________________
though the title has a 'woman' in it the protagonist is a Black man named Uncle Julius, who entertains a white couple from North with his horror stories, and the funny part is that the evil is essentially a Black woman.
Authors like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright have described in detail the invisibility of Black man in White America and have assumed that they have expressed all the ailments of their community. They have vehemently refused to acknowledge the existence of sexism in the lives of the Black women. Their target audience was White, and so there was no need for them to please the Black women. Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes Anna Julia Cooper who writes:
One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black WomanH. The "other side" has not been represented by one who "lives there". And not many can more sensibly tell the weight and fret of the "long dull pain" than the open-eyed but hitherto voiceless Black Women of America (Gates 01).
The era in which most of the Black Protest literature was produced was the beginning of the Black Aesthetics movement. It coincided with the Black Power Movement which tried to establish the identity of the Black men as powerful men in contrast to their image of powerless non-entities. This movement tried to not only established the Black men in the White world but also mark the supremacy of the Black men over the Black women.
It was only the coming of Black women writers that gave the true picture of their unsung sisters. Women writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Toni Cade Bambara have beautifully brought out the pain, the struggle and the triumphs of Black women in America. It was not only sexism that they portrayed in their works but also the racism suffered by them.
Black women writers are the most prolific group of writers in today's literary world. Zora Neale Hurston was a name not known till lately because there was no effort to fid out whether there were any Black women writers. It was Alice Walker who brought Zora out of oblivion. Zora's work titled Their Eyes were Watching God (1937) deals with the story of a woman called Janie who refuses to comply with the role decided for her by the Patriarchy. Janie decides her own fate and is ready to bear the consequences. She knew that her marriage was not working out and so she dreamt of some other unseen man:
She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find
393