Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

(8.) "Like the God of the Old Testament," Awkward argues, "Starks ... virtually wills light into existence with the power of his voice" (34).

(9.) Critics disagree about what this strategic scene achieves. For example, Gates argues that on this occasion Janie "rhetorically" murders Joe Starks ("Blackness" 290), and he also suggests that "the gaining of her own voice is a sign of her authority, but not a sign of a newly found unified identity" ("Speakerly" 187). Clarke interprets the scene as a "linguistic ... castration" that exploits the "visual" as an instrument with empowering potential (606). Wall sees Janie's confrontation as an act of "self-reclamation" ("Zora" 92).

(10.) In Psalms 137:1 the exiled Israelites, grieving for their homeland, declare that "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion," a passage that Frederick Douglass identifies with and will quote in his "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" One of the many black spirituals that draws on the Old Testament image of bondage and the belief in God as the great deliverer is "I am seekin' for a City." This spiritual declares that "a better day" is "a comin'" when the "walls of Zion" will be restored.

(11.) Earlier in the biblical narrative, Michal became a bride of David. Because David could not meet the marriage-price, the scheming Saul, hoping to see David killed and engaging in phallocentric discourse, suggested that a suitable substitute would be a "hundred foreskins of the Philistines." To Saul's surprise and disappointment, David prevailed and received Michal in marriage (1 Samuel 18: 25-30).

(12.) Wall has recognized the meaning in Vergible's name. He is "a veritable man of nature ... at ease being who and what he is" ("Tea Cake" 387). Yoked to "Woods," his name signifies the legitimate trees against which Janie measures her happiness.

(13.) This is not to suggest that Tea Cake is a flawless mate. Wall, for example, argues convincingly that Tea Cake's exemplary qualities are offset by realistic instances of sexism See Wall, qtd. in Awkward 37.

(14.) McKay describes Morrison's justification for writing Beloved as a need for a memorial to heal the wounds of slavery. Morrison's outrage at "the absence of a historical marker" that reminds the American public of the horrors of slavery legendarily prompted her to create a literary monument that would address that need. ("Introduction" 3-4). For a detailed account of the Margaret Garner case, based on Cincinnati newspaper articles, see May. Garner, an escaped slave, murdered one of her four children and apparently intended to kill them all in order to assure that they would not be returned to slavery. Morrison uses this incident as the basis of Sethe Sugg's story in Beloved. Holloway discusses Morrison's "reclamation" and mythologizing of the Margaret Garner story, and suggests that Morrison suspends time and space to document the uniqueness of black women's sense of slave history. Holloway argues that "slavery itself defies traditional historiography" (68). Harris explains the "aura of myth" inhabiting the slaves' memories of Sweet Home, and argues that "these memories ... shape the narrative structure of the novel" and "give an oral quality to the telling of the tale" (149).