Cora's Kitchen

This engaging story has quite a bit of potential as a book club choice. It’s relatively short and a quick read with a story that keeps moving right along. It also provides lots of topics for discussion, race relations, the status of women, and how to realize a dream.
The tensions in Cora’s life will be familiar to lots of readers. She’s a working woman who procured a place working in a library to escape the kind of work that so many black women of her generation (the year is 1928) found available – cooks, house cleaners, and other types of domestics. Even so, she still has the responsibilities of maintaining her household and caring for her two children.
Her husband, a musician, works every night at the club, but doesn’t consider himself responsible for any of the work with a home or the children. He is not cruel or abusive, but she is still not sure if he would in any way be supportive of her dreams to be a writer.
Through her library job, she has met the prominent poet and writer Langston Hughes, and much of the book consists of the correspondence between them as well as Cora’s personal journal entries. She confesses to him her desire to be a writer, and he provides encouragement and advice. One surprising thing about that this story is that while Hughes is in touch with what it means to be a black American, he is not always as perceptive about what it means to be a woman, and here is where I think the real discussions will spring from this book.
How much do women of different races share because they’re women, and how much are their circumstances different? When Cora is offered a patronage by a wealthy white woman, she comes across all of these questions and more as she works to find the story she wants to tell.
Thank you to Netgalley which provided me a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

Plot: 4/5 Characters: 5/5 Writing: 4.5/5 Enjoyment: 5/5

In 1928, Harlem librarian Cora James writes a letter to Langston Hughes whose poetry has inspired her. In ongoing correspondence, he supports her confessed desire to write and offers advice and commentary on her writing attempts.

There are more story elements including a surprising friendship with a white woman and a dangerous encounter, but for me the real story is about Cora’s awakening to the concept of having her own dreams and desires — beyond the expectations of being a wife and mother, a Black woman, and a good Christian. I absolutely loved and was startled by her own recognition of the limitations placed on her by societal and familial norms that she hadn’t even been aware of herself.

As part of the story she reads literature — Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, W.E.B Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Miss Esale Fauset’s There is Confusion, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand — and each informs her developing desire to express more than she knew she had in her to express. It is thoughtful, inspiring, and fascinating. Her reactions to works of literature are individual. She doesn’t like Amos and Andy or the characters in a prize winning Zora Neale Hurston story because she feels they make colored people look like fools. And she doesn’t want to write the standard colored woman story — growing up poor and oppressed in the South etc. She says, “We have been through so much as a people, but we have endured. I guess that’s why I think racism and oppression shouldn’t be our only focus. There are other stories to tell.” And in the end, when forced to choose, she makes what I found to be a surprising (and I was surprised that I was surprised by this) choice to identify more with the womanhood of her characters, rather than their Blackness). She explains it much better than I can, so I’ll let you read the story.

I loved this book and read it in a single sitting (Ok — I was on a long plane flight BUT I had plenty of other books available on the kindle!).

Just a couple of quotes to let you see how Cora’s mind works:
“But most books written by colored authors are about race one way or another. And though I know it’s important to talk about, I’m tired of that being the focus all the time. There are other things in life that are just as important. Dreams. Desires. But maybe that’s too much to ask of a book.”

“But I wish Miss Larsen spent more time exploring Helga Crane’s desire for individuality and beauty, rather than her struggle as a mulatto woman trying to figure out where she belongs. Then maybe the novel would have spoken more to the workings of a colored woman’s mind.”

What a book! So much to say about it, but don't really have the words. Not only was I interested in the exploration between black and white women, and their relationships with each other and their families, I was also inspired by the suggestions Langston Hughes gave for writing. It has made me want to pick up a pen and write! I highly recommend this book for all.