Being a friend of Hall Johnson’s, I turned it over to him to use as he wished with his concert group. He kept it for nearly a year. I called him up about it two or three times and finally he told me that he saw no use for it. The public only wanted to hear spirituals, and spirituals that had been well arranged. I knew that he was mistaken, for white people used to crowd Zion Hope Baptist Church, where my father was pastor to hear the singing, and there certainly were no trained musicians around there. I had seen it in various Negro churches where the congregations just grabbed hold of a tune and everybody worked on it in his or her own way to magnificent harmonic effect. I knew that they liked the work songs, for I had seen them park their cars by a gang of workers just to listen to what happened. So in spite of what he said, I kept to my own convictions.
When he gave me back the songs, I talked about a real Negro concert for a while, to anybody who would listen, and then decided to do it. But I felt that I did not know enough to do it alone.
Not only did I want the singing very natural, I wanted to display West Indian folk dancing. I had been out in the Bahama Islands collecting material and had witnessed the dynamic Fire Dance which had three parts; the Jumping Dance, The Ring Play and the Congo. It was so stirring and magnificent that I had to admit to myself that we had nothing in America to equal it. I went to the dancing every chance I got, and took pains to learn them. I could just see an American audience being thrilled.
So the first step I took was to assemble a troup of sixteen Bahamans who could dance. Then I went back to Hall Johnson with the proposition that we combine his singers and my dancers for a dramatic concert, I had the script all written. It was a dramatization of a working day on a Florida railroad camp with the Fire Dance for a climax. Hall Johnson looked it over and agreed to the thing.
But his mind must have changed, because I took my dancers up to his studio four times, but the rehearsals never came off. Twice he was not even there. Once he said he had a rehearsal of his own group which could not be put off, and once there was no explanation. Besides, something unfortunate happened. While my dancers sat around me and waited, two or three of the singers talked in stage whispers about “monkey chasers dancing.” They ridiculed the whole idea. Who wanted to be mixed up with anything like that?
The American Negroes have the unfortunate habit of speaking of West Indians as “monkey-chasers,” pretending to believe that the West Indians catch monkeys and stew them with rice.
I heard what was being said very distinctly, but I hoped that my group did not. But they did and began to show hurt in their faces. I could not let them feel that I shared the foolish prejudice, which I do not, so I had to make a move. I showed my resentment, gathered my folks, and we all went down to my place in 66th Street. It looked as if I were licked. I had spoken to a man in Judson’s Bureau in Steinway Hall about booking us, and now it all looked hopeless. So I went down next day to call it all off.
He said I ought to go ahead. It sounded fine to him. But go ahead on my own. He happened to know that Gaston, Hall Johnson’s manager, wanted me headed off. He saw in my idea a threat to Hall Johnson’s group. “You are being strung along on this rehearsal gag to throw you off. Go ahead on your own.”
So I went ahead. We rehearsed at my house, here and there, and anywhere. The secretary to John Golden liked the idea after seeing a rehearsal and got me the theater. She undertook to handle the press for me, so I just turned over the money to her and she did well by me.
I had talked Godmother, Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, into helping me. Dr. Locke, her main Negro confidant, had opposed it at first, but he was finally won over. You see, he had been born in Philadelphia, educated at Harvard and Oxford and had never known the common run of Negroes. He was not at all sympathetic to our expression. To his credit, he has changed his viewpoint.
Then came that Sunday night of the tenth. We had a good house, mostly white shirt fronts and ermine. Godmother was out there sitting close enough for me to see her and encourage me. Locke was there, too, in faultless tails. He came back stage to give me a pat of encouragement and went back out front. I needed it. I was as nervous as I could be, and if I had known then as much as I know now, I would have been even more nervous. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
From the lifting of the curtain on the dawn scene where the shack rouser awakens the camp to the end of the first half, it was evident that the audience was with us. The male chorus “lined track” and “spiked” to tremendous applause. The curtain had to be lifted and lowered and then again. I was standing there in the wings still shivering, when Lee Whipper, who had played the part of the itinerant preacher in a beautiful manner, gave me a shove and I found myself out on the stage. A tremendous burst of applause met me, and so I had to say something.
I explained why I had done it. That music without motion was unnatural with Negroes, and what I had tried to do was to present Negro singing in a natural way—with action. I don’t know what else I said, but the audience was kind and I walked off to an applauding house.
Right here, let me set something straight. Godmother had meant for me to call Dr. Locke to the stage to make any explanations, but she had not told me. Neither had Locke told me. I was stupid. When he told me where he would be sitting, he evidently thought that would be enough. But I had not thought of any speech in all my troubles of rehearsals, making costumes and keeping things going. It just had not occurred to me, I would not have been out there myself if Lee Whipper had not shoved me. I found out later that I had seemed to ignore Dr. Locke, for which I am very sorry. I would have much rather had him make a thought-out speech than my improvising. It just did not occur to me in all my excitement. It may be too late, but I ask him please to pardon me. He had been helpful and I meant him good.
The second half of the program went off even better than the first. As soon as the curtain went up on the Fire Dancers, their costuming got a hand. It broke out time and again during the dancing and thundered as Caroline Rich and Strawn executed the last movement with the group as a back-ground. It was good it was the last thing, for nothing could have followed it.
Hall Johnson did a generous thing. I had sent tickets and he and his manager came back stage and Hall said, “You proved your point all right. When you talked to me about it, it sounded like a crazy mess. I really came to see you do a flop, but it was swell!” I thought that was fine of Hall.
The New School of Social Research presented us six weeks later and we danced at the Vanderbilt, Nyack, and various places. But I was worn out with back stage arguments, eternal demands for money, a disturbance in my dance group because one of the men, who was incidentally the poorest dancer of all, preached that I was an American exploiting them and they ought to go ahead under his guidance. Stew-Beef, Lias Strawn and Motor-Boat pointed out to him that they had never dreamed of dancing in public until I had picked them up. I had rehearsed them for months, fed them and routined them into something. Why had he never thought of it before I did. He had discouraged the others from joining me until it began to look successful. So they meant to stick with me, American or no American. But two of the women joined the trouble maker and I fired all three of them. The whole thing was beginning to wear me down. When some other things began to annoy me, I decided to go home to Florida and try to write the book I had in mind, which was Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Before it was hardly started, I heard that Hall Johnson had raided my group and was using it in his “Run Little Chillun.” I never saw the production, but I was told that the religious scene was the spitting image of the one from my concert also. As I said, I never saw it so I wouldn’t know.
But this I do know, that people became very much alive to West Indian dancing and work songs. I have heard myself over the air dozens of times and felt the influence of that concert running through what has been done since. My name is never mentioned, of course, because that is not the way theater people do things, but that concert and the rave notices I got from the critics shoved the viewpoint over toward
s the natural Negro.
Theater Arts Magazine photographed us and presented us in its April issue following the concert at the John Golden. The Folk Dance Society presented us at the Vanderbilt. We appeared at the first National Folk Festival in St. Louis in 1934, at Chicago in 1934, and at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. In Chicago, I had only ten days to try to prepare a full length program and it was not smooth considering that I had only very raw material to work with in so short a time, but at that the dancers and a dramatic bit went over splendidly and got good notices. Katherine Dunham loaned us her studio for rehearsal twice, which was kind of her. Anyway, West Indian dancing had gone west and created interest just as it had done in the east. When I got to Jamaica on my first Guggenheim fellowship in 1936, I found that Katherine Dunham had been there a few months before collecting dances, and had gone on to Haiti.
I made no real money out of my concert work. I might have done so if I had taken it up as a life work. But I am satisfied in knowing that I established a trend and pointed Negro expression back towards the saner ground of our own unbelievable originality.
AFTERWORD
ZORA NEALE HURSTON: “A NEGRO WAY OF SAYING”
I.
The Reverend Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Episcopal priest whose five-volume classic collection, Hoodoo. Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork, more than amply returned an investment of forty years’ research, once asked me during an interview in 1977 what had become of another eccentric collector whom he admired. “I met her in the field in the thirties. I think,” he reflected for a few seconds, “that her first name was Zora.” It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston’s own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.
A graduate of Barnard, where she studied under Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—and more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity into which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft or vision. Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image and myth-making that rescued so many black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites. It is this complexity that refuses to lend itself to the glib categories of “radical” or “conservative,” “black” or “Negro,” “revolutionary” or “Uncle Tom”—categories of little use in literary criticism. It is this same complexity, embodied in her fiction, that, until Alice Walker published her important essay (“In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”) in Ms. magazine in 1975, had made Hurston’s place in black literary history an ambiguous one at best.
The rediscovery of Afro-American writers has usually turned on larger political criteria, of which the writer’s work is supposedly a mere reflection. The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry. Alice Walker’s moving essay recounts her attempts to find Hurston’s unmarked grave in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. Hurston became a metaphor for the black woman writer’s search for tradition. The craft of Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara bears, in markedly different ways, strong affinities with Hurston’s. Their attention to Hurston signifies a novel sophistication in black literature: they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction. This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer’s Cane than to Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.
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 paramoun
t 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.