The charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the need of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self-awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last bloom, as does the large pear tree that stands beside her grandmother’s tiny log cabin.
She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!
To plot Janie’s journey from object to subject, the narrative of the novel shifts from third to a blend of first and third person (known as “free indirect discourse”), signifying this awareness of self in Janie. Their Eyes is a bold feminist novel, the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition. Yet in its concern with the project of finding a voice, with language as an instrument of injury and salvation, of selfhood and empowerment, it suggests many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole.
II.
One of the most moving passages in American literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s account of her last encounter with her dying mother, found in a chapter entitled “Wandering” in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942):
As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama’s eyes would face east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.
We can begin to understand the rhetorical distance that separated Hurston from her contemporaries if we compare this passage with a similar scene published just three years later in Black Boy by Richard Wright, Hurston’s dominant black male contemporary and rival: “Once, in the night, my mother called me to her bed and told me that she could not endure the pain, and she wanted to die. I held her hand and begged her to be quiet. That night I ceased to react to my mother; my feelings were frozen.” If Hurston represents her final moments with her mother in terms of the search for voice, then Wright attributes to a “similar experience a certain somberness of spirit that I was never to lose,” which “grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself…the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness….” Few authors in the black tradition have less in common than Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. And whereas Wright would reign through the forties as our predominant author, Hurston’s fame reached its zenith in 1943 with a Saturday Review cover story honoring the success of Dust Tracks. Seven years later, she would be serving as a maid in Rivo Alto, Florida; ten years after that she would die in the County Welfare Home in Fort Pierce, Florida.
How could the recipient of two Guggenheims and the author of four novels, a dozen short stories, two musicals, two books on black mythology, dozens of essays, and a prizewinning autobiography virtually “disappear” from her readership for three full decades? There are no easy answers to this quandary, despite the concerted attempts of scholars to resolve it. It is clear, however, that the loving, diverse, and enthusiastic responses that Hurston’s work engenders today were not shared by several of her influential black male contemporaries. The reasons for this are complex and stem largely from what we might think of as their “racial ideologies.”
Part of Hurston’s received heritage—and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem Renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement—was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is “deprived” where different, and whose psyches are in the main “pathological.” Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this “the Social Science Fiction Monster.” Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.
Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal.” Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston chose deliberately to ignore this “false picture that distorted….” Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, “was something internal…. The man himself must make his own emancipation.” And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the “arrogance” of whites assuming that “black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.” Her strategy was not calculated to please.
What we might think of as Hurston’s mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism. If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle.
But not the war.
After Hurston and her choice of style for the black novel were silenced for nearly three decades, what we have witnessed since is clearly a marvelous instance of the return of the repressed. For Zora Neale Hurston has been “rediscovered” in a manner unprecedented in the black tradition: several black women writers, among whom are some of the most accomplished writers in America today, have openly turned to her works as sources of narrative strategies, to be repeated, imitated, and revised, in acts of textual bonding. Responding to Wright’s critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and “not a treatise on sociology.” It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker’s depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of “racial health—a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature.” In a tradition in which male authors have ardently denied black literary paternity, this is a major development, one that heralds the refinement of our notion of tradition: Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman’s voice.
The resurgence of popular and academic readerships of Hurston’s works signifies her multiple canonization in the black, the American, and the feminist traditions. Within the critical establishment, scholars of every stripe have found in Hurston texts for all seasons. More people have read Hurston’s works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel, in 1934.
III.
Rereading Hurston, I am always struck by the density of intimate experiences she cloaked in richly elaborated imagery. It is this concern for the figurative capacity of black language, for what a character in Mules and Men calls “a hidden meaning, jus’ like de Bible…de inside meanin’ of words,” that unites Hurston’s anthropological studies with her fiction. For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas’s student at Barnard became metaphors, allegories, and performances in her novels, the traditional recurring canonical metaphors of black culture. Always more of a novelist than a social scientist, even Hurston’s academic collections center on the quality of imagination that makes these lives whole and splendid. But it is in the novel that Hurston’s use of the black idiom realizes its fullest effect. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, her first novel, for instance, the errant preacher, John, as described by Robert Hemenway “is a poet who graces his world with language but cannot find the words to secure his own personal grace.” This concern for language and for the “natural” poets who “bring barbaric splendor of word and song into the very camp of the mockers” not only connects her two disciplines but also makes of “the suspended linguistic moment” a thing to behold indeed. Invariably, Hurston’s writing depends for its strength on the text, not the context, as does John’s climactic sermon, a tour de force of black image and metaphor. Image and me
taphor define John’s world; his failure to interpret himself leads finally to his self-destruction. As Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, concludes, “Such passages eventually add up to a theory of language and behavior.”
Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.” As author, she functions as “a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law.” The myths she describes so accurately are in fact “alternative modes for perceiving reality,” and never just condescending depictions of the quaint. Hurston sees “the Dozens,” for example, that age-old black ritual of graceful insult, as, among other things, a verbal defense of the sanctity of the family, conjured through ingenious plays on words. Though attacked by Wright and virtually ignored by his literary heirs, Hurston’s ideas about language and craft undergird many of the most successful contributions to Afro-American literature that followed.
IV.
We can understand Hurston’s complex and contradictory legacy more fully if we examine Dust Tracks on a Road, her own controversial account of her life. Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions. In this way, Hurston wrote herself, and sought in her works to rewrite the “self” of “the race,” in its several private and public guises, largely for ideological reasons. That which she chooses to reveal is the life of her imagination, as it sought to mold and interpret her environment. That which she silences or deletes, similarly, is all that her readership would draw upon to delimit or pigeonhole her life as a synecdoche of “the race problem,” an exceptional part standing for the debased whole.
Hurston’s achievement in Dust Tracks is twofold. First, she gives us a writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of “the Negro problem.” So many events in this text are figured in terms of Hurston’s growing awareness and mastery of books and language, language and linguistic rituals as spoken and written both by masters of the Western tradition and by ordinary members of the black community. These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.
The representation of her sources of language seems to be her principal concern, as she constantly shifts back and forth between her “literate” narrator’s voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse. Hurston moves in and out of these distinct voices effortlessly, seamlessly, just as she does in Their Eyes to chart Janie’s coming to consciousness. It is this usage of a divided voice, a double voice unreconciled, that strikes me as her great achievement, a verbal analogue of her double experiences as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a black person in a nonblack world, a woman writer’s revision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “double consciousness” for the hyphenated African-American.
Her language, variegated by the twin voices that intertwine throughout the text, retains the power to unsettle:
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Elsewhere she analyzes black “idioms” used by a culture “raised on simile and invective. They know how to call names,” she concludes, then lists some, such as ’gator-mouthed, box-ankled, puzzle-gutted, shovel-footed: “Eyes looking like skint-ginny nuts, and mouth looking like a dishpan full of broke-up crockery!”
Immediately following the passage about her mother’s death, she writes:
The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death. Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere. Made the body of death out of infinite hunger. Made a weapon of his hand to satisfy his needs. This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things.
Language, in these passages, is not merely “adornment,” as Hurston described a key black linguistic practice; rather, manner and meaning are perfectly in tune: she says the thing in the most meaningful manner. Nor is she being “cute,” or pandering to a condescending white readership. She is “naming” emotions, as she says, in a language both deeply personal and culturally specific.
The second reason that Dust Tracks succeeds as literature arises from the first: Hurston’s unresolved tension between her double voices signifies her full understanding of modernism. Hurston uses the two voices in her text to celebrate the psychological fragmentation both of modernity and of the black American. As Barbara Johnson has written, hers is a rhetoric of division, rather than a fiction of psychological or cultural unity. Zora Neale Hurston, the “real” Zora Neale Hurston that we long to locate in this text, dwells in the silence that separates these two voices: she is both, and neither; bilingual, and mute. This strategy helps to explain her attraction to so many contemporary critics and writers, who can turn to her works again and again only to be startled at her remarkable artistry.
But the life that Hurston could write was not the life she could live. In fact, Hurston’s life, so much more readily than does the standard sociological rendering, reveals how economic limits determine our choices even more than does violence or love. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not. Financial problems—book sales, grants and fellowships too few and too paltry, ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects, if not determines, her style, a relation she explored somewhat ironically in “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” We cannot oversimplify the relation between Hurston’s art and her life; nor can we reduce the complexity of her postwar politics, which, rooted in her distaste for the pathological image of blacks, were markedly conservative and Republican.
Nor can we sentimentalize her disastrous final decade, when she found herself working as a maid on the very day the Saturday Evening Post published her short story “Conscience of the Court” and often found herself without money, surviving after 1957 on unemployment benefits, substitute teaching, and welfare checks. “In her last days,” Hemenway concludes dispassionately, “Zora lived a difficult life—alone, proud, ill, obsessed with a book she could not finish.”
The excavation of her buried life helped a new generation read Hurston again. But ultimately we must find Hurston’s legacy in her art, where she “ploughed up some literacy and laid by some alphabets.” Her importance rests with the legacy of fiction and lore she constructed so cannily. As Hurston herself noted, “Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.” If, as a friend eulogized, “She didn’t come to you empty,” then she does not leave black literature empty. If her earlier obscurity and neglect today seem inconceivable, perhaps now, as she wrote of Moses, she has “crossed over.”
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934.
Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937.
Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938.
Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939.
Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942.
Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…& Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Edited by Alice Walker. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1979.
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bsp; The Sanctified Church. Edited by Toni Cade Bambara. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981.
Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1985.
WORKS ABOUT ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, pp. 15–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
——, ed. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987.