric beauty and how that beautyand his domination over itbolstered
his black middle-class respectability. This preference on Starkss part has a

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260Palimpsest
particular impact on Janies performance of gender throughout the novel. In
her book Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle
Class, Lisa B. Thompson notes that the performance of middle-class black
womanhood is tied to impossible standards of respectability.11 Despite Janies
higher quality of life with Starksrelatively few African American women had
the luxury of not working in the early twentieth centuryshe was constrained
and limited by the gender conventions of the day. As Thompson describes
it, this performance relies heavily upon aggressive shielding of the body;
concealing sexuality; and foregrounding morality, intelligence, and civility
as a way to counter negative stereotypes.12 According to Thompson, such
performances also signal racial loyalty while simultaneously highlighting class
status.13
As many critics have rightly observed, Tea Cake holds very traditional
ideas about gender. His occasional bouts of domestic violence are particularly
troubling, even in the context of what Hurston might have viewedand
certainly presented in the textas normal gender behavior. Yet Tea Cakes
views are also fluid and malleable. Tea Cake engages Janie in activities that
many deemed male pursuits, such as hunting, fishing, and playing checkers
on the porch, seemingly unaware of the black male privilege that he risks by
allowing her access into male-defined spaces. It was during their first meeting
that Tea Cake sat with Janie across the checkerboard as she quipped, De men
folks treasures de game round heah. Ah just aint never learnt how (95). Tea
Cakes desire to take Janie hunting with him represents his own ambivalences
about the rigid gender roles of the era. As Hurston writes, Janie got to be a
better shot than Tea Cake. Theyd go out any late afternoon and come back
loaded down with game, highlighting how the couple shared some of the
domestic labor (131).
It is perhaps easy to read Tea Cakes willingness to grant Janie access to
masculine spaces as a gesture toward the realization of feminist possibilities for black women in the postWorld War I period. Tea Cakes desire to
cultivate meaningful intimate public and private spaces that he and Janie can
sharethis is ultimately what the hunting and fishing trips are aboutis often
undermined by his natural instinct (a product of the era that produced him)
to protect Janie. The level of Tea Cakes commitment to perform a traditional
black masculinity seems tethered to his financial stability; when he is working
the fields and making money gambling and hosting parties at the jook, he
presses Janie to stay at home and rest. Ironically when the couple struggles
financially, Tea Cake seems more willing to engage in nontraditional masculine
performances, or more importantly, more willing to allow Janie a freedom from
more traditional and respectable performances of black femininity. It is this
gender fluidity within the couples partnership, particularly when coupled with
Tea Cakes lower social status, which contributes to the attitude of those who

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look askance at Janie and Tea Cakes relationship. In this context, Tea Cake
reads as progressive in opposition to traditional gender politics within black
communities and institutions and the larger society during the era.
In her essay, Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Howard University Professor Jennifer Jordan writes, Ultimately, Janies quest for excitement and pleasure in the Florida Everglades
does not lead to an independent, self-fulfilled womanhood. She never learns to
shape her destiny by making her own choices . . . she is dependent upon [Tea
Cake] for those things she cravesadventure, play, and erotic love.14 Readers
never get the opportunity to find out how Janie and Tea Cakes relationship
might develop as Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog late in the novel (as he
tries to save Janie from drowning) and is well on his way to dying from the
affliction when Janie shoots him in an act of self-defense. The rabid dog
becomes a useful metaphor for the challenges of realizing a progressive black
manhood, especially in regards to the realities of antiblack racism, poverty,
and white supremacy. But, as Jordan argues, Tea Cakes death allows Janie
to hold on to her paradise and to dream of a perfect love. She can choose to
remember the passion and the good times rather than sickness, death, the
return of racism.15 In this regard, Tea Cake exists as a literal fantasy of the
possibilitiesunrealized in Hurstons novelof a black feminist manhood.
As a folk hero, Tea Cake was a product of Hurstons imagination (and the
communities that produced her) and ultimately shaped by the gender dynamics
of the era that produced Their Eyes Were Watching God. In her book Aint I a
Feminist: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness
and Freedom, Aaronette White notes how masculinity rests on assumptions and
practices of powerparticularly the patriarchal power of menthat interact with
other systems.16 Hurstons construction of Tea Cake suggests that she believed
that without access to the privilege afforded whiteness and lacking the class
privilege of middle-class black men, working-class black men might develop a
more flexible, even softer, gender politics, countering later perceptions of middleclass and educated men as most responsive to issues of gender equality. At the
time that Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, there was simply no
language or discourse to describe and/or conceptualize the potential of a black
feminist manhood in the social and political world that Hurston and many
black writers inhabited. Indeed, Hurston, who died in 1960, might not have
been able to imagine the generations of black feminists (Womanists) who came
after her such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and the women who comprised
the Combahee River Collective. Certainly she could have never imagined black
male feminists such as Gary L. Lemons, Kevin Powell, David Ikard, Michael
Awkward, Byron Hurt, Quentin Walcott, and Eric Darnell Pritchard.
Hurstons gestures toward a progressive black gender politics, in concert
with the lack of available language for her to fully represent a black feminist

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262Palimpsest
manhood, makes the character of Tea Cake a useful model to dare to imagine
or dream what that black feminist manhood might look like today. Critical
to having Tea Cake serve this role is understanding that his allusions to a
black feminist manhood were unnamed and unspokenthere was no black
feminist discourse (in the way that weve recognized that discourse since the
late 1960s) that Tea Cake or Hurston could lay claim. Thus, Tea Cakes black
feminist manhood is organic and implicit, not unlike the everyday black feminist behavior that Aaronette White examines in the edited collection, African
Americans Doing Feminism: Putting Theory into Everyday Practice. A professor
of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, White writes in the
books introduction about a feminism that is practical and recognizes that
there is an imbalance of power between men and women in our society and
acts publicly and privately in ways to correct that imbalance. As White further
queries, How can we make feminism work in our lives?17
Tea Cake would have never called himself a feminist, but he embodied the
possibilities of a black feminist manhood, one that time and maturity might
have allowed him to fully embrace. Tea Cake clearly didnt look the part. But,
how many Tea Cakes, so to speak, are walking the streets of our communities
today (who would never think to call themselves feminist and might not even
know how the word has meaning to their own lives as parents, partners, and
community members) that gesture toward a black feminist manhood? In her
own research of black feminist masculinities, White is aware that our critical
rubrics challenge our recognition of where feminist values might exist in our
communities, as she notes the impact of feminism on highly educated black
men: [T]he university context exposes men to feminist courses, feminist
friendships, and feminist mentoring in ways that other contexts do not. She
adds that it is important to engage feminist education at an earlier point in the
social development of black men.18
Whites observations are critical because they index the gap between feminist practice and the public naming of that practice. For many feminist men, it
is necessary to act both privately and publicly to resist sexism and other forms
of oppression. Public acts of resistance challenge an unwritten commandment
of systematic justice.19 Yet such a public embrace of feminist politics by black
feminist menhowever invaluable such responses are in challenging discourses
of sexism and misogynymight be a detriment to those men being able to
reach everyday black men or those men who might resist some of the implications of publicly claiming feminist politics. As White suggests, it is often
within the context of public activism against sexual and physical violence and
abuse against women that black feminist men can most comfortably embrace
feminist politics; yet a true flourishing of feminist politics is what is needed
to transform black communities. The challenge for black feminist men is to
be able to reach the Tea Cakes of the worldthe proverbial corner boysby

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affirming behaviors that embody feminist principles without having to publicly

name them, for as Patricia Hill Collins asks rhetorically, Does it really matter
what [black male feminists] call themselves?20
Notes
1. Mark Anthony Neal, . . . A Way Out of No Way: Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Black
Social Improvisation, in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and
Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
2. Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Traps: African-American Men on Gender
and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Zora Neal Hurston, The Sanctified Church (New York: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981), 70. Hurston used High John the Conquer, while Byrd employs the
commonly used name High John the Conqueror. Both will appear in this essay.
5. Ibid., 70.
6. Byrd and Guy-Sheftall, 4.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Ibid., 20.
10. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperPerennial,
1998). All citations are from this edition of the novel.
11. Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American
Middle Class (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 3.
12. Ibid., 2.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Jennifer Jordan, Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were
Watching God, Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 7 (1988): 111.
15. Ibid., 110.
16. Aaronette M. White, Aint I a Feminist? African American Men Speak Out of Fatherhood. Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2008), xiv; Whites emphasis.
17. Aaronette White, Introduction, in African Americans Doing Feminism: Putting
Theory into Everyday Practice, ed. Aaronette M. White (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2010), 1.
18. White, Aint I a Feminist?, 200.
19. Ibid., 175.
20. Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and
Feminsm (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 124.

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