ity Paperback Club and received critical praise.
In the novel, the author constructs a story with
eight narrators, including a teacher, who reflect
and comment on the murder of a popular high
school student.
Tervalon followed his impressive debut with
Living for the City (1998), a book that was again set
in South Los Angeles, containing numerous inter-
linked stories about black teens confronting gang-
infested and oppressive neighborhoods. The author
continued to win readers and accolades for his nov-
els Dead Above Ground (2000) and All the Trouble
You Need (2002). In 2001, he received the PEN Oak-
land/Josephine Miles National Literacy Award for
Excellence in Multicultural Literature, and in 2005,
he coedited with Gary Phillips an anthology of orig-
inal short stories titled The Cocaine Chronicles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Powells.com. Understand This. Available online. http://
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780385478243-1.
Accessed May 11, 2007.
Melvin Donalson
testifying
As African Americans have been witnesses to the
best and worst of American culture, “testifying”
has come to have a variety of meanings and func-
tions in the African-American experience and folk
life. Spiritually speaking, testifying to the personal
revelation of God in one’s daily life is a consistent
feature of African-American religion. Whether
in work songs or the highly religious dance cer-
emonies called ring shouts—which trace their
origin back to the early 19th century—African
Americans’ testimony to the day-to-day presence
of God in their lives usually occurred in a com-
munal environment. Within these environments,
the culturally centered communicative form of call
and response was critical to the process of testify-
ing. In early African-American history, the auto-
biography, a form of historical testifying, served
to inform humanity of the brutal nature of slav-
ery in America. FREDERICK DOUGLASS’s NARRATIVE
OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN
SL AV E, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF (1845) and My Bondage
and My Freedom (1855) are among many classic
narratives in this tradition that assisted in ending
American slavery. Yet freedom as well as slavery
provides a dominant theme in African-American
testimony. In a political sense, African-American
testifying offered a means of securing freedom by
helping Union soldiers determine the loyalties of
whites in border states such as Kentucky, Mary-
land, and Missouri during the Civil War. In the
mid- to late 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project, a
program under the Works Progress Administra-
tion (WPA), collected a large body of oral histories
of formerly enslaved African Americans and their
families in the American South. Historical, politi-
cal, or spiritual testifying is always an active pro-
cess in African-American culture and tradition.
Malachai CrawfordTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, ZORA NEALE HUR-
STON’s most beloved book, stages the spiritual
and artistic coming of age of an African-Ameri-
can woman griot. A classic “speakerly” text with
its free and indirect African-American rhetorical
strategies, this novel features signifying, woofing
(lying/joking and making excuses), front porch
storytelling, baiting, boasting, and lying. Janie, the
protagonist, the child of a raped mother is raised
by her ex-slave grandmother, who prematurely
marries her off to Logan Killicks, a crude older
man with 60 acres and a mule. Failing to find love,
Janie remembers the magnificent and prophetic
pear tree vision of higher sexual and spiritual ful-
fillment and soon leaves Killicks for Joe Starks. An
ambitious black man, Starks is determined to be-
come “the big voice” in his own black township.
It appears that Janie has escaped being Killicks’s
“mule of the world” only to become Mayor
Starks’s silenced and socially isolated trophy wife.
As love flees this marriage bed, Janie discovers her
own signifying voice, an event that sends Joe into
a shocked physical decline at the assault on his
male ego. When he dies two years later, Janie isTheir Eyes Were Watching God 489