Most of
history is ugly, particularly
American History, particularly for
blacks.
Zora Neale Hurston was unable to accept the idea that the culture of
slaves and
share croppers was without value. It is too frightening for some people to live without a sense of
heritage. So, she boldly reinvented the image of
poor southern blacks. She tried to show that impoverished and oppressed people had created some cultural elements of value. In order to do this she romanticized the ugly. She glorified
poverty, and the mannerisms and
stereotypes about blacks and the south that continue to haunt us to this day. For this reason she has been one of the most
problematic figures in American literature, continually falling in and out of favor with both
liberal and
conservative critics of her work.
Resisting the “New Negro” Mold
Because she chose to write about the lives of poor blacks in the
south Hurston has been unable to escape the charge that her works must have a
political meaning or, more frequently, that they have the wrong political meaning. Hurston, however wanted to go beyond life as a mere “
race champion.” She was committed to showing the inner and outer life of
subtile individuals. Her goal was more
indulgent than any
minority writer of her time, she wished to be afforded the license to write works purely as a
cultural articles.
But, in existing out of the
political sphere in a time when political writing was of extreme importance to other
black writers Hurston's
artwork becomes almost
reactionary. In remaining
apolitical Hurston, ironically, makes a strong political statement.
Hurston stirred her contemporaries in other ways as well. The members of the “
talented tenth” of the
Harlem Renaissance had rejected nearly all aspects of southern black culture in favor of anything from fairly
irrelevant bits of African history to attempts at
assimilation into affluent northern white culture. The historical facts seemed to provide blacks with no
power base, so everyone was searching for something new. It is easy to understand why Hurston, the reactionary, wanted to
romanticize what most
black intellectuals found most repulsive: poor southern blacks.
So, Hurston’s work is
hard to swallow, even today. In
Mules and Men Gold tells the story of how
colored people got to be so black.
“Long before they got thru makin’ de Atlantic Ocean and haulin’ de rocks for de mountains, God was makin’ up de people. But He did finish ‘em all at one time ... Well, He give out eyes one day. All de nations come up and got they eyes. Then He give out teeth and so on. Then He set a day to give out the color. So seven o'clock dat mornin’ everybody was gone to git they color except de niggers. It was gettin’ hot and God wanted to git His work done ... They Hunted all over Heben till dey found de colored folks. All stretched out sleep ... They all jumped up and run o up to de th'one and they was so skeered they might miss sumpin’ they begin to push ... So God hollered “Git Back! Git Back!” and they misunderstood Hin and thought He said, “Git Black.” and they been black ever since.”
The story goes on to play off nearly every
popular stereotype about blacks mainly that they are too,
lazy,
excitable and generally
simple minded. A close reading of the text might reveal a group of people covering their
shared hardships with
self mockery. But, Hurston, perhaps to stay in print, perhaps out of
arrogance did little to make this interpretation apparent to the reader. Many people might (and have) read the text and failed to see the
complexity of her statement.
Hurston is Mistaken for a Minstrel
In fact failing to see the complexity of Hurston’s statements is a favorite pastime of her admires and enemies alike. When Mules and Men was first published a
New York Times Review cooed “At the end you have a very fair idea of how
the other color enjoys life.” The Saturday Review called it “A simple and unpretentious story.” Hurston’s teacher,
anthropologist,
Franz Boas said: “It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the
southern Negro ... “6 On the other hand,
Richard Wright, a columnist for one of the
black newspapers at the time, called it “a
minstrel show.”
All of this
praise and
criticism failed to see the
double layered nature of Hurston’s writing. Hurston’s
layering served her well. The surface reading of a text like mules and men pleased her
white patrons and may have helped to keep her
in print. A more in-depth study quickly revealed Hurston’s motives, mainly to invent a
cultural base for blacks that grows out of
slave culture. It is as if she wished to
justify all of the
suffering and
ignorance blacks endured during and directly after slavery. Perhaps, the thought of that much
wasted life was
too frightening for Hurston, so she was compelled to “prove” its value.
Hurston is Mistaken for a Feminist
This layering became the focus of a Hurston revival lead by
black women writers in the
1970s. They were so delighted to discover a
black female author living and writing so early in the century, they may have failed to consider the
side effects of bringing her work into the light. The
feminist reading of texts like
Their Eyes Were Watching God, is forgiving at best. Her bizarre way of rendering of the southern
black dialect in text was seen as
poetic, her nearly
stock type Mulatto-heroine was “
a woman between two worlds,” and her rather fluffy romance novel-type plot was all about “
sexual empowerment.”
Having been thrust into the attention of
academics once again, Hurston’s works were an instant shoe-in for
anthologies, high school and college
reading lists. One again Hurston was being read on two levels. As a
black women she neatly killed two minority birds with one stone, and her work was
baffling enough to perpetuate the myth that black people are “
sensual” or “
lively” and generally
weird. Hurston’s work provided a porthole into a kind of fantasy
heart of darkness for many readers, who felt through reading her books one might “
understand what it’s like to be black.”
Bourgeois is Beautiful
“Of the nation's 100 poorest counties for children, 84 are in the South. Thirty-four of them are majority Black. The South has a greater number and proportion of people without health coverage than any other region, one in six Southern children — 4.8 million children — lacked health coverage in 1996.
Poor children score lower on reading and math tests, suffer more mental and physical disabilities, and earn 25 percent lower wages as young adults.’
Hurston’s choice to romanticize the
lowest of the low in the
American class system is
problematic especially because she attempts to approach her work from an
anthropological standpoint. The sense of
stability and
community Hurston portrays in poor black communities could potentiality be misinterpreted as a
sanctioning the continuation of that
way of life. Hurston’s
unlikely heroes live in a state just a few steps from
slavery. At a time when black intellectuals were realizing the value of a black
burgher class Hurston attempts to espouse the values of Southern Slave culture. Poor southern black culture can be thought of as residual symptom of the abyss of slavery. Hurston’s romantic vision of a
proud people purging themselves of the pain of there situation through
self-mockery is only one part of the picture. One might also see the folklore of a culture of
financial and
political failure self perpetuating its self by
reinforcing its own lies. Hurston abandons the
upwardly mobile ideals of “
the new Negro” in order to defend her “folks back home.”
In America,
poverty is no virtue. Any group of people but most particularly minorities would be well advised to assimilate themselves to the
majority culture to a great enough extent to have some of their members enter the
bourgeois. Only then might the minority group obtain enough
political power to ensconce itself against further
discrimination. It is dangerous to cling to modes of living, or even reflect fondly on modes of living that do not lead to
economic empowerment.
Assimilating the Black Voice in Literature
Assimilation has grown to carry a kind of negative stigma. But, it is a strong force of
equalization. In “Criteria of Negro Art”
W.E.B. Du Bois tells the story of a professor at a university who reads a poem his class:
“A professor in the University of Chicago read to a class that studied literature a passage of poetry and asked them to guess the author. They guessed a goodly company from Shelley to Robert Browning ... The author was Contee Cullen.”
DuBois thinks this kind of
perfect assimilation as selling out. He neglects to see the double benefits of assimilation. Mainly the author is seen as being more similar and thus
more equal to the majority and the authors ideas are in a position to be heard by the majority. Only by speaking the language will an artist be heard.
Hurston’s motives about the issue of assimilation are clear in her rendering of
dialects. Her
narration is written in “
Standard English” but the dialogue is generally rendered in a kind of proto-
ebonics. Modern authors, such as playwright
August Wilson render dialect just as effectively without “misspelling” any of the words. In other words, Wilson uses
diction rather than word alterations to convey the manner of speech of his characters. For example Boy Willie (from the south) says:
“You know as well as I know the man gonna sell the land to the first one walk up and hand him the money.”
The grammar of this speech is not standard English corrected it might read:
“You know as well as I the man is going to sell the land to the first one who walks up and hands him the money.”
Wilson has rendered a specific mode of speech with very few altered spellings.
His is the
assimilated black voice in literature; the subject and diction are still personal but the general mode of communication is not. As you read the text you start to hear the voices of the characters speaking in
naturalistic dialects just as “
nonstandard” as Hurston’s, the difference is Wilson’s rendering is easier to read and less
alienating. Since Hurston uses Standard English spelling and diction for her narration the effect is a bit
schizophrenic, furthermore the transition from Standard English narration to is often jarring.
The trouble with attempts to characterize a mode of speech though spelling is that there is not, in fact, a true standard pronunciation for any word, or for any spelling for that matter. Unless one resorts to a collection of phonemic symbols the true sound of a word is not continued in the text. Consider a affluent Londoner and Bostonian both saying the following sentence: “I bought another copy.” Though both are speaking politically Standard English their speech could easily be rendered in this manner:
ENGLISHMAN “I bot an-notha cope-pe”
AMERICAN “Ahy baht an-nather ca-pe”
Even these renderings fail to capture the variability of
speech, for example a friend pointed out to me that it is possible to read the rendering for the Englishmen as if you were from inner city Cleveland. On the whole Hurston does little but confuse and annoy her readers with all the “Ah’s” and “dats.” Some critics feel this extra baggage lends musically to the text, but it’s hard to see how this is possible when it is so easy to discount it or misinterpret with when pronouncing the words. (when typing up selection from her books I found my self unconsciously “fixing” the “misspellings” in other words in reading the text I had translated into my own dialect.)
But the altered,
foreign sounding voice created by the disparate text styles fit right in with Hurston’s goal of
romanticizing and heightening the lives of poor black
southerners. It is a reactionary
plea for attention. A effected stamp of uniqueness that has convinced many readers they are getting exposed to something
mystical and
distant. In fact If this quixotic juxtaposition of the
romantic and the ugly was enough to make her work
fascinating then perhaps it is in that respect she is best remembered.
Since Hurston’s works are not straight forward she will continue to be problematic for critics and readers. But as one of the only published
black female author in her time she stands no chance of being forgotten as long as the origin of text continues to count more than the words themselves.
Sources:
DuBois, W.E.B.
Criteria of Negro Art. From: The Portable Harlem Renaissance reader. edited and with an introduction by David Levering Lewis.
CDF report, The High Price of Poverty for Children of the South, May 1998.
Frazier, Franklin E. La Bourgeoisie Noire. c1930.
Pavloska, Susanna .
Modern primitives : race and language in
Gertrude Stein,
Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston .
New York : Garland Pub., 2000.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: a literary biography. 1977
Cronin, Gloria L. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. 1998
Delbanco, Andrew. Required reading : why our American classics matter now
Books by Zora Neale Hurston:
Their eyes were watching God
Mules and men. (With an introd. by
Franz Boas)
Dust tracks on a road; an autobiography
Jonah's gourd vine
Seraph on the Suwanee
I love myself when I am laughing ... and then again when I am looking mean and impressive
Moses, man of the mountain
Tell my horse : voodoo and life in Haiti and Jamaica
Mule bone
Short stories
Folklore and autobiography
Selections
The sanctified church
Sweat