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Contrasting Swinburne’s carefree misotheistic candor, Zora Neal Hurston remained cryptic about her conflicted relationship with God. Partly because she was black and female, readers tend to overlook indications of misotheism, even when they seem plain. Few, if any, critics have taken the words “all gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason” in Their Eyes Were Watching God as potentially targeting Yahweh as well as any other gods. Instead, critics have either ignored such passages in her work or tried to explain them away. This chapter offers fresh readings of Hurston’s acclaimed works, and it draws on private writings, letters, and memoirs to fill in the picture of Hurston’s latent misotheism. Finally, the author reveals a surprising web of concealed references to writers ranging from Epicurus to Proudhon and Nietzsche, to bolster his claim that Hurston was indeed as hostile to God as the thinkers who influenced her.

Centering the life and times of Zora Neal Hurston and the music of Lauryn Hill, this chapter begins to develop the Black Map. The chapter questions the currency of existing map, revealing the consequences of the white logics and practices upon which our maps are based. Also questioning the assumptions within the Great Migration narrative, this chapter offers the idea of a “long migration” to better characterize the constant movement by black people in their quest for freedom. The authors illustrate the radical potential of imagining and creating maps that better reflect the lives and experiences of people of color.

This chapter traces the impact “race motherhood” had on community definitions of success, using as references Quicksand (1928) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Race motherhood held that black women best contribute to racial uplift by supporting men. Though questioning race motherhood made black women vulnerable to harsh criticism and possible ostracism, black women authors of the 1920s and 1930s suggest that this ideology emerged to coerce them into advancing a black male-centered agenda. Larsen’s and Hurston’s protagonists prioritize achieving what they define as success and a sense of belonging. In the process, they expose the harm caused by race motherhood, an ideology that many in the community embraced despite its tendency to disregard black women’s right to pleasure, not simply survival and service. [123 of 125 words]