black women have painfully faced throughout
their lives: straightening their hair to rid them-
selves of the coarse (nappy) hair associated with
basic African-American identity, to approximate
the more culturally acceptable silken hair validated
by Western aesthetics. For many years, fair-com-
plexioned Venus (and those around her) had been
rather proud of her straight hair, the symbol, as it
is for Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937), of her beauty and
female identity.
To maintain this more acceptable appearance,
Venus had spent years and thousands of dollars
shackled to her beautician’s chair having her hair
chemically treated:
This was my ball and chain, aka my hair and
about 360 relaxers. What was the sense of
going through the ritual, the wash, the condi-
tioner, and combing it out ever so gently so as
not to raise the grain? I counted back to the
age of four, the tender age of my introduction
to the lye. Averaging out to fifty bucks a pop,
it could’ve been a nice little padding for my
retirement fund, to the sum of eighteen thou-
sand dollars, not including interest” (7)Much to the displeasure of all around her, Venus
cuts her hair and wears it in a short, curly afro.
On the other hand, Nappily Ever After is about
Venus’s relationship with her live-in noncommit-
tal boyfriend, Clint, a doctor with whom she has
spent three years without being married. To lib-
erate herself and achieve the freedom needed for
true rebirth and self-empowerment, Venus has to
let Clint go, and she does. Thomas followed her
debut novel with a sequel, Would I Lie to You: A
Novel (2004), in which readers find a more ma-
ture Venus Johnston, living and working in Wash-
ington, D.C., as the director of a marketing firm
and also in Los Angeles, where she becomes part
of the business world of hip-hop fashion and
culture.
Wilfred D. SamuelsThurman, Wallace (1902–1934)
During the Harlem Renaissance Wallace Thur-
man had an impressive influence on such contem-
poraries as Langston Hughes, Dorothy West,
and Bruce Nugent. His influence has lasted, at
least indirectly, and is evidenced in the works of
James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Marlon Riggs,
and E. Lynn Harris. In his brief life, Thurman
experimented with many genres in hopes of find-
ing a niche that would propel him to be a great
American writer. Thurman’s nine-year hegira in
Harlem was preceded by a middle-class, provin-
cial life that began with his birth in Salt Lake City,
Utah, on August 6, 1902, where his parents (Oscar
and Beulah Thurman) and grandparents, Western
pioneers, had settled. His grandparents, after his
parents’ marriage ended early, raised Thurman; he
describes in a 1929 letter his poignant first meeting
with his father. The family’s gypsy-like existence,
which took them from Boise, Idaho, to Chicago,
Illinois, to Omaha, Nebraska, and back to Salt Lake
City, resulted in Thurman’s attending school in a
succession of midwestern cities while continually
combating illnesses. In Salt Lake City, Thurman
not only managed to complete high school, in
1918, but also he spent two years as a pre-medical
student at the University of Utah.
During the next three years, 1922–25, Thurman
decided to dedicate his life to writing. He moved to
Los Angeles, worked as a postal clerk, and, simulta-
neously studied for two years at the University of
Southern California. Through coincidence, Thur-
man and Arna Bontemps, another renaissance
literary artist, worked for several months as night
clerks for the same post office. In Los Angeles,
Thurman published and edited his own magazine,
Outlet, which grew out of his unsuccessful efforts
to establish a West Coast–based “New Negro”
movement. In addition, Thurman also wrote a
column titled “Inklings” for a black Los Angeles
newspaper. Thurman traveled to Harlem in 1925,
during the heightened black literary activity and,
as he told a friend, began “to live.”
In Harlem, the Thurman best known to schol-
ars began to emerge. He worked as a reporter and496 Thurman, Wallace