In 1937, Zora Neale Hurston wrote one of the most enduring observations about Black women’s lives in American literature.
“De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”
For decades, readers have quoted the line as a memorable piece of dialogue from Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Hurston was doing something much larger than writing beautiful prose.
She was naming a structure.
Nearly ninety years later, management scholars Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam introduced the concept of the glass cliff; the documented phenomenon in which women, and particularly black women, are more likely to be placed in leadership positions during moments of institutional crisis, with fewer resources, higher expectations, and greater risk of failure than their predecessors.
Corporate America gave the phenomenon a name, Zora Neale Hurston had already described it, The Mule of the World. The mule is not simply an animal of labor, it is an animal that carries burdens assigned by others. It does not choose the load, it simply bears it.
Hurston understood that Black women had long occupied that position within American society. They were expected to absorb everyone else’s expectations, emotional labor, and institutional failures while receiving the least protection, recognition, and support.
The burden was never accidental, it was structural. No policy had to announce it. No handbook had to describe it. Everyone simply learned who would carry the weight.
Janie Crawford’s Journey
At its heart, Their Eyes Were Watching God is often described as a love story, because it is. It is also the story of a Black woman slowly removing burdens that never belonged to her. Janie Crawford spends much of her life living according to other people’s visions.
She marries according to someone else’s expectations, performs respectability according to someone else’s standards, and suppresses her voice to preserve someone else’s comfort. Again and again, she is handed responsibilities that benefit everyone except herself.
The novel’s greatest act of resistance is not romance, it is reclamation. Janie eventually decides that she will no longer live from the outside in. She chooses to pursue her own horizon rather than continue carrying everyone else’s. That decision remains revolutionary.
A Book the Literary World Almost Lost
Ironically, Hurston’s novel experienced the same treatment it documented. When Their Eyes Were Watching God was published, it was criticized by many Black intellectuals of the era.
Richard Wright argued that the novel lacked political urgency. Much of the Harlem Renaissance literary establishment overlooked it.
Eventually, it went out of print. For years, one of the most important books ever written about Black women’s interior lives became almost impossible to find.
Until another Black woman refused to let it disappear. In the 1970s, Alice Walker searched for Hurston’s unmarked grave, wrote about her work, and helped return Their Eyes Were Watching God to public consciousness.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. A Black woman documented a truth, the establishment dismissed it, until another Black woman recovered it… The truth survived anyway.
Before Corporate America Called It a Glass Cliff
Today, leadership experts describe the glass cliff as a modern organizational phenomenon. Black women often inherit institutions already in crisis.
They receive fewer resources than those who came before them. They are expected to repair years of structural failure in months rather than decades.
When those structural problems persist, the leader becomes the story; not the institution, the board, or the decades of decisions that created the crisis… Her.
This week alone, IMPACT examines the disproportionate job losses affecting Black women and explored how structural forces continue shaping leadership outcomes. Hurston reminds us that none of this is new. What management theory now measures, Black women have lived for generations.
Why This Book Matters
Their Eyes Were Watching God is not simply a classic of American literature. It is structural analysis disguised as fiction. Hurston shows readers that systems do not always announce themselves through laws or policies.
Sometimes they reveal themselves through expectations, burdens, and the quiet assumption that one group of people will always carry more than everyone else. And she also shows something equally important, the burden can be put down.
Who Should Read This
Every Black woman who has ever carried responsibilities that were never hers to carry.
Every leader trying to understand why structural inequality cannot be explained through individual effort alone.
Every reader who wants to understand that many of today’s leadership theories have existed in Black literature for generations.
Zora Neale Hurston did not write this novel to comfort readers. She wrote it to name what she saw so clearly that future generations would have language for it. Nearly ninety years later, we are still finding new names for the structures she already understood.
This article is part of IMPACT Magazine’s Unmuted Reads series, featuring books that provide structural analysis of Black wealth, power, leadership, and legacy.
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