payment page
Leafy Crawford—Janie’s birth mother—is a minor character with a tremendous influence on the story. Born just before the end of the Civil War, Leafy is a product of the turmoil that she was raised in: a socially and culturally volatile climate where Black people had only just won the right to freedom. Fatherless, as her mother was raped by her slave-master, Leafy was a passionate girl forced to exist in the confines of society. She, like her mother before her, was doomed to deny herself in the interest of serving others, maintaining the status quo, and not incurring the very real and present dangers that loomed always around her. For all the ways that her mother tried to instill a caution and prudence to protect her, Leafy still longed for the most basic rights of human existence: a chance to make her own way, to be seen as a woman, and to give and receive love.
Hurston includes Leafy as a character to establish one of the novel's most central and devastating themes: generational trauma. Leafy’s mother—Nanny—had remained unmarried, choosing instead to take work with a white family who afforded her kindness and offered her resources and education for her daughter. It was Nanny’s greatest fear that her daughter would be harmed as she had been, and she did everything she could to ensure that wouldn’t happen. Despite all the precautions, Leafy was raped by her schoolteacher when she was only a teenager. This event altered her forever, as it resulted in Janie’s conception and sent Leafy into alcoholism. Leafy began staying out to escape the pain of what she endured. In the novel, the inclusion of Leafy’s tragic story emphasizes on of Hurston’s main ideas. To be a woman, especially a Black woman, means you might have to endure the death of your dreams.
