SOURCE: “The Confluence of Food and Identity in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills: ‘What We Eat is Who We Is,’” in College Language Association Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1, September, 1993, pp. 1-18.

In the following essay, Toombs theorizes that in Linden Hills, Naylor offers food consumption as a viable way of understanding problematic issues regarding African-American identity.

Yet the people went on living and reproducing in spite of the bad food. Most of the children had straight bones, strong teeth. But it couldn't go on like that. Even the strongest heritage would one day run out.

—Ann Petry, The Street

Gloria Naylor's second novel, Linden Hills (1985), presents a scathing examination of the precarious struggle for African-American identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The novel, concerned with an exploration of the fictional middle-class black community of Linden Hills, devotes a significant amount of its attention to detailing the ways in which...