Introduction : Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the "Ancient power" of black women / Marjorie Pryse -- Adding color and contour to early American self-portraitures : autobiographical writings of Afro-American women / Frances Smith Foster -- Green-eyed monsters of the slavocracy : jealous mistresses in two slave narratives / Minrose C. Gwin -- Pauline Hopkins : our literary foremother / Claudia Tate -- Out of the woods and into the world : a study of interracial friendships between women in American novels / Elizabeth Schultz -- The neglected dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset / Deborah E. McDowell -- Ann Petry's demythologizing of American culture and Afro-American character / Bernard W. Bell -- "Pattern against the sky" : deism and motherhood in Ann Petry's The street / Marjorie Pryse -- Jubilee : the Black woman's celebration of human community / Minrose C. Gwin -- Chosen place, timeless people : some figurations on the new world / Hortense J. Spillers -- Lady no longer sings the blues : rape, madness, and silence in The bluest eye / Madonne M. Miner.

Recitation to the Griot : storytelling and learning in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon / Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr. -- The wise witches : Black women mentors in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler / Thelma J. Shinn -- "What it is I think she's doing anyhow" : a reading of Toni Cade Bambara's The salt eaters / Gloria T. Hull -- Trajectories of self-definition : placing contemporary Afro-American women's fiction / Barbara Christian -- Afterword : Cross-currents, discontinuities : Black women's fiction / Hortense J. Spillers.